his place—­in the Gallery.  It was rare sport to see him, “like an eagle in a dovecote, flutter the Volscians in Corioli.”  He has found out the secret of attracting by repelling.  Those whom he is likely to attack are curious to hear what he says of them:  they go again, to show that they do not mind it.  It is no less interesting to the by-standers, who like to witness this sort of onslaught—­like a charge of cavalry, the shock, and the resistance.  Mr. Irving has, in fact, without leave asked or a licence granted, converted the Caledonian Chapel into a Westminster Forum or Debating Society, with the sanctity of religion added to it.  Our spirited polemic is not contented to defend the citadel of orthodoxy against all impugners, and shut himself up in texts of Scripture and huge volumes of the Commentators as an impregnable fortress;—­he merely makes use of the stronghold of religion as a resting-place, from which he sallies forth, armed with modern topics and with penal fire, like Achilles of old rushing from the Grecian tents, against the adversaries of God and man.  Peter Aretine is said to have laid the Princes of Europe under contribution by penning satires against them:  so Mr. Irving keeps the public in awe by insulting all their favourite idols.  He does not spare their politicians, their rulers, their moralists, their poets, their players, their critics, their reviewers, their magazine-writers; he levels their resorts of business, their places of amusement, at a blow—­their cities, churches, palaces, ranks and professions, refinements, and elegances—­and leaves nothing standing but himself, a mighty landmark in a degenerate age, overlooking the wide havoc he has made!  He makes war upon all arts and sciences, upon the faculties and nature of man, on his vices and his virtues, on all existing institutions, and all possible improvements, that nothing may be left but the Kirk of Scotland, and that he may be the head of it.  He literally sends a challenge to all London in the name of the KING of HEAVEN, to evacuate its streets, to disperse its population, to lay aside its employments, to burn its wealth, to renounce its vanities and pomp; and for what?—­that he may enter in as the King of Glory; or after enforcing his threat with the battering-ram of logic, the grape-shot of rhetoric, and the crossfire of his double vision, reduce the British metropolis to a Scottish heath, with a few miserable hovels upon it, where they may worship God according to the root of the matter, and an old man with a blue bonnet, a fair-haired girl, and a little child would form the flower of his flock!  Such is the pretension and the boast of this new Peter the Hermit, who would get rid of all we have done in the way of improvement on a state of barbarous ignorance, or still more barbarous prejudice, in order to begin again on a tabula rasa of Calvinism, and have a world of his own making.  It is not very surprising that when nearly the whole