XXV. CHARACTER OF CHARLES THE FIRST. MACAULAY.

I. THE advocates of Charles, like the advocates of other malefactors against whom overwhelming evidence is produced, generally decline all controversy about the facts, and content themselves with calling testimony to character. He had so many private virtues! And had James the Second no private virtues? Was Oliver Cromwell, his bitterest enemies themselves being judges, destitute of private virtues ?

2.

And what, after all, are the virtues ascribed to Charles? A religious zeal, not more sincere than that of his son, and fully as weak and narrow-minded, and a few of the ordinary household decencies which half the tombstones in England claim for those who lie beneath them. A good father! A good husband! Ample apologies indeed for fifteen years of persecution, tyranny, and falsehood!

3. We charge him with having broken his coronation oath ; and we are told that he kept his marriage vow!

We accuse him of having given up his people to the merciless inflictions of the most hot-headed and hard-hearted of prelates; and the defence is, that he took his little son on his knee and kissed him! We censure him for having violated the articles of the Petition of Right, after having, for good and valuable consideration, promised to observe them; and we are informed that he was accustomed to hear prayers at six o'clock in the morning! It is to such considerations as these, together with his Vandyke dress, his handsome face, and his peaked beard, that he owes, we verily believe, most of his popularity with the present generation.

4. For ourselves, we own that we do not understand the common phrase, a good man, but a bad king We can as easily conceive a good man and an unnatural father, or a good man and a treacherous friend. We cannot, in estimating the character of an individual, leave out of our consider

tion his conduct in the most important of all human relations ; and if in that relation we find him to have been selfish, cruel, and deceitful, we shall take the liberty to call him a bad man, in spite of all his temperance at table, and all his regularity at chapel.

XXVI. 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!

XXVII. ELOQUENCE. — WEBSTER.

WHEN public bodies are to be addressed on momentous occasions, when great interests are at stake and strong passions excited, nothing is valuable in speech further than it is connected with high intellectual and moral endowments. Clearness, force, and earnestness are the qualities which produce conviction. True eloquence, indeed, does not consist in speech. It cannot be brought from afar. Labor and learning may toil for it, but they will toil in vain. Words and phrases may be marshalled in every way, but they cannot compass it. It must exist in the man, in the subject, and in the occasion. Affected passion, intense expression, the pomp of declamation, all may aspire after it; they cannot reach it. It comes, if it comes at all, like the outbreaking of a fountain from the earth, or the bursting forth of volcanic fires, with spontaneous, original, native force. The graces taught in the schools, the costly ornaments and studied contrivances of speech, shock and disgust men when their own lives, and the fate of their wives, their children, and their country, hang on the decision of the hour. Then words have lost their power, rhetoric is vain, and all elaborate oratory contemptible. genius itself then feels rebuked and subdued, as in the presence of higher qualifies. Then patriotism is eloquent; then self-devotion is eloquent. The clear conception, outrunning the deductions of logic, the high purpose, the firm resolve, the dauntless spirit, speaking on the tongue, beaming from the eye, informing every feature and urging the whole man onward, right onward to his object, this, this is Eloquence, or rather it is something greater and higher than all eloquence, - it is Action, noble, sublime, God-like Action.

Even

THE eloquence of the college is like the discipline of a review. The art of war, we are all sensible, does not con

sist in manœuvres on a training-day; nor the steadfastness of the soldier in the hour of battle, in the drilling of his orderly sergeant. Yet the superior excellence of the veteran army is exemplified in nothing more forcibly than in the per fection of its discipline. It is in the heat of action, upon the field of blood, that the fortune of the day may be decided by the exactness of manual exercise; and the art of displaying a column, or directing a charge, may turn the balance of victory, and change the history of the world. The application of these observations is as direct to the art of oratory as to that of war. The exercises to which you are here accustomed are not intended merely for the display of the talents. you have acquired. They are instruments put into your hands for future use. Their object is not barely to prepare you for the composition and delivery of an oration to amuse an idle hour on some public anniversary. It is to give you a clew for the labyrinth of legislation in the public councils; a spear for the conflict of judicial war in the public tribunals; a sword for the field of religious and moral victory in the pulpit.

XXIX. THE FIRST AMERICAN CONGRESS.

J. MAXCY.

THE interposition of Divine Providence was eminently conspicuous in the first General Congress. What men, what patriots, what independent, heroic spirits! chosen by the unbiased voice of the people; chosen, as all public servants ought to be, without favor and without fear. What an august assembly of sages! Rome in the height of her glory fades before it. There never was in any age or nation a body of men who for general information, for the judicious use of the results of civil and political history, for eloquence and virtue, for true dignity, elevation and grandeur of soul, could stand a comparison with the first American Congress! See what the people will do when left to themselves; to their unbiased good sense, and to their true interests! The ferocious

Gaul would have dropped his sword at the hall door, and have fled thunderstruck as from an assembly of gods! Whom do I behold? a Hancock, a Jefferson, an Adams, a Henry, a Lee, a Rutledge! Glory to their immortal spirits! On you depend the destinies of your country; the fate of three millions of men, and of the countless millions of their posterity! Shall these be slaves, or will you make a noble stand for liberty, against a power whose triumphs are already coextensive with the earth; whose legions trample on thrones and sceptres; whose thunders bellow on every ocean? How tremendous the occasion! How vast the responsibility! The President and all the members of this august assembly take their seats. Every countenance tells the mighty struggle within. Every tongue is silent. It is a pause in nature, that solemn, awful stillness which precedes the earthquake and tornado! At length Demosthenes arises; he is only adequate to the great occasion, the Virginian Demosthenes, the mighty Henry! What dignity! What majesty! Every eye fastens upon him. Firm, erect, undaunted, he rolls on the mighty torrent of his eloquence. What a picture does he draw of the horrors of servitude, and the charms of freedom! At once he gives the full rein to all his gigantic powers, and pours his own heroic spirit into the minds of his auditors; they become as one man, actuated by one soul; and the universal shout is, "Liberty or death! This single speech of this illustrious man gave an impulse which probably decided the fate of America. His eloquence seized and moved the assembled sages; as the descending hail-storm, bursting in thunder, rending the forest, and shaking the mountains. God bestows on nations no greater gift than great and good men, endowed with the high and commanding powers of eloquence. Such a man as Patrick Henry may on some great occasion, when the happiness or misery of millions depends on a single decision, render more important service to a nation than all the generations of a century.