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Our capitols, our cities, our armies, our fleets, our palaces, our museums, our magistrates, our citizens; became his capitols, his towns, his armies, his fleets, his palaces, his museums, his magistrates, and his subjects. He drew after him the nation over the battle-fields of Europe, where we have left no other remembrance than the insolence of our victories, our carcasses, and our gold. In fine, after having besieged the forts of Cadiz, after having held the keys of Lisbon, and of Madrid, of Vienna and of Berlin, of Naples and of Rome; after having shaken the very pavements of Moscow beneath the thunder of his cannonading, he has rendered France less great than he found her--all bleeding of her wounds, dismantled, exposed, impoverished, and humbled.”

LXVIII-QUALIFICATIONS FOR SOLDIERS.

SYDNEY SMITH.

You say these men interpret the Scriptures in an orthodox manner; and that they eat their God. Very likely. All this may seem very important to you, who live fourteen miles from a market-town, and, from long residence upon your living, are become a kind of holy vegetable; and, in a theological sense, it is highly important. But I want soldiers and sailors for the state; I want to make a greater use than I now can do of a poor country full of men; I want to render the military service popular among the Irish; to check the power of France; to make every possible exertion for the safety of Europe, which in twenty years' time, will be nothing but a mass of French slaves; and then you, and ten thousand other such boobies as you, call out-" For God's sake, do not think of raising cavalry and infantry in Ireland! . . They interpret the Epistle to Timothy in a different manner from what we do! They eat a bit of wafer every Sunday, which they call their God!” . . . I wish to my soul they would eat you, and such reasoners as you are. What! when Turk, Jew, Heretic, Infidel, Catholic, Protestant, are all combined against this country; when men of every religious persuasion, and no religious persuasion; when the population of half the globe is up in arms against us; are we to stand examining our generals and armies as a bishop exam

ines a candidate for holy orders? and to suffer no one to bleed for England who does not agree with you about the 2d of Timothy? You talk about the Catholics! If you and your brotherhood have been able to persuade the country into a continuation of this grossest of all absurdities, you have ten times the power which the Catholic clergy ever had in their best days. Louis XIV., when he revoked the Edict of Nantes, never thought of preventing the Protestants from fighting his battles; and gained accordingly some of his most splendid victories by the talents of his Protestant generals. No power in Europe, but yourselves, has ever thought, for these hundred years past, of asking whether a bayonet is Catholic, or Presbyterian, or Lutheran; but whether it is sharp and well-tempered. A bigot delights in public ridicule; for he begins to think he is a martyr. I can promise you the full enjoyment of this pleasure, from one extremity of Europe to the other.

LXIX.-GRIEVANCES OF THE ENGLISH GOVERNMENT.

MACKINTOSH.

WE are boldly challenged to produce our proofs; our complaints are asserted to be chimerical; and the excellence of our government is inferred from its beneficial effects. Most unfortunately for us-most unfortunately for our country, these proofs are too ready and too numerous. We find them in that "monumental debt," the bequest of wasteful and profligate wars, which already wrings from the peasant something of his hard-earned pittance,-which already has punished the industry of the useful and upright manufacturer, by robbing him of the asylum of his house, and the judgment of his peers, to which the madness of political Quixotism adds a million for every farthing that the pomp of ministerial empiricism pays,—and which menaces our children with convulsions and calamities, of which no age has seen the parallel. We find them in the black and bloody roll of persecuting statutes that are still suffered to stain our code;—a list so execrable, that were no monument to be preserved of what England was in the eighteenth century but her Statute Book, she might be deemed to have been then still plunged

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in the deepest gloom of superstitious barbarism. We find them in the ignominious exclusion of great bodies of our fellow-citizens from political trusts, by tests which reward falsehood and punish probity,-which profane the rights of the religion it pretends to guard, and usurp the dominion of the God they profess to revere. We find them in the growing corruption of those who administer the government,—in the venality of the House of Commons, which has become only a cumbrous and expensive chamber for registering ministerial edicts,—in the increase of a nobility degraded by the profusion and prostitution of honors, which the most zealous partisans of democracy would have spared them. We find them, above all, in the rapid progress which has been made in silencing the great organ of public opinion, that Press, which is the true control over the ministers and parliaments, who might else, with impunity, trample on the impotent forinalities that form the pretended bulwark of our freedom. The mutual control, the well-poised balance of the several members of our Legislature, are the visions of theoretical, or the pretext of practical politicians. It is a government, not of check, but of conspiracy,-a conspiracy which can only be repressed by the energy of popular opinion.

