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.