Samuel conceived himself much ahead of his family.  Quite uneducated, in any legitimate sense of the word, he had yet learnt that such a thing as education existed, and, by dint of busy perusal of penny popularities, had even become familiar with names and phrases, with modes of thought and of ambition, appertaining to a world for ever closed against him.  He spoke of Culture, and imagined himself far on the way to attain it.  His mind was packed with the oddest jumble of incongruities; Herbert Spencer jostled with Charles Bradlaugh, Matthew Arnold with Samuel Smiles; in one breath he lauded George Eliot, in the next was enthusiastic over a novel by Mrs. Henry Wood; from puerile facetiae he passed to speculations on the origin of being, and with equally light heart.  Save for Pilgrim’s Progress and Robinson Crusoe, he had read no English classic; since boyhood, indeed, he had probably read no book at all, for much diet of newspapers rendered him all but incapable of sustained attention.  Whatever he seemed to know of serious authors came to him at second or third hand.  Avowing his faith in Christianity when with orthodox people, in the society of sceptics he permitted himself to smile at the old faiths,—­though he preferred to escape this temptation, the Nonconformist conscience still reigning within him.  At home he posed as a broad-minded Anglican, and having somewhere read that Tennyson’s ‘In Memoriam’ represented this attitude, he spoke of the poem as ‘one of the books that have made me what I am.’

His circle of acquaintances lay apart from that in which the Lords moved; it consisted for the most part of young men humbly endowed in the matter of income, and making little pretence of social dignity.  When others resorted to theatre or public-house, or places not so readily designated, Samuel and his friends met together to discourse on subjects of which they knew somewhat less than nothing.  Some of them occasionally held audacious language, especially when topics such as the relations of the sexes invited their wisdom; they had read something somewhere which urged them to cast off the trammels of conventional thought; they ‘ventured to say’ that in a very few years ‘surprising changes of opinion would come about.’  These revolutionaries, after startling the more sober of their hearers, went quietly home to mother or landlady, supped on cheese and cocoa, and next day plied the cleric pen with exemplary zeal.

Samuel believed himself in love.  That he should conceive matrimonial intentions with regard to Stephen Lord’s daughter was but the natural issue of circumstance; from that conception resulted an amorous mood, so much inflamed by Nancy’s presence that a young man, whose thoughts did not often transgress decorum, had every reason to suppose himself her victim.  When Nancy rejected his formal offer of devotion, the desire to wed her besieged him more vigorously; Samuel was piqued at the tone of lofty trifling in which the girl answered his proposal; for assuredly