sceptical, and he had a superficial acquaintance, second-hand, with a
multitude of books, many of them of an infidel turn. I once rebuked
him for his hypocrisy, and his defence was that religious disputes
were indifferent to him, and that at any rate a man associates with
gentlemen if he is a churchman. Cultivation and manners he thought
to be of more importance than Calvinism. I believe that he partly
meant what he said. He went to church because the school would have
failed if he had gone to chapel; but he was sufficiently keen-sighted
and clever to be beyond the petty quarrels of the sects, and a song
well sung was of much greater moment to him than an essay on paedo-
baptism. It was all very well of Chalmers to revile him for his
shallowness. He was shallow, and yet he possessed in some mysterious
way a talent which I greatly coveted, and which in this world is
inestimably precious--the talent of making people give way before
him--a capacity of self-impression. Chalmers could never have
commanded anybody. He had no power whatever, even when he was right,
to put his will against the wills of others, but yielded first this
way and then the other. Clem, on the contrary, without any
difficulty or any effort, could conquer all opposition, and smilingly
force everybody to do his bidding.

Clem had a peculiar theory with regard to his own rights and those of
the class to which he considered that he belonged. He always held
implicitly and sometimes explicitly that gifted people live under a
kind of dispensation of grace; the law existing solely for dull
souls. What in a clown is a crime punishable by the laws of the land
might in a man of genius be a necessary development, or at any rate
an excusable offence. He had nothing to say for the servant-girl who
had sinned with the shopman, but if artist or poet were to carry off
another man's wife, it might not be wrong.