As it is the property of fame to grow with time, and the way of a great name to begin with brains and end with lords, a great man’s descendants are not unnaturally found persons of much greater consequence than the original great one.  In like manner the dignity and importance of the members of the Literary and Philosophical Society had grown, in direct ratio to their distance from the original founders of it; and the learned Doctors Sibley and Ambrose, who really did know something about art and poetry and certainly loved them, can never have been persons of such consequence as one or two of their descendants who are nameless, and who certainly knew nothing about either.

One of the real objects of this sad little Society was passionately to ignore what they contemptuously called local talent.  It is true that there was not much to ignore, and, after all, it has now to be recorded to their credit that they did unreservedly give Theophilus Londonderry his chance.  By what quaintness of accident he could not imagine, he suddenly found himself invited to lecture before them.  The invitation read something like a command, and there seemed to be an implication that if all were satisfactory, he might thus earn the right of acknowledging the patronage of the Literary and Philosophical Society of Coalchester.

Theophilus Londonderry’s subject, therefore, was “Walt Whitman,”—­a name which conveyed no offence to the Committee, for the simple reason that it conveyed nothing.  It was a strange and humorous thing for the young man to think of, that his was to be the first human voice that had spoken that name of the future aloud in Coalchester.  As he rose to give his paper, he pronounced its title slowly, with his full carrying voice, and allowed the strange new name to roll away in menacing echoes through the old Lyceum:  “W-a-l-t W-h-i-t-m-a-n.”

Even yet no one saw the coming doom, heard not the voice that tolled a funeral bell through all Lyceums and other haunted houses of dead learning.  The Canon in the chair smiled benignantly, with an expression that I can only compare to buttered rolls.  He was just three hundred years old that very day, and the audience (a scanty fifty or so) ran from a hundred and fifty upwards.  The only young men present besides the lecturer were two friends of his I have yet to introduce,—­Rob Clitheroe, a fiery young poet and pamphleteer of many ambitions, and James Whalley (little James Whalley he was always called) a gentle lover of letters, with perhaps the most delicate taste in the whole little coterie; and Mr. Moggridge,—­not entirely comfortable, it having been by some mysterious atmospheric effect conveyed to him that he was a tradesman and a dissenter, in which latter capacity he felt a certain traditional resentment towards his complacent fellow listeners.  A quite recent ancestor had refused to pay tithes.  That ancestor was in his blood to-night.

Jenny was not there.  Ladies were not admitted to the meetings of the Society, there being a sort of implication that masonries of learning, occult sciences of the brain, were practised at their meetings,—­matters which never came out in the “Transactions.”