| tles of their interest, and as their soldiers, how should we feel if we were to be excluded from all their cartels? How must we feel if the pride and flower of the English nobility and gentry, who might escape the pestilential clime and the devouring sword, should, if taken prisoners, be delivered over as rebel subjects, to be condemned as rebels, as traitors, as the vilest of all eriminals, by tribunals formed of Maroon negro slaves, covered over with the blood of their masters, who were made free, and organized into judges for their robberies and murders? What should we feel under this inhuman, insulting, and barbarous protection of Muscovites, Swedes, or Holanders? Should we not obtest Heaven, and whatever justice there is yet on earth? Oppression makes wise men mad; but the distemper is still the madness of the wise, which is better than the sobriety of fools. Their cry is the voice of sacred misery, exalted, not into wild raving, but into the sanctified frenzy of prophecy and inspiration-in that bitterness of soul, in that indignation of suffering virtue, in that ex glish loyalty cry out with an awful warning voice, and denounce the destruction that wai's on monarchs, who consider fidelity to them as the most degrading of all vices; who suffer it to be punished as the most abominable of all crimes; and who have no respect but for rebels, traitors, regicides, and furious negro slaves, whose crimes have broke their chains? Would not this warm language of high indignation have more of sound reason in it, more of real affection, more of true attachment, than all the lullabies of flatterers, who would hush monarchs to sleep in the arms of death? lent clergy were either massacred or robbed of all, and transported-the Christian religion, in all its denominations, forbidden and persecuted -the law, totally, fundamentally, and in all its parts, destroyed-the judges put to death by revolutionary tribunals-the peers and commons robbed to the last acre of their estates; massacred if they stayed, or obliged to seek life in flight, in exile, and in beggary-that the whole landed property should share the very same fate -that every military and naval officer of honor and rank, almost to a man, should be placed in the same description of confiscation and exilethat the principal merchants and bankers should be drawn out, as from a hen-coop, for slaughter -that the citizens of our greatest and most flourishing cities, when the hand and the machinery of the hangman were not found sufficient, should have been collected in the public squares, and massacred by thousands with cannon; if three hundred thousand others should have been doomed to a situation worse than death in noisome and pestilential prisons—in such a case, is it in the faction of robbers I am to look for my coun-altation of despair, would not persecuted Entry? Would this be the England that you and I, and even strangers admired, honored, loved, and cherished? Would not the exiles of England alone be my government and my fellow-citizens? Would not their places of refuge be my temporary country? Would not all my duties and all my affections be there, and there only? Should I consider myself as a traitor to my country, and deserving of death, if I knocked at the door and heart of every potentate in Christendom to succor my friends, and to avenge them on their enemies? Could I, in any way, show myself more a patriot? What should I think of those potentates who insulted their suffering brethren; who treated them as vagrants, or, at least, as mendicants; and could find no allies, no friends, but in regicide murderers and robbers? What ought I to think and feel if, being geographers instead of kings, they recognized the desolated cities, the wasted fields, and the rivers polluted with blood, of this geometrical measurement, as the honorable member of Europe called England? In that condition, what should we think of Sweden, Denmark, or Holland, or whatever power afforded us a churlish and treacherous hospitality, if they should invite us to join the standard of our King, our laws, and our religion; if they should give us a direct promise of protection; if, after all this, taking advantage of our deplorable situation, which left us no choice, they were to treat us as the lowest and vilest of all mercenaries? If they were to send us far from the aid of our King and our suffering country, to squander us away in This passage was probably suggested by Virthe most pestilential climates for a venal enlarge-gil's description of Neptune, as seated in his chariot, ment of their own territories, for the purpose of and controlling his impatient steeds (book v., line trucking them, when obtained, with those very 818), till willing at last to give full course to their robbers and murderers they had called upon us swiftness, to oppose with our blood? What would be our sentiments, if, in that miserable service, we were not to be considered either as English, or as Swedes, Dutch, Danes, but as outcasts of the human race? While we were fighting those bat CONDUCT EXPECTED FROM MR. PITT WHEN After such an elaborate display had been made of the injustice and insolence of an enemy, who seems to have been irritated by every one of the means which had been commonly used with effect to soothe the rage of intemperate power, the natural result would be, that the scabbard, in which we in vain attempted to plunge our sword, should have been thrown away with scorn. would