Hauteville is
the last place that I should choose for my residence, even if I remained
in England. But I hear the horses.'
The important night at length arrived, or rather the important
messenger, who brought down, express, a report of its proceedings to
Castle Dacre.
Nothing is more singular than the various success of men in the House of
Commons. Fellows who have been the oracles of coteries from their
birth; who have gone through the regular process of gold medals,
senior wranglerships, and double firsts, who have nightly sat down
amid tumultuous cheering in debating societies, and can harangue
with unruffled foreheads and unfaltering voice, from one end of a
dinner-table to the other, who, on all occasions, have something to say,
and can speak with fluency on what they know nothing about, no sooner
rise in the House than their spells desert them. All their effrontery
vanishes. Commonplace ideas are rendered even more uninteresting by
monotonous delivery; and keenly alive as even boobies are in those
sacred walls to the ridiculous, no one appears more thoroughly aware of
his unexpected and astounding deficiencies than the orator himself.
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