d you will see the
same delightful air of fashionable repose. If the grace that is divine
be as common there as the grace that is earthly, Mr. Dale's charge must
be a happy flock indeed. With what an air does it bow at the name of
Jesus! with what a grace does it confess itself to consist of 'miserable
sinners!' One would hardly mind, in the midst of such rich city
merchants and their charming daughters, being a miserable sinner himself.
Such opulent misery and fashionable sin seem rather enviable than
otherwise. At any rate, the burden of such misery and such sin seems one
easily to be borne.

But prayers are over, and yon immense congregation has quietly settled
into an attitude of attention. All eyes are turned in the direction of
the pulpit. We look there as well, and see a man rather below the
average height, with fresh complexion, mild grey eyes beneath
light-coloured eyebrows, with a common-place forehead, and a figure
presenting altogether rather a pedantic appearance. This is the Rev.
Thomas Dale, M.A. He looks as if the world had gone easy with him; and
truly it has, for he is a popular Evangelical preacher--perhaps, next to
Mr. Melville, the most popular preacher in the English Church. He is a
popular poet--he is Vicar of St. Pancras, and Canon of St. Paul's.

Mr. Dale reads, and reads rapidly; his enunciation is perfectly distinct;
his voice is somewhat monotonous, but musical; his action is very slight.
You are not carried away by his physical appearance, nor, as you listen,
does the preacher bear you irresistibly aloft. His sermons are highly
polished, but they are too invariably the same. There are no depths nor
heights in them. They are all calm, subdued, toned down. They do not
take you by storm: you miss the thunder and the lightning of such men as
Melville and Binney. Mr. Dale's sermons are, like himself and like his
poetry, polished and pleasing. All that man can do by careful study Mr.
Dale has done; but he lacks inspiration, the _vis vivida_, the vision and
the faculty divine, which, if a man have not, 'This brave overhanging
firmament--this majestical roof fretted with golden fire'--'is but a foul
and pestilent congregation of vapours.' Yet Mr. Dale has an immense
congregation. I take it that he suits the level of the city magnates
that crowd his pews. Philosophy, poetry, passion are quite out of the
reach of such men, whose real god is the Stock Exchange, and whose real
heaven