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of retribution, our character and constitution are placed on a solid basis never to be shaken. The glory acquired by our gallant tars, by our Jacksons and our Browns on the land, is that nothing? True, we had our vicissitudes, there were humiliating events which the patriot cannot review without deep regret-but the great account, when it comes to be balanced, will be found vastly in our favour.

3. Is there a man who would obliterate from the proud pages of our history the brilliant achievements of Jackson, Brown, and Scott, and the host of heroes on land and sea, whom I cannot enumerate? Is there a man who could not desire a participation in the national glory acquired by the war? Yes, national glory, which, however the expression may be condemned by some, must be cherished by every genuine patriot. What do I mean by national glory? Glory such as Hull, Jackson, and Perry have acquired.

4. And are gentlemen insensible to their deeds—to the value of them in animating the country in the hour of peril hereafter? Did the battle of Thermopyla preserve Greece but once? Whilst the Mississippi continues to bear the tributes of the Iron Mountains and the Alleghanies to her Delta and to the Gulf of Mexico, the eighth of January shall be remembered, and the glory of that day shall stimulate future patriots, and nerve the arms of unborn freemen in driving the presumptuous invader from our country's soil.

5. Gentlemen may boast of their insensibility to feelings inspired by the contemplation of such events. But I would ask, does the recollection of Bunker's Hill, Saratoga, and Yorktown afford them no pleasure? Every act of noble sacrifice to the country, every instance of patriotic devotion to her cause has its beneficial influence.

6. A nation's character is the sum of its splendid deeds; they constitute one common patrimony, the nation's inheritance. They awe foreign powers, they arouse and animate our own people. I love true glory. It is the sentiment which ought to be cherished; and, in spite of cavils, and sneers, and attempts to put it down, it will finally conduct this nation to that height to which God and nature have destined it.

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LESSON CLVII.

CATHARIANA.-Addressed to Miss Stapleton.

1. She came she is gone-we have met-
And meet perhaps never again;
The sun of that moment is set,

And seems to have risen in vain.
Cathariana has fled like a dream-
(So vanishes pleasure, alas!)
But has left a regret and esteem,
That will not so suddenly pass.

2. The last evening ramble we made,
Cathariana, Maria, and I,
Our progress was often delayed
By the nightingale warbling nigh.
We paused under many a tree,

And much was she charmed with a tone

Less sweet to Maria and me,

Who so lately had witnessed her own.

3. My numbers that day she had sung,
And gave them a grace so divine,
As only her musical tongue

Could infuse into numbers of mine.
The longer I heard, I esteemed

The work of my fancy the more,
And ev❜n to myself never seemed
So tuneful a poet before.

4. Though the pleasures of London exceed
In number the days of the year,
Cathariana, did nothing impede,
Would feel herself happier here;
For the close woven arches of limes
On the banks of our river, I know,
Are sweeter to her many times

Than aught that the city can show.

5. So it is, when the mind is endued
With a well judging taste from above,
Then, whether embellished or rude,
"Tis nature alone that we love;

The achievements of art may amuse,
May even our wonder excite,
But groves, hills, and valleys, diffuse
A lasting, a sacred delight.

6. Since then in the rural recess
Cathariana alone can rejoice,
May it still be her lot to possess
The scene of her sensible choice!
To inhabit a mansion remote

From the clatter of street-pacing steeds,
And by Philomel's annual note

To measure the life that she leads.

7. With her book, and her voice, and her lyre,
To wing all her moments at home;
And with scenes that new nature inspire,
As oft as it suits her to roam;

She will have just the life she prefers,
With little to hope or to fear,

And ours would be pleasant as hers,
Might we view her enjoying it here.

COWPER.

LESSON CLVIII.

Picture of an Informer.

1. But the learned gentleman is further pleased to say, that the traverser has charged the government with the encouragement of informers. This, gentlemen, is another small fact that you are to deny at the hazard of your souls, and upon the solemnity of your oaths. You are, upon your oaths, to say to the sister country, that the government of Ireland uses no such abominable instruments of destruction as informers.

