itudes of life, rendered him the center of a very | ousy, too much innocence to provoke any enmigreat and unparalleled variety of agreeable so- ty. The loss of no man of his time can be felt cieties, which will be dissipated by his death. with more sincere, general, and unmixed sorrow. He had too much merit not to excite some jeal- HAIL AND FAREWELL! A dispo DETACHED SENTIMENTS AND MAXIMS.1 Never was there a jar or discord between genuine sentiment and sound policy. Never, no, never, did nature say one thing and wisdom say another. The meditations of the closet have infected senates with a subtle frenzy, and inflamed armies with the brands of the furies. We are alarmed into reflection; our minds are purified by terror and pity; our weak, unthinking pride is humbled under the dispensations of a mysterious wisdom. The road to eminence and power, from obscure condition, ought not to be made too easy, nor a thing too much of course. The temple of honor ought to be seated on an eminence. If it be opened through virtue, let it be remembered that virtue is never tried but by some difficulty and some struggle. Public virtue, being of a nature magnificent and splendid, instituted for great things, and conversant about great concerns, requires abundant scope and room, and can not spread and grow under confinement, and in circumstances straitened, narrow, and sordid. All persons possessing any portion of power ought to be strongly and awfully impressed with an idea that they act in trust, and that they are to account for their conduct in that trust to the one great master, author, and founder of society. They who administer in the government of men, in which they stand in the person of God himself, should have high and worthy notions of their function and destination. Their hope should be full of immortality. It is with the greatest difficulty that I attempt to separate policy from justice. Justice is itself the great standing policy of civil society, and any eminent departure from it, under any circumstances, lies under the suspicion of being no policy at all. In all mutations (if mutations must be), the circumstance which will serve most to blunt the edge of their mischief, and to promote what good may be in them, is, that they should find us with our minds tenacious of justice, and tender of property. A man, full of warm, speculative benevolence, may wish society otherwise constituted than he finds it; but a good patriot, and a true politician, always considers how he shall make the most of A few of these sentences have been very slightly modified or abridged, in order to give them the character of distinct propositions, but in no way af fecting the sense. It is one of the excellencies of a method, in which time is among the assistants, that its operation is slow, and, in some cases, almost imperceptible. It can not be too often repeated, line upon line, precept upon precept, until it comes into the currency of a proverb, to innovate is not to reform. It is the degenerate fondness for taking short cuts, and little fallacious facilities, that has in so many parts of the world created governments with arbitrary powers. Rage and frenzy will pull down more in half an hour, than prudence, deliberation, and foresight can build up in a hundred years. I shall always consider that liberty as very equivocal in her appearance, which has not wisdom and justice for her companions, and does not lead prosperity and plenty in her train. What is liberty without wisdom and without virtue ? It is the greatest of all possible evils; for it is folly, vice, and madness, without tuition or restraint. The strong struggle in every individual to preserve possession of what he has found to belong to him and to distinguish him, is one of the securities against injustice and despotism implanted in our nature. It operates as an instinct to secure property, and to preserve communities in a settled state. What is there to shock in this? Nobility is a graceful ornament to the civil order. It is a sour, malignant, envious disposition, without taste for the reality, or for any image or representation of virtue, that sees with joy the unmerited fall of what had long flourished in splendor and in honor. The perennial existence of bodies corporate and their fortunes, are things particularly suited to a man who has long views; who meditates designs that require time in fashioning, and which propose duration when they are accomplished. None can aspire to act greatly, but those who are of force greatly to suffer. Strong instances of self-denial operate powerfully on our minds; and a man who has no wants has obtained great freedom and firmness, and even dignity. Difficulty is a severe instructor, set over us by the supreme ordinance of a parental guardian and legislator, who knows us better than we know ourselves, as he loves us better too. Pater ipse colendi Haud facilem esse viam voluit.2 He that wrestles with us strengthens our nerves and sharpens our skill. It has been the glory of the great masters in all the arts to confront and to overcome; and when they have overcome the first difficulty, to turn it into an instrument for new conquests