ormer. In his neighbourhood
in London was the place of assembly of a Knowledge-is-Power Club. The
members at the close of their meetings collected mending-stones from
the road, and broke the windows to the right and left of their line
of march. They had a flag on which was inscribed, "The power of public
opinion." Whenever the enlightened assembly met, my father closed his
shutters, but, closing within, they did not protect the glass. One
morning he picked up, from where it had fallen between the window and
the shutter, a very large, and consequently very demonstrative, specimen
of dialectical granite. He preserved it carefully, and mounted it on
a handsome pedestal, inscribed with "The power of public opinion."
He placed it on the middle of his library mantelpiece, and the daily
contemplation of it cured him of his passion for Reform. During the rest
of his life he never talked, as he had used to do, of "the people":
he always said "the rabble," and delighted in quoting every passage
of _Hudibras_ in which the rabble-rout is treated as he had come to
conclude it ought to be. He made this piece of granite the nucleus of
many political disquisitions. It is still in my possession, and I look
on it with veneration as my principal tutor, for it had certainly a
large share in the elements of my education. If, which does not seem
likely, another reform lunacy should arise in my time, I shall take care
to close my shutters against "The power of public opinion.1"

The Reverend Doctor Opimian being called on to contribute his share to
these diversions of rainy afternoons, said--

'The sort of prose lecture which I am accustomed to deliver would not
be exactly appropriate to the present time and place. I will therefore
recite to you some verses, which I made some time since, on what
appeared to me a striking specimen of absurdity on the part of the
advisers of royalty here--the bestowing the honours of knighthood,
which is a purely Christian institution, on Jews and Paynim; very worthy
persons in themselves, and entitled to any mark of respect befitting
their class, but not to one strictly and exclusively Christian;
money-lenders, too, of all callings the most anti-pathetic to that of a
true knight. The contrast impressed itself on me as I was reading a
poem of the twelfth century, by Hues de Tabaret--_L'Ordene de
Chevalerie_--and I endeavoured to express the contrast in the manner and
form following:--

A NEW ORDER OF