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TRIAL OF WARREN HASTINGS.

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when the sceptre shall have passed away from England when perhaps, travellers from distant regions shall in vain labor to decipher on some mouldering pedestal the name of our proudest chief; shall hear savage hymns chanted to some misshapen idol over the ruined dome of our proudest temple: and shall see a single naked fisherman wash his nets in the river of the ten thousand masts,―her influence and her glory would still survive,-fresh in eternal youth, exempt from mutability and decay, immortal as the intellectual principle from which they derived their origin, and over which they exercise their control.

X.-TRIAL OF WARREN HASTINGS.

T. B. MACAULAY.

It was the great

THE place was worthy of such a trial. hall of William Rufus; the hall which had resounded with acclamations at the inaugurations of thirty kings; the hall which had witnessed the just sentence of Bacon, and the just absolution of Somers; the hall where the eloquence of Stratford had for a moment awed and melted a victorious party inflamed with just resentment; the hall where Charles had confronted the High Court of Justice with the placid courage which has half redeemed his fame. Neither military nor civil pomp was wanting. The avenues were lined with grenadiers. The streets were kept clear by cavalry. The gray old walls were hung with scarlet. The long galleries were crowded by such an audience as rarely has excited the fears or emulation of an orator. There were gathered together, from all parts of a great, free, enlightened, and prosperous realm, grace and female loveliness, wit and learning, the representatives of every science and every art. were seated around the queen the fair-haired daughters of the house of Brunswick. There the ambassadors of great kings and commonwealths gazed with admiration on a spectacle which no other country in the world could present. There Siddons, in the prime of her majestic beauty, looked with emotion on a scene surpassing all the imitations of the stage. There the historian of the Roman Empire thought of the days when Cicero pleaded the cause of Sicily against Verres;

There

and when, before a senate which had still some show of freedom, Tacitus thundered against the oppressor of Africa. There were seen, side by side, the greatest painter and the greatest scholar of the age. The spectacle had allured Reynolds from that easel which has preserved to us the thoughtful foreheads of so many writers and statesmen, and the sweet smiles of so many noble matrons. It had induced Parr to suspend his labors in that dark and profound mine from which he had extracted a vast treasure of erudition-a treasure too often buried in the earth, too often paraded with injudicious and inelegant ostentation; but still precious, massive, and splendid. There appeared the voluptuous charms of her to whom the heir of the throne had in secret plighted his faith. There, too, was she, the beautiful mother of a beautiful race, the Saint Cecilia, whose delicate features, lighted up by love and music, art has rescued from the common decay. There were the members of that brilliant society which quoted, criticized, and exchanged repartees, under the rich peacock hangings of Mrs. Montague. And there the ladies, whose lips, more persuasive than those of Fox himself, had carried the Westminster election against palace and treasury, shone round Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire.

There stood Fox and Sheridan, the English Demosthenes and the English Hyperides. There was Burke, ignorant, indeed, of the art of adapting his reasonings and his style to the capacity of his hearers; but in aptitude of comprehension. and richness of imagination superior to every orator, ancient or modern.

XI.-BURNS.

THOMAS CARLYLE.

WE are far from regarding Burns as guilty before the world, as guiltier than the average; nay, from doubting that he is less guilty than one of ten thousand. Tried at a tribunal far more rigid than that where the Plebiscita of common civic reputations are pronounced, he has seemed to us even then less worthy of blame than of pity and wonder. But the world is habitually unjust in its judgments of such men ; unjust on many grounds, of which this one may be stated as the substance. It decides like a court of law by dead stat

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PERSONAL VINDICATION.

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utes; and not positively but negatively, less on what is done right, than on what is, or is not, done wrong. Not the few inches of reflection from the mathematical orbit, which are so easily measured, but the ratio of these to the whole diameter, constitutes the real aberration. This orbit may be a planet's, its diameter the breadth of the solar system; or it may be a city hippodrome; nay, the circle of a ginhorse, its diameter a score of feet or paces. But the inches of deflection only are measured; and it is assumed that the diameter of the ginhorse, and that of the planet, will yield the same ratio when compared with them. Here lies the root of many a blind, cruel condemnation of Burnses, Swifts, Rousseaus, which one never listens to with approval. Granted, the ship comes into harbor with shrouds and tackle damaged, and the pilot is therefore blameworthy; for he has not been all-wise and all-powerful; but to know how blameworthy, tell us first whether his voyage has been round the globe, or only to Ramsgate and the Isle of Dogs.

