mont, "there is a great question for you and Lady
Firebrace to ponder over. This is a lesson for you fine ladies, who
think you can govern the world by what you call your social influences:
asking people once or twice a-year to an inconvenient crowd in your
house; now haughtily smirking, and now impertinently staring, at them;
and flattering yourselves all this time, that to have the occasional
privilege of entering your saloons and the periodical experience of
your insolent recognition, is to be a reward for great exertions, or if
necessary an inducement to infamous tergiversation."

Book 4 Chapter 4

It was night: clear and serene, though the moon had not risen; and a
vast concourse of persons were assembling on Mowbray Moor. The chief
gathering collected in the vicinity of some huge rocks, one of which,
pre-eminent above its fellows, and having a broad flat head, on which
some twenty persons might easily stand at the same time, was called the
Druid's Altar. The ground about was strewn with stony fragments, covered
tonight with human beings, who found a convenient resting-place amid
these ruins of some ancient temple or relics of some ancient world. The
shadowy concourse increased, the dim circle of the nocturnal assemblage
each moment spread and widened; there was the hum and stir of many
thousands. Suddenly in the distance the sound of martial music: and
instantly, quick as the lightning and far more wild, each person present
brandished a flaming torch, amid a chorus of cheers, that, renewed
and resounding, floated far away over the broad bosom of the dusk
wilderness.

The music and the banners denoted the arrival of the leaders of the
people. They mounted the craggy ascent that led to the summit of
the Druid's Altar, and there, surrounded by his companions, amid the
enthusiastic shouts of the multitude, Walter Gerard came forth to
address a TORCH-LIGHT MEETING.

His tall form seemed colossal in the uncertain and flickering light, his
rich and powerful voice reached almost to the utmost limit of his vast
audience, now still with expectation and silent with excitement. Their
fixed and eager glance, the mouth compressed with fierce resolution or
distended by novel sympathy, as they listened to the exposition of their
wrongs, and the vindication of the sacred rights of labour--the shouts
and waving of the torches as some bright or bold phrase touched them to
the quick--the cause, the hour, the scene--all