have been natural, that, rising in the fullness of their might, insulted majesty, despised dignity, violated justice, rejected supplication, patience goaded into fury, would have poured out all the length of the reins upon all the wrath which they had so long restrained. It might It -manibusque omnes effundit habenas. He pours forth all the reins from out his hands. In like manner, the attributes here personified, "insulted majesty," "despised dignity," &e., “pour out all the length of the reins upon all the wrath have been expected, that, emulous of the glory | forth from their hideous kennel (where his scruof the youthful hero [the Austrian Archduke Charles] in alliance with him, touched by the example of what one man, well formed and well placed, may do in the most desperate state of affairs, convinced there is a courage of the cabinet full as powerful, and far less vulgar than that of the field, our minister would have changed the whole line of that unprosperous prudence, which hitherto had produced all the effects of the blindest temerity. If he found his situation full of danger (and I do not deny that it is perilous in the extreme), he must feel that it is also full of glory; and that he is placed on a stage, than which no muse of fire that had ascended the highest heaven of invention could imagine any thing more awful and august. It was hoped that, in the swelling scene in which he moved, with some of the first potentates of Europe for his fellow-actors, and with so many of the rest for the anxious spectators of a part, which, as he plays it, determines forever their destiny and his own, like Ulysses, in the unraveling point of the epic story, he would have thrown off his patience and his rags together; and, stripped of unworthy disguises, he would have stood forth in the form and in the attitude of a hero. On that day, it was thought he would have assumed the port of Mars; that he would bid to be brought which they had so long restrained." We have few images in our language of equal force and beauty. See the prologue to Shakspeare's Henry V.: But when the wary hero wise He seized a shaft which at the table side He then pours out the arrows at his feet, and turns his bow on the suitors till they are all de stroyed. pulous tenderness had too long immured them) those impatient dogs of war, whose fierce regards affright even the minister of vengeance that feeds them; that he would let them loose, in famine, fever, plagues, and death upon a guilty race, to whose frame, and to all whose habit, order, peace, religion, and virtue are alien and abhorrent. It was expected that he would at last have thought of active and effectual war; that he would no longer amuse the British lion in the chase of mice and rats; that he would no longer employ the whole naval power of Great Britain, once the terror of the world, to prey upon the miserable remains of a peddling commerce, which the enemy did not regard, and from which none could profit. It was expected that he would have reasserted whatever remained to him of his allies, and endeavored to recover those whom their fears had led astray; that he would have rekindled the martial ardor of his citizens; that he would have held out to them the example of their ancestry, the assertor of Europe, and the scourge of French ambition; that he would have reminded them of a posterity which, if this nefarious robbery, under the fraudulent name and false color of a government, should in full power be seated in the heart of Europe, must forever be consigned to vice, impiety, barbarism, and the most ignominious slavery of body and mind. In so holy a cause it was presumed that he would (as in the beginning of the war he did) have opened all the temples; and with prayer, with fasting, and with supplication (better directed than to the grim Moloch of regicide in France), have called upon us to raise that united cry, which has so often stormed Heaven, and with a pious violence forced down blessings upon a repentant people. It was hoped that, when he had invoked upon his endeavors the favorable regard of the Protector of the human race, it would be seen that his menaces to the enemy and his prayers to the Almighty were not followed, but accompa nied, with correspondent action. It was hoped that his shrilling trumpet should be heard, not to announce a show, but to sound a charge. DUTIES OF THE HIGHER CLASSES IN CARRYING In the nature of things it is not with their persons that the higher classes principally pay their contingent to the demands of war. There is another and not less important part which rests with almost exclusive weight upon them. They furnish the means "How war may best upheld, 10 Then should the warlike Harry like himself, SENTIMENTS BECOMING THE CRISIS. Nor are sentiments of elevation in themselves turgid and unnatural. Nature is never more truly herself than in her grandest form. The Apollo of Belvidere (if the universal robber has yet left him at Belvidere) is as much in nature as any figure from the pencil of Rembrandt, or any clown in the rustic revels of Teniers. Indeed, it is when a great nation is in great difficulties that minds must exalt themselves to the occasion, or all is lost. Strong passion, under the direction of a feeble reason, feeds a low fever, which serves only to destroy the body that entertains it. But vehement passion does not always indicate an infirm judgment. It often accompanies, and actuates, and is even auxiliary