nately large of limb and
shoulder. He would, perhaps, hardly have been said to be a handsome
man. His face was coarse, and in parts of it heavy. But he had a most
commanding presence, and he was withal a picturesque--if it be not
more accurate to say a statuesque--figure. Some of the features, too,
were good. He had a very keen and intelligent blue eye, a mass of iron
grey hair, lips, the scornful curl of which was terrible, and with all
this a voice stentorian in its power, and yet flexible, with a flow
of language rapid and abundant as the flow of a great river, and as
unstemmable--the very _beau-ideal_ of a mob orator.

"In the evening," says my diary, "we drove out to Stayley Bridge to
hear the preaching of Stephens, the man who has become the subject of
so much newspaper celebrity," (Does any one remember who he was?) "We
reached a miserable little chapel, filled to suffocation, and besieged
by crowds around the doors. We entered through the vestry with very
great difficulty, and only so by the courtesy of sundry persons who
relinquished their places, on Doherty's representing to them that we
were strangers from a distance and friends to the cause. Presently
Stephens arrived, and a man who had been ranting in the pulpit,
merely, as it seemed, to occupy the people till he should come,
immediately yielded his place to him. Stephens spoke well, and said
some telling words in that place, of the cruel and relentless march of
the great Juggernauth, Gold. But I did not hear anything which seemed
to me to justify his great reputation. Really the most striking part
of the performance, and that which I thought seemed to move the people
most, was Oastler's mounting the pulpit and giving out the verses of a
hymn, one by one, which the congregation sang after him." So says my
diary. Him I remember well, though Stephens not at all. I remember,
too, the pleasure with which I listened to his really fine delivery of
the lines; his pronunciation of the words was not incorrect, and when
he spoke, as I heard him on sundry subsequent occasions, his language,
though emphasised rather, as it seemed, than marred by a certain
roughness of Lancashire accent, was not that of an uncultivated man.
Yes! Oastler, the King of Lancashire as the people liked to call
him, was certainly a man of power, and an advocate whom few platform
orators would have cared to meet as an adversary.

When my mother's notes for her projected novel were completed, w