as an instance.  Nothing can be more insignificant as to mere outward appearance, and yet he is listened to in the House of Commons.  But he does not wield it, he does not insult or bully it.  He leads by following opinion, he trims, he shifts, he glides on the silvery sounds of his undulating, flexible, cautiously modulated voice, winding his way betwixt heaven and earth, now courting popularity, now calling servility to his aid, and with a large estate, the “saints,” and the population of Yorkshire to swell his influence, never venturing on the forlorn hope, or doing any thing more than “hitting the house between wind and water.”  Yet he is probably a cleverer man than Mr. Irving.

There is a Mr. Fox, a Dissenting Minister, as fluent a speaker, with a sweeter voice and a more animated and beneficent countenance than Mr. Irving, who expresses himself with manly spirit at a public meeting, takes a hand at whist, and is the darling of his congregation; but he is no more, because he is diminutive in person.  His head is not seen above the crowd the length of a street off.  He is the Duke of Sussex in miniature, but the Duke of Sussex does not go to hear him preach, as he attends Mr. Irving, who rises up against him like a martello tower, and is nothing loth to confront the spirit of a man of genius with the blood-royal.  We allow there are, or may be, talents sufficient to produce this equality without a single personal advantage; but we deny that this would be the effect of any that our great preacher possesses.  We conceive it not improbable that the consciousness of muscular power, that the admiration of his person by strangers might first have inspired Mr. Irving with an ambition to be something, intellectually speaking, and have given him confidence to attempt the greatest things.  He has not failed for want of courage.  The public, as well as the fair, are won by a show of gallantry.  Mr. Irving has shrunk from no opinion, however paradoxical.  He has scrupled to avow no sentiment, however obnoxious.  He has revived exploded prejudices, he has scouted prevailing fashions.  He has opposed the spirit of the age, and not consulted the esprit de corps.  He has brought back the doctrines of Calvinism in all their inveteracy, and relaxed the inveteracy of his northern accents.  He has turned religion and the Caledonian Chapel topsy-turvy.  He has held a play-book in one hand, and a Bible in the other, and quoted Shakspeare and Melancthon in the same breath.  The tree of the knowledge of good and evil is no longer, with his grafting, a dry withered stump; it shoots its branches to the skies, and hangs out its blossoms to the gale—­

  “Miraturque novos fructus, et non sua poma.”

He has taken the thorns and briars of scholastic divinity, and garlanded them with the flowers of modern literature.  He has done all this, relying on the strength of a remarkably fine person and manner, and through that he has succeeded—­otherwise he would have perished miserably.