attack, and the “Old Guard” advanced merrily to the charge. But they were presently brought to a check. “Up Guards!” shouted the hostile Wellington as they approached, while “click” went the cock of his double-barrelled gun, as he raised it to his shoulder, vehemently swearing at the same time that he would shoot the first man who dared to lay hands upon the debatable boundary. The assailants wavered. The squire shouted to them in vain. Even he himself did not like the look of the double-barrelled gun, but, fixing upon John, his butler, to be his Marshal Ney, he encouraged him to the attack. John, however, feeling that “discretion was the better part of valour,” hesitated, when his master again cheered him to the fight with this promise of posthumous consolation, “Never mind him, John; if the scoundrel does shoot you, we’ll have him hanged for it afterwards.” “But please, master,” said John, as wisely and innocently, “I’d rather you hanged him first.” This was too much. There was no help for it. Hugoumont was saved. Napoleon and his forces retreated, baffled and discomfited, from the field. The squire, peace to his memory, fine old fellow, used often to tell this story in after years, never failing to revile poor John for his cowardice, which lost the day. But we always defended John, and turned the laugh against the squire, by gently insinuating that there was somebody more interested in the quarrel, who was even more prudent than prudent John. CHAPTER XIX. The Church, in the days we are speaking of, was in a very torpid and sleepy state, not only in Liverpool, but throughout the land. None of the evangelical clergy had then appeared in this district, to stimulate the pace of the old-fashioned jog-trot High Churchmen. Neither had Laudism revived, under its new name of Puseyism. Nothing was heard from our pulpits but what might have passed muster at Athens, or been preached without offence in the great Mosque of Constantinople. In fact, “Extract of Blair” was the dose administered, Sunday after Sunday, by drowsy teachers to drowsy congregations. If it did no harm, it did no good. We do not here speak of James Blair, Commissary of Virginia, President of William and Mary College, etc., whose works, little known, contain a mine of theological wealth. We allude to Dr. Hugh Blair, whose sermons, so celebrated in his day and long after, are really, when analysed, nothing better than a string of cold moral precepts, mixed up with a few gaudy flowers culled from the garden of rhetoric. We have often wondered at the praise beyond measure which Dr. Johnson again and again bestowed upon Blair’s diluted slip-slop and namby-pamby trifles. He not only spoke of them in the highest terms on every occasion, but thus, in his strange way, once exclaimed, “I love Blair’s sermons. Though the dog is a Scotchman, and a Presbyterian, and everything he should not be, I was the first to praise them.