quent speeches he had ever uttered. The effect was tremendous, and at its close the whole assembly started to their feet, waved their hats, and rent the air with deafening shouts of applause for several minutes. Even the masters and judges of eloquence who were present were similarly moved, and Lord Jeffrey declared it as his opinion, that never had eloquence produced a greater effect upon a popular assembly, and that he could not believe more had ever been done by the oratory of Demosthenes, Cicero, Burke, or Sheridan.
After the college session had ended, Dr. Chalmers was not allowed to retire into his beloved seclusion. Indeed, his opinions were now of such weight with the public mind, and his services so valuable, that he was considered as a public property, and used accordingly. It was for this cause that our statesmen who advocated Catholic emancipation were so earnest that he should give full publicity to his sentiments on the subject. When this duty was discharged, another awaited him: it was to repair to London, and unfold his views on pauperism before a committee of the House of Commons, with reference to the proposal of introducing the English system of poor-laws into Ireland. During this visit to London, he had the honour of being appointed, without any solicitation on his part, one of the chaplains of his Majesty for Scotland. On returning home another visit to London was necessary, as one of the members of a deputation sent from the Church of Scotland to congratulate William IV. on his accession to the throne. It is seldom that our Scottish presbyters are to be found in kings' palaces, so that the ordeal of a royal presentation is generally sufficient to puzzle their wisest. Thus felt Dr. Chalmers upon the occasion; and in the amusing letters which he wrote home to his children, he describes with full glee the difficulty he experienced from his cocked hat, and the buttons of his court dress. The questions put to him at this presentation were of solemn import, as issuing from kingly lips: " Do you reside constantly in Edinburgh?" "How long do you remain in town?" He returned to the labours of his class room, and the preparation of his elaborate work on "Political Economy," which had employed his thoughts for years, and was published at the beginning of 1832. This care of authorship in behalf of principles which he knew to be generally unpalatable, was further aggravated by the passing of the Reform Bill, to which he was decidedly hostile. After his work on "Political Economy," which fared as he had foreseen, being roughly handled by the principal critics of the day, against whose favourite doctrines it militated, he published his well-known Bridgewater Treatise, "On the Adaptation of External Nature to the Moral and Intellectual Constitution of Man." At the same period the cholera, which in its tremendous but erratic march had arrived in the island, and commenced its havoc in Newcastle and Sunderland, proceeded northward, and entered like a destroying angel within the gates of Edinburgh, which it filled with confusion and dismay. As its ravages went onward, the people became so maddened as to raise riots round the cholera hospitals, and treat the physicians, who attended on the patients at the risk of their own lives, with insult and violence. This exhibition was so afflictive to Dr. Chalmers, that he expressed his feelings upon the subject in the most impressive manner that a human being can possibly adopt—this was in public prayer, upon the national fast in St. George's church, while he was earnestly beseeching that the plague might be stayed, and the people spared. "We pray, Lord, in a more especial manner," he thus supplicated, "for those patriotic men whose duty calls them to a personal encounter with this calamity, and