to a powerful understanding; and when they both conspire and act harmoniously, their force is great to destroy disorder within, and to repel injury from abroad. If ever there was a time that calls on us for no vulgar conception of things, and for exertions in no vulgar strain, it is the awful hour that Providence has now appointed to this nation. Every little measure is a great error; and every great error will bring on no small ruin. Nothing can be directed above the mark that we must aim at; every thing below it is absolutely thrown away. also, by their personal service in the fleets and their country may demand the certain sacrifice armies of their country. They do contribute, of thousands. and in their full and fair proportion, according to the relative proportion of their numbers in the community. They contribute all the mind that actuates the whole machine. The fortitude required of them is very different from the unthinking alacrity of the common soldier, or common sailor, in the face of danger and death; it is not a passion, it is not an impulse, it is not a sentiment; it is a cool, steady, deliberate principle, always present, always equable; having no connection with anger; tempering honor with prudence; incited, invigorated, and sustained by a generous love of fame; informed, moderated, and directed by an enlarged knowledge of its own great public ends; flowing in one blended stream from the opposite sources of the heart and the head; carrying in itself its own commission, and proving its title to every other command, by the first and most difficult command, that of the bosom in which it resides; it is a fortitude which unites with the courage of the field the more exalted and refined courage of the council; which knows as well to retreat as to advance; which can conquer as well by delay as by the rapidity of a march or the impetuosity of an attack; which can be, with Fabius, the black cloud that lowers on the tops of the mountains, or with Scipio, the thunderbolt of war; which, undismayed by false shame, can patiently endure the severest trial that a gallant spirit can undergo, in the taunts and provocations of the enemy, the suspicions, the cold respect, and "mouth honor" of those from whom it should meet a cheerful obedience; which, undisturbed by false humanity, can calmly assume that most awful moral responsibility of deciding when victory may be too dearly purchased by the loss of a single life, and when the safety and glory of * ** * Who knows whether indignation may not succeed to terror, and the revival of high sentiment, spurning away the delusion of a safety purchased at the expense of glory, may not yet drive us to that generous despair, which has often subdued distempers in the state, for which no remedy could be found in the wisest councils? MISCELLANEOUS. WILLIAM III. FORMING THE GRAND ALLIANCE AGAINST LOUIS XIV. held on his course. He was faithful to his object; and in councils, as in arms, over and over again repulsed, over and over again he returned The steps which were taken to compose, to to the charge. All the mortifications he had reconcile, to unite, and to discipline all Europe suffered from the last Parliament, and the greatagainst the growth of France, certainly furnish er he had to apprehend from that newly chosen, to a statesman the finest and most interesting were not capable of relaxing the vigor of his part in the history of that great period. It form- mind. He was in Holland when he combined ed the master-piece of King William's policy, the vast plan of his foreign negotiations. When dexterity, and perseverance. Full of the idea he came to open his design to his ministers in of preserving, not only a local civil liberty unit- England, even the sober firmness of Somers, the ed with order, to our country, but to embody it undaunted resolution of Shrewsbury, and the adin the political liberty, the order, and the inde-venturous spirit of Montague and Orford, were pendence of nations united under a natural head, staggered. They were not yet mounted to the the King called upon his Parliament to put itself elevation of the King. The cabinet (then the into a posture "to preserve to England the weight | regency) met on the subject at Tunbridge Wells and influence it at present had on the councils the 28th of August, 1698; and there, Lord Somand affairs ABROAD. It will be requisite Eu-ers holding the pen, after expressing doubts on rope should see you will not be wanting to your- the state of the continent, which they ultimately selves." refer to the King, as best informed, they give Baffled as that monarch was, and almost heart-him a most discouraging portrait of the spirit of broken at the disappointment he met with in the this nation. "So far as relates to England," mode he first proposed for that great end, he say these ministers, "it would be want of duty workman died; but the work was formed on true mechanical principles; and it was as truly wrought. It went by the impulse it had receiv not to give your majesty this clear account, that there is a deadness and want of spirit in the nation universally, so as not to be at all disposed to entering into a new war. That they seemed from the first mover. The man was dead; to be tired out with taxes to a degree beyond what was discerned, till it appeared upon occasion of the late elections. This is the truth of the fact upon which your majesty will determine what resolution ought to be taken." but