I doubt whether the cynical old poet who wrote “The Pleasures of Memory,” would have included in that category the recollections of the famous preachers whom he might have heard. Yet possibly he might, as his earliest predilections, we were told, were for the pulpit, and all have, more or less, of the parsonic element in them. The love to lecture, the desire to make their poor ignorant friends as sensible as themselves, the innate feeling that one is a light and guide in a wildering maze exist more or less in us all. “Did you ever hear me preach?” said Coleridge one day to Lamb. “Did I ever hear you do anything else?” was the reply. And now, when we have got an awakened Christianity and a forward ministry, it is just as well to run over the list of our old popular ministers to remind the present generation that great men have filled the London pulpits and quickened the London conscience and aroused the London intellect before ever it was born. It is the more necessary to do this as the fact is that no one has so short-lived a popularity as the orator: whether in Exeter Hall, whether on the stage, whether in the pulpit, what comes in at one ear soon goes out at the other. The memory of a great preacher dies as soon as his breath leaves the body—often before. The pulpit of to-day differs in one respect _in toto_ from the past. The preacher who would succeed now must remember that this is the age of advertisement, that if he has a talent he must not wrap it in a napkin. He must write letters to newspapers; he must say odd things that make men talk about him; he must manage to be the subject of newspaper gossip; he must cling to the skirts of some public agitation—in fact, his light must be seen and his voice heard everywhere. It was not so in the times when, half a century ago, I had more to do with the London pulpit than I have now. Some of the men in it were giants. One was Melville, who preached somewhere over the water—Camberwell way. He was a High Churchman; he had a grand scorn of the conventicle. I should say he was a Tory of the Tories—a man who would be impossible in a London suburban church now; but what a crowd he drew to hear him, as he, like a mighty, rushing wind, swept over the heads of an audience who seemed to hang upon his lips! He was tall, dark, with a magnificent bass voice that caused every sentence he read—for he read, and rapidly—to vibrate from the pulpit to the furthest corner of the church. His style was that of the late Dr. Chalmers, always sweeping to a climax, which, when reached and mastered, was a relief to all. I think he was made Canon of St. Paul’s. He also was the Golden Lecturer somewhere near the Bank—an appropriate locality. His sermons were highly finished—I am told he laboured at them all the week. He was a preacher—nothing less, nothing more.