objurgatory domestic eloquence.

Associating the loss of his old client with Mr. Tryan's influence,
Dempster began to know more distinctly why he hated the obnoxious curate.
But a passionate hate, as well as a passionate love, demands some leisure
and mental freedom. Persecution and revenge, like courtship and toadyism,
will not prosper without a considerable expenditure of time and
ingenuity, and these are not to spare with a man whose law-business and
liver are both beginning to show unpleasant symptoms. Such was the
disagreeable turn affairs were taking with Mr. Dempster, and, like the
general distracted by home intrigues, he was too much harassed himself to
lay ingenious plans for harassing the enemy.

Meanwhile, the evening lecture drew larger and larger congregations; not
perhaps attracting many from that select aristocratic circle in which the
Lowmes and Pittmans were predominant, but winning the larger proportion
of Mr. Crewe's morning and afternoon hearers, and thinning Mr. Stickney's
evening audiences at Salem. Evangelicalism was making its way in Milby,
and gradually diffusing its subtle odour into chambers that were bolted
and barred against it. The movement, like all other religious 'revivals',
had a mixed effect. Religious ideas have the fate of melodies, which,
once set afloat in the world, are taken up by all sorts of instruments,
some of them woefully coarse, feeble, or out of tune, until people are in
danger of crying out that the melody itself is detestable. It may be that
some of Mr. Tryan's hearers had gained a religious vocabulary rather than
religious experience; that here and there a weaver's wife, who, a few
months before, had been simply a silly slattern, was converted into that
more complex nuisance, a silly and sanctimonious slattern; that the old
Adam, with the pertinacity of middle age, continued to tell fibs behind
the counter, notwithstanding the new Adam's addiction to Bible-reading
and family prayer: that the children in the Paddiford Sunday school had
their memories crammed with phrases about the blood of cleansing, imputed
righteousness, and justification by faith alone, which an experience
lying principally in chuck-farthing, hop-scotch, parental slappings, and
longings after unattainable lollypop, served rather to darken than to
illustrate; and that at Milby, in those distant days, as in all other
times and places where the mental atmosphere is changing, and men are
inhaling the sti