Star.
London, England, 1830-05-27 00:00:00

CRALAIRRA AND IRVING.
London Letter Letter in the Dalai Library Gaunt.

Dr. Chalmers has been in town during the last week.
He held forth, on Sunday, for an hour and a-half, in
the Scotch church, Regent-square ; and every part of
that ample pile was thronged to hear him. The street
was filled with splendid and gay equipages—the crowd
extended beyond the porches to the outer door—and all
was bustle and excitement to hear the Demosthenes of
the Scottish kirk. I often doubted, after reading the
splendid sermons of Dr. Chalmers, whether they were
adapted for a popular audience; possessed as they
were of every refinement and polish that literature could
4fford, they seemed to me to require an audience to ap-
preciate their merits, far more accomplished than I could
give credit to his ordinary Caledonian congregations for
being. All his fine language and illustration would have
gone for nothing, had they been delivered in the plain,
tame, " gentlemanly" pulpit style which prevails here
among the best preachers of the episcopal churches.
With the Scottish divine, however, not a sentence—not
a phrase was lost—all was energy and emphasis " with
Gine discretion :" whether he soared or crept along the
ground he commanded the undivided attention of his
auditory ; he dictated, and he thundered out the mild
precept of the gospel with surprising power : at least, to
me, it was surprising, thinking, that the principles and
practice of the Christian religion are better advocated—
better enjoined, by the gentle methods of persuasion,
than by the stern alarms of the drum ecclesiastic.
_ _ _

Dr. Chalmer's personnel is by no means prepossessing.
He is coarse-featured, short-necked, and altogether
clumsy looking : his hair cut short—its tint an iron
gray. His action in the pulpit, owing to his left hand
being perpetually fixed upon his manuscript, is almost
wholly confined to the right side. He moves his whole
body, rapidly, forward or backward, upward or down-
ward : but sill the right shoulder is ever elevated ; the
right arm is in perpetual motion. There is nothing grace-
ful in its delivery—its characteristic is its force. He la-
bours to produce conviction rather than to persuade. His
voice is loud enough—but harsh with overstraining: it
splits the ear occasionally, and sometimes borders on a
scream. In what, then, you will ask, consists his prin-
cipal attraction ? How has he become so cele-
brated ? By his animation and earnestness ; by
the beauty and eloquence of his language ; and by the
evident perfection, the palpable completeness of all that
he delivers. We can observe no redundancy of epithets,
no idle digressions, no spinning out of " the thread of
his verbosity finer than the staple of his argument."
Every sentence seems to have received its last polish ; it
is fit for press ; and the sermon, generally, leaves no
longer any doubt but that those eloquent discourses of
his, which have been published, were pronounced
originally just as they now meet the eye of the reader.
The manner of Dr. Chalmers is all that I intended to
write about : with the matter of his discourse I shall not
meddle further than simply to say, that its topics were of
a very comprehensive and general character—" on the
conduct of the " irreligious, perhaps it might be de-
fined ; it was in this respect, what it should be, precisely
an occasional sermon. It is long since the walls of the
national kirk have been warned by such a crowd. The
orations of its extraordinary " meenisther and pasthur"
have no longer any attraction for the million. Their ex-
citement is no more ; the glory has departed from that
house—lchabod Irving is an altered man. At least, I
should conclude him altered, for, after frequent, fair, and
impartial bearings, I can find nothing in him to justify
the religious rage that once prevailed upon his account.
His physical capabilities are, no doubt, admirable; his
voice, in its sober and subdued tones, is faultless; his ta-
lent for recitation, in delivering a psalm for instance, or
in pronouncing the Loan's prayer, is indeed of a very high
order. But beyond this, I have been able to discover in
him nothing more remarkable than his extravagance of
action, and his consummwe skill in the art of mystifying.
To such perfection has he carried this art, that I think we
may safely say, the more we apply ourselves to understand
what he undertakes to explain, the less we know about it. 1
A few evenings since the preacher went on for an hour
mystifying and explaining the history of Samson—every
instance of that great man's life, recorded in Scripture,
be proved, by a peculiar process of reasoning, to Le a
typification allegorical of Christ and his church. The
riddle, the foxes and firebrands, the jaw-bone of an ass-
0, that the comment were all written in a book ! I left
the Scottish kirk, that night, most strangely edified. My
brains were spinning like a teetotum.

A writer in the United States Gazette speaks of a
wonderful and ingenious piece of mechanism and dis-
covery in the construction of a cloak in Philadelphia. It
possesses the power of winding itself up by the mere
change of the atmosphere, and is calculated to go as long
as the materials of which it is composed last. It makes
a beautiful piece of furniture for a parlour, and so simple
in its nature, that a child may handle it without causing
any derangement to its operations. It has been going
upwards of twelve months, and the owner states that he
will set it in competition, respecting keeping time, with
any patent lever watch or clock in the world. The dis-
coveror of it is a plain New England farmer, who had one
in operation some time before ho made it known to the
world.

The parish officers of St. Saviour's, Southwark, have
issued a handbill, stating that paupers who kept dogs
would henceforth be refused parochial relief, as they
consider that such paupers misapply part of the funds
deaigned for the support of themselves and their children.
MAD Docs.—About three o'clock on Tuesday after-
noon, a dog, in a rabid state, was observed running at a
quick pace in Tooley-street, Borough. Several persons
followed the dog, for the purpose of destroying him, but
he escaped their vigilance, and turned into Kent-street,
where be bit two dogs, and made a snap at a costermon-
ger's donkey. The costenuonger, however, preserved
his ass from being bitten by striking the og with his
stick. Many persons, by this time, raised the cry of
" mad dog," following him with all their speed ; but
still the rabid animal outstripped his pursuers, and before
be reached the Bricklayers Arms, in the Kent-road, he
bit a journeyman carpenter, named Mason, who was,
with a piece of wood which be had in his hand, attempt-
ing a blow at him, in which he failed. The rabid ani-
mal was attacked so successfully immediately after biting
Mason, by two labouring men, that he was destroyed
without committing any further mischief. Mason, with
great resolution, upon the instant of his having been bit-
ten, submitted to have the part of the calf of his leg,
which the animal had only slightly punctured with his
teeth, cut completely out with a pen-knife, by a person
passing at the time, and applied a handkerchief to the
Wound to stop Igis bleeding, until the poor fellow could
get surgical aid. We could not ascertain whether the
dogs bitten 4y the infuriated animal were destroyed;
owdikere is too much reason to feat, from the great
atinahor of dogs prowling abort the streets, especially in
the ainablka of the metropoliz, without any owners, that
the_y WO he atilt Ong at large, to the imminent danger
ftealife.