which will stand after this globe is burned to ashes, our advo cate or our accuser before the great Judge, when He comes to call upon us for the tenor of a well-spent life.

7. My lords, the Commons will share in every fate with your lordships. There is nothing sinister which can happen to you, in which we are not involved. And if it should so happen that your lordships, stripped of all the decorous distinctions of human society, should, by hands at once base and cruel, be led to those scaffolds and machines of murder upon which great kings and glorious queens have shed their blood, amid the prelates, the nobles, the magistrates who supported their thrones, may you in those moments feel that consolation which I am persuaded they felt in the critical moments of their dreadful agony !

*

*

8. My lords, if you must fall, may you so fall! But if you stand-and stand I trust you will, together with the fortunes of this ancient monarchy; together with the ancient laws and liberties of this great and illustrious kingdom-may you stand as unimpeached in honor as in power! May you stand, not as a substitute for virtue; may you stand, and long stand, the terror of tyrants; may you stand, the refuge of afflicted nations; may you stand, a sacred temple for the perpetual residence of inviolable JUSTICE!

BURKE

44. HYDER ALI'S INVASION OF THE CARNATIC.

[This is taken from Burke's great speech on the "Nabob of Arcot's Debts," in which for nearly five hours this unrivaled orator poured out his feelings with an ardor and impetuosity which he had never before equaled. In rhetorical address, vivid painting, lofty declamation, bitter sarcasm, and withering invective it surpasses all his other speeches. His description of Hyder Ali sweeping over the Carnatic with fire and sword is the most eloquent passage he ever produced. Lord Brougham has pronounced this speech "by far the best of all Mr. Burke's orations."]

W

HEN at length Hyder Ali found that he had to do with

men who either would sign no convention, or whom no

treaty and no signature could bind, and who were the deter mined enemies of human intercourse itself, he decreed to make the country possessed by these incorrigible and predestinated criminals a memorable example to mankind.

2. He resolved, in the gloomy recesses of a mind capacious of such things, to leave the whole Carnatic an everlasting monument of vengeance, and to put perpetual desolation as a barrier between him and those against whom the faith which holds the moral elements of the world together was no protection. He became at length so confident of his force, so collected in his might, that he made no secret whatsoever of his dreadful resolution.

3. Having terminated his disputes with every enemy and every rival, who buried their mutual animosities in their common detestation against the creditors of the Nabob of Arcot, he drew from every quarter whatever a savage ferocity could add to his new rudiments in the arts of destruction; and compounding all the materials of fury, havoc, and desosation into one black cloud, he hung for a while on the declivities of the mountains.

4. While the authors of all these evils were idly and stupidly gazing on this menacing meteor, which blackened all their horizon, it suddenly burst, and poured down the whole of its contents upon the plains of the Carnatic. Then ensued a scene of woe, the like of which no eye had seen, no heart conceived, and which no tongue can adequately tell.

5. All the horrors of war before known or heard of were mercy to that new havoc. A storm of universal fire blasted every field, consumed every house, destroyed every temple.

6. The miserable inhabitants, flying from their flaming villages, in part were slaughtered; others, without regard to sex, to age, to the respect of rank, or sacredness of function; fathers torn from children, husbands from wives, enveloped in a whirlwind of cavalry, and, amid the goading spears of drivers and the trampling of pursuing horses, were swept into captivity, in an unknown and hostile land.

7. Those who were able to evade this tempest fled to the walled cities, but, escaping from fire, sword, and exile, they fell into the jaws of famine. The alms of the settlement (Madras), in this dreadful exigency, were certainly liberal, and all was done by charity that private charity could do; but it was a people in beggary; it was a nation which stretched out its hands for food.

8. For months together these creatures of sufferance, whose very excess and luxury in their most plenteous days had fallen short of the allowance of our austerest fasts, silent, patient, resigned, without sedition or disturbance, almost without complaint, perished by a hundred a day in the streets of Madras; every day seventy at least laid their bodies in the streets, or on the glacis of Tanjore, and expired of famine in the granary of India.

