Chippinge Borough by Stanley J. Weyman — Read

Arthur Vaughan had been quick to see that he could not step at once into place and fame; that success in political life could not in these days be attained at a bound. But had he been less quick, the great debate which preceded the passage of the Bill through the Commons must have availed to persuade him. That their last words of warning to the country, their solemn remonstrances, might have more effect, the managers of the Opposition had permitted the third reading to be carried in the manner which has been described. But, that done, they unmasked all their forces, bent on proving that if in the time to come the peers threw out the Bill they would do so with a respectable weight, not only of argument, but of public feeling behind them; and that, not only in the country, but in the popular House. All that the bitter invective of Croker, the mingled gibes and predictions of Wetherell, the close and weighty reasoning of Peel, the precedents of Sugden could do to warn the timid and arouse the prudent was done. That ancient Chamber, which was never again to echo the accents of a debate so great, which stood indeed already doomed, as if it could not long survive the order of things of which it had been for centuries the centre, had heard, it may be, speeches more lofty, men more eloquent-for whom had it not heard? -but never men more in earnest, or words more keenly barbed by the prejudices of the passing, or the aspirations of the coming, age. Of the one party were those who could see naught but glory in the bygone, naught but peril in change, of the other, those whose strenuous aim it was to make the future redress the wrongs of the past. The former were like children, viewing the Armada hangings which tapestried the neighbouring Chamber, and seeing only the fair front: the latter like the same children, picking with soiled fingers at the backing, coarse, dusty and cobwebbed, which for two hundred years had clung to the roughened masonry.

Vaughan sat through the three nights, brooding darkly on the feats performed before him. If they who fought in the arena were not giants, if the House no longer held a match for Canning and Brougham, the combatants seemed giants to him; for a man's opinion of himself is never far from the opinion which others hold of him. And he soon perceived that a common soldier might as easily step from the ranks and set the battle in order as he, Arthur Vaughan, rise up, without farther training, and lead the attack or cover the defence. He sat soured and gloomy, a mere spectator; dwelling, even while he listened to the flowery periods of Macaulay, or the trenchant arguments of Peel, on the wrong done to himself by the disposal of his seat.