the Grand Alliance survived, in which King William lived and reigned. That heartless and dispirited people, whom Lord Somers had represented, about two years before, as dead in energy and operation, continued that war, to which it was supposed they were unequal in mind and in means, for near thirteen years. ERTY.1 His majesty did determine, and did take and pursue his resolution. In all the tottering imbecility of a new government, and with Parliament totally unmanageable, he persevered. He persevered to expel the fears of his people by his THE DUKE OF BEDFORD'S HOLD ON HIS PROPfortitude to steady their fickleness by his constancy to expand their narrow prudence by his enlarged wisdom-to sink their factious temper in his public spirit. In spite of his people, he resolved to make them great and glorious; to make England, inclined to shrink into her narrow self, the arbitress of Europe, the tutelary angel of the human race. In spite of the ministers, who staggered under the weight that his mind imposed upon theirs, unsupported as they felt themselves by the popular spirit, he infused into them his own soul; he renewed in them their ancient heart; he rallied them in the same cause. It required some time to accomplish this work. The people were first gained, and through them their distracted representatives. Under the influence of King William, Holland had rejected the allurements of every seduction, and had resisted the terrors of every menace. With Hannibal at her gates, she had nobly and magnanimously refused all separate treaty, or any thing which might for a moment appear to divide her affection or her interest, or even to distinguish her in identity from England. The English House of Commons was more reserved. The principle of the Grand Alliance was not directly recognized in the resolution of the Commons, nor the war announced, though they were well aware the alliance was formed for the war. However, compelled by the returning sense of the people, they went so far as to fix the three great immovable pillars of the safety and greatness of England, as they were then, as they are now, and as they must ever be to the end of time. They asserted in general terms the necessity of supporting Holland; of keeping united with our allies; and maintaining the liberty of Europe; though they restricted their vote to the succors stipulated by actual treaty. But now they were fairly embarked, they were obliged to go with the course of the vessel; and the whole nation, split before into an hundred adverse factions, with a king at its head evidently declining to his tomb, the whole nation -Lords, Commons, and people-proceeded as one body, informed by one soul. Under the British union, the union of Europe was consolidated; and it long held together with a degree of cohesion, firmness, and fidelity, not known before or since in any political combination of that extent. Just as the last hand was given to this immense and complicated machine, the master The Crown has considered me after long serv ice, the Crown has paid the Duke of Bedford by advance. He has had a long credit for any services which he may perform hereafter. He is secure, and long may he be secure, in his advance, whether he performs any services or not. But let him take care how he endangers the safety of that Constitution which secures his own utility or his own insignificance; or how he discourages those who take up even puny arms to defend an order of things, which, like the sun of heaven, shines alike on the useful and the worthless. His grants are ingrafted on the public law of Europe, covered with the awful hoar of innumerable ages. They are guarded by the sacred rules of prescription, found in that full treasury of jurisprudence from which the jejuneness and penury of our municipal law has, by degrees, been enriched and strengthened. This prescription I had my share (a very full share) in bringing to its perfection. The Duke of Bedford will stand as long as prescriptive law endures; as long as the great stable laws of property, common to us with all civilized nations, are kept in their integrity, and without the smallest intermixture of laws, maxims, principles, or precedents of the grand revolution. secure against all changes but one. The whole revolutionary system, institutes, digest, code, novels, text, gloss, comment, are not only not the same, but they are the very reverse, and the reverse, fundamentally, of all the laws on which civil life has hitherto been upheld in all the gov ernments of the world. The learned professors of the rights of man regarded prescription, not as a title to bar all claim, set up against all possession-but they look on prescription as itself a bar against the possessor and proprietor. They hold an immemorial possession to be no more than a long-continued, and therefore an aggravated injustice. They are Such are their ideas, such their religion; and such their law. But as to our country and our race, as long as the well-compacted structure of our church and state, the sanctuary, the holy of This passage is taken from a letter to a Noble Lord, which was called forth by an insulting attack from the Duke of Bedford when Mr. Burke received his pension. Sir George Savile's Act, called the Nullum Tem pus Act. at all to dispute, has ordained it in another manner, and (whatever my querulous weakness might suggest) a far better. The storm has gone over me, and I lie like one of those old oaks which the