gave the accustomed warning, out flowed the occupants of the coffee-room; the pages of the Herald or the Courier were for a while forsaken, and during two of the best business hours of the day the old reading-room wore a strange aspect of desolation. The busiest merchants of the city were wont, indeed, upon those memorable days to leave their desks, and kind masters allowed their clerks and apprentices to follow their example. Out of the very heart of the great tumult an hour or two stood redeemed for the highest exercises of the spirit; and the low traffic of earth forgotten, heaven and its high economy and its human sympathies and eternal interests, engrossed the mind at least and the fancy of congregated thousands. In January, 1817, this series of discourses was announced as ready for publication. It had generally been a matter of so much commercial risk to issue a volume of sermons from the press, that recourse had been often had in such cases to publication by subscription. Dr. Chalmers's publisher, Mr. Smith, had hinted that perhaps this method ought in this instance also to be tried. "It is far more agreeable to my feelings," Dr. Chalmers wrote to him a few days before the day of publication, "that the book should be introduced to the general market, and sell on the public estimation of it, than that the neighborhood here should be plied in all the shops with subscription papers, and as much as possible wrung out of their partialities for the author." Neither author nor publisher had at this time the least idea of the extraordinary success which was awaiting their forthcoming volume. It was published on the 28th of January, 1817. In ten weeks 6000 copies had been disposed of, the demand showing no symptom of decline. Nine editions were called for within a year, and nearly 20,000 copies were in circulation. Never previously, nor ever since, has any volume of sermons met with such immediate and general acceptance. The "Tales of my Landlord" had a month's start in the date of publication, and even with such a competitor it ran an almost equal race. Not a few curious observers were struck with the novel competition, and watched with lively curiosity how the great Scottish preacher and the great Scottish novelist kept for a whole year so nearly abreast of one another. It was, besides, the first volume of Sermons which fairly broke the lines which had separated too long the literary from the religious public. Its secondary merits won audience for it in quarters where evangelical Christianity was nauseated and despised. It disarmed even the keen hostility of Hazlitt, and kept him for a whole forenoon spell-bound beneath its power. "These sermons," he says, "ran like wild-fire through the country, were the darlings of watering-places, were laid in the windows of inns, and were to be met with in all places of public resort.... We remember finding the volume in the orchard of the inn at Burford Bridge, near Boxhill, and passing a