could understand; all of them were scholars and gentlemen, as blameless in their lives as they were superior in their powers; and all of them lived upon a kind of intellectual platform, philosophical demigods, sufficient for themselves, and looking down with a good deal of curiosity, a little contempt, and a little pity, upon the crowds who thronged below of common men. These were the people to whom Lionel Rivers, in the first flush of his emancipation, had hastened from his high-churchism, and his country pulpit--some of them had been his companions at College--some had inspired him by their books, or pleased him by their eloquence. They were a brotherhood of men of great cultivation--his equals, and sometimes his superiors. He had yearned for their society when he was quite removed from it; but he was of a perverse and unconforming mind. What did he do now? He took the strange fancy suddenly, and telling no man, of wandering through those frightful regions of crime and darkness, which we hide behind our great London streets. He went about through the miserable thoroughfares, looking at the miserable creatures there. What was the benefit to them of these polluted lives of theirs? They had their enjoyments, people said--their enjoyments! Their sorrows, like the sorrows of all humanity, were worthy human tears, consolation, and sympathy,--their hardships and endurances were things to move the universal heart; but their enjoyments--Heaven save us!--the pleasures of St Giles’s, the delights and amusements of those squalid groups at the street corners! If they were to have nothing more than that, what a frightful fate was theirs! And there came upon the spectator, as he went among them in silence, a sudden eagerness to try that talisman which Agnes Atheling had bidden him use. It was vain to try philosophy there, where no one knew what it meant--vain to offer the rites of the Church to those who were fatally beyond its pale. Was it possible, after all, that the one word in the world, which could stir something human--something of heaven--in these degraded breasts, was that one sole unrivalled _Name_? He could not withdraw himself from the wretched scene before him. He went on from street to street with something of the consciousness of a man who carries a hidden remedy through a plague-stricken city, but hides his knowledge in his own mind, and does not apply it. A strange sense of guilt--a strange oppression by reason of this grand secret--an overpowering passionate impulse to try the solemn experiment, and withal a fascinated watchfulness which kept him silent--possessed the mind of the young man.