 portfolios, handing round maps and photographs, etc.,—supplanting in this function the jealous and sensitive Mackay, who, after his original opposition, had now arrived at regarding Robert as his own particular property, and the lecturer's quick smile of thanks for services rendered as his own especial right. The bright, quicksilvery, irascible little workman, however, was irresistible and had his way. He had taken a passion for Robert as for a being of another order and another world. In the dis[Pg 504]cussions which generally followed the lecture he showed a receptiveness, an intelligence, which were in reality a matter not of the mind but of the heart. He loved, therefore he understood. At the club he stood for Elsmere with a quivering spasmodic eloquence, as against Andrews and the Secularists. One thing only puzzled Robert. Among all the little fellow's sallies and indiscretions, which were not infrequent, no reference to his home life was ever included. Here he kept even Robert absolutely at arm's length. Robert knew that he was married and had children, nothing more.

The old Scotchman, Macdonald, came out after the first lecture somewhat crestfallen.

'Not the sort of stooff I'd expected!' he said, with a shade of perplexity on the rugged face. 'He doosn't talk eneuf in the aabstract for me.'

But he went again, and the second lecture, on the origin of the Gospels, got hold of him, especially as it supplied him with a whole armoury of new arguments in support of Hume's doctrine of conscience, and in defiance of 'that blatin' creetur, Reid.' The thesis with which Robert, drawing on some of the stores supplied him by the squire's book, began his account—i.e. the gradual growth within the limits of history of man's capacity for telling the exact truth—fitted in, to the Scotchman's thinking, so providentially with his own favourite experimental doctrines as against the 'intueetion' folks, 'who will have it that a babby's got as moch mind as Mr. Gladstone, ef it only knew it!' that afterwards he never missed a lecture.

Lestrange was more difficult. He had the inherited temperament of the Genevese frondeur, which made Geneva the headquarters of Calvinism in the sixteenth century, and bids fair to make her the headquarters of continental radicalism in the nineteenth. Robert never felt his wits so much stretched and sharpened as when after the lecture Lestrange was putting questions and objections with an acrid subtlety and persistence worthy of a descendant of that