over new difficulties. It is often impossible, in political inquiries, to find any proportion between the apparent force of any moral causes we may assign, and their known operation. Some states, at the very moment when they seemed plunged in unfathomable abysses of disgrace and disaster, have suddenly emerged; they have begun a new course and opened a new reckoning; and even in the depths of their calamity, and on the very ruins of the country, have laid the foundations of a towering and durable greatness. with no hope but in a compromise with his pride, by a submission to his will. There is a courageous wisdom: there is also a false, reptile prudence, the result, not of caution, but of fear. The eye of the mind is dazzled and Hypocrisy delights in the most sublime specu- vanquished. An abject distrust of ourselves, an lations; for, never intending to go beyond spec-extravagant admiration of the enemy, present us ulation, it costs nothing to have it magnificent. Men who are too much confined to professional and faculty habits, and, as it were, inveterate in the recurrent employment of that narrow circle, are rather disabled than qualified for whatever depends on the knowledge of mankind, on experience in mixed affairs, on a comprehensive, connected view of the various complicated external and internal interests which go to the formation of that multifarious thing called a state.3 Turbulent, discontented men of quality, in proportion as they are puffed up with personal pride and arrogance, generally despise their own order. The great must submit to the dominion of prudence and of virtue, or none will long submit to the dominion of the great. Living law, full of reason, and of equity and justice (as it is, or it should not exist), ought to be severe and awful too; or the words of menace, whether written on the parchment roll of England, or cut into the brazen tablet of Rome, will excite nothing but contempt. Men and states, to be secure, must be respected. Power, and eminence, and consideration, are things not to be begged. They must be commanded; and those who supplicate for mercy from others, can never hope for justice through themselves. Parsimony is not economy. Expense, and great expense, may be an essential part in true economy, which is a distributive virtue, and consists not in saving, but in selection. Parsimony requires no providence, no sagacity, no powers of combination, no comparison, no judgment. Mere instinct, and that not an instinct of the noblest kind, may produce this false economy in perfection. The other economy has larger views. It demands a discriminating judgment, and a firm, sagacious mind. If wealth is the obedient and laborious slave of virtue and of public honor, then wealth is in If we command our its place, and has its use. wealth, we shall be rich and free; if our wealth commands us, we are poor indeed. No sound ought to be heard in the church but the healing voice of Christian charity. Those who quit their proper character to assume what does not belong to them, are, for the greater part, ignorant both of the character they leave and of the character they assume. They have nothing of politics but the passions they excite. Surely the church is a place where one day's truce ought to be allowed to the dissensions and animosities of mankind. Steady, independent minds, when they have an object of so serious a concern to mankind as gov. ernment under their contemplation, will disdain The blood of man should never be shed but to assume the part of satirists and declaimers. to redeem the blood of man. It is well shed for our family, for our friends, for our God, for our country, for our kind. The rest is vanity; the rest is crime. In a conflict between nations, that state which is resolved to hazard its existence rather than to abandon its objects, must have an infinite advantage over that which is resolved to yield rather than to carry its resistance beyond a certain point. 2 The Father of our race himself decrees That culture shall be hard. Virgil's Georgics, i., 121. * See, also, on this subject, the sketch of Mr. George Grenville's character, page 251. Those persons who creep into the hearts of most people, who are chosen as the companions of their softer hours, and their reliefs from care and anxiety, are never persons of shining qualities or strong virtues. It is rather the soft green of the soul on which we rest our eyes that are fatigued with beholding more glaring objects. When pleasure is over, we relapse into indifference, or, rather, we fall into a soft tranquillity, which is tinged with the agreeable color of the for mer sensation. Nothing tends so much to the corruption of science as to suffer it to stagnate: these waters must be troubled before they can exert their virtues. It is better to cherish virtue and humanity by leaving much to free will, even with some loss to the object, than to attempt to make men mere machines and instruments of a political benevolence. The world, on the whole, will gain by a liberty without which virtue can not exist. The dignity of every occupation wholly depends upon the quantity and the kind of virtue that may be exerted