cullus, when he marched up to Tigranocerta, bad an army of 300,000 men to attack. What was the conduct of Lucullus? He did not go about to his officers and say, "Do you think I had better attack them? or "what do you think about it? I have really a great "mind to do so." His army and his officers were disconcerted with their numbers. Lucullus, the very moment he glanced at their position, exclaimed, "We "have them!" It happened to be on one of those days which the Romans had marked out in their calendar as unfortunate, because it had formerly been memorable by defeats. They requested him to consider this well, and not to hazard a battle on such a day. “I "will put it among the fortunate days," said he, and immediately ordered them to march. An hundred thousand barbarians fell in the battle; with the loss of five Romans killed, and an hundred wounded.

The calm resignation to inevitable fate, equally removed from insolence and fear, and which is so peculiar to great minds, is to be classed among the sublimer feelings of our nature. In this manner Socrates drank the poison; the three hundred perished at the Straits of Greece; so died the Chancellor More on the scaffold, and the great Lord Falkland in the field; and in the same manner, the memorable Lord Strafford pleaded before his enemies: "And

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now, my lords," he says, "I thank God I have been "(by his blessing) sufficiently instructed in the "extreme vanity of all temporary enjoyments, compared to the importance of our eternal duration; "and so, my lords, even so, with all humility, and all tranquillity of mind, I submit clearly and freely to your judgments; and whether that righteous doom "shall be to life or death, I shall repose myself, full of gratitude and confidence, in the arms of the great "Author of my existence."

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"Certainly," says Whitelock, (with his usual candour,) never any man acted such a part on such a theatre, with more wisdom, constancy, and elo

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quence; with greater reason, judgment, and temper; " and with a better grace in all his words and actions, 66 than did this great and excellent person: and he "moved the hearts of all his auditors, (some few excepted,) to pity and remorse."

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All these men, in their different walks of life, as warriors, or as statesmen, seemed, at the approach of their destiny, to have enveloped themselves in their own greatness; and to have been lifted up above us, by a kind of serenity to which we should feel it impossible, in similar situations, to attain.

I have been thus diffuse upon the subject of the sublime in morals, because it is of all things the most inspiring and useful, to contemplate the best models of our own species, and to know what those limits are, to which our nature really does extend: and one of the great advantages of that classical education in which we are trained in this country, is, that it sets before us so many examples of sublimity in action, and of sublimity in thought. It is impossible for us, in the first and most ardent years of life, to read the great actions of the two greatest nations in the world, so beautifully related, without catching, ourselves, some taste for greatness, and a love for that glory which is gained by doing greater and better things than other And though the state of order and discipline into which the world is brought, does not enable a man frequently to do such things, as every day produced in the fierce and eventful democraties of Greece and Rome, yet, to love that which is great, is the best security for hating that which is little; the best cure for envy; the safest antidote for revenge; the surest pledge for the abhorrence of malice; the noblest incitement to love truth, and manly independence, and honourable labour, to glory in spotless innocence, and build up the system of life upon the rock of integrity.

men.

It is the greatest and first use of history, to show us the sublime in morals, and to tell us what great

men have done in perilous seasons. Such beings, and such actions, dignify our nature, and breathe into us a virtuous pride which is the parent of every good. Wherever you meet with them in the page of history, read them, mark them, and learn from them, how to live, and how to die! for the object of common men, is only to live. The object of such men as I have spoken of, was to live grandly, and in favour with their own difficult spirits to live, if in war, gloriously; if in peace, usefully, justly, and freely!!

LECTURE XVII.

ON THE FACULTIES OF ANIMALS, AS COMPARED WITH THOSE OF MEN.

I CONFESS I treat on this subject with some degree of apprehension and reluctance; because, I should be very sorry to do injustice to the poor brutes, who have no professors to revenge their cause by lecturing on our faculties: and at the same time I know there is a very strong anthropical party, who view all eulogiums on the brute creation with a very considerable degree of suspicion; and look upon every compliment which is paid to the ape, as high treason to the dignity of

man.

There may, perhaps, be more of rashness and illfated security in my opinion, than of magnanimity or liberality; but I confess I feel myself so much at my ease about the superiority of mankind, I have such a marked and decided contempt for the understanding of every baboon I have yet seen, I feel so sure that the blue ape without a tail will never rival us in poetry, painting, and music, - that I see no reason

whatever, why justice may not be done to the few fragments of soul, and tatters of understanding, which they may really possess. I have sometimes, perhaps, felt a little uneasy at Exeter 'Change, from contrasting the monkeys with the 'prentice-boys who are teazing them; but a few pages of Locke, or a few lines of Milton, have always restored me to tranquillity, and convinced me that the superiority of man had nothing to fear.

Philosophers have been much puzzled about the essential characteristics of brutes, by which they may

be distinguished from men. Some define a brute to be an animal that never laughs, or an animal incapable of laughter: some say they are mute animals. The Peripatetics allowed them a sensitive power, but denied them a rational one. The Platonists allowed them reason and understanding; though in a degree less pure, and less refined, than that of men. Lactantius allows them every thing which men have, except a sense of religion and some sceptics have gone so far as to say they have this also. Descartes maintained that brutes are mere inanimate machines, absolutely destitute, not only of all reason, but of all thought and reflection; and that all their actions are only consequences of the exquisite mechanism of their bodies. This system, however, is much older than Descartes; it was borrowed by him from Gomez Pereira, a Spanish physician, who employed thirty years in composing a treatise on this subject, which he very affectionately called by the name of his father and mother" Antoniana Margarita." Systems and theories, however, differ very materially in their importance, according to the parent who ushers them into the world, and the obscurity or notoriety of the name to which they happen to be connected. Poor Gomez was so far from having opponents, that he had not even readers: his theory, in the hands of Descartes, excited a controversy which reached from one end of Europe to the other: many, who maintained the opposite hypothesis to Descartes, contended that brutes are endowed with a soul, essentially inferior to that of man; and to this soul some have impiously allowed immortality. But the most curious of all opinions, respecting the understanding of beasts, is that advanced by Père Bougeant, a Jesuit, in a work entitled "Philosophical Amusement on the Language of Beasts." In this book he contends, that each animal is inhabited by a separate and distinct devil; that not only this was the case with respect to cats, which have long been known to be very favourite residences