The Hall of Science in the Old Street Road is not an attractive place outside, and internally it is less of a hall and more of a barn than any public building with which I chance to be familiar. And yet, Sunday night after Sunday night, it is well filled, though the admission for each person is from threepence to a shilling, and there is no attempt by music or ritual to attract the sentimental or the weak. The lectures delivered are long and argumentative, and it is worth the study, especially of the Christian minister who complains that he cannot get at the working man, how it is that the people prefer to pay money to hear the lectures at Old Street, while he offers them the Gospel without money and without price and often with the additional attraction of a free tea. With that view I went to hear Mrs. Besant one Sunday night. I know little of Mrs. Besant, save that she has been made the subject of a prosecution which, whatever be its results, whether of fine or imprisonment to herself or of gain to her prosecutors, is one deeply to be deplored. If a clergyman of the Established Church of England established or attempted to establish the fact that mankind has a tendency to increase beyond the means of existence, a woman, on behalf of the sex that has the most to suffer from the misery of overpopulation, has a right in the interests of humanity to call attention to the subject. In a very old-fashioned couplet it has been remarked of woman— That if she will, she will, you may depend on’t; And if she won’t, she won’t, and there’s an end on’t. To that class of female Mrs. Besant emphatically belongs. She is one of those rare ones who will say what she thinks. There is a great deal of firmness in her face. Such a woman always goes her own way. It was a pleasant change from the strong meat of the Hall of Science—the withering scorn and contempt there poured on all that the best men in the world have held to be best—to the mild excitement of a Shakespearian reading in a public-house. Could there be a fitter teacher for the people who do not go to church, and, let me add, also for those who do? There could be no negative reply to such a question, and surely if Shakespeare is quoted in the pulpit on a Sunday morning, the people may hear him read on a Sunday evening.