e been difficult
to assemble nine Lambeth workmen of higher aggregate intellect than
those who responded to the summons; it would have been, on the other
hand, the easiest thing to find nine with not a man of them available
for anything more than futile wrangling over politics or religion.
Egremont would know this some day; he was yet young in social reform.

And the lectures? It is not too much to say that they were good.
Egremont had capacity for teaching; with his education, had he been
without resources, he would probably have chosen an academic career,
and have done service in it. There was nothing deep in his style of
narrative and criticism, and here depth was not wanted; sufficient that
he was perspicuous and energetic. He loved the things of which he
spoke, and he had the power of presenting to others his reason for
loving them. Not one in five hundred men inexperienced in such work
could have held the ears of the class as he did for the first two or
three evenings. It was impossible for them to mistake his
spirit--ardent, disinterested, aspiring--impossible not to feel
something of a respondent impulse. That familiarity should diminish the
effect of his speech was only to be anticipated. He was preaching a
religion, but one that could find no acceptance as such with eight out
of nine who heard him. Common minds are not kept at high-interest mark
for long together by exhibition of the merely beautiful, however
persuasively it be set forth.

He had chosen the Elizabethan period, and he led up to it by the kind
of introduction which he felt would be necessary. Trusting himself more
after the first fortnight, he ceased to write out his lectures
verbatim; free utterance was an advantage to himself and his audience.
He read at large from his authors; to expect the men to do this for
themselves--even had the books been within their reach--would have been
too much, and without such illustration the lectures were vain. This
reading brought him face to face with his main difficulty: how to
create in men a sense which they do not possess. The working man does
not read, in the strict sense of the word; fiction has little interest
for him, and of poetry he has no comprehension whatever; your artisan
of brains can study, but he cannot read. Egremont was under no illusion
on this point; he knew well that the loveliest lyric would appeal to a
man like Bower no more than an unintelligible demonstration of science.
Was it imp