FROM LORD CHATHAM'S SPEECH AGAINST EMPLOYING INDIANS IN THE AMERICAN WAR. BUT, my lords, who is the man that, in addition to these disgraces and mischiefs, of our army, has dared to authorize and associate to our arms the tomahawk and scalping-knife of the savage?-to call into civilized alliance the wild and inhuman savage of the woods; to delegate1 to the merciless Indian the defence of disputed rights, and to wage the horrors of his barbarous war against our brethren? My lords, these enormities cry aloud for redress and punishment. Unless thoroughly done away, it will be a stain on the national character. It is a violation of the Constitution. I believe it is against law. But, my lords, this barbarous measure has been defended, not only on the principles of policy and necessity, but also on those of morality; for, said Lord Suffolk, "it was perfectly justifiable to use all the means that God and nature put into our hands!"

I AM ASTONISHED!-shocked! to hear such principles confessedto hear them avowed in this House, or in this country; principles equally unconstitutional, inhuman, and unchristian!

My lords, I did not intend to have encroached3 again upon your attention; but I cannot repress my indignation. I feel myself impelled by every duty. My lords, we are called upon as members of this House, as men, as Christian men, to protest against such notions standing near the throne, polluting the ear of Majesty. "That God and nature put into our hands!" I know not what ideas that lord may entertain of God and nature; but I know that such abominable principles are equally abhorrent to religion and humanity. What! to attribute the sacred sanction of God and nature to the massacres of the Indian scalping-knife-to the cannibal savage torturing, murdering, roasting, and eating; literally, my lords, eating, the mangled victims of his barbarous battles! Such horrible notions shock every precept of religion, divine or - natural, and every generous feeling of humanity. And, my lords, they shock every sentiment of honour; they shock me as a lover of honourable war, and a detester of murderous barbarity. MEANINGS 1. Delegate, hand over. 2. Policy, state reasons. 3. Encroached, trespassed. 4. Abhorrent, contrary to.

NAPOLEON.*

WHо does not know the name of Solicitor Nap? At what alehouse is not his behaviour discussed? In what print-shop is not his picture seen? Yet how little truth has been said about him!

* This and the following are not spaced.

Some people hold that he used to give laudanum by pints to his sick clerks for his amusement. Others whose number has very much increased since he was killed by the gaol distemper, conceive that he was the very model of honour and good nature. I shall try to tell the truth about him.

He was assuredly an excellent solicitor. In his way he never was surpassed. As soon as the parish began to employ him, their cause took a turn. In a very little time they were successful, and Nap became rich. He now set up for a gentleman, took possession of the old manor-house, got into the commission of the peace, and affected to be on a par with the best of the county. He governed the vestries as absolutely as the old family had done. Yet, to give him his due, he managed things with far more discretion than either Sir Lewis or the rioters who had pulled the lords of the manor down. He kept his servants in tolerable order. He removed the steel-traps from the highways and the corners of the streets. He still left a few, indeed, in the more exposed parts of his premises, and set up a board announcing that traps and spring-guns were set in his grounds. He brought the poor parson back to the parish; and though he did not enable him to keep a fine house and a coach as formerly, he settled him in a snug little cottage, and allowed him a pleasant pad-nag. He whitewashed the church again, and put the stocks, which had been much wanted of late, into good repair.

With the neighbouring gentry, however, he was no favourite. He was crafty and litigious. He cared nothing for right if he could raise a point of law against them. He pounded their cattle, broke their hedges, and seduced their tenants from them. He almost ruined Lord Cæsar with actions, in every one of which he was successful. Von Blunderbussen went to law with him for an alleged trespass, but was cast, and almost ruined by costs of suit. He next took a fancy to the seat of Squire Don, who was, to say the truth, little better than an idiot. He asked the poor dupe to dinner, and then threatened to have him tossed in a blanket unless he would make over his estates to him. The poor squire signed and sealed a deed, by which the property was assigned to Joe, a brother of Nap himself. The tenants, however, stood out. They maintained that the estate was entailed, and refused to pay rents to the new landlord; and in this refusal they were stoutly supported by the people in St. George's.

About the same time Nap took it into his head to match with quality, and nothing would serve him but one of the Miss Germains. Lord Cæsar swore like a trooper, but there was no help for it. Nap had twice put executions in his principal residence, and had refused to discharge the latter of the two till he had extorted a bond from his lordship, which compelled him to comply.

MACAULAY.

DEATH OF MARIE-ANTOINETTE.

Marie-Antoinette was the queen of Louis XVI., King of France. Soon after her husband's execution she was tried for crimes that she had never committed, and condemned to death.

ON Monday, the 14th of October, 1793, a cause is pending' in the Palace of Justice, in the new Revolutionary Court, such as these old stone walls never witnessed-the trial of Marie-Antoinette. The once brightest of queens, now tarnished, defaced, forsaken, stands here at the judgment-bar, answering for her life. The indictment 2 was delivered her last night. To such changes of human fortune what words are adequate? Silence alone is adequate.

4

Her

Marie-Antoinette, in this her utter abandonment and hour of extreme need, is not wanting to herself, the imperial woman. look, they say, as that hideous indictment was reading, continued calm; "she was sometimes observed moving her fingers as when one plays on the piano." You discern, not without interest, how she bears herself queenlike. Her answers are prompt, clear, often of laconic brevity, resolution, which has grown contemptuous, without ccasing to be dignified, veils itself in calm words. "You persist then in denial ?" 66 My plan is not denial; it is the truth I have said, and I persist in that." At four o'clock on Wednesday morning, after two days and two nights of interrogating, jury-charging, and other darkening of counsel, the result comes out-sentence of death! "Have you anything to say ?" The accused shook her head without speech. Night's candles are burning out; and with her too time is finishing, and it will be eternity and-day. This hall of justice is dark, illlighted except where she stands. Silently she withdraws from it, to

die.

