seemed sure that he had a right to the enjoyment of the simplest
pleasures so long as London was before him. What a farce, he would
cry, is all this poetry, philosophy, art, and culture, when millions
of wretched mortals are doomed to the eternal darkness and crime of
the city! Here are the educated classes occupying themselves with
exquisite emotions, with speculations upon the Infinite, with
addresses to flowers, with the worship of waterfalls and flying
clouds, and with the incessant portraiture of a thousand moods and
variations of love, while their neighbours lie grovelling in the
mire, and never know anything more of life or its duties than is
afforded them by a police report in a bit of newspaper picked out of
the kennel. We went one evening to hear a great violin-player, who
played such music, and so exquisitely, that the limits of life were
removed. But we had to walk up the Haymarket home, between eleven
and twelve o'clock, and the violin-playing became the merest
trifling. M'Kay had been brought up upon the Bible. He had before
him, not only there, but in the history of all great religious
movements, a record of the improvement of the human race, or of large
portions of it, not merely by gradual civilisation, but by
inspiration spreading itself suddenly. He could not get it out of
his head that something of this kind is possible again in our time.
He longed to try for himself in his own poor way in one of the slums
about Drury Lane. I sympathised with him, but I asked him what he
had to say. I remember telling him that I had been into St. Paul's
Cathedral, and that I pictured to myself the cathedral full, and
myself in the pulpit. I was excited while imagining the opportunity
offered me of delivering some message to three or four thousand
persons in such a building, but in a minute or two I discovered that
my sermon would be very nearly as follows: "Dear friends, I know no
more than you know; we had better go home." I admitted to him that