r. Chalmers visited the place on the last of his
Church Extension journeys; and I heard, for the first time, that most
impressive of modern orators address a public meeting, and had a curious
illustration of the power which his "_deep mouth_" could communicate to
passages little suited, one might suppose, to call forth the vehemency
of his eloquence. In illustrating one of his points, he quoted from my
"Memoir of William Forsyth" a brief anecdote, set in description of a
kind which most men would have read quietly enough, but which, coming
from him, seemed instinct with the Homeric vigour and force. The
extraordinary impressiveness which he communicated to the passage served
to show me, better than aught else, how imperfectly great orators may be
represented by their written speeches. Admirable as the published
sermons and addresses of Dr. Chalmers are, they impart no adequate idea
of that wonderful power and impressiveness in which he excelled all
other British preachers.[19]

I had been introduced to the Doctor in Edinburgh a few weeks before;
but on this occasion I saw rather more of him. He examined with curious
interest my collection of geological specimens, which already contained
not a few valuable fossils that could be seen nowhere else; and I had
the pleasure of spending the greater part of a day in visiting in his
company, by boat, some of the more striking scenes of the Cromarty
Sutors. I had long looked up to Chalmers as, on the whole, the man of
largest mind which the Church of Scotland had ever produced;--not more
intense or practical than Knox, but broader of faculty; nor yet fitted
by nature or accomplishment to make himself a more enduring name in
literature than Robertson, but greatly nobler in sentiment, and of a
larger grasp of general intellect. With any of our other Scottish
ministers it might be invidious to compare him; seeing that some of the
ablest of them are, like Henderson, little more than mere historic
portraits drawn by their contemporaries, but whose true intellectual
measure cannot, from the lack of the necessary materials on which to
form a judgment, be now taken anew; and that many of the others employed
fine faculties in work, literary and ministerial, which, though
important in its consequences, was scarce less ephemeral in its
character than even the labours of the newspaper editor. The mind of
Chalmers was emphatically a many-sided one. Few men ever came into
friendly contact with