As long as Mr.Tryan's hearers were confined to Paddiford Common--which, by the by, was hardly recognizable as a common at all, but was a dismal district where you heard the rattle of the handloom, and breathed the smoke of coal-pits--the 'canting parson' could be treated as a joke.

Not so when a number of single ladies in the town appeared to be infected, and even one or two men of substantial property, with old Mr.Landor, the banker, at their head, seemed to be 'giving in' to the new movement--when Mr.Tryan was known to be well received in several good houses, where he was in the habit of finishing the evening with exhortation and prayer.

Evangelicalism was no longer a nuisance existing merely in by-corners, which any well-clad person could avoid; it was invading the very drawing-rooms, mingling itself with the comfortable fumes of port-wine and brandy, threatening to deaden with its murky breath all the splendour of the ostrich feathers, and to stifle Milby ingenuousness, not pretending to be better than its neighbours, with a cloud of cant and lugubrious hypocrisy.

The alarm reached its climax when it was reported that Mr.Tryan was endeavouring to obtain authority from Mr.Prendergast, the non-resident rector, to establish a Sunday evening lecture in the parish church, on the ground that old Mr.Crewe did not preach the Gospel.
It now first appeared how surprisingly high a value Milby in general set on the ministrations of Mr.Crewe; how convinced it was that Mr.Crewe was the model of a parish priest, and his sermons the soundest and most edifying that had ever remained unheard by a church-going population.

All allusions to his brown wig were suppressed, and by a rhetorical figure his name was associated with venerable grey hairs; the attempted intrusion of Mr.Tryan was an insult to a man deep in years and learning; moreover, it was an insolent effort to thrust himself forward in a parish where he was clearly distasteful to the superior portion of its inhabitants.