that he is entitled to be regarded as an Orator in the best and highest sense of the word, we utterly deny. It is the faculty of an Orator to kindle the same emotions in the bosoms of his hearers which glow in his own ;-to take hold of their sympathies like a spell, and almost to rule them at will. The impulses communicated by the highest order of eloquence lead directly to action. The hearer is plunged immediately into the midst of things, and so occupied with the subject matter of discourse as to have no time to think of or to admire the great master of speech, who acts upon the intelligent masses by whom he is surrounded, as some mighty Galvanic Battery,-hearing and common sympathies forming the links of connection between him and them. Eloquence is more than mere rhetoric, whose shafts glance off the skin of Leviathan without lasting impression. Inspired with the matter of Passion, it hurls its shafts to the very heart of its object. In its noblest specimens, there is a close affinity between the speaker's thoughts and the subject-matter of discourse. It is bold and even adventurous in its flights, and its powerful pinions sustain it throughout. It combines grandeur of conception with a wide range of vision. It utters its denunciations against the Wrong-doer with vehemence. It subordinates all the powers of the mind,-Reason-Imagination – Memory — Conscience and the Affections, to the promotion of its object. It hurls the thunder, it wields the lightning of genius, and carries its appeals to the heart with impassioned earnestness. Perhaps Robert Hall more perfectly exemplified these views of the highest order of eloquence, than any other minister in modern times, next to him Chalmers, and at some distance Irving, who, for a brief period, was a much greater object of attraction than either. Since the sun of Edward Irving set in a troubled sky, both England and Scotland have produced many greater men than this erratic genius, who was at once the idol of the Metropolis and the Wonder of the rural districts, but none who, as Pulpit Orators, have commanded so largely the admiration of the public. The Rev. Charles Spurgeon certainly more closely approaches Irving in the measure of his popularity, than any other minister has done since that lamented individual's decease; but in judging from the accounts which have been handed down from the last generation to the present, he is as far below the measure of Irving in the higher qualities of eloquence, as that great man was inferior to his distinguished contemporaries, Hall and Chalmers. It is, in fact, vastly more difficult to account for his great popularity with a large class of the London public than for Irving's. Irving, in addition to one of the finest voices for public speaking that any man has had since the days of Whitfield, had a commanding presence. Of unusual size and stature and a person naturally adapted to the most graceful action; with "sable locks-iron-grey countenance and firm set features, which converted the raw Scotchman into the likeness of a noble Italian picture,"—Irving, even, in the presence of members of the Royal family of England, looked like one born to be the King of

men.

Mr. Spurgeon has a good voice for being heard. It is clear and powerful, but not more so than the voice of Newton, Flesher, Raffles, and several other great speakers whom we have heard, and it is inferior to the voice of any of these in the music of its intonations.

Mr. Spurgeon's countenance has very little power of expression. His features are not lit up by much of sentiment. His eye is large and full indeed, but such a one, we fancy, as the Poet was thinking of, when he said ;

"There is no speculation in his eye.”

Now these may seem little things, but popular men have sometimes owed much to such little things. Mr. Irving's imposing figure and dignified manner, we are told, enabled him to hazard sentiments and assertions that would have been fatal to others. His controver sial daring was backed by his bodily prowess, and by bringing his intellectual pretensions boldly into a line with his physical accomplishments, he presented a very formidable front indeed to the sceptic or scoffer. "Take a cubit from his stature," says a cotemporary Critic, "and his whole manner resolves itself into an impertinence. But with that addition he overcrows the town, browbeats their prejudices, and bullies them out of their senses, and is not afraid of being contradicted by any one less than himself." Mr. Spurgeon has done a good deal in this way, and with impunity too, but his success is due to some other cause than the power of his presence or the fascination of his manner. In some other particulars we may trace a faint resemblance between these celebrated men. Mr. Spurgeon, like Irving, is somewhat of a Polemic. He treats all kinds of subjects,-Fate, Foreknowledge, and Free-will. He essays to reason on these points. He has a certain ad captandum method of dealing with the matters in question, but he evinces no faculty for close and well-sustained argumentation. He attempts to make breaches in the citadel of the foe without any "battering train of Logic;"-his Rhetoric, however, is called in to supply the place of the severer art; but between Mr. Spurgeon's assaults on the defences of an opponent and those of Mr. Irving, there is about the same difference as between the discharge of a piece of artillery crammed with small sand and one filled with grape-shot. In some other respects the resemblance is more complete. He resembles Mr. Irving in his disposition to revive the worn-out notions of a class of persons who existed a hundred years ago, on the five points in all their ancient repulsiveness, under the pretence of proclaiming the doctrines of grace. He resembles him, too, in denouncing all churches but his own, as so many decayed structures on which Corruption more than Time has already fixed the tooth of Destruction.

