he male Cynthia of the pulpit make the best of his fleeting
popularity--a popularity fading with the first dawn of the double chin,
or the first bud of the grey hair. Dear brother, such is your inevitable
fate. Stern destiny will make no exception in your favour. Other white
hands will be pressed as warmly as your own. Other lips shall speak
oracles, or move the heart of woman to laughter or to tears. For others,
divine eyes shall moisten the best French cambric, and worsted slippers
shall be worked by fairy hands. Every dog has his day.

On his legs, whether on the platform or in the pulpit, Dr. Wolff is one
of the extraordinary men of our time. In shape he is somewhat of a tub.
Wrap it up in black cloth, put on it a big head with a fat face, let that
face have small eyes, a slightly Jewish nose, and be of a light
complection, jolly and sensual, and you have Dr. Wolff. To complete the
picture, let the figure have a Bible in his right hand, and let him read
from it incessantly with a foreign pronunciation, but with a musical
voice. As a preacher or a lecturer the Doctor is but an indifferent
model. He gets off the rail as soon as he starts. He gives you a
heterogeneous mass of raw material, gathered in every country under
heaven. He talks of Bokhara as familiarly as we do of the Bank; he is as
much at home in Palestine as we in Piccadilly. He begins a sentence with
'As I was last in Abyssinia,' as we should say, 'When we were last in
Chancery-lane;' or he says, 'As I was smoking with the Schah of Persia,'
as we should speak of smoking a quiet pipe with Smithers of the Strand;
and then he loses himself, shouts as if he were a war-horse going into
battle--bursts out into unknown tongues--sings Hebrew melodies in what
the distracted Puritan calls 'the blessed tongue of Canaan,' and has a
wild look in his eye as if he were speaking to his own people by the
silent waters and ruined temples of Babel, and not in a Christian church
and speaking to Christian men. The Doctor is a rhapsodist, not a
lecturer. He belongs to the men who have died out amongst us, to the
bards and scalds of ancient days. He is out of place amidst the
conventional proprieties and ecclesiastical decorums of the modern
church, and especially in that section of it which in this country is
honoured with State patronage and pay. I wonder how Dr. Wolff ever could
have become a clergyman--or ever settled down. Was it Lady Georgiana
that produc