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SELECTIONS FROM EUROPEAN ELOQUENCE.

I. THE PERFECT ORATOR.

SHERIDAN.

IMAGINE to yourselves a Demosthenes, addressing the most illustrious assembly in the world, upon a point whereon the fate of the most illustrious of nations depended.-How awful such a meeting! how vast the subject! By the power of his eloquence, the augustness of the assembly is lost in the dignity of the orator; and the importance of the subject, for a while, superseded by the admiration of his talents.

With what strength of argument, with what powers of the fancy, with what emotions of the heart, does he assault and subjugate the whole man; and, at once, captivate his reason, his imagination, and his passions! To effect this, must be the utmost of the most improved state of human nature. Not a faculty that he possesses, but is here exerted to its highest pitch. All his internal powers are at work; all his external, testify their energies. Within, the memory, the fancy, the judgment, the passions, are all busy; without, every muscle, every nerve is exerted ;—not a feature, not a limb, but speaks. The organs of the body, attuned to the exertions of the mind, through the kindred organs of the hearers, instantaneously vibrate these energies from soul to soul. Notwithstanding the diversity of mind in such a multitude, by the lightning of eloquence they are melted into one mass; the whole assembly, actuated in one and the same way, become, as it were, but one man, and have but one voice. The universal cry is-Let us march against Philip, let us fight for our liberties—let us conquer or die!

II-APPEAL FOR QUEEN CAROLINE.

BROUGHAM.

queen.

SUCH, my lords, is the case before you! such is the evidence in support of this measure-evidence inadequate to prove a debt, impotent to deprive of a civil right, ridiculous to convict of the lowest offence, scandalous, if brought forward to support a charge of the highest nature which the law knows, monstrous to ruin the honor and blast the name of an English queen! What shall I say, then, if this is the proof by which an act of judicial legislation, a parliamentary sentence, an ex post facto law, is sought to be passed against a defenceless woman? My lords, I pray you to pause; I do earnestly beseech you to take heed. You are standing upon the brink of a precipice-then beware! It will go forth as your judgment, if sentence shall pass against the But it will be the only judgment you ever pronounced, which, instead of reaching its object, will return and bound back upon those who give it. Save the country, my lords, from the horrors of this catastrophe-save yourselves from this peril. Revere that country of which you are the ornaments, but in which you can flourish no longer, when severed from the people, than the blossom when cut off from the roots and the stem of the tree. Save that country, that you may continue to adorn it; save the crown, which is in jeopardy, the aristocracy, which is shaken; save the altar, which must stagger with the blow that rends its kindred throne! You have said, my lords, you have willed, the church to the queen, have willed that she should be deprived of its solemn service. She has, instead of that solemnity, the heartfelt prayers of the people. She wants no prayers of mine. But I do here pour forth my humble supplication to the throne of mercy, that that mercy may be poured down upon the people, in a larger measure than the merits of its rulers may deserve, and that your hearts may be turned to justice.

DEFENCE FROM THE CHARGE OF TYRANNY.

223

III.-DEMAND FOR JUSTICE TO IRELAND.

O'CONNELL.

I WILL never be guilty of the crime of despairing of my country; and to-day, after two centuries of suffering, here I stand amidst you in this hall, repeating the same complaints, demanding the same justice which was claimed by our fathers; but no longer with the humble voice of the suppliant, but with the sentiment of our force and the conviction that Ireland will henceforth find means to do, without you, what you shall have refused to do for her! I make no compromise with you; I want the same rights for us that you enjoy; the same municipal system for Ireland as for England and Scotland: otherwise, what is a union with you? A union upon parchment! Well, we will tear this parchment to pieces, and the Empire will be sundered!

I hear, day after day, the plaintive voice of Ireland, crying, Am I to be kept forever waiting and forever suffering? No, fellow-countrymen, you will be left to suffer no longer: you will not have in vain asked justice from a people of brothers. England is no longer that country of prejudices where the mere name of popery excited every breast and impelled to iniquitous cruelties. The representatives of Ireland have carried the Reform bill, which has enlarged the franchises of the English people; they will be heard with favor in asking their colleagues to render justice to Ireland. But should it prove otherwise, should Parliament still continue deaf to our prayer, then we will appeal to the English nation, and if the nation too should suffer itself to be blinded by its prejudices, we will enter the fastnesses of our mountains and take counsel but of our energy, our courage, and our despair.