9. I was going to awake your justice towards this unhappy part of our fellow-citizens, by bringing before you some of the circumstances of this plague of hunger. Of all the calamities which beset and waylay the life of man, this comes the nearest to our heart, and is that wherein the proudest of us all feels himself to be nothing more than he is. But I find myself unable to manage it with decorum.

10. These details are of a species of horror so nauseous and disgusting; they are so degrading to the sufferers and to the hearers; they are so humiliating to human nature itself, that, on better thoughts, I find it more advisable to throw a pall over this hideous object, and to leave it to your general conceptions.

11. For eighteen months, without intermission, this destruction raged from the gates of Madras to the gates of Tan. jore; and so completely did these masters in their art, Hyde Ali and his more ferocious son (Tippoo Saib), absolve them selves of their impious vow, that when the British armies traversed, as they did, the Carnatic, for hundreds of miles in all directions, through the whole line of their march they did not see one man-not one woman-not one child-not one

four-footed beast of any description whatever! uniform silence reigned over the whole region.

One dead,

IT

45. MARIE ANTOINETTE, QUEEN OF LOUIS XVI.

T is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the Queen of France, then the Dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she just began to move in-glittering like the morning-star, full of life, and splendor, and joy.

2. Oh, what a revolution! and what a heart must I have to contemplate, without emotion, that elevation and that fall! Little did I dream, when she added titles of veneration to that enthusiastic, distant, respectful love, that she should ever be obliged to carry the sharp antidote against disgrace concealed in that bosom; little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fallen upon her in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers.

3. I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards to avenge even a look that threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone. That of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded; and the glory of Europe is extinguished forever! Never, never more shall we behold that generous loyalty to rank and sex, that proud submission, that dignified obedience, that subordination of the heart, which kept alive, even in servitude itself, the spirit of an exalted freedom.

4. The unbought grace of life, the cheap defence of nations, the nurse of manly sentiment and heroic enterprise is gone! It is gone, that sensibility of principle, that chastity of honor, which felt a stain like a wound, which inspired courage while it mitigated ferocity, and ennobled whatever it touched, and under which vice itself lost half its evil by losing all its grossness.

BURKE,

46. THE TITHE BILLS.

[An able British reviewer gives the following able criticism of O'Connell,

as an orator:

O'Connell was successful alike at the bar, in the senate, and before assembled thousands of his fellow-citizens and fellow-countrymen, exhibiting an almost solitary instance of eminence in the various modifications of style necessary for his different audiences. O'Connell occupies one of the highest stations among modern orators. The whole course of his eloquence, as well in Parliament as out of doors, is rapid and sonorous, and whenever he spoke he bends, or sways, or alarms, or soothes, at pleasure, the passions of his hearers. He was master of the eloquence which sometimes tears up all before it like a whirlwind or at other times steals imperceptibly upon the senses and probes to the bottom of the heart-eloquence which engrafts opinions that are new, and eradicates the old. In graphic and heart-rending descriptions of scenes, whether of weal or of woe, O'Connell surpassed all competitors. Most soul-stirring was the debate on the Irish tithe bill, when he thus depicted the scenes of blood that had been perpetrated in Ireland, 1835.]

THE

HE tithe bills were continued; laws passed, with some cessation from time to time, but the innate sense of injustice, the conviction of wrong, arising from the payment of a sinecure Protestant clergy by a Catholic population, overturned the boundaries of law; broke asunder the parchment chains of the acts of Parliament; the dungeons were filled, the convict ship was crowded, even the scaffold was reared, and blood has been shed in oceans, but shed in vain.

2. Is it not time to put an end to such scenes of atrocity? Blood is flowing still; even now, is not Rathcormac red with human gore? I do not mean to canvass the merits of this melancholy event, which is under progress of legal inquiry; but two magistrates, who are implicated in the matter, have presided over the investigation.

3. A poor woman has been examined. Have honorable members read her statement? The mother was with her child in the morning. After the affray, she went out to look for her son. The first body she turned over she shouted for joy. Why? Because human blood had been spilled? Because the life of a human being had been sacrificed? Ah! no; but because it happened not to have been her son.