chested, sallow young shoemaker, with a shelving forehead, who seeing
three gentlemen enter to him recognized at once with a practised
resignation that they had not come to order shoe-leather, though he would
fain have shod them, being needy; but it was not the design of Providence
that they should so come as he in his blindness would have had them.
Admitting this he wished for nothing.

The battle with Carpendike lasted three-quarters of an hour, during which
he was chiefly and most effectively silent. Carpendike would not vote
for a man that proposed to open museums on the Sabbath day. The striking
simile of the thin end of the wedge was recurred to by him for a damning
illustration. Captain Beauchamp might be honest in putting his mind on
most questions in his address, when there was no demand upon him to do
it; but honesty was no antidote to impiety. Thus Carpendike.

As to Sunday museuming being an antidote to the pothouse--no. For the
people knew the frequenting of the pothouse to be a vice; it was a
temptation of Satan that often in overcoming them was the cause of their
flying back to grace: whereas museums and picture galleries were
insidious attractions cloaked by the name of virtue, whereby they were
allured to abandon worship.

Beauchamp flew at this young monster of unreason: 'But the people are not
worshipping; they are idling and sotting, and if you carry your despotism
farther still, and shut them out of every shop on Sundays, do you suppose
you promote the spirit of worship? If you don't revolt them you unman
them, and I warn you we can't afford to destroy what manhood remains to
us in England. Look at the facts.'

He flung the facts at Carpendike with the natural exaggeration of them