Alexandria Gazette

We find in an English paper the following sketch of Rev. Mr. Spurgeon, the "eloquent young preacher" of London.

"His sermons were purchased and read, and being a kind of comic pulpit, though in parts dismal and obscure enough, readers became listeners. Park street Chapel overflowed: Exeter Hall, with capacity to hold 4,000, was hired, but as many more thousands remained in the Strand unadmitted.- Next Julien's Surrey Music Hall was hired. It is said to hold 10,000-with cramming, 12,000 more. On Sunday evening last the number within and without the Surrey Garden's gates, attracted by Mr. Spurgeon, was variously estimated at from 18,000 in the Times to 30,000 in other daily papers.

Now, what is the manner and matter of this preacher? The inquiring visiter sees a short, square-built man enter, with a round, pallid-looking face, relieved, however, by expressive dark eyes and a profusion of black hair parted in the middle. His reading and prayer, in which there is nothing very singular, unless it be familiarity suggestive of profanity, with which he addresses the Throne of Grace, he begins his sermon. If it have reference to the fall of Adam, and expiation of sin through faith in Jesus Christ, he lets his audience know, in a jovial kind of tone, that he is about to amuse them. He looks intently to the farthest corner of the house, and exclaims "Holloa, Adam?" In the presumption that Adam is afraid to face such a congregation in answer to such a summons, he makes the father of mankind reply tremulously, "Here am I; what wouldst thou?" "What would I," he indignantly rejoins, "I would know what you have done, Adam, that we are all damned through you?" Adam makes a speech. The preacher answers him. Adam has a rejoinder; the preacher another. Adam is greatly abashed, and has decidedly the worst of the argument, and is told, in the slang of the taproom, "I thought I should make him sing small." Then in a jolly, rollicking, bantering style, he comforts Adam thus, "Ah, never mind, never mind man; we have a new Adam, we have Christ instead of you," &c. Then he brings the Trinity on the platform, and holds colloquy with them. In like manner he introduces prophets, apostles, and all other scriptural personages. He makes the Savior and Mary Magdalene hold conversation, the preacher imitating the tones of a timid, repentant woman. And this it is which the tens of thousands of the metropolitan population are crowding even unto death, to hear, to grieve at, or to approve, by occasional bursts of laughter or floods of tears. He gives scenes from hell, in which the persons represented are his brother ministers, with their congregations; he has a powerful voice and alters his tones with considerable effect, in a dramatic sense. He walks up and down the platform, and is only at home when he has such a stage. A pulpit cramps him.- He tells that his gains to the kingdom of Christ have been a thousand souls a year since he came to London, and he expects they will amount to an additional thousand this year."