ry
happily. We took a ten days' trip from Leamington after leaving
Sheffield, coaching through the exquisite scenery around about Warwick,
Kenilworth, and the Shakespeare country in Stratford-on-Avon. Most of
these reminiscences are full of incidents too intimate for public
interest. Like a dream that lifts one from prosaic life into the places
of precious remembrance I recall these long, happy days in the glorious
sunset of his life.

We returned to London in time for the Doctor's first preaching
engagement there on May 28, 1900. The London newspapers described him as
"The American Spurgeon."

"And now before the services opened at St. James' Hall a congregation of
3,000 people waited to hear Dr. Talmage," says a London newspaper. Then
it goes on to say further:--

"Dr. Talmage, who has preached from pulpits all over the world, may be
described as an 'American Spurgeon.' None of our great English speakers
is less of an orator. Dr. Talmage is a great speaker, but his power as
an orator is not by any means that of a Gladstone or a Bright. It lies
more in the matter than in the manner, in his wonderful imagery, the
vividness with which he conjures up a picture before the congregation.
He is a great artist in words. Dr. Talmage affects nothing; he is
naturalness itself in the pulpit, and the manner of his speech suggests
that he is angry with his subject. The sermon on this occasion lent
itself well to a master of metaphor such as Dr. Talmage, it being a
review of the last great battle of the world, when the forces of right
and wrong should meet for the final mastery."

Dr. Talmage rarely preached this sermon because it was a great tax on
his memory. It included a suggestion of all the great battles of the
earth, a vivid description of the armies of the world marching forward
in the eternal human struggle of right against wrong until they were
masked for the last great battle of all, when "Satan would take the
field in person, in whose make-up nothing bad was left out, nothing good
was put in."

It is very remarkable to see the universal acknowledgments of the
Doctor's genius in England, one of the London newspapers going so far as
to describe him in its headlines as "America's Apostle." Nothing I could
write about him could be more in eulogy, more in sympathy in
comprehension of his brilliant sacred message to the world. England
proclaimed him as he was, with deep sincerity and reverence.

His favourite sermon, an