certain families, it is said, the good-looking are put into the
army--if fools, into the Church. Yet, generally, the jewel is worthy of
the casket. If the one be rich and beautiful, the other is so as well.
Plain and slouching as he is, I am told the Doctor succeeded in engaging
the affections of a lady possessed of considerable property. But this is
by no means remarkable: clergymen of every denomination make as many
successful marriages as most men. One would think that they took the
common wicked standard of wicked men, and judged a woman's worth by the
extent of her purse. I fear that there are as many fortune-hunters in
the Church as there are in the world.

If 'Hudibras' had been written in our day, we should at once have
supposed that Dr. Hamilton had helped the poet to a hero. Like Hudibras,
the Doctor

'scarce can ope
His mouth, but out there flies a trope.'

He has been called the Moore of the pulpit. An admiring critic says of
him: 'Like the poet of "Lalla Rookh," he possesses vivid imagination,
brilliant fancy, and sparkling phraseology. His sentences are strings of
pearls, and whatever subject he touches he invariably adorns. His
affluence of imagery is surprising. To illustrate some particular
portion of Scripture, he will lay science, art, and natural history under
contribution, and astonish us by the vastness of his acquirements, and
his tact in availing himself of the stores of knowledge which, from all
sources, he has garnered up in his mind. But plenteous as are the
flowers of eloquence with which he presents us, their perfume, their
sweetness, do not cloy. We listen in absolute wonderment as he pours
forth a stream of eloquence, whose surface exhibits the iridescent hues
of loveliness--one tint as it fades away being succeeded by another and a
brighter. And a pure spirit of earnest piety pervades the whole of the
sermon, the only drawback of which, to southern ears, being the broad
Scotch accent in which it is delivered.'

Perhaps this character is a little coloured. Something must be set down
in it for effect. Still the characteristic of the Doctor's oratory,
whether in the pulpit or on the platform, is poetry. He is a prose poet,
and his genius makes everything it touches rich and rare. As becomes a
divine, he sees everything through an Eastern medium. He is at home in
the Holy Land. Jerusalem is as dear to him as London. All the scenes of
sacred story, in