Tall, of dark complexion, with grey hair and blue eyes, with a face lit up with genius—the most brilliant preacher in the English Church: such is Henry Melville. His action is simple and singular. When he commences scarcely any is observable. Then as he flies along, and warms as he proceeds, the head is dropped with a convulsive jerk, and the right hand is raised, and the climax is ejaculated (for so rapid is his delivery it can scarcely be called preaching) with a corresponding emphasis. No sooner is the text enunciated than he plunges at once into his subject, developing and illustrating his meaning with a brilliancy and rapidity unparalleled in the pulpit at the present day. You are kept in breathless attention. The continuity of thought is unbroken for an instant. Every sentence is connected with that which precedes or follows; and, as the preacher goes on his way like a giant, every instant mounting higher, every instant pouring out a more gorgeous rhetoric, every instant climbing to a loftier strain, you are reminded of some monster steam-ship ploughing her way across the Atlantic, proudly asserting her mastery over the mountain-waves, landing her precious cargo safe in port. When she started, you trembled for her safety; she was so lavish of her power that you feared it would fail her when she needed it most. But on she wends her gallant way, scattering around her the mad waves as in play. I can compare Melville with nothing else, as he stands in that pulpit—in that sea of human souls—drowning all discord by his own splendid voice, mastering all passions by his own irresistible will, piercing all scepticism by his own living faith. And yet Melville is not what some understand by the term, ‘an intellectual preacher.’ He does not aim to demonstrate the reasonableness of Christian truth—to convince men whose understandings reject it. With the large class who are perpetually halting between two opinions, who to-day are convinced by one man, and to-morrow by another—who have lost themselves hopelessly in German mysticism—Melville has no sympathy whatever. I never heard him use the terms objective and subjective in my life. Of honest intellectual doubt, with all its pain and horror, he seems to have no idea. Melville always is as positive as Babington Macaulay himself. In no circumstances could he have been a Blanco White, or a Francis Newman, or a Froude. As a churchman he stands rigidly inside the pale of the Church. His God is a personal God. His Christ descended into hell. His heaven has a golden pavement, and shining thrones. Wordsworth tells us— ‘Feebly must they have felt, who in old times Array’d with vengeful whips the furies. Beautiful regards were turned on me, The face of her I loved.’