IT was in the month of May, 1801, that the members of the congregation united in a very earnest call to Mr. John Clayton to become their minister. As no fewer than a hundred names appear as signatories, we may infer that considerable progress had been made under Mr. Lake’s ministry. Mr. Clayton was still formally unordained, though he had been assistant minister to the Rev. John Winter at Newbury for one year since leaving college. He was barely twenty-one years of age when he came to Kensington to take up the work of the pastorate. The portrait of him that adorns the Deacons’ Vestry, and which is here reproduced, was clearly taken in the maturity of middle-life. He maintained admirably the traditions of the Clayton family. His father, the Rev. John Clayton, was a well-known divine, of the most approved style of pulpit manners. We read with a kind of awe of his “thickly-powdered head” and his general magnificence of demeanour. Both his sons, George and John, inherited their father’s ideal. We have heard it said that the Kensington congregation has never assembled punctually on Sunday morning since John Clayton’s day. It was part of the service to watch the procession of their minister from the vestry to the pulpit. Young as he was, he bore himself so bravely, in full canonicals, with gloved hands and dignified movements, that it is no wonder the congregation conceived a great admiration for his person. No one can look at his portrait without perceiving that he was a man of commanding presence; and we surely cannot wonder if he knew it, and utilised it to the best advantage. And it is only just to him to add, that the effect of his preaching was by no means due solely, or mainly, to his striking appearance. He was a man of great mental abilities, and had had considerable culture. He was thus admirably adapted in many ways to the sphere he was called to occupy. With a liking for the best society, and a distinguished appearance, his courtly habits of speech and carriage gained him a deference that was not commonly paid to Dissenting preachers. If the assiduous cultivation of these personal characteristics had tended to make him less alive to the spiritual necessities of his people, we should have been justified in depreciating them. But it had not that effect. One has only to read the energetic charge, which his father delivered to him at the ordination service at Kensington, to see that the fastidiousness of outward manner and apparel of the elder Clayton were not incompatible with a directness, incisiveness, and even vehemence of speech, that the warmest partisan might covet. It seems probable that John Clayton took his father’s advice not to be an “unfaithful, accommodating pastor” in its most literal sense. He had been told in the ordination charge not only “to feed the flock, but to _drive away_ the grievous wolves”; an exhortation which permitted of a mischievous application. The writer of this sketch