tends to show how he abashed an "infidel;" it is a favorite
exercise with him to form conjectures of the process by which the earth
is to be burned up, and to picture Dr. Chalmers and Mr. Wilberforce
being caught up to meet Christ in the air, while Romanists, Puseyites
and infidels are given over to gnashing of teeth. But of really
spiritual joys and sorrows, of the life and death of Christ as a
manifestation of love that constrains the soul, of sympathy with that
yearning over the lost and erring which made Jesus weep over Jerusalem,
and prompted the sublime prayer, "Father, forgive them," of the gentler
fruits of the Spirit, and the peace of God which passeth
understanding--of all this, we find little trace in Dr. Cumming's
discourses.

Even more severe is her account of the poet Young. She speaks of him as "a
remarkable individual of the species _divine_." This is her account of his
life:

He is on the verge of fifty, and has recently undergone his
metamorphosis into the clerical form. Rather a paradoxical specimen, if
you observe him narrowly: a sort of cross between a sycophant and a
psalmist, a poet whose imagination is alternately fired by the "Last
Day" and by a creation of peers, who fluctuate between rhapsodic
applause of King George and rhapsodic applause of Jehovah. After
spending "a foolish youth, the sport of peers and poets," after being a
hanger-on of the profligate Duke of Wharton, after aiming in vain at a
parliamentary career, and angling for pensions and preferment with
fulsome dedications and fustian odes, he is a little disgusted with his
imperfect success, and has determined to retire from the general
mendicancy business to a particular branch; in other words, he has
determined on that renunciation of the world implied in "taking
orders," with the prospect of a good living and an advantageous
matrimonial connection. And no man can be better fitted for an
Established Church. He personifies completely her nice balance of
temporalities and spiritualities. He is equally impressed with the
momentousness of death and of burial fees; he languishes at once for
immortal life and for "livings;" he has a vivid attachment to patrons
in general, but on the whole prefers the Almighty. He will teach, with
something more than official conviction, the nothingness of earthly
things; a