f Memory,"
would have included in that category the recollections of the famous
preachers whom he might have heard. Yet possibly he might, as his
earliest predilections, we were told, were for the pulpit, and all have,
more or less, of the parsonic element in them. The love to lecture, the
desire to make their poor ignorant friends as sensible as themselves, the
innate feeling that one is a light and guide in a wildering maze exist
more or less in us all. "Did you ever hear me preach?" said Coleridge
one day to Lamb. "Did I ever hear you do anything else?" was the reply.
And now, when we have got an awakened Christianity and a forward
ministry, it is just as well to run over the list of our old popular
ministers to remind the present generation that great men have filled the
London pulpits and quickened the London conscience and aroused the London
intellect before ever it was born. It is the more necessary to do this
as the fact is that no one has so short-lived a popularity as the orator:
whether in Exeter Hall, whether on the stage, whether in the pulpit, what
comes in at one ear soon goes out at the other. The memory of a great
preacher dies as soon as his breath leaves the body--often before. The
pulpit of to-day differs in one respect _in toto_ from the past. The
preacher who would succeed now must remember that this is the age of
advertisement, that if he has a talent he must not wrap it in a napkin.
He must write letters to newspapers; he must say odd things that make men
talk about him; he must manage to be the subject of newspaper gossip; he
must cling to the skirts of some public agitation--in fact, his light
must be seen and his voice heard everywhere.

It was not so in the times when, half a century ago, I had more to do
with the London pulpit than I have now. Some of the men in it were
giants. One was Melville, who preached somewhere over the
water--Camberwell way. He was a High Churchman; he had a grand scorn of
the conventicle. I should say he was a Tory of the Tories--a man who
would be impossible in a London suburban church now; but what a crowd he
drew to hear him, as he, like a mighty, rushing wind, swept over the
heads of an audience who seemed to hang upon his lips! He was tall,
dark, with a magnificent bass voice that caused every sentence he
read--for he read, and rapidly--to vibrate from the pulpit to the
furthest corner of the church. His style was that of the late Dr.
Chalmers, al