composition.  Put the case that Mr. Irving had been five feet high—­Would he ever have been heard of, or, as he does now, have “bestrode the world like a Colossus?” No, the thing speaks for itself.  He would in vain have lifted his Lilliputian arm to Heaven, people would have laughed at his monkey-tricks.  Again, had he been as tall as he is, but had wanted other recommendations, he would have been nothing.

  “The player’s province they but vainly try,
  Who want these powers, deportment, voice, and eye.”

Conceive a rough, ugly, shock-headed Scotchman, standing up in the Caledonian chapel, and dealing “damnation round the land” in a broad northern dialect, and with a harsh, screaking voice, what ear polite, what smile serene would have hailed the barbarous prodigy, or not consigned him to utter neglect and derision?  But the Rev. Edward Irving, with all his native wildness, “hath a smooth aspect framed to make women” saints; his very unusual size and height are carried off and moulded into elegance by the most admirable symmetry of form and ease of gesture; his sable locks, his clear iron-grey complexion, and firm-set features, turn the raw, uncouth Scotchman into the likeness of a noble Italian picture; and even his distortion of sight only redeems the otherwise “faultless monster” within the bounds of humanity, and, when admiration is exhausted and curiosity ceases, excites a new interest by leading to the idle question whether it is an advantage to the preacher or not.  Farther, give him all his actual and remarkable advantages of body and mind, let him be as tall, as strait, as dark and clear of skin, as much at his ease, as silver-tongued, as eloquent and as argumentative as he is, yet with all these, and without a little charlatanery to set them off, he had been nothing.  He might, keeping within the rigid line of his duty and professed calling, have preached on for ever; he might have divided the old-fashioned doctrines of election, grace, reprobation, predestination, into his sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth heads, and his lastly have been looked for as a “consummation devoutly to be wished;” he might have defied the devil and all his works, and by the help of a loud voice and strong-set person—­

  “A lusty man to ben an Abbot able;”—­

have increased his own congregation, and been quoted among the godly as a powerful preacher of the word; but in addition to this, he went out of his way to attack Jeremy Bentham, and the town was up in arms.  The thing was new.  He thus wiped the stain of musty ignorance and formal bigotry out of his style.  Mr. Irving must have something superior in him, to look over the shining close-packed heads of his congregation to have a hit at the Great Jurisconsult in his study.  He next, ere the report of the former blow had subsided, made a lunge at Mr. Brougham, and glanced an eye at Mr. Canning; mystified Mr. Coleridge, and stultified Lord Liverpool in