"Pass on," thus spoke the Angel: For Heaven is yours at last; Your thousand years have passed." (217.) CHARACTER OF LORD CHATHAM. Right Honourable Henry Grattan, educated at Trinity College, Dublin, was called to the Irish bar in 1772, and three years afterwards returned to the Irish parliament. The Irish nation voted him £100,000 in testimony of his services. The Secretary stood alone. Modern degeneracy had not reached him. Original and unaccommodating, the features of his character had the hardihood of antiquity. His august mind overawed majesty, and one of his sovereigns thought royalty so impaired in his presence that he conspired to remove him, in order to be relieved from his superiority. No state chicanery, no narrow system of vicious politics, no idle contest for ministerial victories, sunk him to the vulgar level of the great but overbearing, persuasive, and impracticable, his object was England, his ambition was fame. Without dividing, he destroyed party; without corrupting, he made a venal age unanimous. France sunk beneath him. With one hand he smote the house of Bourbon, and wielded in the other the democracy of England. The sight of his mind was infinite; and his schemes were to affect, not England, not the present age only, but Europe and posterity. Wonderful were the means by which these schemes were accomplished; always seasonable, always adequate, the suggestions of an understanding animated by ardour, and enlightened by prophecy. The ordinary feelings which make life amiable and indolent were unknown to him. No domestic difficulties, no domestic weakness, reached him; but aloof from the sordid occurrences of life, and unsullied by its intercourse, he came occasionally into our system, to counsel and to decide. A character so exalted, so strenuous, so various, so authoritative, astonished a corrupt age, and the treasury trembled at the name of Pitt through all her classes of venality. Corruption imagined, indeed, that she had found defects in this statesman, and talked much of the inconsistency of his glory, and much of the ruin of his victories; but the history of his country and the calamities of the enemy answered and refuted her. Nor were his political abilities his only talents: his eloquence was an era in the senate, peculiar and spontaneous, familiarly expressing gigantic sentiments and instinctive wisdom; not like the torrent of Demosthenes, or the splendid conflagration of Tully; it resembled sometimes the thunder, and sometimes the music of the spheres. Like Murray, he did not conduct the understanding through the painful subtilty of argumentation; nor was he, like Townshend, for ever on the rack of exertion; but rather lightened upon the subject, and reached the point by the flashings of the mind, which, like those of his eye, were felt, but could not be followed. Upon the whole, there was in this man something that could create, subvert, or reform; an understanding, a spirit, and an eloquence, to summon mankind to society, or to break the bonds of slavery asunder, and to rule the wilderness of free minds with unbounded authority; something that could establish or overwhelm empire, and strike a blow in the world that should resound through the universe. (218.) A DISTURBANCE IN CHURCH. Max Adeler, an American humorist, whose recent sketches on social life and character have won for him much repute. They have had more trouble at our Methodist meeting-house. Last Sunday our minister was just beginning his sermon, and had uttered the words, "Brethren, I wish to direct your attention this morning to the fourth verse of the twentieth chapter of Saint"when a hen emerged from the recess beneath the pulpit. As she had just laid an egg, she interrupted the minister to announce the fact to the congregation; and he stopped short as she walked out into the aisle, screeching: “Kuk-kuk-kuk-kuk-te-ke! Kuk-kuk-kuk-kukte-ko!" The minister contemplated her for a moment, and then concluded to go on; but the sound of his voice seemed to provoke her to rivalry, and so she put on a pressure of five or six pounds to the square inch, and made such a racket that the preacher stopped again, and said,"Will our friend Mr. Grimes please remove that disgraceful chicken from the meeting-house?" The deacon rose, and proceeded with the task. He first tried to drive her toward the door; but she dodged him, and, still clucking vigorously, got under the seat in the front pew. Then the deacon seized his umbrella and scooped her out into the aisle again, after which he tried to "shoo" her toward the door; but she darted into a pew, hopped over the partition, came down in the opposite pew, and out into the side aisle, making a noise like a steam planing-mill. The deacon didn't like to climb over after her, so he went round, and just as he got into the side aisle the hen flew over into the middle aisle again. Then the boys in the gallery laughed, and the deacon began to grow red in the face. At last Mr. Binns came out of his pew to help, and as both he and the deacon made a dash at the chicken from opposite directions she flew up with a wild cluck to the gallery, and perched on the edge, while she gave excited expression to her views by emitting about five hundred clucks a minute. The deacon flung a hymn-book at her to scare her down again, but he missed, and hit a Sundayschool scholar in the eye. Then another boy in the gallery made a dash at her, and reached so far over that he tumbled and fell on Mrs. Miskey's bonnet, whereupon she said loud that he was predestined for the gallows. The crash scared the hen, and she flew over and roosted on the stove-pipe that ran along just under the ceiling, fairly howling with fright. In order to bring her down, the deacon and Mr. Binns both beat on the lower part of the pipe with their umbrellas, and at the fifth or sixth knock the pipe separated and about forty feet of it came down with a crash, emptying a barrel or two of soot over the congregation. The hen came down with the stove-pipe; and as she flew by Mr. Binns he made a dash at her with his umbrella, and knocked her clear through a pane of glass, whereupon she landed in the street, and hopped off clucking insanely. The