of lackeys. To those gay and elegant nobles who studied military science as a fashionable accomplishment, and expected military rank as a part of their birthright, have suc ceeded men born in lofts and cellars; educated in the halfnaked ranks of the revolutionary armies, and raised by ferocious valor and self-taught skill, to dignities with which the coarseness of their manners and language forms a grotesque contrast. The government may amuse itself by playing at despotism, by reviving the names and aping the style of the old court-as Helenus in Epirus consoled himself for the lost magnificence of Troy, by calling his book Xanthus, and. the entrance of his little capital the Scæan gate. But the law of entail is gone, and cannot be restored. The liberty of the press is established, and the feeble struggles of the Minister cannot permanently put it down. The Bastile is fallen, and can never more rise from its ruins. A few words, a few ceremonies, a few rhetorical topics, make up all that remains of that system which was founded so deeply by the policy of the house of Valois, and adorned so splendidly by the pride of Louis the Great.

Is this a romance? Or is it a faithful picture of what has lately been in a neighboring land-of what may shortly be, within the borders of our own? Has the warning been given in vain? Have our Mannerses and Clintons so soon forgotten the fate of houses as wealthy and as noble as their own? Have they forgotten how the tender and delicate woman,-the woman who would not set her foot on the earth for tenderness and delicateness, the idol of gilded drawing-rooms, the pole-star of crowded theatres, the standard of beauty, the arbitress of fashion, the patroness of genius, was compelled to exchange her luxurious and dig nified ease for labor and dependence, the sighs of Dukes and the flattery of bowing Abbés for the insults of rude pupils and exacting mothers;-perhaps, even to draw an infamous and miserable subsistence from those charms which had been the glory of royal circles to sell for a morsel of bread her reluctant caresses and her haggard smiles-to be turned over from a garret to a hospital, and from a hospital to a parish vault? Have they forgotten how the gallant and luxurious nobleman, sprung from illustrious ancestors, marked out from his cradle for the highest honors of the State, and of the army, impatient of all control, exquisitely sensible of the slightest affront, with all his high spirit, his polished manners, his voluptuous habits, was reduced to re

quest, with tears in his eyes, credit for half a crown,—to pass day after day in hearing the auxiliary verbs mis-recited, or the first page of Télémaque misconstrued by petulant boys. who infested him with nicknames and caricatures, who mim icked his foreign accent, and laughed at his threadbare coat? Have they forgotten all this? God grant that they may never remember it with unavailing self-accusation, when desolation shall have visited wealthier cities and fairer gardens; when Manchester shall be as Lyons, and Stowe as Chantilly; when he who now, in the pride of rank and opulence, sneers at what we have written in the bitter sincerity of our hearts, shall be thankful for a porringer of broth at the door of some Spanish convent, or shall implore some Italian money-lender to advance another pistole on his George?

SPEECH

ON HIS INSTALLATION AS LORD RECTOR OF THE UNIVERSITY OF GLASGOW.

[March 21, 1849.]

My first duty, gentlemen, is to return you my thanks for the high honor you have conferred on me. That honor, as you well know, was wholly unsolicited, and I can assure you it was wholly unexpected. I may add, that if I had been invited to become a candidate for your suffrages, I should have respectfully declined the invitation. My predecessor, whom I am so happy as to be able to call my friend-declared from this place last year, in language which well became him, that he would not have come forward to displace so eminent a statesman as Lord John Russell. I can with equal truth declare that I would not have come forward to displace so estimable a gentleman and so accomplished a man as Colonel Mure. But he felt last year that it was not for him, and I feel this year that it is not for me, to question the propriety of your decision, in a point on which, by the constitution of your body, you are the sole judges. I therefore accept with thankfulness the office to which I am called

fully purposing to use whatever powers belong to it with the single view of the promotion of the credit and the welfare of this university.

I am not using a mere phrase, of course, when I say that the feelings with which I bear a part in the ceremony of this day, are such as I find it difficult to utter in words. I do not think it strange, that when that great master of eloquence, Edmund Burke, stood where I now stand, he faltered and remained mute. Doubtless the multitude of thoughts which rushed into his mind were such as even he could not easily arrange or express. In truth, there are few spectacles more striking or affecting, than that which a great historical place of education presents on a solemn public day.

