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Your wives inflicted the same vengeance on his wife. For the Athenians of that day looked out for no speaker, no general to procure them a state of prosperous slavery. They had the spirit to reject even life, unless they were allowed to enjoy that life in freedom. Should I then attempt to assert that it was I who inspired you with sentiments worthy of your ancestors, I should meet the just resentment of every hearer. No; it is my point to shew that such sentiments are properly your own; that they were the sentiments of my country long before my days. I claim but my share of merit, in having acted on such principles, in every part of my administration. He, then, who condemns every part of my administration, he who directs you to treat me with severity, as one who hath involved the state in terrors and dangers, while he labours to deprive me of present honour, robs you of the applause of all posterity. For if you now pronounce that, as my public conduct hath not been right, Ctesiphon must stand condemned, it must be thought that you yourselves have acted wrong, not that you owe your present state to the caprice of fortune. But it cannot be! No, my countrymen! it cannot be you have acted wrong in encountering danger bravely, for the liberty and the safety of all Greece. No! by those generous souls of ancient times who were exposed at Marathon! By those who stood arrayed at Platea! By those who encountered the Persian fleet at Salamis! who fought at Artemisium! By all those illustrious sons of Athens, whose remains lie deposited in the public monuments, all of whom received the same honourable interment from their country; not those only who prevailed, not those only who were victorious ;and with reason ;-what was the part of gallant men they all performed their success was such as the Supreme Director of the world dispensed to each.

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There are two distinguishing qualities, Athenians, which the virtuous citizen should ever possess- -a zeal for the honour and pre-eminence of the state, in his official conduct, on all occasions; and in all transactions an affection for his country. This, nature can bestow. Abilities and success depend upon another power. And in this affection you find me firm and invariable. Not the solemn demand of my person, not the vengeance of the Amphictyonic council, which they denounced against me, not the terror of their threatenings, not the flattery of their promises; no, nor the

fury of those accursed wretches, whom they roused like wild beasts against me, could ever tear this affection from my breast. From first to last I have uniformly pursued the just and virtuous course of conduct: assertor of the honours, of the prerogatives, of the glory of my country: studious to support them, zealous to advance them, my whole being is devoted to this glorious cause. I was never known to march through the city with a face of joy and exultation at the success of a foreign power; embracing and announcing the joyful tidings to those who I supposed would transmit it to the proper place. I was never known to receive the successes of my own country with tremblings, with sighings, with eyes bending to the earth, like those impious men who are the defamers of the state, as if, by such conduct, they were not defamers of themselves; who look abroad, and when a foreign potentate hath established his power on the calamities of Greece, applaud the event; and tell us we should take every means to perpetuate his power.

Hear me, ye immortal gods! and let not these their desires be ratified in heaven! Infuse a better spirit into these men! Inspire even their minds with purer sentiments! This is my first prayer. Or, if their natures are not to be reformed, on them, on them only, discharge your vengeance! Pursue them both by land and sea! Pursue them even to destruction! But to us display your goodness in a speedy deliverance from impending evils, and all the blessings of protection and tranquillity !— LELAND.

CHATHAM, A PRIVATE MAN.

It remains to speak of Lord Chatham as a private man, and he appears to have been in all respects exemplary and amiable. His disposition was exceedingly affectionate. The pride, bordering upon insolence, in which he shewed himself encased to the world, fell naturally from him, and without any effort to put it off, as he crossed the threshold of his own door. To all his family he was simple, kindly, and gentle. His pursuits were of a nature that showed how much he loved to unbend himself. He delighted in poetry and other light reading; was fond of music, loved the country; took peculiar pleasure in gardening, and had even an extensively happy taste in laying out grounds. His early education appears to have been further prosecuted afterwards; and he was

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familiar with the Latin classics, although there is no reason to believe that he had much acquaintance with the Greek. In all our own classical writers he was well versed; and his time was much given to reading them. A correspondence with his nephew, which Lord Grenville published about forty years ago, shewed how simple and classical his tastes were, how affectionate his feelings, and how strong his sense of both moral and religious duty. These letters are reprinted in a work which has been published since the first edition of this book, because the answers have since been recovered; and it contains a great body of other letters both to and from him. Amongst the latter are to be found constant tokens of his amiable disposition.