in it The degree of estimation in which any profession is held becomes the standard of the estimation in which the professors hold themselves. It is generally in the season of prosperity that men discover their real temper, principles, and designs. Nothing but the possession of some power can, with any certainty, discover what at the bottom is the true character of any man. All men that are ruined, are ruined on the side of their natural propensities. Good men do not suspect that their destruction is attempted through their virtues. Whoever uses instruments, in finding helps, finds also impediments. things, that men of intemperate minds can not It is ordained, in the eternal constitution of be free. Their passions forge their fetters. Some persons, by hating vices too much, come to love men too little. There are some follies which baffle argument, which go beyond ridicule, and which excite no feeling in us but disgust. Men are as much blinded by the extremes of misery as by the extremes of prosperity. Desperate situations produce desperate councils and desperate measures. judgment. They never give themselves time They who always labor can have no true to cool. They can never plan the future by the past. Men who have an interest to pursue are extremely sagacious in discovering the true seat of power. In all bodies, those who will lead must also, True humility is the low, but deep and firm in a considerable degree, follow. foundation of all real virtue. While shame keeps its watch, virtue is not wholly extinguished in the heart, nor will moderation be utterly exiled from the minds of ty rants. The punishment of real tyrants is a noble and awful act of justice; and it has with truth been said to be consolatory to the human mind. The arguments of tyranny are as contemptible as its force is dreadful. The virtues and vices of men in large towns are sociable; they are always in garrison; and they come embodied and half disciplined into the hands of those who mean to form them for civil or military action. The elevation of mind, to be derived from fear, will never make a nation glorious. The vice of the ancient democracies, and one cause of their ruin, was, that they ruled by occasional decrees (psephismata), which broke in Wisdom is not the most severe corrector of upon the tenor and consistency of the laws. folly. The love of lucre, though sometimes carried to a ridiculous, sometimes to a vicious excess, is the grand cause of prosperity to all states. Good order is the foundation of all good things. Those who execute public pecuniary trusts, ought, of all men, to be the most strictly held to their duty. Nothing turns out to be so oppressive and unjust as a feeble government. HENRY GRATTAN. HENRY GRATTAN was born at Dublin on the third day of July, 1746. His father was an eminent barrister, and acted for many years as recorder of that city, which he also represented for a time in the Parliament of Ireland. In the year 1763, young Grattan entered Trinity College, Dublin, where he was distinguished for the brilliancy of his imagination and the impetuosity of his feelings. Having graduated in 1767, with an honorable reputation, he repaired to London, and became a member of the Middle Temple. His mind, however, was at first too exclusively occupied with literary pursuits to allow of his devoting much time to the study of the law. Politics next engaged his attention. The eloquence of Lord Chatham drew him as an eager listener to the debates in Parliament, and acted with such fascination upon his mind as seemed completely to form his destiny. Every thing was forgotten in the one great object of cultivating his powers as a public speaker. To emulate and express, though in the peculiar forms of his own genius, the lofty conceptions of the great English orator, was from this time the object of his continual study and most fervent aspirations. In 1772 he returned to Ireland, where he was admitted to the bar; and in 1775 he became a member of the Irish Parliament, under the auspices of Lord Charlemont. He, of course, joined the ranks of Opposition, and united at once with Mr. Flood and the leading patriots of the day, in their endeavors to extort from the English minister the grant of free trade for Ireland. The peculiar circumstances of the country favored their design. The corps of Irish Volunteers had sprung into existence upon the alarm of invasion from France, and was marshaled throughout the country, to the number of nearly fifty thousand, for the defense of the island. With a semblance of some connection with the government, it was really an army unauthorized by the laws, and commanded by officers of their own choosing. Such a force could obviously be turned, at any moment, against the English; and, seizing on the advantage thus gained, Mr. Grattan, in 1779, made a motion, which was afterward changed into a direct resolution, that "nothing but a free trade could save the country from ruin." It was passed with enthusiasm by the great body of the House; and the nation, with arms in their hands, echoed the resolution as the watch-word of their liberties. Lord North and his government were at once terrified