nd, after all, it has now to be recorded
to their credit that they did unreservedly give Theophilus Londonderry
his chance. By what quaintness of accident he could not imagine, he
suddenly found himself invited to lecture before them. The invitation
read something like a command, and there seemed to be an implication
that if all were satisfactory, he might thus earn the right of
acknowledging the patronage of the Literary and Philosophical Society of
Coalchester.

Theophilus Londonderry's subject, therefore, was "Walt Whitman,"--a name
which conveyed no offence to the Committee, for the simple reason that
it conveyed nothing. It was a strange and humorous thing for the young
man to think of, that his was to be the first human voice that had
spoken that name of the future aloud in Coalchester. As he rose to give
his paper, he pronounced its title slowly, with his full carrying voice,
and allowed the strange new name to roll away in menacing echoes through
the old Lyceum: "W-a-l-t W-h-i-t-m-a-n."

Even yet no one saw the coming doom, heard not the voice that tolled a
funeral bell through all Lyceums and other haunted houses of dead
learning. The Canon in the chair smiled benignantly, with an expression
that I can only compare to buttered rolls. He was just three hundred
years old that very day, and the audience (a scanty fifty or so) ran
from a hundred and fifty upwards. The only young men present besides the
lecturer were two friends of his I have yet to introduce,--Rob
Clitheroe, a fiery young poet and pamphleteer of many ambitions, and
James Whalley (little James Whalley he was always called) a gentle lover
of letters, with perhaps the most delicate taste in the whole little
coterie; _and_ Mr. Moggridge,--not entirely comfortable, it having been
by some mysterious atmospheric effect conveyed to him that he was a
tradesman and a dissenter, in which latter capacity he felt a certain
traditional resentment towards his complacent fellow listeners. A quite
recent ancestor had refused to pay tithes. That ancestor was in his
blood to-night.

Jenny was not there. Ladies were not admitted to the meetings of the
Society, there being a sort of implication that masonries of learning,
occult sciences of the brain, were practised at their meetings,--matters
which never came out in the "Transactions."

The lecture was a straightforward and eloquent account of Whitman's
writings and doctrines, with extracts from "The Leaves of Gra