They conversed and differed healthily upon other topics.
After some conversation on indifferent topics Canon Fox said to him:
The monks knew how to avail themselves of all these popular topics, and to set off their own character to the best advantage.
They are talking,--listen,--of the harvest, and the late election, and of how the local member is mentioned for the cabinet and all the old familiar topics of the sort.
This was a favourite place for observation, for you appeared to be quite taken up by the topics of the day, and kept an oblique eye on the true object of your scrutiny. . . .
But though the royalists insisted on these plausible topics before the commencement of war, they were obliged to own, that the progress of civil commotions had somewhat abated the force and evidence of this reasoning.
The Lady Jane had presence of mind in those melancholy circumstances not only to defend her religion by all the topics then in use, but also to write a letter to her sister in the Greek language, in which, besides sending her a copy of the Scriptures in that tongue, she exhorted her to maintain in every feature a like steady perseverance.
As it turned out, a great variety of party names were retained or adopted in the Congressional and State campaigns of 1854, the designation of "anti- Nebraska" being perhaps the most common, and certainly for the moment the most serviceable, since denunciation of the Nebraska bill was the one all-pervading bond of sympathy and agreement among men who differed very widely on almost all other political topics.