into submission. They had tampered with the subject, exciting hopes and expectations only to disappoint them, until a rebellion in Ireland was about to be added to a rebellion in America. In the emphatic words of Mr. Burke, "a sudden light broke in upon us all. It broke in, not through well-contrived and well-disposed windows, but through flaws and breaches-through the yawning chasms of our ruin." Every thing they asked was freely granted; and Ireland, as the English minister imagined, was propitiated. But Mr. Grattan had already fixed his eye on a higher object-the complete independence of the Irish Parliament. By an act of the sixth year of George the First, it was declared that Ireland was a subordinate and dependent kingdom; that the Kings, Lords, and Commons of England had power to make laws to bind Ireland ; that the Irish House of Lords had no jurisdiction, and that all proceedings before that court were void. This arbitrary act Mr. Grattan now determined to set aside. He availed himself of the enthusiasm which pervaded the nation, and, reminding them that the concessions just made might be recalled at any moment, if England continued to bind Ireland by her enactments, he urged them to a DECLARATION OF RIGHT, denying the claim of the British Parliament to make laws for Ireland. His friends endeavored to dissuade him from bringing the subject before the Irish Parliament; but the voice of the nation was with him, and on the 19th of April, 1780, he made his memorable motion for a Declaration of Irish Right. His speech on that occasion, which is the first in this selection, "was the most splendid piece of eloquence that had ever been heard in Ireland." As a specimen of condensed and fervent argumentation, it indicates a high order of talent; while in brilliancy of style, pungency of application, and impassioned vehemence of spirit, it has rarely, if ever, been surpassed. The conclusion, especially, is one of the most magnificent passages in our eloquence. Mr. Grattan's motion did not then pass, but he was hailed throughout Ireland as the destined deliverer of his country. No Irishman had ever enjoyed such unbounded popularity. He animated his countrymen with the hope of ultimate success; he inspired them with his own imaginative and romantic spirit, and awakened among them a feeling of nationality such as had never before existed. He taught them to cherish Irish affections, Irish manners, Irish art, Irish literature; and endeavored, in short, to make them a distinct people from the English in every respect but one, that of being governed by the same sovereign. Nothing could be more gratifying to the enthusiastic spirit of that ardent and impulsive race; and though it was impossible that such a plan should succeed, he certainly stamped his own character, in no ordinary degree, on the mind of the nation. That peculiar kind of eloquence, especially, which prevails among his countrymen, though springing, undoubtedly, from the peculiarities of national temperament, was rendered doubly popular by the brilliant success of Mr. Grattan, who presents the most perfect exhibition of the highly-colored and impassioned style of speaking in which the Irish delight, with but few of its faults, or, rather, for the most part, with faults in the opposite direction. With this ascendency over the minds of the people, Mr. Grattan spent nearly two years in preparing for the next decisive step. The Volunteers held their famous meeting at Dungannon in February, 1782, and passed unanimously a resolution drawn up by Mr. Grattan, that "a claim of any body of men, other than the King, Lords, and Commons of Ireland, to make laws to bind this kingdom, is unconstitutional, illegal, and a grievance." This resolution was virtually a declaration of war in case the act of Parliament complained of, was not repealed. It was adopted throughout the country, not merely by shouting thousands at mass meetings, but by armed regiments of citizens and owners of the soil, and by grand juries at judicial assizes. The administration of Lord North was now tottering to its fall. The avowed friends of Ireland, Lord Rockingham, Lord Shelburne, and Mr. Fox, took his place in March, 1782; and Mr. Grattan determined at once to try the sincerity of their feelings. He therefore gave notice that, on the 16th of the ensuing April, he should repeat his motion, in the Irish House of Commons, for a Declaration of Irish Right. It was a trying moment for the new Whig administration. To concede at such a time, when the Irish stood with arms in their hands, was to lay England at their feet. Mr. Fox, therefore, seconded by Burke, Sheridan, Sir Philip Francis, Colonel Barré, and other distinguished Irishmen, pleaded for delay. Lord Charlemont brought the message to the bedside of Mr. Grattan, who was confined by a severe illness, and received for reply, "No TIME! NO TIME! The Irish leaders are pledged to the people; they can not postpone the question; it is public property." When the day arrived, Mr. Grattan, to the surprise of all who knew his debilitated state, made his appearance in the House, and delivered a speech, the second one in these extracts, |