Mr. Spurgeon's sermons abound in Rhetorical passages which will ring very well, we dare say, on the Ears of many of his hearers, but would be found to be light, indeed, if put into the scales of the Understanding. The following is not a bad sample.

"My friends, did you ever walk the centuries, and mark the rise and fall of various empires of unbelief? if so, you will seem to be on a battlefield, and you see corpses; you ask the names of the dead, and some one replies, that is the corpse of such a system, and that the carcase of such a theory; and mark you, as surely as time rolls on, the now rampant style of infidelity will perish, and in fifty years we shall see the skeleton of an exploded scheme; and of its admirers, the epitaph will be, Here lies a fool, called of old a Secularist. Now what shall we say of Mormonism, the hag gard superstition of the West; or of Puseyism, the express image of

Popery; or of the Socinian and Arian heresies, of Arminian Perversions, or of Antinomian abuse? What shall we say of each, but that their death-knell shall soon toll, and these children of Hell shall sink back to their birthplace in the pit."-Page 56, of Sermon on the Saint's Heritage and Watchword, in the Pulpit Library.'

Now, it is has never, that we are aware, fallen to our lot to cite a passage from any man of any note whatever, in which, so many high sounding words, and figurative allusions have been employed to express so little. In short, if it were not for the ridiculous and absurd allusion to Arminian notions, under the metaphor of "children"-CHILDREN OF HELL, that shall sink back to their BIRTHPLACE IN THE PIT, we should have been content to pass it over as a grand specimen of that kind of speaking, in which volumes of highsounding Words are employed and yet nothing is communicated. But the combined presumption and uncharitableness that could so describe the origin and destiny of the belief of the majority of religionists in this country, demands a remark or two. The passage is quite a phenomenon. It may be a curious exercise for the inductive faculties of our readers, to determine by what process a young man of one or two and twenty, should, in the middle of the nineteenth century, and in a Metropolitan Pulpit, in the presence of four or five thousand* persons, perpetrate such an outrage on all decency, as such an utterance implies. It is certain, that it never could have escaped the lips of a person much fettered with youthful modesty, or who paid the ordinary amount of deference to the intelligence of his hearers. But let it not be supposed that Mr. Spurgeon always enacts the Oracle, and speaks as if it were an impertinence in any one to call his opinions in question. Sometimes he is unpretensive to a fault. We remember at least, one instance in which he spoke of himself in very humble terms indeed.

"Grace," says he, "is not spoiled by the hollow wooden spout it runs through. God did once speak by an Ass to Balaam, but that did not spoil his words. So he now speaks, not simply by an Ass which he often does, but by something worse than that."

This certainly is a set-off against the presumption indicated in the former passage. But it would be impossible, we think, to account for a really honest man having uttered both in the course of a few weeks, possibly a few days, without supposing that he pre-meditates but little, and reflects less. Mr. Spurgeon's brilliancy of Fancy has been a frequent theme of Eulogy with his ardent admirers. Our readers will not however imagine that he is always giving the reins to Fancy, without any curb of Discretion to check its course. It is true, that in his favourite pieces, images of all kinds are heaped together, like atoms on a sand-bank, and that words, used as the playthings of his fancy, form the most grotesque combinations in his more laboured passages. But his hearers are sometimes privileged to listen to a different style of address, in which the flights are less ambitious. This was to be expected, for it is, we are told, the prerogative of genius to be simple. Mr. S. sometimes exercises this prerogative to * We are quite sure that the place in Surrey Gardens will not seat more than 5000 persons, at the utmost.-EDITOR.

admiration. Take as an example his Sermon on "I am become as a bottle in the smoke."

"Now a bottle when it is in the smoke, gets very black; so does the Christian when he is in the smoke of trial, or in the smoke of the Gospel ministry, or the smoke of persecution, get very black in his own esteem. It is marvellous how bright we are when everything goes right with us; but it is equally marvellous how black we get when a little tribulation comes upon us. We think very well of ourselves while there is no smoke: but let the smoke come, and it just reveals the blackness of our hearts. Trials teach us what we are; they dig up the soil, and let us see what we are made of; they just turn up some of the ill weeds on the surface; they are good for this reason, they make us know our blackness. A bottle, too, that hangs up in the smoke, will become very useless. So do we often when we are under a trying ministry, or a trying providence, feel that we are very useless, good for nothing, like a bottle that has been hung up in the smoke, that nobody will drink out of any more, because it will smoke everything that is put in it. We feel that we are of no use to anybody-that we are poor unprofitable creatures. In our joys we are honourable creatures; we scarcely think the Creator could do without us; but when we are in trouble we feel, I am a worm and no man'-good for nothing; let me die; I have become useless, as well as black, like a bottle in the smoke.'