2. Let me ask you honestly, what do you feel, when in my hearing, when in the face of this audience, you are called upon to give a verdict that every man of us, and every man of you knows by the testimony of his own eyes to be utterly and absolutely false? I speak not now of the public proclamation of informers with a promise of secrecy and of extravagant reward; I speak not of the fate of those

horrid wretches who have been so often transferred from the table to the dock, and from the dock to the pillory.

3. I speak of what your own eyes have seen day after day during the course of this commission from the box where you are now sitting; the number of horrid miscreants who avowed upon their oaths that they had come from the very seat of government-from the castle, where they had been worked upon by the fear of death and the hopes of compensation, to give evidence against their fellows, that the mild and wholesome councils of this government, are holden over these catacombs of living death, where the wretch that is buried a man, lies till his heart has time to fester and dissolve, and is then dug up a witness.

4. Is this fancy, or is it fact? Have you not seen him after his resurrection from that tomb, after having been dug out of the region of death and corruption, make his appearance upon the table, the living image of life and of death, and the supreme arbiter of both? Have you not marked when he entered, how the stormy waves of the multitude retired at his approach? Have you not marked how the human heart bowed to the supremacy of his power, in the undissembled homage of differential horror?

5. How his glance, like the lightning of heaven, seemed to rive the body of the accused, and mark it for the grave, while his voice warned the devoted wretch of wo and death; a death which no innocence can escape, no art elude, no force resist, no antidote prevent:-there was an antidote— a juror's oath-but even this adamantine chain, that bound the integrity of man to the throne of eternal justice, is solved and melted in the breath that issues from the informer's mouth; conscience swings from her moorings, and the appalled and affrighted juror consults his own safety in the surrender of the victim. CURRAN.

LESSON CLIX.

Extract from an Oration delivered at Washington, 1812.

1. When Britain shall pass from the stage of nations, it will be, indeed, with her glory, but it will also be with her shame. And with shame, will her annals in nothing more

be loaded than in this-that, while in the actual possession of much relative freedom at home, it has been her uniform characteristic to let fall upon the remote subjects of her own empire, an iron hand of harsh and vindictive power. If, as is alleged in her eulogy, to touch her soil proclaims emancipation to the slave, it is more true, that when her sceptre reaches beyond that confined limit, it thenceforth, as it menacingly waves throughout the globe, inverts the rule that would give to her soil this purifying virtue.

2. Witness Scotland, towards whom her treatment, until the union in the last century, was marked, during the longest periods, by perfidious injustice or by rude force, circumventing her liberties, or striving to cut them down with the sword. Witness Ireland, who for five centuries has bled, who, to the present hour, continues to bleed, under the yoke of her galling supremacy; whose miserable victims seem at length to have laid down, subdued and despairing, under the multiplied inflictions of her cruelty and rigour.

3. In vain do her own best statesmen and patriots remonstrate against this unjust career! in vain put forth the annual efforts of their benevolence, their zeal, their eloquence; in vain touch every spring that interest, that humanity, that the maxims of everlasting justice can move, to stay its force and mitigate the fate of Irishmen. Alas, for the persecuted adherents of the cross she leaves no hope! witness her subject millions in the east, where, in the descriptive language of the greatest of her surviving orators, "sacrilege, massacre, and perfidy pile up the sombre pyramids of her renown."

4. But, all these instances are of her fellow men, of merely co-equal, perhaps unknown descent and blood; co-existing from all time with herself, and making up only accidentally, a part of her dominion. We ought to have been spared. The otherwise undistinguishing rigour of this outstretched sceptre might still have spared us. We were not so much a part of her empire as a part of herself-her very self.

5. Towards her own it might have been expected she would relent. When she invaded our homes, she saw her own countenance, heard her own voice, beheld her own altars! Where was then that pure spirit which, she now would tell us, sustains her amidst self-sacrifices, in her generous contest for the liberties of other nations?

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