nate to credit or comprehend. 'The
celebrated Mr. Cameron,' says the minister of the Scottish Church,
London, 'was left on Drumclog a mangled corpse.' Fine thing to be
minutely acquainted with ecclesiastical history! We illiterate
non-intrusionists hold, and we are afraid Mr. Cunningham among the
rest, that the celebrated Cameron was killed, not at the skirmish of
Drumclog, but at the skirmish of Airdmoss, which did not take place
until about a twelvemonth after; but this must result surely from our
ignorance. Has the Rev. Mr. Cumming no intention of settling our
disputes, by giving us a new history of the Church?

That portion of the internal evidence in the article before us which
depends on style and manner, seems very conclusive indeed. Take some
of the avowed sublimities of the Rev. Mr. Cumming. No man stands more
beautifully on tiptoe when he sets himself to catch a fine thought. In
describing an attached congregation, 'The hearer's prayers rose to
heaven,' he says, 'and returned in the shape of broad impenetrable
bucklers around the venerable man. A thousand broadswords leapt in a
thousand scabbards, as if the electric eloquence of the minister found
in them conductors and depositories.'

Poetry such as this is still somewhat rare; but mark the kindred
beauties of the writer in _Fraser_. Around such men as Mr. Tait,
Dr. M'Leod, and Dr. Muir, 'must crystallize the piety and the hopes
of the Scottish Church.' What a superb figure! Only think of the Rev.
Dr. Muir as of a thread in a piece of sugar candy, and the piety of
the Dean of Faculty and Mr. Penney, joined to that of some four or
five hundred respectable ladies of both sexes besides, all sticking
out around him in cubes, hexagons, and prisms, like cleft almonds in a
bishop-cake. Hardly inferior in the figurative is the passage
which follows: 'The Doctor (Dr. Chalmers) rides on at a rickety
trot,--Messrs. Cunningham, Begg, and Candlish by turns whipping up
the wornout Rosenante, and making the rider believe that windmills
are Church principles, and the echoes of their thunder solid argument.
A ditch will come; and when the first effects of the fall are over,
the dumbfounded Professor will awake to the deception, and smite
the minnows of vetoism hip and thigh.' The writer of this passage is
unquestionably an ingenious man, but he could surely have made a
little more of the last figure. A dissertation on the hips and thighs
of minnows might be made to reflect