tion existed, and, by dint of busy perusal of penny popularities,
had even become familiar with names and phrases, with modes of thought
and of ambition, appertaining to a world for ever closed against him. He
spoke of Culture, and imagined himself far on the way to attain it. His
mind was packed with the oddest jumble of incongruities; Herbert Spencer
jostled with Charles Bradlaugh, Matthew Arnold with Samuel Smiles; in
one breath he lauded George Eliot, in the next was enthusiastic over
a novel by Mrs. Henry Wood; from puerile facetiae he passed to
speculations on the origin of being, and with equally light heart.
Save for Pilgrim's Progress and Robinson Crusoe, he had read no English
classic; since boyhood, indeed, he had probably read no book at all,
for much diet of newspapers rendered him all but incapable of sustained
attention. Whatever he seemed to know of serious authors came to him
at second or third hand. Avowing his faith in Christianity when with
orthodox people, in the society of sceptics he permitted himself to
smile at the old faiths,--though he preferred to escape this temptation,
the Nonconformist conscience still reigning within him. At home he posed
as a broad-minded Anglican, and having somewhere read that Tennyson's
'In Memoriam' represented this attitude, he spoke of the poem as 'one of
the books that have made me what I am.'

His circle of acquaintances lay apart from that in which the Lords
moved; it consisted for the most part of young men humbly endowed in
the matter of income, and making little pretence of social dignity. When
others resorted to theatre or public-house, or places not so readily
designated, Samuel and his friends met together to discourse on subjects
of which they knew somewhat less than nothing. Some of them occasionally
held audacious language, especially when topics such as the relations of
the sexes invited their wisdom; they had read something somewhere
which urged them to cast off the trammels of conventional thought;
they 'ventured to say' that in a very few years 'surprising changes of
opinion would come about.' These revolutionaries, after startling the
more sober of their hearers, went quietly home to mother or landlady,
supped on cheese and cocoa, and next day plied the cleric pen with
exemplary zeal.

Samuel believed himself in love. That he should conceive matrimonial
intentions with regard to Stephen Lord's daughter was but the natural
issue of circumstance; fr