and they ran with a rush and a rhapsody into the floweriest meads of rhetoric. Some of his published addresses on special anniversaries or occasions, are deeply marked with these characteristics; more frequently those delivered in the first years of his ministry. But this should not be ascribed to the youthful ecstasies of an exuberant imagination in the speaker. At the time when he delivered his most florid addresses, grave members of the British Parliament and platform orators adopted a style and diction equally ornate. The public taste for glowing and redundant metaphor pervaded every assembly, religious or political; and what would now offend, then delighted the ears of an audience. Sheridan would hardly have ventured to deliver one of his rhapsodies in the hearing of the present orators of the House of Commons. Thus public taste, as it were, creates both its own standards and examples of excellence.
Mr. James was born in Blandford, in Dorsetshire, in 1785; and after a short term of academical and theological education at what might be called the private school of Dr. Bogue at Gosport, was settled as the pastor of Carr's Lane Chapel, Birmingham, in September, 1805. He was then hardly twenty years of age, but had been "put on the preaching list" when he was but little more than seventeen; so that his pulpit teachings and his own tuition in theology literally commenced at the same time.
