and was therefore qualified to speak from experience as to the best means of elevating those who pursued it.  The details of his story, as they fell from the mouth of the reverend speaker, were highly spiced.  His hearers were amused, interested, and stirred; and, when a daily newspaper gave a headlined account of the speech, with a portrait of the speaker, the professional fortune of the Adulated Clergyman (for it was he) was assured.

Shortly afterwards his biography appeared in a series published in a weekly periodical under the title of Unconventional Clerics, and he himself wrote a touching letter on “The Plague Spots of Nova Zembla,” in which an eloquent appeal was made for subscriptions on behalf of the inhabitants of that chill and neglected region.  Ladies now began to say to one another:  “Have you heard Mr. So-and-So preach?  Really, not?  Oh, you should.  He’s so wonderful, so convincing, so unlike all others.  You must come with me next Sunday,” and thus gradually he gathered round him in his remote church a band of faithful women, drawn from the West End by the fame of his unconventional eloquence.  A not too fastidious critic might, perhaps, have been startled by a note of vulgarity in his references to sacred events, as well as by the tone of easy and intimate familiarity with which he spoke of those whose names are generally mentioned with bated breath, and printed with capital letters; but the most refined women seemed to find in all this an additional fascination.  His sermons dealt in language which was at the same time plain and highly-coloured.  He denounced his congregation roundly as the meanest of sinners.  To the women he was particularly merciless.  He tore to rags their little vesture of self-respect, shattered their nerves with emotional appeals, harrowed all their feelings, and belaboured them so violently with prophecies of wrath, that they left church, after shedding gallons of tears and emptying their expiatory purses into the subscription-plate, in a state of pale but pious pulp.  In the drawing-rooms, however, to which he afterwards resorted, his manner changed.  His voice became soft; he poured oil into the wounds he had inflicted.  “How are you to-day?” he would say, in his caressing way.  “Is the neuralgia any better?  And the dulness of spirits? has meditation prevailed over it?  Ah me! it is the lot of the good to suffer, and silence, perhaps, were best.”  Whereupon he is treated as a Father Confessor of domestic troubles, and persuades young married women that their husbands misunderstand them.

It is unnecessary to add that his subscription-lists flourished, his bazaars prospered, his missions and retreats overflowed with feminine money, and his Church was overloaded with floral tributes.  The brutal tribe of men, however, sneered at him, and perversely suspected his motives; nor were they reconciled to him when they saw him relieving the gloom of a generally (so it was understood) ascetic existence by dining at a smart restaurant with a galaxy of devoted women, whom he proposed to conduct in person to a theatre.  Such, then, is, or was, the Adulated Clergyman.  It is unnecessary to pursue his career further.  Perhaps he quarrelled with his Bishop, and unfrocked himself; possibly he found himself in a Court of Law, where an unsympathetic jury recorded a painful verdict against him.