But in private, if it suited his purpose, he could always be airily sceptical, and he had a superficial acquaintance, second-hand, with a multitude of books, many of them of an infidel turn.  I once rebuked him for his hypocrisy, and his defence was that religious disputes were indifferent to him, and that at any rate a man associates with gentlemen if he is a churchman.  Cultivation and manners he thought to be of more importance than Calvinism.  I believe that he partly meant what he said.  He went to church because the school would have failed if he had gone to chapel; but he was sufficiently keen-sighted and clever to be beyond the petty quarrels of the sects, and a song well sung was of much greater moment to him than an essay on paedo-baptism.  It was all very well of Chalmers to revile him for his shallowness.  He was shallow, and yet he possessed in some mysterious way a talent which I greatly coveted, and which in this world is inestimably precious—­the talent of making people give way before him—­a capacity of self-impression.  Chalmers could never have commanded anybody.  He had no power whatever, even when he was right, to put his will against the wills of others, but yielded first this way and then the other.  Clem, on the contrary, without any difficulty or any effort, could conquer all opposition, and smilingly force everybody to do his bidding.

Clem had a peculiar theory with regard to his own rights and those of the class to which he considered that he belonged.  He always held implicitly and sometimes explicitly that gifted people live under a kind of dispensation of grace; the law existing solely for dull souls.  What in a clown is a crime punishable by the laws of the land might in a man of genius be a necessary development, or at any rate an excusable offence.  He had nothing to say for the servant-girl who had sinned with the shopman, but if artist or poet were to carry off another man’s wife, it might not be wrong.

He believed, and acted upon the belief, that the inferior ought to render perpetual incense to the superior, and that the superior should receive it as a matter of course.  When his father was ill he never waited on him or sat up a single night with him.  If duty was disagreeable to him Clem paid homage to it afar off, but pleaded exemption.  He admitted that waiting on the sick is obligatory on people who are fitted for it, and is very charming.  Nothing was more beautiful to him than tender, filial care spending itself for a beloved object.  But it was not his vocation.  His nerves were more finely ordered than those of mankind generally, and the sight of disease and suffering distressed him too much.  Everything was surrendered to him in the houses of his friends.  If any inconvenience was to be endured, he was the first person to be protected from it, and he accepted the greatest sacrifices, with a graceful acknowledgment, it is true, but with no repulse.  To what better purpose could the best wine be put