Next there rises before me the vision of Howard Hinton—a big, cadaverous, grey-haired man, preaching in a small chapel on the site in Shoreditch now occupied by the Great Eastern Railway. The congregation was not large, but it was very select; I fancy it represented the _élite_ of the London Baptists. He was a very fascinating preacher by reason of his great subtlety of thought, and at times he was terribly impressive, as his big, burly frame trembled with emotion, and his choked-up utterance intimated with what agony he had sought to deliver his soul from blood-guiltiness, as, wailing and weeping, he anticipated the awful doom of the impenitent. I must own I got wearied of his metaphysical subtleties, which seemed to promise so much, and whose conclusions were so lame and impotent, ever disappointing; and it often seemed to me that his celebrated son—the late James Hinton—too soon removed, as it seemed to many of us—inherited not a little of his father’s ingenuity in this respect. But he was a grand man; you felt it in his presence, and still more as you walked home thinking of what he said. Amongst the Independents—as they were termed—the leading men were the Brothers Clayton: one preaching at the Poultry, the other in Walworth, to large congregations—fine portly men, and able in their way, though it was an old-fashioned one. Nor must Dr. Bengo Collyer be forgotten—a fat, oily man of God, as Robert Hall called him, who had at one time great popularity, and whom the Duke of Kent had been to hear preach.