The most severe judge of human actions, the critic whose searching eye looks for defects in every portrait, and regards it as fiction, not a likeness, when he fails to find any, will naturally ask if such a character as Lord Chatham's could be without reproach; if feelings so strong never boiled over in those passions which are dangerous to virtue; if fervour of soul such as his could be at all times kept within the bounds which separate the adjoining provinces of vehemence and intemperance? Nor will he find reason to doubt the reality of the picture which he is scrutinizing, when we have added the traits that undeniably disfigured it. Some we have already thrown in; but they rather are shades that give effect and relief to the rest, than deformities or defects. It must now be farther recorded that not only was he impracticable, difficult beyond all men to act with, overbearing, impetuously insisting on his own views being adopted by all as infallible, utterly regardless of other men's opinions when he had formed his own, as little disposed to profit by the lights of their wisdom as to avail himself of their co-operative efforts in action-all this is merely the excess of his great qualities of running loose uncontrolled; but he appears to have been very far from sustaining the exalted pitch of magnanimous independence and utter disregard of sublunary interest which we should suspect him to have reached, and kept as a matter of course from a more cursory glance at the mould in which his lofty character was cast.-BROUGHAM'S STATESMEN.

CHARACTER OF LORD CHATHAM'S ELOQUENCE.

All accounts concur in representing the effects of Lord Chatham's eloquence to have been prodigious. The spirit and vehemence which animated its greater passages-their perfect application to the subject-matter of debate the appositeness of his invective to the individual assailed-the boldness of the feats which he ventured upon-the grandeur of the ideas which he unfolded-the heart-stirring nature of his appeals, are all confessed by the united testimony of his contemporaries; and the fragments which remain bear out to a considerable extent such representations; nor are we likely to be misled by those fragments, for the more striking portions were certainly the ones least likely to be either forgotten or fabricated. To these mighty attractions was added the imposing, the animating, the commanding power of a countenance singularly expressive; an eye so piercing that hardly any one could stand its glare; and a manner altogether singularly striking, original, and characteristic, notwithstanding a peculiarly defective and even awkward action. Latterly, indeed, his infirmities precluded all action; and he is described as standing in the House of Lords leaning upon his crutch, and speaking for ten minutes together in an under-tone of voice scarcely audible, but raising his notes to their full pitch when he broke out into one of his grand bursts of invective or exclamation.

There can be no doubt that of reasoning, of sustained and close argument, his speeches had but little. His statements were desultory, though striking, perhaps not very distinct, certainly not at all detailed. His discourse was, however, fully informed with matter; his allusions to analogous subjects, and his references to the history of past events, were frequent; his expression of his own opinions was copious and free, and stood very generally in the place of any elaborate reasoning in their support. A noble statement of enlarged views, a generous avowal of dignified sentiments, a manly and somewhat severe contempt for all petty or mean views— whether their business proceeded from narrow understanding or from corrupt bias-always pervaded his whole discourse; and, more than any other orator since Demosthenes, he was distinguished by the grandeur of feeling with which he regarded, and the amplitude of survey which he cast upon the

subject-matter of debate. His invective was unsparing and hard to be endured, although he was a less eminent master of sarcasm than his son, and rather overwhelmed his antagonist with the burst of words and vehement indignation, than wounded him by the edge of ridicule, or tortured him with the gall of bitter scorn, or fixed his arrow in the wound by the barb of epigram. These things seemed, as it were, to betoken too much labour and too much art-more labour than was consistent with absolute scorn-more art than could stand with heart-felt rage, or entire contempt inspired by the occasion, at the moment and on the spot. But his great passages, those by which he has come down to us, those which gave his eloquence its peculiar character, and to which its dazzling success was owing, were as sudden and unexpected as they were natural. Every one was taken by surprise when they rolled forth-every one felt them to be so natural, that he could hardly understand why he had not thought of them himself, although into no one's imagination had they ever entered. If the quality of being natural, without being obvious, is a pretty correct description of felicitous expression, or what is called fine writing, it is a yet more accurate representation of fine passages or felicitous hits in speaking. These form the grand charm of Lord Chatham's oratory; they were the distinguishing excellence of his great predecessor, and give him at will to wield the fierce démocratie of Athens, and fulmine over Greece.-BROUGHAM'S STATESMEN.

SPECIMEN OF LORD CHATHAM'S ELOQUENCE-ON YIELDING

UP AMERICA.

My Lords-I rejoice that the grave has not closed upon me, that I am still alive to lift up my voice against the dismemberment of this ancient and noble monarchy. Pressed down as I am by the load of infirmity, I am little able to assist my country in this most perilous conjuncture; but, my Lords, while I have sense and memory, I will never consent to tarnish the lustre of this nation by an ignominious surrender of its rights and fairest possessions. Shall a people so lately the terror of the world, now fall prostrate before the house of Bourbon ?1 It is impossible! In God's name, if it is

1 France, still recent from the losses of the "Seven years' war," assisted the Americans in their revolt against England, (see p. 290). In the subsequent revolution she suffered for her officiousness, in the effects of her army's contact with republican principles.

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