This announcement was followed, within two hours, by the arrival of Captain Dashmore himself, in a carriage-and-four covered with yellow favors, and filled, inside and out, with harum-scarum looking friends who had come down with him to aid the canvass and share the fun.
Captain Dashmore was a thorough sailor, who had, however, taken a disgust to the profession from the date in which a Minister's nephew had been appointed to the command of a ship to which the Captain considered himself unquestionably entitled. It is just to the Minister to add, that Captain Dashmore had shown as little regard for orders from a distance, as had immortalized Nelson himself; but then the disobedience had not achieved the same redeeming success as that of Nelson, and Captain Dashmore ought to have thought himself fortunate in escaping a severer treatment than the loss of promotion. But no man knows when he is well off; and retiring on half-pay, just as he came into unexpected possession of some forty or fifty thousand pounds bequeathed by a distant relation, Captain Dashmore was seized with a vindictive desire to enter parliament, and inflict oratorical chastisement on the Administration.
A very few hours sufficed to show the sea-captain to be a most capital electioneerer for a small and not very enlightened borough. It is true that he talked the saddest nonsense ever heard from an open window; but then his jokes were so broad, his manner so hearty, his voice so big, that in those dark days, before the schoolmaster was abroad, he would have beaten your philosophical Radical and moralizing Democrat hollow. Moreover he kissed all the women, old and young, with the zest of a sailor who has known what it is to be three years at sea without sight of a beardless lip; he threw open all the public-houses, asked a numerous committee every day to dinner, and, chucking his purse up in the air, declared "he would stick to his guns while there was a shot in the locker." Till then, there had been but little political difference between the candidate supported by Lord Lansmere's interest and the opposing parties--for country gentlemen, in those days, were pretty much of the same way of thinking, and the question had been really local--viz., whether the Lansmere interest should or should not prevail over that of the two squirearchical families who had alone, hitherto, ventured to oppose it. But though Captain Dashmore was really a very loyal man, and much too old a sailor to think that the State (which, according to established metaphor, is a vessel, _par excellence_), should admit Jack upon quarter-deck, yet, what with talking against lords and aristocracy, jobs and abuses, and searching through no very refined vocabulary for the strongest epithets to apply to those irritating nouns-substantive, his bile had got the better of his understanding, and he became fuddled, as it were, by his own eloquence. Thus, though as innocent of Jacobinical designs as he was incapable of setting the Thames on fire, you would have guessed him, by his speeches, to be one of the most determined incendiaries that ever applied a match to the combustible materials of a contested election; while, being by no means accustomed to respect his adversaries, he could not have treated the Earl of Lansmere with less ceremony if his Lordship had been a Frenchman. He usually designated that respectable nobleman by the title of "Old Pompous;" and the Mayor, who was never seen abroad but in top-boots, and the Solicitor, who was of a large build, received from his irreverent wit the joint sobriquet of "Tops and Bottoms!" Hence the election had now become, as I said before, a personal matter with my Lord, and, indeed, with the great heads of the Lansmere interest. The Earl seemed to consider his very coronet at stake in the question. "The man from Baker-street," with his preternatural audacity, appeared to him a being ominous and awful--not so much to be regarded with resentment, as with superstitious terror: he felt as felt the dignified Montezuma, when that ruffianly Cortez, with his handful of Spanish rapscallions, bearded him in his own capital, and in the midst of his Mexican splendor--"The gods were menaced if man could be so insolent!" wherefore said my Lord, tremulously, "The Constitution is gone if the Man from Baker-street comes in for Lansmere!"