meetings and legislative halls are by no means schools of true oratory. They are infested by that order of declaimers whom Cicero terms "hackney operators with glib tongues;" by persons "who dwell in the lower forms of a court," and who are chiefly remarkable for assurance, violence, and volubility. The privilege and the practice are to smatter, spout, rail, or drawl, as much as to speak to the subject correctly, skilfully, or instructively. Men of business and good speakers are, certainly, found in them, in a satisfactory proportion; but, comparatively, very few orators in the just sense of the term; and no where is occasion oftener afforded to apply the lines of Pope "Distrustful sense with modest caution speaks, It still looks home and short excursions makes; Bursts down, resistless, with a thund'ring tide." It is almost time for the American community in general to distinguish between real merit and false pretension in the oratory of our deliberative assemblies. The first belongs only to solid and apt information; lofty and energetic sentiment; fair and methodical reasoning; good taste and regulated fancy in the rhetorical parts; sound judgment in the choice, and patriotic earnestness in the treatment of the topics. Turgid language; vague declamation; pert flippancy; grovelling calculation; irony and waggery levelled at generous sympathies and exalted national objects, should excite feelings very different from esteem and admiration. Severe criticism and open reproof are more frequently due than lavish panegyric. DEATH AND THE DEAD. We are not warranted in regretting for themselves the fate of those who have left behind them no arrears of duty or fondness; who have departed in peace and purity; who have escaped, perhaps, sharper and longer trials than their brief mortal anguish-who will be the earlier improved to perfect worth at the fountain of immortal being and beatitude. Death is said to be the privilege of human nature,—the port of refuge,-the crown of life. It must be so for the stainless soul; it is a transition from dangerous time to safe eternity. It shocks the survivors who cherished the defunct, like a rupture of all the fibres of their hearts; their lacerated bosoms may long feel and betray deep wounds; but they have their consolation in the security of disembodied merit; and it is a loud and benevolent call of Providence upon them, for self-preparation of every kind, in reference to a doom which is universal. All the gushes of painful memory may serve as salutary admonitions, all may cause their thoughts and resolutions to ascend to that sphere, in which our religion and our reason place the shades of the beloved and the good. The sudden dissolution which has been and must be frequent, of persons of public distinction and wide social connexions, must affect not a few of their distinguished associates, with influences such as those which the poet ascribes to such an event. "Our dying friends come o'er us, like a cloud, Welcome, as safe, our port from every storm. Which makes us stoop from our aerial height, &c." Were it certain that, the longer we live the wiser we become and the happier, then, indeed, a long life would be desirable; but since, on the contrary, our mental strength decays, and diseases and sorrows take place of health and enjoyments, if any wish is wise, it is surely the wish that we should be taken away, unshaken by years, undepressed by equals, and undespoiled of our better faculties. Old Ford says of death "Death! pish! 'tis but a sound; a name in air, A minute's storm, or not so much; to tumble By some physicians, for a month or two, In hope of freedom from a fever's torments, Great stress is often laid upon the consideration, that husband and wife, or other near relatives, should not be "divided in the grave." This popular notion is artificial, and may not always be indulged. The mortal remains become, in a few years, as nothing. "Dust thou art, and unto dust thou shalt return." What with the depredations of time and the worm, and the physical casualties and processes of change, all attempts at union in death, in this sense, prove idle,-all moralization is fanciful. The enlightened nations that consigned every corpse to the flames, did not suppose that they violated any sacred sympathies, or separated the dead-the Indian wife who ascends the funeral pyre thinks that she goes to join her husband, when her ashes are scattered to the winds of heaven: in the vast majority of instances of burial, or the disposition of the human body, those who have been connected in life, are for ever "divided in death." The true union is to be looked for in another form and sphere, which we are taught to regard as much less precarious and perishable. It is not, however, to be disputed that the will of the dead with regard to their remains should be observed, as far as practicable, and when no motives exist to the contrary, which the dead themselves, if capable of communicating their opinion, would acknowledge to be paramount. All wanton, or mercenary violation of the grave is, too, detestable. A rigid abstinence from any entrance into the tomb, on whatever occasion, for what purpose soever, would be sheer superstition or refinement excessive and preposterous. Honours to the dead,—unless they be intended to flatter the living,—form an innocent homage of which the exaggeration is extenuated by the disinterestedness, and the effect upon the spirit of emulation may be salutary. The imperfections of character and errors of conduct, which were blended with great merits in the deceased individual, are not present to lessen the esteem and the desire of imitation which the latter excite :-worth is acknowledged and felt; the rest is forgotten or but faintly remembered, if personal interests, or party passions, or the claims of justice and morality do not provoke a full survey and vivid exposure. This last exception however, is highly important. The maxim that the shroud should serve as a pall of oblivion generally for the faults or vices of the dead, who have filled high stations and a large space in the eye of mankind, has always appeared to us to be unsound and even of a mischievous tendency. Bad examples, especially when they have been attended with the catastrophe ap propriate to their character, are as useful in the moral, as the good, and should be industriously recalled to public notice in all their deformity and with the warning conveyed by their earthly punishment. If the good are employed to attract and incite, the bad should be equally, to disgust and terrify. This being the case, the propriety of unveiling and stigmatizing the latter, becomes the more manifest and exigent, when they are attempted to be imposed upon public opinion in a false and seductive light; when by palliatives and glosses and partial exhibitions, their natural and just effect is counteracted; or, what is worse, perverted into a blind for the understanding and a sedative for the moral sense, in the perception of obliquity. All this is to be understood, as quite distinct from any approval of that wanton aspersion of the respectable dead, to which resort is sometimes had, even for the purpose of calumniating estimable survivors. No reprobation could be too severe for this practice. We can conceive nothing more base or atrocious than to strike or to sting at the monuments where “noble names lie sleeping”—to distil anew the rank venom of forgotten gall, gleaned in slander's den, and so spread it afresh that it may eat into the marrow of a consecrated fame. Mr. Burke, stigmatizing the corps of libellers in Paris at the height of the French revolution, observed: "They have tigers to fall upon animated strength; they have hyenas to prey upon carcasses; the sanctuary of the tomb is not sacred to them ;-they deny even to the departed the sacred immunities of the grave. Their turpitude purveys to their malice; and they unplumb the dead for bullets to assassinate the living." Far different is this vampire war from the legitimate hostilities of criticism, satire or reprobation, whether moral, political or literary. Whoever he may be that pursues it, will |