IV. DEFENCE FROM THE CHARGE OF TYRANNY.

ROBESPIERRE.

THEY call me a tyrant! If I were so, they would fall at my feet: I should have gorged them with gold, assured them of impunity to their crimes, and they would have worshipped Had I been so, the kings whom we have conquered

me.

would have been my most cordial supporters. It is by the aid of scoundrels you arrive at tyranny. Whither tend those who combat them? To the tomb and immortality! Who is the tyrant that protects me? What is the faction to which I belong? It is yourselves! What is the party which, since the commencement of the Revolution, has crushed all other factions-has annihilated so many specious traitors? It is yourselves; it is the people; it is the force of principles ! This is the party to which I am devoted, and against which crime is everywhere leagued. I am ready to lay down my life without regret. I have seen the past: I foresee the future. What lover of his country would wish to live, when he can no longer succor oppressed innocence ? Why should he desire to remain in an order of things where intrigue eternally triumphs over truth-where justice is deemed an imposture where the vilest passions, the most ridiculous fears, fill every heart, instead of the sacred interests of humanity? Who can bear the punishment of seeing the horrible succession of traitors, more or less skilful in concealing their hideous vices under the mask of virtue, and who will leave to posterity the difficult task of determining which was the most atrocious? In contemplating the multitude of vices which the Revolution has let loose pell mell with the civic virtues, I own I sometimes fear that I myself shall be sullied in the eyes of posterity by their calumnies. But I am consoled by the reflection that, if I have seen in history all the defenders of liberty overwhelmed by calumny, I have seen their oppressors die also. The good and the bad disappear alike from the earth; but in very different conditions. No, Chaumette! "Death is not an eternal sleep!"-Citizens, efface from the tombs that maxim, engraven by sacrilegious hands, which throws a funeral pall over nature, which discourages oppressed innocence: write rather, “Death is the commencement of immortality!" I leave to the oppressors of the people a terrible legacy, which well becomes the situation in which I am placed; it is the awful truth, "Thou shalt die !"

ORATION AGAINST WARREN HASTINGS.

225

V. PERORATION IN THE ORATION AGAINST WARREN HASTINGS.

BURKE.

My lords, at this awful close, in the name of the Commons, and surrounded by them, I attest the retiring, I attest the advancing generations, between which, as a link in the great chain of eternal order, we stand. We call this nation, we call the world to witness, that the Commons have shrunk from no labor; that we have been guilty of no prevarication; that we have made no compromise with crime; that we have feared no odium whatsoever, in the long warfare we have carried on with the crimes-with the vices-with the exorbitant wealth-with the enormous and overpowering influence of Eastern corruption. This war, my lords, we have waged for twenty-two years, and the conflict has been fought, at your lordships' bar, for the last seven years. My lords, twenty-two years is a great space in the scale of the life of man; it is no inconsiderable space in the history of a great nation. A business which has so long occupied the councils and the tribunals of Great Britain, cannot possibly be huddled over in the course of vulgar, trite, and transitory events. Nothing but some of those great revolutions, that break the traditionary chain of human memory, and alter the very face of nature itself, can possibly obscure it. My lords, we are all elevated to a degree of importance by it; the meanest of us will, by means of it, more or less, become the concern of posterity—if we are yet to hope for such a thing, in the present state of the world, as a recording, retrospective, civilized posterity: but this is in the hand of the great Disposer of events; it is not ours to settle how it shall be. My lords, your house yet stands; it stands as a great edifice; but let me say, it stands in the midst of ruins-in the midst of the ruins that have been made by the greatest moral earthquake that ever convulsed or shattered this globe of ours. My lords, it has pleased Providence to place us in such a state, that we appear every moment to be upon the verge of some great mutations. There is one thing, and one thing only, which defies all mutation, that which existed before the world, and will survive the fabric of the world itself-I mean justice: that justice which, emanating from Divinity, has a place in the breast of very one of us, given us for our guide with regard to our

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