The next public appearance which Oliver made was in delivering a lecture on Wordsworth in the town-hall, which was readily lent to any respectable lecturer, native or foreign, who undertook to enlighten or please the townspeople. Courses of lectures were not uncommon in Friarton, though more frequently delivered in winter than at any other season, but no tradesman had ever before stood at the lecturer’s desk improvised for the occasion. Oliver could bring himself to read a lecture as he could sing a song. He had read prize essays before an audience at once more critical and a good deal more aggressive. Though Friarton did not form an exception to the great rule of a man’s not being a prophet in his own country, he was not likely to be bidden speak out and turn over his leaf by the most sarcastic of his fellow-citizens. After much reflection, Oliver had come to the conclusion that a lecture from him might be useful and acceptable, and he had wished to give it at once that he might not interfere with the courses of lectures which Mr. Fremantle and others were wont to read to select circles, generally with some distinctly charitable or purely intellectual object in view, from November to February. Besides, Oliver was reluctant to let the autumn pass without an attempt to rouse those of his neighbours with whom he had cast in his lot to take their share of the wealth which was free to them. After his experience at the annual excursion, and at the Friarton floricultural and horticultural show, where it was evident so much energy was spent on raising Brobdingnag cabbages and roses, he suspected that the book of nature, with all its higher teaching, was closed to his class even beyond other classes. He wished to do what he could to show how much good as well as beauty existed in the world simply for the taking, and how deeply and vitally humanity was interested in the grand and terrible, and fair and sweet framework around it. The pleasant little episode of the discovery he had made in Miss Nancy Barr had influenced him to a certain extent, but there must have been another less purely public-spirited inducement muddling Oliver’s brains, or else, young man of dreams and aspirations as he was—and to such an individual it is hard to say what misconception is too grotesque and outrageous—he could not have gone so wide of the mark as to choose Wordsworth of all writers to fire over the heads of his fellow-tradesmen. He might more judiciously have selected the most difficult question of the most difficult play of Shakespeare, the problem of the madness or non-madness of Hamlet, the theory of the morality of Timon of Athens, and offered it to those excellent people as a nut to crack. And Oliver ought to have known, and did know, in a form of knowledge undigested and unapplied—as it appeared in this instance—that while ballad literature is the first conscious intellectual effort of a people, in