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"I am looked upon as being as mad," he wrote to his brother, "because on a hasty notice, I took a defaulting lecturer's place at the Philosophical Institution, and discoursed on the polarization of light . . . But I like work: it is a family weakness." Then followed chronic malaise sleepless nights, days of pain, and more spitting of blood.
I turn aside from their plays in the theatre and in the library as I turn aside from the fictions of Pierre de Coulevain and Arnold Bennett. I love to fashion wreathes of my own and if two young men will now step forward to the lecturer's bench I will take delight in crowning them with my own hands.
Pradamite such was the lecturer's euphonious name undertook to prove conclusively that man was not descended from the gorilla; but when the little old gentleman walked briskly upon the stage, she whispered John that he would have been a valuable advocate of the theory held by the other side: he wanted nothing but a little pointed felt hat, with a feather in it, to look very much like a small edition of the original gorilla reduced to earning his living by assisting a hand-organist.
We found Delbras, or the man we believed to be Delbras, still occupying the 'lecturer's' place at the entrance to the theatre. He was disguised to the extent of a pair of black whiskers and some slightly smoked gold-rimmed nose-glasses, just as he had been in the morning; and he did not labour continuously.
There was no great rush, but the lectures drew well and abundantly paid all expenses including the lecturer's fee. The press did not take much notice of the lectures, for the Workingman's party had no newspapers expressly in its favor, except the one I have already quoted from. But he was one of the few men whose power is great enough to advertise itself. Wherever he was he was felt.
What stunned the gossips of the windows to awed admiration, however, was the unconcerned and stoical fashion in which she wore a long bodkin straight through her head. It seemed a large sacrifice merely to make sure one's hat remained in place. The party took seats a little to the left and rear of the lecturer's table, and faced the audience.
Instead of storing the memory, during the period when the memory is the predominant faculty, with facts for the after exercise of the judgment; and instead of awakening by the noblest models the fond and unmixed love and admiration, which is the natural and graceful temper of early youth; these nurslings of improved pedagogy are taught to dispute and decide; to suspect all but their own and their lecturer's wisdom; and to hold nothing sacred from their contempt, but their own contemptible arrogance; boy-graduates in all the technicals, and in all the dirty passions and impudence of anonymous criticism.
After the course there will be an examination; and then, with the lecturer's help and the advice, if I might suggest it, of Lady Williams, who can tell him if the candidate's family be respectable and deserving we can surely select a young person to do us credit."
There is neither desk nor pulpit, for the service stands in no need of such adjuncts, inasmuch as the devotional parts of it consist mainly of psalm-singing, and the exhortation is delivered, like a lecturer's address at the British Institution, from the table.
When he came on the platform she was so amazed at his personal appearance that she cried out, but fortunately her exclamation was lost in the applause that greeted the lecturer. The man was the exact duplicate of her betrothed. She listened to the lecture in a daze; it seemed to her that even the tones of the lecturer's voice were those of her lover.
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