sentiments that were clothed in the most
lovely, and yet, as it seemed to me, the most obvious and the
most inevitable language.

It was while I was thus under the full spell of the Shakespearean
necromancy that a significant event occurred. My Father took me
up to London for the first time since my infancy. Our visit was
one of a few days only, and its purpose was that we might take
part in some enormous Evangelical conference. We stayed in a dark
hotel off the Strand, where I found the noise by day and night
very afflicting. When we were not at the conference, I spent long
hours, among crumbs and bluebottle flies, in the coffee-room of
this hotel, my Father being busy at the British Museum and the
Royal Society. The conference was held in an immense hall,
somewhere in the north of London. I remember my short-sighted
sense of the terrible vastness of the crowd, with rings on rings
of dim white faces fading in the fog. My Father, as a privileged
visitor, was obliged with seats on the platform, and we were in
the heart of the first really large assemblage of persons that I
had ever seen.

The interminable ritual of prayers, hymns and addresses left no
impression on my memory, but my attention was suddenly stung into
life by a remark. An elderly man, fat and greasy, with a voice
like a bassoon, and an imperturbable assurance, was denouncing
the spread of infidelity, and the lukewarmness of professing
Christians, who refrained from battling with the wickedness at
their doors. They were like the Laodiceans, whom the angel of the
Apocalypse spewed out of his mouth. For instance, who, the orator
asked, is now rising to check the outburst of idolatry in our
midst? 'At this very moment,' he went on, 'there is proceeding,
unreproved, a blasphemous celebration of the birth of
Shakespeare, a lost soul now suffering for his sins in hell!' My
sensation was that of one who has suddenly been struck on the
head; stars and sparks beat around me. If some person I loved had
been grossly insulted in my presence, I could not have felt more
powerless in anguish. No one in that vast audience raised a word
of protest, and my spirits fell to their nadir. This, be it
remarked, was the earliest intimation that had reached me of the
tercentenary of the Birth at Stratford, and I had not the least
idea what could have provoked the outburst of outraged godliness.

But Shakespeare was certainly in the air. When we returned to the
hotel that noo