 quench his fiery face with his drink of water,
the comparison between the orator and the crowd of attentive faces turned
towards him, was extremely to his disadvantage. Judging him by Nature's
evidence, he was above the mass in very little but the stage on which he stood.
In many great respects he was essentially below them. He was not so honest, he
was not so manly, he was not so good-humoured; he substituted cunning for their
simplicity, and passion for their safe solid sense. An ill-made, high-shouldered
man, with lowering brows, and his features crushed into an habitually sour
expression, he contrasted most unfavourably, even in his mongrel dress, with the
great body of his hearers in their plain working clothes. Strange as it always
is to consider any assembly in the act of submissively resigning itself to the
dreariness of some complacent person, lord or commoner, whom three-fourths of it
could, by no human means, raise out of the slough of inanity to their own
intellectual level, it was particularly strange, and it was even particularly
affecting, to see this crowd of earnest faces, whose honesty in the main no
competent observer free from bias could doubt, so agitated by such a leader.
    Good! Hear, hear! Hurrah! The eagerness both of attention and intention,
exhibited in all the countenances, made them a most impressive sight. There was
no carelessness, no languor, no idle curiosity; none of the many shades of
indifference to be seen in all other assemblies, visible for one moment there.
That every man felt his condition to be, somehow or other, worse than it might
be; that every man considered it incumbent on him to join the rest, towards the
making of it better; that every man felt his only hope to be in his allying
himself to the comrades by whom he was surrounded; and that in this belief,
right or wrong (unhappily wrong then), the whole of that crowd were gravely,
deeply, faithfully in earnest; must have been as plain to any one who chose to
see what was there, as the bare beams of the roof and the whitened brick walls.
Nor could any such spectator fail to know in his own breast, that these men,
through their very delusions, showed great qualities, susceptible of being
turned to the happiest and best account; and that to pretend (on the strength of
sweeping axioms, howsoever cut and dried) that they went astray wholly without
cause, and of their own irrational wills, was to pretend that there could be
