me that everything which had been
done in that way was wrong--that Plato, Robert Owen, and Dr Tuffle who
wrote in the 'Regulator,' were all equally mistaken--gave my
superstitious nature a thrill of anxiety. After what had passed about
the poets, it did not seem likely that Lentulus had all systems by
heart; but who could say he had not seized that thread which may
somewhere hang out loosely from the web of things and be the clue of
unravelment? We need not go far to learn that a prophet is not made by
erudition. Lentulus at least had not the bias of a school; and if it
turned out that he was in agreement with any celebrated thinker,
ancient or modern, the agreement would have the value of an undesigned
coincidence not due to forgotten reading. It was therefore with renewed
curiosity that I engaged him on this large subject--the universal
erroneousness of thinking up to the period when Lentulus began that
process. And here I found him more copious than on the theme of poetry.
He admitted that he did contemplate writing down his thoughts, but his
difficulty was their abundance. Apparently he was like the woodcutter
entering the thick forest and saying, "Where shall I begin?" The same
obstacle appeared in a minor degree to cling about his verbal
exposition, and accounted perhaps for his rather helter-skelter choice
of remarks bearing on the number of unaddressed letters sent to the
post-office; on what logic really is, as tending to support the buoyancy
of human mediums and mahogany tables; on the probability of all miracles
under all religions when explained by hidden laws, and my
unreasonableness in supposing that their profuse occurrence at half a
guinea an hour in recent times was anything more than a coincidence; on
the haphazard way in which marriages are determined--showing the
baselessness of social and moral schemes; and on his expectation that he
should offend the scientific world when he told them what he thought of
electricity as an agent.

No man's appearance could be graver or more gentleman-like than that of
Lentulus as we walked along the Mall while he delivered these
observations, understood by himself to have a regenerative bearing on
human society. His wristbands and black gloves, his hat and nicely
clipped hair, his laudable moderation in beard, and his evident
discrimination in choosing his tailor, all seemed to excuse the
prevalent estimate of him as a man untainted with heterodoxy, and likely
to be