Mr. Dale reads, and reads rapidly; his enunciation is perfectly distinct; his voice is somewhat monotonous, but musical; his action is very slight. You are not carried away by his physical appearance, nor, as you listen, does the preacher bear you irresistibly aloft. His sermons are highly polished, but they are too invariably the same. There are no depths nor heights in them. They are all calm, subdued, toned down. They do not take you by storm: you miss the thunder and the lightning of such men as Melville and Binney. Mr. Dale’s sermons are, like himself and like his poetry, polished and pleasing. All that man can do by careful study Mr. Dale has done; but he lacks inspiration, the _vis vivida_, the vision and the faculty divine, which, if a man have not, ‘This brave overhanging firmament—this majestical roof fretted with golden fire’—‘is but a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours.’ Yet Mr. Dale has an immense congregation. I take it that he suits the level of the city magnates that crowd his pews. Philosophy, poetry, passion are quite out of the reach of such men, whose real god is the Stock Exchange, and whose real heaven is the three per cents. Another and a better reason of Mr. Dale’s immense congregation is, that his charity is unremitting—given in the best way, in the shape of work instead of alms—and irrespective of the religious sect of the recipient. I have heard of several such cases that do him much honour. And, after all, in the pulpit as well as elsewhere, conduct tells more than character in the long run. Hence his personal influence is great; and, of course, that helps to fill the church. Nor can we much wonder. What eloquence is stronger than that of a holy, a useful, a devoted life? Acts speak stronger than words. I see more power in an act of charity, done in the name of religion and of God, than in the passionate and fascinating gorgeous rhetoric of an hour. Mr. Dale is a good Greek scholar, and has translated Sophocles. It is easy to see why Sophocles should better suit him than Æschylus or Euripides—the polish of the one would please him better than the wild grandeur of the others. Of him, as a poet, I cannot speak very highly. His versification is correct—his sentiment is good. To the very large class of readers who will accept such substitutes for poetry as the real thing, our divine is a poet of no mean order. ‘What we want, sir,’ said a publisher to me the other day, ‘is a lively religious novel.’ Mr. Dale’s poetry answers to these conditions: hence its success.