And then a bottle in the smoke is an empty bottle. It would not have been hung up in the smoke, unless it had been empty. And very often under trials how empty we become! we are full enough in our joys; but the smoke and heat soon dry every atom of moisture out of us; all our hope is gone, all our strength is departed, we then feel that we are empty sinners, and want a full Christ to save us. We are like bottles in smoke.'

Mr.

Now some of our readers will say, that here again verbiage is in an inverse ratio to thought; that if the whole passage were stripped of the little adornments which the Fancy of the Speaker has thrown around it to conceal its nakedness, nothing would remain but a lifeless skeleton, or bodiless phantom. Well, be this as it may, Spurgeon's execution in this passage more nearly approaches what he attempts, than in many others. The passage may be somewhat smoky, like the subject, and the sounds you hear may proceed from very little fishes indeed; but he does not here, as in some other places, make his “little fishes talk like great whales." This is, at least, a negative excellence. It may not be quite agreeable to observe an individual going on, in the full career of his subject, without advancing a jot nearer his object; but then he does not tantalize you by keeping alive the promise and the expectation of genius, without once satisfying it-soaring into mediocrity with adventurous enthusiasm—" writhing," as an eminent critic once caustically ob served of the Marquis of Wellesley, "with agony under a truism, and launching a commonplace with all the fury of a thunderbolt."

Mr. Spurgeon's vocabulary abounds in simple and forcible words, but he wants the power of condensation. His purpose is good, but he often allows himself to be ignominiously drawn aside by Sectarian bias. His acquaintance with our good old Puritan divines, far exceeds that of most young men of his years, and he often tries to translate their noble sentiments into modern English, but instead of transla

ting, he is apt to bury them beneath mountain-masses of verbiage. He dresses them up in a profusion of "metaphors," but those manly sentiments are only encumbered by his tropes and figures, brought together as thickly as lie the "leaves in Vallombrosa, where the Etrurian shades, high over-arched, imbower." He has great facility of production, but gives small indication of that unremitting and pains-taking application which is indispensable to excellence of the highest order in every department of study. Two greater contrasts could not be found than the facile Spurgeon and the fastidious but elegant Robert Hall. Want of space admonishes us that we must not proceed further with this Critique in the present number. We hope, however, to be able ere long to resume the subject in a future number, and to trace out those qualities of Mr. Spurgeon's mind, and peculiarities of his manner, to which he is mainly indebted for the eminence he occupies in the public esteem.

Man in Earnest, exemplified in the Life and Labours of the REV. F. W. WHEELER. BY ROBERT FERGUSON, D.D., L.L.D. London: LONGMAN, BROWN, and Co.

The subject of this volume was a Missionary in Jamaica. He was sent out by the London Missionary Society, and at the time of his death occupied the Station of that Society in the City of Kingston. We knew many devoted men in that distant Isle, but probably no man equal in this respect to our deceased friend,—the late F. W. Wheeler. The account of his life and labours is full of interest. We cordially recommend it to the attention of our readers.

Shirley Hibberd's Garden Favourites and Exhibition Flowers. London: GROOMBRIDGE and SONS, 5, Paternoster-row. Price Sixpence.

This number treats on the Geranium, its history, properties, cultivation, propagation, and general management in all seasons. It contains a number of very excellent illustrations, and cannot fail to be deeply interesting to individuals who have a taste for the floral beauties which, with many, form the principal attractions of the Garden. The Christian Cabinet. (No. XCVI.) London: PARTRIDGE and

Co.

This is a number of a Weekly Newspaper designed to edify the Churches. In addition to reporting the leading events of the day as matters of current intelligence, it usually supplements its reportby observations on passing occurrences, as viewed from the Christian stand-point. This publication has our best wishes.

The Library of Biblical Literature. London: FREEMAN, Fleetstreet.

Another volume of one of the most interesting and popular works ever issued in the department of Biblical Literature. We give it high commendation when we state, that the present volume fully sustains the high character which the former volumes had won for this most valuable work.