the old Lyceum: "W-a-l-t W-h-i-t-m-a-n."

Even yet no one saw the coming doom, heard not the voice that tolled a
funeral bell through all Lyceums and other haunted houses of dead
learning. The Canon in the chair smiled benignantly, with an expression
that I can only compare to buttered rolls. He was just three hundred
years old that very day, and the audience (a scanty fifty or so) ran
from a hundred and fifty upwards. The only young men present besides the
lecturer were two friends of his I have yet to introduce,--Rob
Clitheroe, a fiery young poet and pamphleteer of many ambitions, and
James Whalley (little James Whalley he was always called) a gentle lover
of letters, with perhaps the most delicate taste in the whole little
coterie; _and_ Mr. Moggridge,--not entirely comfortable, it having been
by some mysterious atmospheric effect conveyed to him that he was a
tradesman and a dissenter, in which latter capacity he felt a certain
traditional resentment towards his complacent fellow listeners. A quite
recent ancestor had refused to pay tithes. That ancestor was in his
blood to-night.

Jenny was not there. Ladies were not admitted to the meetings of the
Society, there being a sort of implication that masonries of learning,
occult sciences of the brain, were practised at their meetings,--matters
which never came out in the "Transactions."

The lecture was a straightforward and eloquent account of Whitman's
writings and doctrines, with extracts from "The Leaves of Grass;" and
from beginning to end you might have heard a pin drop, particularly
during one or two of the quotations. When it was ended the buttered-roll
expression had faded from the Canon's face, and his "our young friend"
expression was ready for the chairman's remarks. Londonderry's sitting