love. He is at home in the external, the polemical, the historical, the
circumstantial, and is only episodically devout and practical. The
great majority of his published sermons are occupied with argument or
philippic against Romanists and unbelievers, with vindications of the
Bible, with the political interpretation of prophecy, or the criticism
of public events; and the devout aspiration, or the spiritual and
practical exhortation, is tacked to them as a sort of fringe in a
hurried sentence or two at the end. He revels in the demonstration that
the Pope is the Man of Sin; he is copious on the downfall of the
Ottoman empire; he appears to glow with satisfaction in turning a story
which tends to show how he abashed an "infidel;" it is a favorite
exercise with him to form conjectures of the process by which the earth
is to be burned up, and to picture Dr. Chalmers and Mr. Wilberforce
being caught up to meet Christ in the air, while Romanists, Puseyites
and infidels are given over to gnashing of teeth. But of really
spiritual joys and sorrows, of the life and death of Christ as a
manifestation of love that constrains the soul, of sympathy with that
yearning over the lost and erring which made Jesus weep over Jerusalem,
and prompted the sublime prayer, "Father, forgive them," of the gentler
fruits of the Spirit, and the peace of God which passeth
understanding--of all this, we find little trace in Dr. Cumming's
discourses.

Even more severe is her account of the poet Young. She speaks of him as "a
remarkable individual of the species _divine_." This is her account of his
life:

He is on the verge of fifty, and has recently undergone his
metamorphosis into the clerical form. Rather a paradoxical specimen, if
you observe him narrowly: a sort of cross between a sycophant and a