still too long.  Those gentlemen had built and endowed a church and a school for their hands, and everything was done in their mill which could humanise and improve the lot of the men, women, and children.  Mr. Bull, who was to be the incumbent of the new church, then not quite finished, was far less hopeful than his patron.  He told me that he looked forward to some tremendous popular outbreak, and should not be surprised any night to hear that every mill in Bradford was in flames.

But perhaps the most remarkable individual with whom this Lancashire journey brought us into contact, was a Mr. Oastler.  He was the Danton of the movement.  He would have been a remarkable man in any position or calling in life.  He was a very large and powerfully framed man, over six feet in height, and proportionately large of limb and shoulder.  He would, perhaps, hardly have been said to be a handsome man.  His face was coarse, and in parts of it heavy.  But he had a most commanding presence, and he was withal a picturesque—­if it be not more accurate to say a statuesque—­figure.  Some of the features, too, were good.  He had a very keen and intelligent blue eye, a mass of iron grey hair, lips, the scornful curl of which was terrible, and with all this a voice stentorian in its power, and yet flexible, with a flow of language rapid and abundant as the flow of a great river, and as unstemmable—­the very beau-ideal of a mob orator.

“In the evening,” says my diary, “we drove out to Stayley Bridge to hear the preaching of Stephens, the man who has become the subject of so much newspaper celebrity,” (Does any one remember who he was?) “We reached a miserable little chapel, filled to suffocation, and besieged by crowds around the doors.  We entered through the vestry with very great difficulty, and only so by the courtesy of sundry persons who relinquished their places, on Doherty’s representing to them that we were strangers from a distance and friends to the cause.  Presently Stephens arrived, and a man who had been ranting in the pulpit, merely, as it seemed, to occupy the people till he should come, immediately yielded his place to him.  Stephens spoke well, and said some telling words in that place, of the cruel and relentless march of the great Juggernauth, Gold.  But I did not hear anything which seemed to me to justify his great reputation.  Really the most striking part of the performance, and that which I thought seemed to move the people most, was Oastler’s mounting the pulpit and giving out the verses of a hymn, one by one, which the congregation sang after him.”  So says my diary.  Him I remember well, though Stephens not at all.  I remember, too, the pleasure with which I listened to his really fine delivery of the lines; his pronunciation of the words was not incorrect, and when he spoke, as I heard him on sundry subsequent occasions, his language, though emphasised rather, as it seemed, than marred by a certain roughness of Lancashire accent, was not that of an uncultivated man.  Yes!  Oastler, the King of Lancashire as the people liked to call him, was certainly a man of power, and an advocate whom few platform orators would have cared to meet as an adversary.