There is something strangely interesting in the contrast between the venerable antiquity of the body and the fresh and ardent youth of the great majority of the members. Recollections and hopes crowd upon us together. The past and the future are at once brought close to us. Our thoughts wander back to the time when the foundations of this ancient building were laid, and forward to the time when those whom it is our office to guide and to teach will be the guides and teachers of our posterity. On the present occa sion we may, with peculiar propriety, give such thoughts their course. For it has chanced that my magistracy has fallen in a great secular epoch. This is the four hundredth year of the existence of your university. At such jubilees as these jubilees of which no individual sees more than one-it is natural, it is good, that a society like this-a society which survives all the transitory parts of which it is composed a society which has a corporate existence and a perpetual succession, should review its annals, should retrace the stages of its growth, from infancy to maturity, and should try to find in the experience of generations which have passed away, lessons which may be profitable to gener ations yet unborn. The retrospect is full of interest and instruction.

Perhaps it may be doubted whether, since the Christian era, there has been any point of time more important to the highest interests of mankind than that at which the existence of your university commenced. It was the moment of a great destruction and of a great creation. Your society was instituted just before the empire of the east perishedthat strange empire, which, dragging on a languid life

through the great age of darkness, connected together the two great ages of light-that empire which, adding nothing to our stores of knowledge, and producing not one man great in letters, in science, or in art, yet preserved, in the midst of barbarism, those masterpieces of Attic genius which the highest minds still contemplate, and long will contemplate, with admiring despair; and, at that very time, while the fanatical Moslem were plundering the churches and palaces of Constantinople, breaking in pieces Grecian sculpture, and giving to the flames piles of Grecian eloquence, a few humble German artisans, who little knew that they were calling into existence a power far mightier than that of the victorious sultan, were busied in cutting and setting the first types. The university came into existence just in time to see the last trace of the Roman empire disappear, and to see the earliest printed book.

At this conjuncture-a conjuncture of unrivalled interest in the history of letters-a man never to be mentioned without reverence by every lover of letters, held the highest place in Europe. Our just attachment to that Protestant faith to which our country owes so much, must not prevent us from paying the tribute which, on this occasion and in this place, justice and gratitude demand to the founder of the University of Glasgow, the greatest of the revivers of learning, Pope Nicholas the Fifth. He had sprung from the common people; but his abilities and his erudition had early attracted the notice of the great. He had studied much and travelled far. He had visited Great Britain, which, in wealth and refinement, was to his native Tuscany what the back settlements of America now are to Britain. He had lived with the merchant princes of Florence, those men who first ennobled trade by making trade the ally of philosophy, of eloquence, and of taste. It was he who, under the protection of the munificent and discerning Cosmo, arrayed the first public library that modern Europe possessed. From privacy your founder rose to a throne; but on the throne he never forgot the studies which had been his delight in privacy. He was the centre of an illustrious group, composed partly of the last great scholars of Greece and partly of the first great scholars of Italy, Theodore Gaza and George of Trebizond, Bessarin and Tilelfo, Marsilio Ficino and Poggio Bracciolini. By him was founded the Vatican library, then and long after the most precious and the most extensive collection of books in the world. By him were

carefully preserved the most valuable intellectual treasures which had been snatched from the wreck of the Byzantine empire. His agents were to be found everywhere in the bazaars of the farthest East, in the monasteries of the farthest West-purchasing or copying worm-eaten parchments, on which were traced words worthy of immortality. Under his patronage were prepared accurate Latin versions of many precious remains of Greek poets and philosophers. But no department of literature owes so much to him as history. By him were introduced to the knowledge of Western Eu rope, two great and unrivalled models of historical compcsitio, the work of Herodotus and the work of Thucydides. By him, too, our ancestors were first made acquainted with the graceful and lucid simplicity of Xenophon, and with the manly good sense of Polybius.

It was while he was occupied with cares like these that his attention was called to the intellectual wants of this region-a region now swarming with population, rich with culture, and resounding with the clang of machinery—a region which now sends forth fleets laden with its admirable fabrics to lands of which, in his days, no geographer had ever heard--then a wild, a poor, a half-barbarous tract, lying in the utmost verge of the known world. He gave his sanction to the plan of establishing a University at Glasgow, and bestowed on the new seat of learning all the privileges which belonged to the University of Bologna. I can conceive that a pitying smile passed over his face as he named Bologna and Glasgow together. At Bologna he had long studied. No spot in the world has been more favored by nature or by art. The surrounding country was a fruitful and sunny country, a country of corn-fields and vineyards. In the city the house of Bentivoglio bore rule—a house which vied with the Medici in taste and magnificencewhich has left to posterity noble palaces and temples, and which gave a splendid patronage to arts and sciences.

Glasgow he knew to be a poor, a small, a rude town, and, as he would have thought, not likely ever to be otherwise; for the soil, compared with the rich country at the foot of the Apennines, was barren, and the climate was such that an Italian shuddered at the thought of it. But it is not on the fertility of the soil-it is not on the mildness of the atmosphere that the prosperity of nations chiefly depends. Slavery and superstition can make Campania a land of beggars, and can change the plain of Enna into a desert. Nor