Were I my own master, I would kick him, politics and religious movements, to a considerable distance." {110} During his travels after his abandonment of Grub Street, "Lavengro" frequently came upon the traces of the man in black.

While sojourning for one night with a hospitable though superstitious acquaintance, whom he met after leaving Salisbury, "Lavengro" heard the story of the Rev.Mr.Platitude, a sacerdotalist of weak intellects who had been cajoled from his lawful allegiance to the "good, quiet Church of England," by the wiles of a sharking priest come over from Italy to proselytize and to plunder.

From what he then heard of the sharking priest, by putting two and two together, Lavengro was now able to identify him with the "man in black." Subsequently he heard of the efforts of the same clever dialectician to overcome the Methodist preacher Peter Williams--efforts which collapsed upon the appearance of the preacher's wife Winifred.

"Wife, wife," muttered the disconcerted priest, "if the fool has a wife he will never do for us." In the course of his wanderings this nineteenth-century S.Augustine often gave himself out to be a teacher of elocution.
{117} The man in black was completely mystified by the knowledge of his own past life which this remark revealed (see Chap.IX.

_infra_.).