Is there a man's heart that thinks without pity of those long months and years of slow, wasting ignominy;7 of thy birth, soft cradled in imperial Schönbrunn, the winds of heaven not to visit thy face too roughly, thy foot to light on softness, thine eye on splendour; and then of thy death, or hundred deaths, to which the guillotine and the judgment-bar were but the merciful end? Look there, O man born of woman! The bloom of that fair face is wasted, the hair is grey with care; the brightness of those eyes is quenched, their lids hang drooping; the face is stony pale, as of one living in death. Mean weeds, which her own hand has mended, attire the queen of the world. The death-hurdle 10 where thou sittest pale, motionless, which only curses environ,11 has to stop; a people, drunk with vengeance, will drink it again in full draught, looking at thee there. Far as the eye reaches, a multitudinous sea of maniac heads, the air deaf with their triumph-yell. The living-dead must shudder with yet another pang; 12 her startled blood yet again suffuses 13 with the hue of agony that pale face, which she hides with her hands.

There is there no heart to say, God pity thee! O think not of these; think of Him whom thou worshippest, the Crucified-who also, treading the wine-press alone, fronted sorrow still deeper, and triumphed over it, and made it holy, and built of it a “sanctuary of sorrow for thee and all the wretched. Thy path of thorns is nigh ended: one long last look at the Tuileries, where thy step was once so light-where thy children shall not dwell. The head is on the block; the axe rushes-dumb lies the world; that wild-yelling world, with all its madness, is behind thee. CARLYLE.

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MEANINGS: 1. Pending, going on. 2. Indictment, a legal paper which set forth the crimes with which she was charged. 3. Adequate, equal. 4. Laconic brevity, pithy shortness. 5. Interrogating, questioning the accused. 6. Darkening of counsel, hiding the facts in a mist of words. 7. Ignominy, the loss of one's good name, shame, disgrace. 8. Imperial Schönbrunn, the palace of the Emperor of Austria, her father. 9. Weeds, garments. 10. Death-hurdle, the cart in which criminals were taken to the place of execution. 11. Environ, surround. Pang, throb of pain. 13. Suffuses, pours over. 14. Tuileries, the palace of the French kings.

12.

THERE has of late a gentleman appeared, who thinks the study of rhetoric essential to a perfect education. That bold male eloquence, which often without pleasing convinces, is generally destroyed by such institutions. Convincing eloquence, however, is infinitely more serviceable to its possessor than the most florid harangue or the most pathetic tones that can be imagined; and the man who is thoroughly convinced himself, who understands his subject and the language he speaks in, will be more apt to silence opposition, than he who studies the force of his periods, and fills our ears with sounds, while our minds are destitute of conviction.

It was reckoned the fault of the orators at the decline of the Roman Empire, when they had been long instructed by rhetoricians, that their periods were so harmonious, as that they could be sung as well as spoken. What a ridiculous figure must one of these gentlemen cut, thus measuring syllables and weighing words, when he should plead the cause of his client! Two architects were once candidates for the building a certain temple at Athens: the first harangued the crowd very learnedly upon the different orders of architecture, and showed them in what manner the temple should be built; the other, who got up to speak after him, only observed, that what his brother had spoken he could do; and thus he at once gained his cause.

A man, therefore, may be called eloquent, who transfers the passion or sentiment with which he is moved himself into the breast of another; and this definition appears the more just, as it comprehends the graces of silence and of action. An intimate persuasion of the

truth to be proved is the sentiment and passion to be transferred; and who effects this is truly possessed of the talent of eloquence.

I have called eloquence a talent, and not an art, as so many rhetoricians have done; as art is acquired by exercise and study, and eloquence is the gift of nature. Rules will never make either a work or a discourse eloquent; they only serve to prevent faults, but not to introduce beauties; to prevent those passages which are truly eloquent and dictated by nature from being blended with others which might disgust, or at least abate our passion.

What we clearly conceive, says Boileau, we can clearly express. I may add, that what is felt with emotion is expressed also with the same movements; the words rise as readily to paint our emotions as to express our thoughts with perspicuity. The cool care an orator takes to express passions which he does not feel, only prevents his rising into that passion he would seem to feel. In a word, to feel your subject thoroughly, and to speak without fear, are the only rules of eloquence, properly so called, which I can offer. Examine a writer of genius on the most beautiful parts of his work, and he will always assure you, that such passages are generally those which have given him the least trouble, for they came as if by inspiration. To pretend that cold and didactic precepts will make a man eloquent, is only to prove that he is incapable of eloquence.

GOLDSMITH.

LABOUR.

THE dignity of labour! Consider its achievements! Dismayed by no difficulty, shrinking from no exertion, exhausted by no struggle, ever eager for renewed efforts, in its persevering promotion of human happiness, "clamorous labour knocks with its hundred hands at the golden gate of the morning," obtaining each day, through succeeding centuries, fresh benefactions for the world! Labour clears the forest, and drains the morass, and makes "the wilderness rejoice and blossom as the rose." Labour drives the plough, and scatters the seeds, and reaps the harvest, and grinds the corn, and converts it into bread, the staff of life. Labour, tending the pastures and sweeping the waters, as well as cultivating the soil, provides with daily sustenance the nine hundred millions of the family of man. Labour gathers the gossamer 2 web of the caterpillar, the cotton from the field, and the fleece from the flock, and weaves it into raiment,3 soft and warm and beautiful—the purple robe of the prince and the grey gown of the peasant being alike its handiwork. Labour moulds the brick, and splits the slate, and quarries the stone, and shapes the column, and rears, not only the humble cottage, but the