Do many of the Londoners of this day remember Dr. James Hamilton, the pastor of the Presbyterian Church in Regent’s Square?  They should do so, for in his time he was the most popular devotional writer of both sides of the Atlantic; and during my visit to London, in 1857, I was very happy to form his acquaintance.  He was a most cordial and charming man, slender, tall, with dark eyes and hair, and a beaming countenance.  When one entered Hamilton’s study he would hurry forward, seize his hands, and taking both in his, reply to your “How do you do, sir,” with “Come in, come in; I am nicely, I assure ye.”  Would that all ministers were as cordial and approachable.  When I attended his church in Regent Square they were singing, when I came in, a Psalm from the old Scotch Version.  The choristers sat in a desk below the pulpit.  The singing was general through the church, and excellent in style.  Dr. Hamilton preached in a gown, and, as the heat grew oppressive in the middle of his sermon, threw it off.  The discourse was delivered with extremely awkward gestures, but in a voice of great sweetness.  The text was:  “My soul thirsteth for the Living God.”  He described an arid wilderness, hot and parched, and down beneath it a mighty vein of water into which an artesian well was bored, and forthwith the waters gushed up through it and swept over all the dry desert, making it one emerald meadow.  “So,” said he, “it is the incarnate Jesus flowing up through our own dusty, barren desert humanity, and overflowing us with Heavenly life and grace, until what was once dreary and dead becomes a fruitful garden of the Lord.”  The discourse was like a chapter from one of Hamilton’s savory volumes.  Five years afterwards, I dined with Hamilton, and the Rev. William Arnot (who afterwards was his biographer), and I went to his church to deliver the preparatory discourse to the sacrament on the next Sabbath.

On my way up to London, I halted one night at Birmingham, and while out on a stroll, came upon the City Hall, which was crowded with a great meeting in aid of foreign missions.  The heroic Robert Moffat, the Apostle of South Africa, was addressing the multitude, who cheered him in the old English fashion.  Two years before that, Robert Moffat had met a young man in a boarding house in Aldersgate Street, London, and induced him to become a missionary in Africa.  The young man was the sublimest of all modern missionaries, David Livingstone.  Two years after that evening, Livingstone married Miss Mary Moffat (daughter of the man to whom I was listening), in South Africa, and she became the sharer of his trials and explorations.  After Moffat had concluded his speech, a broad-shouldered, merry-faced man, with thick grey hair rose on the platform.  “Who is that?” I inquired of my next neighbor.  With a look of surprise that I should ask such a question in Birmingham, he said:  “It is John Angell James.”  He was the man whom Dr. Cox wittily described as “An