circulating through the papers a very striking paragraph from an article by that distinguished divine, Mr. Caird, in which, with a sharp criticism, he deals, as we should suppose a man of his high tone would deal, with the theme of popular preaching, especially as to its effects upon the dispenser of it and upon the crowds who gather to it. Mr. Robertson shrank from the repute of it, and the inflictions which it visits, as he did from sin. He knew full well, that, as the popular taste and standard were not educated to an appreciation and approval of the very loftiest style of ministration, the more of curious, gaping notoriety, or even admiration, he might draw towards him, the poorer was the incense. Yet there must be a fallacy somewhere involved in the common judgment on this subject. For Mr. Robertson certainly was a popular preacher; and yet, as he never made the slightest concession to any of the arts or trickeries, the displays or exaggerations, which are supposed to be essential conditions of that repute, his own example and experience may stand as at least an exceptional proof of the possible dignity and solidity of the position. When he had been addressing a thronged congregation, who hung, impressed and awed, upon his utterances, he goes home to write about the scene and its circumstances in strong disdain, almost with angry contempt, as if it were a reproach to himself. Did not the large majority of his hearers receive in their hearts and minds the electric power of his earnest and ever instructive speech? Suppose it were true, as he had painful reasons for knowing, that there were always before him frivolous, empty-headed, and unappreciative hearers, the hangers-on of a fashionable watering-place, who went to listen to him because he was the rage; such as these could be only a scattering among his auditors. Suppose, too, that the captious, the jealous, the bigoted, and the conceited were represented there, intending to catch matter for bringing him under public odium in their own circles, because he trespassed upon the borders of heresy, or shocked the conventional standards of snobbish society, or spread his range broadly over the widest fields of moral and political relations; the very presence and purpose of such listeners were, to one of his grandeur and purity of spirit, a new inspiration of courage and fidelity. On the whole, so far as Mr. Robertson really came under the designation which he so dreaded to bear, he has made it an honorable one. Perhaps it would not be saying the right, as it certainly is not saying the best thing about his sermons, now so widely circulated on both sides of the Atlantic, to speak of them as meeting any popular taste. Would that we could estimate so highly the craving and the standard, among what are called religious readers, as to assert for him a favoritism equal to that accorded to a Cumming, a Spurgeon, or even a Chalmers. Chalmers may have spoken from