LXX.-DUTY OF ENGLAND TO ITALY.

MACKINTOSH.

ITALY is, perhaps, of all civilized countries, that which affords the most signal example of the debasing power of provincial dependence, and of a foreign yoke. With independence, and with national spirit, they have lost, if not talent, at least the moral and dignified use of talent, which constitutes its only worth. Italy alone seemed to derive some hope of independence from the convulsions which had destroyed that of other nations. The restoration of Europe annihilated the hopes of Italy:-the emancipation of other countries announced her bondage. Stern necessity compelled us to suffer the re-establishment of foreign masters in a greater part of that renowned and humiliated country. But as to Genoa, our hands were unfettered; we were at liberty to be just, or if you will, to be generous. We had in our

hands the destiny of the last of that great body of Republics which united the ancient and the modern world,—the children and heirs of Roman civilization, who spread commerce, and with it refinement, liberty, and humanity over Western Europe, and whose history has lately been rescued from oblivion, and disclosed to our times, by the greatest of living historians. I hope I shall not be thought fanciful when I say that Genoa, whose greatness was founded on naval power, and which, in the earliest ages, gave the almost solitary example of a commercial gentry,-Genoa, the remnant of Italian liberty, and the only remaining hope of Italian independence, had peculiar claims-to say no more—on the generosity of the British nation. How have these claims been satisfied? She has been sacrificed to a frivolous, a doubtful, perhaps an imaginary, speculation of convenience. The most odious of foreign yokes has been imposed upon her by a free state,—by a people whom she never injured,—after she had been mocked by the re-appearance of her ancient government, and by all the ensigns and badges of her past glory. And after all this, she has been told to be grateful for the interest which the government of England has taken in her fate. By this confiscation of the only Italian territory which was at the disposal of justice, the doors of hope have been barred on Italy forever. No English general can ever again deccive Italians.

LXXI.-DEFENCE OF THE POET ARCHIAS.

CICERO.

HAD I not been convinced from my youth, by much instruction and much study, that nothing is greatly desirable in life but glory and virtue, and that, in the pursuit of these, all bodily tortures, and the perils of death and exile, are to be slighted and despised, never should I have exposed myself to so many and so great conflicts for your preservation, nor to the daily rage and violence of the most worthless of men. But on this head books are full, the voice of the wise is full, antiquity is full; all which, were it not for the lamp of learning, would be involved in thick obscurity. How many pictures of the bravest of men have the Greek and Latin

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writers left us, not only to contemplate, but likewise to imitate! But were pleasure only to be derived from learning, without the advantages we have mentioned, you must still, I imagine, allow it to be a very liberal and polite amusement; for other studies are not suited to every time, to every age, and to every place; but these give strength in youth and joy in old age; adorn prosperity, and are the support and consolation of adversity; at home they are delightful, and abroad they are easy; at night they are company to us; when we travel they attend us: and, in our rural retirements, they do not forsake us. Though we ourselves were incapable of them, and had no relish for their charms, still we should admire them when we see them in others.

How often have I seen this Archias, my lords, without using his pen, and without any labor or study, make a great number of excellent verses on occasional subjects. How often, when a subject was resumed, have I heard him give it a different turn of thought and expression while those compositions which he finished with care and exactness were as highly approved as the most celebrated writings of antiquity. And shall I not love this man? Shall I not admire him? Shall I not defend him to the utmost of my power? For men of the greate-t eminence and learning have taught us that other branches of science require education, art, and precept; but that the poet is formed by the plastic hand of nature herself, is quickened by the native fire of genius, and animated, as it were, by a kind of divine enthusiasm. It is with justice therefore that our Ennius bestows on poets the epithet of " venerable," because they seem to have some peculiar gifts of the gods to recommend them to us. Let the name of poet, then, which the most barbarous nations have never profaned, be revered by you, my lords, who are so great admirers of polite learning. Rocks and deserts re-echo sounds; savage beasts are often softened by music, and listen to its charms and shall we, with all the advantages of the best education, be unaffected with the voice of poetry? The praises of our fleet shall ever be recorded and celebrated for the wonders performed at Tenedos, where the enemy's ships were sunk, and their commanders slain: such are our trophies, such our monuments, such our triumphs. Those, therefore, whose genius describes these exploits, celebrate likewise the praises of the Roman name.

We beg of you, therefore, my lords, since in matters of