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Then it is possible that Hill's dietary was conducive to morbid
conscientiousness; a breakfast frequently eaten in a hurry, a midday bun,
and, at such hours after five as chanced to be convenient, such meat as
his means determined, usually in a chop-house in a back street off the
Brompton Road. Occasionally he treated himself to threepenny or ninepenny
classics, and they usually represented a suppression of potatoes or chops.
It is indisputable that outbreaks of self-abasement and emotional revival
have a distinct relation to periods of scarcity. But apart from this
influence on the feelings, there was in Hill a distinct aversion to
falsity that the blasphemous Landport cobbler had inculcated by strap and
tongue from his earliest years. Of one fact about professed atheists I am
convinced; they may be--they usually are--fools, void of subtlety,
revilers of holy institutions, brutal speakers, and mischievous knaves,
but they lie with difficulty. If it were not so, if they had the faintest
grasp of the idea of compromise, they would simply be liberal churchmen.


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