CHAPTER IV
GLASGOW IN THE DAWN
I had to leave the Edinburgh meeting immediately after Morris finished his lecture, as I had to return to Glasgow that night. Morris came on to Glasgow early on the Sunday, and was, I think, the guest of Professor John Nichol, of the Chair of Literature. I did not see him until the evening meeting in St. Andrews Hall. Despite the wretched weather, the hall, the largest in Glasgow, seating nearly 5000 people, had an audience of about 3000 for him. Perhaps in no other city in the kingdom could audiences of a higher level of intelligence be obtained than those which assembled on Sunday evenings in Glasgow at that period, under the auspices of the Sunday Society, to listen to lecturers of the variety and stamp of Professor Tyndall, Alfred Russel Wallace, Ford Madox Brown, W.M. Rossetti, Bret Harte, Henry George, and Professor John Stuart Blackie. For while the Sabbatarian ban, then still stringent in Scotland, against the holding of any but religious meetings on Sundays kept away the more timid of the intellectual elite, it ensured, on the other hand, that the audiences which attended the Sunday Society lectures were for the greater part composed of men and women whose minds had been aroused from orthodox sloth and were prepared to take unconventional paths. Morris himself remarked on the prevalence of eager, intelligent faces in the crowded seats near the platform. There were, of course, among his listeners a considerable number of
25
