it was very easy to gain indiscriminate praise and unstinted admiration; on the other hand, we received from Christians equally indiscriminate abuse and hatred.  It was, therefore, needful that we should be our own harshest judges, and that we should be sure that we knew thoroughly every subject that we taught.  He saved me from the superficiality that my “fatal facility” of speech might so easily have induced; and when I began to taste the intoxication of easily won applause, his criticism of weak points, his challenge of weak arguments, his trained judgment, were of priceless service to me, and what of value there is in my work is very largely due to his influence, which at once stimulated and restrained.

One very charming characteristic of his was his extreme courtesy in private life, especially to women.  This outward polish, which sat so gracefully on his massive frame and stately presence, was foreign rather than English—­for the English, as a rule, save such as go to Court, are a singularly unpolished people—­and it gave his manner a peculiar charm.  I asked him once where he had learned his gracious fashions that were so un-English—­he would stand with uplifted hat as he asked a question of a maidservant, or handed a woman into a carriage—­and he answered, with a half-smile, half-scoff, that it was only in England he was an outcast from society.  In France, in Spain, in Italy, he was always welcomed among men and women of the highest social rank, and he supposed that he had unconsciously caught the foreign tricks of manner.  Moreover, he was absolutely indifferent to all questions of social position; peer or artisan, it was to him exactly the same; he never seemed conscious of the distinctions of which men make so much.

Our first conversation, after the meeting at the Hall of Science, took place a day or two later in his little study in 29, Turner Street, Commercial Road, a wee room overflowing with books, in which he looked singularly out of place.  Later I learned that he had failed in business in consequence of Christian persecution, and, resolute to avoid bankruptcy, he had sold everything he possessed, save his books, had sent his wife and daughters to live in the country with his father-in-law, had taken two tiny rooms in Turner Street, where he could live for a mere trifle, and had bent himself to the task of paying off the liabilities he had incurred—­incurred in consequence of his battling for political and religious liberty.  I took with me my MS. essay “On the Nature and Existence of God,” and it served as the basis for our conversation; we found there was little difference in our views.  “You have thought yourself into Atheism without knowing it,” he said, and all that I changed in the essay was the correction of the vulgar error that the Atheist says “there is no God,” by the insertion of a passage disclaiming this position from an essay pointed out to me by Mr. Bradlaugh.  And at this stage of my life-story, it is necessary to put very