congregation are going to expel the owner of that hen from the church when they discover his identity. (219.) JOAN OF ARC. Thomas de Quincey, essayist and journalist, b. 1785, d. 1860. A merchant's son, educated at Eton and Oxford. His Confessions of an Opium Eater reveal much of his earlier life. "Every department of literature he illumined." [Joan of Arc was born in a village called Domremy. Her father and mother were poor country folk, who brought up their child to keep cattle. Joan professed to be inspired to liberate France from the English, and was finally burnt as a witch in the market-place at Rouen. Schiller has a tragedy on the subject and Voltaire a burlesque.] What is to be thought of her? What is to be thought of the poor shepherd-girl from the hills and forests of Lorraine, that-like the Hebrew shepherd-boy from the hills and forests of Judea-rose suddenly out of the quiet, out of the safety, out of the religious inspiration, rooted in deep pastoral solitudes, to a station in the van of armies, and to the more perilous station at the right hand of kings? The Hebrew boy inaugurated his patriotic mission by an act, by a victorious act, such as no man could deny. But so did the girl of Lorraine, if we read her story as it was read by those who saw her nearest. Adverse armies bore witness to the boy as no pretender: but so they did to the gentle girl. Judged by the voices of all who saw them from a station of good-will, both were found true and loyal to any promises involved in their first acts. Enemies it was that made the difference between their subsequent fortunes. The boy rose-to a splendour and a noonday prosperity, both personal and public, that rang through the records of his people, and became a by-word amongst his posterity for a thousand years, until the sceptre was departing from Judah. The poor, forsaken girl, on the contrary, drank not herself from that cup of rest which she had secured for France. She never sang together with the songs that rose in her native Domremy, as echoes to the departing steps of invaders. She mingled not in the festal dances of Vaucouleurs which celebrated in rapture the redemption of France. No! for her voice was then silent. No! for her feet were dust. Pure, innocent, noble-hearted girl! whom, from earliest youth, ever I believed in as full of truth and self-sacrifice, this was amongst the strongest pledges for thy side, that never once-no, not for a moment of weakness-didst thou revel in the vision of coronets and honour from man. Coronets for thee! Oh, no! Honours, if they come when all is over, are for those that share thy blood. Daughter of Domremy, when the gratitude of thy king shall awaken, thou wilt be sleeping the sleep of the dead. Call her, king of France, but she will not hear thee! Cite her by thy apparitors to come and receive a robe of honour, but she will be found en contumace. When the thunders of universal France, as even yet may happen, shall proclaim the grandeur of the poor shepherd girl that gave up all for her country-thy ear, young shepherdgirl, will have been deaf for five centuries. To suffer and to do, that was thy portion in this life; to do—never for thyself, always for others; to suffer-never in the persons of generous champions, always in thy own; that was thy destiny; and not for a moment was it hidden from thyself. "Life," thou saidst, "is short, and the sleep which is in the grave is long. Let me use that life, so transitory, for the glory of those heavenly dreams destined to comfort the sleep which is so long." This pure creature-pure from every suspicion of even a visionary self-interest, even as she was pure in senses more obvious-never once did this holy child, as regarded herself, relax from her belief in the darkness that was travelling to meet her. She might not prefigure the very manner of her death; she saw not in vision, perhaps, the aerial altitude of the fiery scaffold, the spectators without end on every road pouring into Rouen as to a coronation, the surging smoke, the volleying flames, the hostile faces all around, the pitying eye that lurked but here and there until nature and imperishable truth broke loose from artificial restraints; these might not be apparent through the mists of the hurrying future. But the voice that called her to death, that she heard for ever. (220.) SCENE FROM THE "HEIR AT LAW.” George Colman, dramatist and comic writer, b. 1762, d. 1836. Originally designed for the law, became a dramatist in his father's theatre, and was appointed by George IV. to the office of Lord-chamberlain's Examiner of Plays. [The "Heir at Law" is the story of an ignorant old chandler who is raised to a peerage through the supposed death of the rightful heir. The old man employs an ignorant pedant to teach him and his son to speak correctly. Finally he is reduced to his old station by the unexpected appearance of the rightful heir to the estate.] Three Speakers: Doctor PANGLOSS, DICK DOWLAS, and WAITER. Pan. Never before did honour and affluence let fall such a shower on the head of Doctor Pangloss! Fortune, I thank thee! Propitious goddess, I am grateful! I, thy favoured child, who commenced his career in the loftiest apartment of a muffin-maker in Milk Alley! Little did I think-"good easy man!" Shakspeare.--Hem !—of the riches and literary dignities which now My pupil! Enter DICK DOWLAS. Dick [entering]. Well, where is the man that wants-[seeing Pangloss.] Oh! you are he, I suppose. Pan. I am the man, young gentleman. "Homo sum." Terence. -Hem! Sir, the person who now presumes to address you is Peter Pangloss; to whose name, in the college of Aberdeen, is subjoined LL.D., signifying Doctor of Laws; to which has been recently added the distinction of A double S-the Roman initials for a Fellow of the Society of Arts. Dick. Sir, I am your most obedient, Richard Dowlas; to whose name, in his tailor's bill, is subjoined D.R., signifying Debtor; to which are added L.S.D.-the Roman initials for pounds, shillings, and pence.—But what are your commands with me, doctor! Pan. I have the honour, young gentleman, of being deputed an ambassador to you from your father. Dick. Then you have the honour to be ambassador of as good |