“Three P.M. 
   T.C.”

He told me afterwards that his hand had become so tremulous that he seldom touched a pen.  My beloved friend, the Rev. Newman Hall, asked the privilege of accompanying me, as, like most Londoners, he had never put his eye on the recluse philosopher.  We found the same old brick house, No. 5 Cheyne Row, Chelsea, without the slightest change outside or in.  But, during those thirty years the gifted wife had departed, and a sad change had come over the once hale, stalwart man.  After we had waited some time, a feeble, stooping figure, attired in a long blue flannel gown, moved slowly into the room.  His gray hair was unkempt, his blue eyes were still keen and piercing, and a bright hectic spot of red appeared on each of his hollow cheeks.  His hands were tremulous, and his voice deep and husky.  After a few personal inquiries the old man launched out into a most extraordinary and characteristic harangue on the wretched degeneracy of these evil days.  The prophet, Jeremiah, was cheerfulness itself in comparison with him.  Many of the raciest things he regaled us with were entirely too personal for publication.  He amused us with a description of half a night’s debate with John Bright on political economy, while he said, “Bright theed and thoud with me for hours, while his Quaker wife sat up hearin’ us baith.  I tell ye, John Bright got as gude as he gie that night”; and I have no doubt that he did.

Most of his extraordinary harangue was like an eruption of Vesuvius, but the laugh he occasionally gave showed that he was talking about as much for his own amusement as for ours.  He was terribly severe on Parliament, which he described as “endless babblement and windy talk—­the same hurdy-gurdies grinding out lies and inanities.”  The only man he had ever heard in Parliament that at all satisfied him was the Old Iron Duke.  “He gat up and stammered away for fifteen minutes; but I tell ye, he was the only mon in Parliament who gie us any credible portraiture of the facts.”  He looked up at the portrait of Oliver Cromwell behind him, and exclaimed with great vehemence:  “I ha’ gone doon to the verra bottom of Oliver’s speeches, and naething in Demosthenes or in any other mon will compare wi’ Cromwell in penetrating into the veritable core of the fact.  Noo, Parliament, as they ca’ it, is joost everlasting babblement and lies.”  We led him to discuss the labor question and the condition of the working classes.  He said that the turmoil about labor is only “a lazy trick of master and man to do just as little honest work and to get just as much for it as they possibly can—­that is the labor question.”  It did my soul good, as a teetotaler, to hear his scathing denunciation of the liquor traffic.  He was fierce in his wrath against “the horrible and detestable damnation of whuskie and every kind of strong drink.”  In this strain the thin and weird looking old Iconoclast went on for an hour until he wound up with declaring, “England has