ouldn't exchange Gasometer Street for the Isles of
Greece!

CHAPTER II

INTRODUCES MORE UNROMANTIC MATERIAL

That French poet only concerns us here as, so to say, the highest light
in the contrast which it was the happy business of Theophilus
Londonderry, Jenny Talbot, and two or three devoted friends to make in
the vicinity of Gasometer Street and indeed in little Coalchester
at large.

Theophilus Londonderry! It is rather a mouthful of a name. Yet it's so
like the long, expansive, good-natured, eloquent fellow it stands for,
that I must not shorten it, though we shall presently abbreviate it for
purposes of affectionate reference. He himself liked "Theophil" for its
reminiscence of another French poet, though "Theo" was perhaps the more
suitable abbreviation for one of his profession. Really, or perhaps
rather seemingly, Theophilus Londonderry had two professions,--or say
one was a profession and the other was a vocation, a "call." By day he
professed to be a clerk in a cotton-office,--and he was no fool at that
(there is no need for a clever man to be a fool at anything), but by
night, and occasionally of an afternoon,--when he got leave of absence
to solemnise a marriage, or run through a funeral,--he was a spiritual
pastor, the young father of his flock.

Here I must permit myself some necessary remarks on the subject of
Nonconformity, its influence on individualities and its direct
relationship to Romance. In the churches of England or of Rome,--though
he sometimes looked wistfully towards the latter,--Theophilus
Londonderry, with his disabilities of worldly condition, would have
found no place to be himself in. His was an organism that could not
long have breathed in any rigid organisation. It was the
non-establishment, the comparative free-field, of Nonconformity that
gave him his chance. Conscious, soon after his first few breaths, of a
personal force that claimed operation in some human employment, some
work not made with hands, but into which also entered the spirit of man,
and being quite poor, and entirely hopeless of family wealth or
influence, there were only two fields open to him, Art or Nonconformity.
To art in the usual sense of the word he was not called, but to the art
of Demosthenes he was unmistakably called; and for this
Nonconformity--with a side entrance into politics--was his opportunity.

This bourne of his faculties had indeed been predestined for him by no
remoter influence