With our hearers in general, with men of right feeling anywhere, we are not required to plead for Burns. In pitying admiration, he lies enshrined in all our hearts, in a far nobler mausoleum than that one of marble; neither will his works, even as they are, pass away from the memory of men. While the Shakspeares and Miltons roll on like mighty rivers through the country of thought, bearing fleets of traffickers and assiduous pearl-fishers on their waves; this little Valclusa Fountain will also arrest our eye; for this also is of Nature's own and most cunning workmanship, bursts from the depths of the earth, with a full gushing current into the light of day; and often will the traveller turn aside to drink of its clear waters, and muse among its rocks and pines!

XII-PERSONAL VINDICATION.

MIRABEAU.

WHAT have I done that was so criminal? I have wished that my order were wise enough to give to-day what will infallibly be wrested from it to-morrow; that it should receive the merits and glory of sanctioning the assemblage of the Three Orders, which all Provence loudly demands. This

is the crime of your "enemy of peace." Or rather I have ventured to believe that the people might be in the right. Ah, doubtless, a patrician soiled with such a thought deserves vengeance! But I am still guiltier than you think; for it is my belief that the people which complains is always in the right; that its indefatigable patience invariably waits the uttermost excesses of oppression, before it can determine on resisting; that it never resists long enough to obtain complete redress; and does not sufficiently know that to strike its enemies into terror and submission, it has only to stand still, that the most innocent as the most invincible of all powers is the power of refusing to do. I believe after this manner: punish the enemy of peace!

I have appealed to

Disinterested "friends of peace!" your honor, and summon you to state what expressions of mine have offended against either the respect we owe to the royal authority, or to the nation's right? Nobles of Provence, Europe is attentive; weigh well your answer. Men of God, beware; God hears you! And if you do not answer, but keep silence, shutting yourselves up in the vague declamations you have hurled at me, then allow me to add one word.

In all countries, in all times, aristocrats have implacably persecuted the people's friends; and if, by some singular combination of fortune, there chanced to exist such a one in their own circle, it was he above all whom they struck at, eager to inspire wider terror by the elevation of their victim. Thus perished the last of the Gracchi by the hands of the patricians; but, being struck with the mortal stab, he flung dust towards heaven, and called on the Avenging Deities; and from this dust sprang Marius,-Marius, not so illustrious for exterminating the Cimbri, as for overturning in Rome the tyranny of the Noblesse !

XIII. THE DUKE OF WELLINGTON.

ALISON.

THE glory of the conqueror is nothing new; other ages have been dazzled with the phantom of military renown; other nations have bent beneath the yoke of foreign oppres

THE DUKE OF WELLINGTON.

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sion, and other ages have seen the energies of mankind wither before the march of victorious power. It has been reserved for our age alone to witness-it has been the high prerogative of Wellington alone to exhibit,- —a more animating spectacle; to behold power applied only to the purposes of beneficence; victory made the means of moral renovation, conquest become the instrument of moral resurrection. Before the march of his victorious power we have seen the energies of the world revive; we have heard his triumphant voice awaken a fallen race to noble duties, and recall the remembrance of their pristine glory; we have seen his banners waving over the infant armies of a renovated people, and the track of his chariot-wheels followed, not by the sighs of a captive, but the blessings of a liberated world. We may well say a liberated world; for it was his firmness which first opposed a barrier to the hitherto irresistible waves of Gallic ambition; it was his counsel which traced out the path of European deliverance, and his victories which reanimated the all but extinguished spirit of European resistance. It was from the rocks of Tores Vedras that the waves of French conquest first permanently receded. When the French legions, in apparently invincible strength, were preparing for the fight of Borodino, they were startled by the salvos from the Russian lines, which announced the victory of Salamanca. And when the Russian army were marching in mournful silence round their burning capital, and the midnight sky was illuminated by the flames of Moscow, a breathless messenger brought the news of the fall of Madrid, and the revived multitude beheld in the triumph of Wellington, and the capture of the Spanish capital, an omen of their own deliverance and the rescue of their own metropolis. Nor were the services of the Duke of Wellington of less vital consequence in later times. When the tide of victory had ebbed on the plains of Saxony, and European freedom quivered in the balance, at the Congress of Prague, it was Wellington that threw his sword into the beam by the victory of Victoria, it was the shout of the world at the delivered peninsula which terminated the indecision of the cabinet of Vienna.

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