late hurricane has scattered about me. I am stripped of all my honors; I am torn up by the roots, and lie prostrate on the earth! There, and prostrate there, I most unfeignedly recognize the divine justice, and in some degree submit to it. CHARACTER OF SIR JOSHUA REYNOLDS. holies of that ancient law, defended by reverence, | to resist, and whose wisdom it behooves us not defended by power, a fortress at once and a temple,3 shall stand inviolate on the brow of the British Sion-as long as the British monarchy, not more limited than fenced by the orders of the state, shall, like the proud Keep of Windsor, rising in the majesty of proportion, and girt with the double belt of its kindred and coeval towers, as long as this awful structure shall oversee and guard the subjected land-so long the mounds and dikes of the low, fat, Bedford level will have nothing to fear from the pick-axes of all the levelers of France. As long as our sovereign lord the King, and his faithful subjects, the lords and commons of this realm-the triple cord, which Last night (February 23, 1792), in the sixtyno man can break; the solemn, sworn, constitu- ninth year of his age, died, at his house in Leitional frank-pledge of this nation; the firm guar-cester Fields, Sir Joshua Reynolds. antees of each other's being and each other's rights; the joint and several securities, each in its place and order, for every kind and every quality of property and of dignity. As long as these endure, so long the Duke of Bedford is safe; and we are all safe together-the high from the blights of envy and the spoliations of rapacity; the low from the iron hand of oppression and the insolent spurn of contempt. Amen! and so be it, and so it will be, Dum domus Æneæ Capitoli immobile saxum MR. BURKE ON THE DEATH OF HIS SON. Had it pleased God to continue to me the hopes of succession, I should have been, according to my mediocrity, and the mediocrity of the age I live in, a sort of founder of a family; I should have left a son, who, in all the points in which personal merit can be viewed, in science, in erudition, in genius, in taste, in honor, in generosity, in humanity, in every liberal sentiment, and every liberal accomplishment, would not have shown himself inferior to the Duke of Bedford, or to any of those whom he traces in his line. His grace very soon would have wanted all plausibility in his attack upon that provision which belonged more to mine than to me. HE would soon have supplied every deficiency, and symmetrized every disproportion. It would not have been for that successor to resort to any stagnant wasting reservoir of merit in me, or in any ancestry. He had in himself a salient, living spring of generous and manly action. Ev ery day he lived he would have repurchased the bounty of the Crown, and ten times more, if ten times more he had received. He was made a public creature, and had no enjoyment whatever but in the performance of some duty. At this exigent moment, the loss of a finished man is not easily supplied. But a Disposer whose power we are little able › Templum in modum arcis. Tacitus of the temple of Jerusalem. While on the Capitol's unshaken rock, Virgil's Eneid, book ix., line 448. His illness was long, but borne with a mild and cheerful fortitude, without the least mixture of any thing irritable or querulous, agreeably to the placid and even tenor of his whole life. He had from the beginning of his malady a distinct view of his dissolution, which he contemplated with that entire composure, that nothing but the innocence, integrity, and usefulness of his life, and an unaffected submission to the will of Providence, could bestow. In this situation he had every consolation from family tenderness, which his own kindness to his family had indeed well deserved. Sir Joshua Reynolds was, on very many accounts, one of the most memorable men of his time. He was the first Englishman who added the praise of the elegant arts to the other glories of his country. In taste, in grace, in facility, in happy invention, and in the richness and harmony of coloring, he was equal to the greatest masters of the most renowned ages. In portrait he went beyond them; for he communicated to that description of the art, in which English artists are the most engaged, a variety, a fancy, and a dignity derived from the higher branches, which even those who professed them in a superior manner did not always preserve when they delineated individual nature. His portraits remind the spectator of the invention of history and the amenity of landscape. In painting portraits, he appeared not to be raised upon that platform, but to descend upon it from a higher sphere. His paintings illustrate his lessons, and his lessons seem to be derived from his paintings. He possessed the theory as perfectly as the practice of his art. To be such a painter, he was a profound and penetrating philosopher. In full happiness of foreign and domestic fame, admired by the expert in art and by the learned in science, courted by the great, caressed by sovereign powers, and celebrated by distinguished poets, his native humility, modesty, and candor never forsook him, even on surprise or provocation; nor was the least degree of arrogance or assumption visible to the most scrutinizing in any part of his conduct or discourse. His talents of every kind-powerful from nature, and not meanly cultivated by letters-his social virtues in all the relations and all the hab eye, |