His fellow-feeling for the poor drunken schoolmaster rested on sentiment. In Alistair the seed of genius, delicate from the first, had been choked, not by the pressure of physical needs, but by a profound moral discouragement. During the years in which genius begins to recognize itself, to try its wings, and point its first shy flight towards the empyrean, he had found himself living the life of a criminal on a ticket-of-leave. He had been kept in a state of spiritual starvation, deprived of the food for which his nature pined, and choked with the dry bread of Calvinism. The budding tendrils of his mind had shrivelled, vainly searching for the air of sympathy and the warm sun of praise. He had been made to feel afraid of his own intelligence, his dreams and guesses after truth and beauty were imputed to him as iniquity; and if he ever sought to give them expression, he wrote as Crusoe might have written on his desert isle--for the ears of savages. His genius had emerged from this ordeal maimed for life. If he sang now, it was not as the birds sang, rejoicing in their Maker’s gift to them, but stealthily, as prisoners sing in dungeons, apprehensive of the passing warder’s tread. Even the desire for fame was now a broken spring. He had tasted too deeply of the bitter cup of disapproval to hope to cleanse his mouth with the honey of applause. He felt vaguely that he had been sent into the world to teach his fellow-men to rejoice with him in all its beauty and its wonder, and that they had struck him brutally across the lips, and bidden him become dull and timid and mean-hearted, like themselves. A whole generation in England had endured an experience more or less like Alistair’s, and the literature of the age still breathes a suppressed bitterness against the cruelties of Evangelicalism. The persecution was all the more oppressive because it was not sanctioned by any public authority, nor embodied in any law. It was carried on privately, around every hearth, and in every hour of family life, poisoning the springs of truthfulness and self-respect, and breaking the hearts of the young. It was the memory of such wrongs that had made easy the triumph of the Catholic reaction; the Protestant tyranny had fallen, as other tyrannies fall, more by its own abuses than by the strength of its assailants. The fires of Smithfield were forgotten, and the little pagan group who surrounded Alistair Stuart patronized the Roman Church as their most powerful ally against the Nonconformist conscience.