ualities, the more striking
in their immediate effect, in proportion as they are unlooked-for and
heterogeneous, like the violent opposition of light and shade in a
picture. We shall endeavour to explain this view of the subject more at
large.

Mr. Irving, then, is no common or mean man. He has four or five
qualities, possessed in a moderate or in a paramount degree, which,
added or multiplied together, fill up the important space he occupies in
the public eye. Mr. Irving's intellect itself is of a superior order; he
has undoubtedly both talents and acquirements beyond the ordinary run of
every-day preachers. These alone, however, we hold, would not account
for a twentieth part of the effect he has produced: they would have
lifted him perhaps out of the mire and slough of sordid obscurity, but
would never have launched him into the ocean-stream of popularity, in
which he "lies floating many a rood;"--but to these he adds uncommon
height, a graceful figure and action, a clear and powerful voice, a
striking, if not a fine face, a bold and fiery spirit, and a most
portentous obliquity of vision, which throw him to an immeasurable
distance beyond all competition, and effectually relieve whatever there
might be of common-place or bombast in his style of composition. Put the
case that Mr. Irving had been five feet high--Would he ever have been
heard of, or, as he does now, have "bestrode the world like a Colossus?"
No, the thing speaks for itself. He would in vain have lifted
his Lilliputian arm to Heaven, people would have laughed at his
monkey-tricks. Again, had he been as tall as he is, but had wanted other
recommendations, he would have been nothing.

"The player's province they but vainly try,
Who want these powers, deportment, voice, and eye."

Conceive a rough, ugly, shock-headed Scotchman, standing up in the
Caledonian chapel, and dealing "damnation round the land" in a broad
northern dialect, and with a harsh, screaking voice, what ear polite,
what smile serene would have hailed the barbarous prodigy, or not
consigned him to utter neglect and derision? But the Rev. Edward Irving,
with all his native wildness, "hath a smooth aspect framed to make
women" saints; his very unusual size and height are carried off and
moulded into elegance by the most admirable symmetry of form and ease of
gesture; his sable locks, his clear iron-grey complexion, and firm-set
features, turn the raw, uncouth Scotchman into the likene