of teeth.  But of really spiritual joys and sorrows, of the life and death of Christ as a manifestation of love that constrains the soul, of sympathy with that yearning over the lost and erring which made Jesus weep over Jerusalem, and prompted the sublime prayer, “Father, forgive them,” of the gentler fruits of the Spirit, and the peace of God which passeth understanding—­of all this, we find little trace in Dr. Cumming’s discourses.

Even more severe is her account of the poet Young.  She speaks of him as “a remarkable individual of the species divine.”  This is her account of his life: 

He is on the verge of fifty, and has recently undergone his metamorphosis into the clerical form.  Rather a paradoxical specimen, if you observe him narrowly:  a sort of cross between a sycophant and a psalmist, a poet whose imagination is alternately fired by the “Last Day” and by a creation of peers, who fluctuate between rhapsodic applause of King George and rhapsodic applause of Jehovah.  After spending “a foolish youth, the sport of peers and poets,” after being a hanger-on of the profligate Duke of Wharton, after aiming in vain at a parliamentary career, and angling for pensions and preferment with fulsome dedications and fustian odes, he is a little disgusted with his imperfect success, and has determined to retire from the general mendicancy business to a particular branch; in other words, he has determined on that renunciation of the world implied in “taking orders,” with the prospect of a good living and an advantageous matrimonial connection.  And no man can be better fitted for an Established Church.  He personifies completely her nice balance of temporalities and spiritualities.  He is equally impressed with the momentousness of death and of burial fees; he languishes at once for immortal life and for “livings;” he has a vivid attachment to patrons in general, but on the whole prefers the Almighty.  He will teach, with something more than official conviction, the nothingness of earthly things; and he will feel something more than private disgust if his meritorious efforts in directing man’s attention to another world are not rewarded by substantial preferment in this.  His secular man believes in cambric bands and silk stockings as characteristic attire for “an ornament of religion and virtue;” hopes courtiers will never forgot to copy Sir Robert Walpole; and writes begging letters to the King’s mistress.  His spiritual man recognizes no motives more familiar than Golgotha and the skies; it walks in graveyards, or it soars among the stars.  His religion exhausts itself in ejaculations and rebukes, and knows no medium between the ecstatic and the sententious.  If it were not for the prospect of immortality, he considers it would be wise and agreeable to be indecent or to murder one’s father; and, heaven apart, it would be extremely irrational in any man not to be a knave.  Man, he thinks, is a compound of the angel and the brute;