effectually.  Yet the fact was that Bower’s selection had been a remarkably good one.  It would have been difficult to assemble nine Lambeth workmen of higher aggregate intellect than those who responded to the summons; it would have been, on the other hand, the easiest thing to find nine with not a man of them available for anything more than futile wrangling over politics or religion.  Egremont would know this some day; he was yet young in social reform.

And the lectures?  It is not too much to say that they were good.  Egremont had capacity for teaching; with his education, had he been without resources, he would probably have chosen an academic career, and have done service in it.  There was nothing deep in his style of narrative and criticism, and here depth was not wanted; sufficient that he was perspicuous and energetic.  He loved the things of which he spoke, and he had the power of presenting to others his reason for loving them.  Not one in five hundred men inexperienced in such work could have held the ears of the class as he did for the first two or three evenings.  It was impossible for them to mistake his spirit—­ardent, disinterested, aspiring—­impossible not to feel something of a respondent impulse.  That familiarity should diminish the effect of his speech was only to be anticipated.  He was preaching a religion, but one that could find no acceptance as such with eight out of nine who heard him.  Common minds are not kept at high-interest mark for long together by exhibition of the merely beautiful, however persuasively it be set forth.

He had chosen the Elizabethan period, and he led up to it by the kind of introduction which he felt would be necessary.  Trusting himself more after the first fortnight, he ceased to write out his lectures verbatim; free utterance was an advantage to himself and his audience.  He read at large from his authors; to expect the men to do this for themselves—­even had the books been within their reach—­would have been too much, and without such illustration the lectures were vain.  This reading brought him face to face with his main difficulty:  how to create in men a sense which they do not possess.  The working man does not read, in the strict sense of the word; fiction has little interest for him, and of poetry he has no comprehension whatever; your artisan of brains can study, but he cannot read.  Egremont was under no illusion on this point; he knew well that the loveliest lyric would appeal to a man like Bower no more than an unintelligible demonstration of science.  Was it impossible to bestow this sense of intellectual beauty?  With what earnestness he made the endeavour!  He took sweet passages of prose and verse, and read them with all the feeling and skill he could command.  ‘Do you yield to that?’ he said within himself as he looked from face to face.  ’Are your ears hopelessly sealed, your minds immutably earthen?’ Grail—­Oh yes, Grail had the right intelligence in his eyes;