The form of preachers was canvassed like the form of public entertainers, ...

The form of preachers was canvassed like the form of public entertainers, and the circulation of some

Victorian sermons is a thing to fill

a modern writer with despair. If we consider the effect, beginning in childhood, of all the preachers on all the congregations, of men loud or unctuous, authoritative or persuasive, speaking out of a body of acknowledged truth to the respectful audience below them, we shall see why the homiletic cadence, more briefly Cant, is so persistent in Victorian oratory and literature.

It sufficed to persuade the lower middle classes that Tupper was a poet and the upper middle classes that Emerson was a philosopher.

Mr Gladstone formed his style by reading sermons aloud, and his diaries are full of self-delivered homilies.' Old Sir Billy Peel trained his son to repeat every Sunday the discourse he had just heard, a practice to which he owed his astonishing recollection of his opponents' arguments and something, perhaps, of the unction of his own replies. The sermon was the standard vehicle of serious truth, and to the expositions and injunctions of their writers and statesmen the Victorian public brought the same hopeful determination to be instructed, and to be elevated, which held them attentive to the pleadings, denunciations, and commonplaces of their preachers.

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