Common minds are not kept at high-interest mark for long together by exhibition of the merely beautiful, however persuasively it be set forth.
He had chosen the Elizabethan period, and he led up to it by the kind of introduction which he felt would be necessary.

Trusting himself more after the first fortnight, he ceased to write out his lectures verbatim; free utterance was an advantage to himself and his audience.
He read at large from his authors; to expect the men to do this for themselves--even had the books been within their reach--would have been too much, and without such illustration the lectures were vain.

This reading brought him face to face with his main difficulty: how to create in men a sense which they do not possess.

The working man does not read, in the strict sense of the word; fiction has little interest for him, and of poetry he has no comprehension whatever; your artisan of brains can study, but he cannot read.

Egremont was under no illusion on this point; he knew well that the loveliest lyric would appeal to a man like Bower no more than an unintelligible demonstration of science.
Was it impossible to bestow this sense of intellectual beauty?
With what earnestness he made the endeavour! He took sweet passages of prose and verse, and read them with all the feeling and skill he could command.