make a proper use of those means which the God of nature hath placed in our power. Three millions of people, armed in the holy cause of liberty, and in such a country as that which we possess, are invincible by any force which our enemy can send against us. Besides, sir, we shall not fight our battles alone. There is a just Power who presides over the destinies of nations, and who will raise up friends to fight our battles for us. The battle, sir, is not to the strong alone; it is to the vigilant, the active, the brave. Besides, sir, we have no election. If we were base enough to desire it, it is now too late to retire from the contest. There is no retreat, but in submission and slavery. Our chains are forged. Their clanking may be heard on the plains of Boston. The war is inevitable, and let it come! I repeat it, sir-let it come! It is in vain, sir, to extenuate the matter. Gentlemen may cry "Peace! peace!" but there is no peace! The war is actually begun! The next gale that sweeps from the north will bring to our ears the clash of resounding arms! Our brethren are already in the field! Why stand we here idle? What is it that gentlemen wish? What would they have? Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it Almighty Power! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty, or give me death!

IV.-BURKE'S PANEGYRIC ON SHERIDAN.
(BURKE.)

Edmund Burke, the great writer, orator, and statesman, was born in Dublin in 1730, and died 1797.

Richard Brinsley Sheridan was born in Dublin in 1751. After a brilliant career as a dramatist, as a wit, and as a statesman, he spent the latter years of his life in difficulties and sorrow. Died 1816.

HE has this day surprised the thousands who hung with rapture on his accents, by such an array of talents, such an exhibition of capacity, such a display of powers, as are unparalleled in the annals of oratory; a display that reflected the highest honour on himself-lustre upon letters-renown upon parliament-glory upon the country. Of all species

of rhetoric, of every kind of eloquence that has been witnessed or recorded, either in ancient or modern times; whatever the acuteness of the bar, the dignity of the senate, the solidity of the judgment-seat, and the sacred morality of the pulpit, have hitherto furnished;-nothing has equalled what we have this day heard. No holy seer of religion, no statesman, no orator, no man of any literary description whatever, has come up, in the one instance, to the pure sentiments of morality; or, in the other, to that variety of knowledge, force of imagination, propriety and vivacity of allusion, beauty and elegance of diction, strength and copiousness of style, pathos and sublimity of conception, to which we this day listened with ardour and admiration. From poetry up to eloquence, there is not a species of composition, of which a complete and perfect specimen might not, from that single speech, be culled and collected.

V.-BURKE'S PANEGYRIC ON MARIE ANTOINETTE.

(BURKE.)

It 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 splendour, and joy. 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 those of enthusiastic, distant, respectful love, that she should ever be obliged to carry the sharp antidote against disgrace, concealed in that bosom; little Idid 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 honour and of cavaliers. 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 calcu

lators, has succeeded; and the glory of Europe is extinguished for ever. 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. 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 honour, which felt a stain like a wound, which inspired courage whilst it mitigated ferocity; which ennobled whatever it touched, and under which, vice itself lost half its evil, by losing all its grossness.

VI. THE SWORD OF WASHINGTON AND THE STAFF

OF FRANKLIN.

(JOHN QUINCY ADAMS.)

John Quincy Adams, son of John Adams, second President of the United States, was born at Boston in 1769. He himself became President of the United States in 1825. Died 1848.

George Washington, born 1732; died 1799. Benjamin Franklin, born 1706;

died 1790.

THE Sword of Washington! the Staff of Franklin! O sir, what associations are linked in adamant with these names! Washington, whose sword was never drawn but in the cause of his country, and never sheathed when wielded in his country's cause! Franklin, the philosopher of the thunderbolt, the printing-press, and the ploughshare! What names are these in the scanty catalogue of the benefactors of human kind! Washington and Franklin! What other two men, whose lives belong to the eighteenth century of Christendom, have left a deeper impression of themselves upon the age in which they lived, and upon all after time!

WASHINGTON, the warrior and the legislator! In war, contending by the wager of battle for the independence of his country, and for the freedom of the human race,—ever manifesting, amid its horrors, by precept and by example, his reverence for the laws of peace, and for the tenderest sympathies of humanity;-in peace, soothing the ferocious

spirit of discord among his own countrymen into harmony and union, and giving to that very sword, now presented to his country, a charm more potent than that attributed, in ancient times, to the lyre of Orpheus.

FRANKLIN! the mechanic of his own fortune; teaching in early youth, under the shackles of indigence, the way to wealth, and, in the shade of obscurity, the path to greatness; in the maturity of manhood, disarming the thunder of its terrors, the lightning of its fatal blast, and wresting from the tyrant's hand the still more afflictive sceptre of oppression: while descending into the vale of years, traversing the Atlantic Ocean, braving, in the dead of winter, the battle and the breeze, bearing in his hand the Charter of Independence which he had contributed to form, and tendering from the self-created nation to the mightiest monarchs of Europe, the olive-branch of peace, the mercurial wand of commerce, and the amulet of protection and safety to the man of peace, on the pathless ocean, from the inexorable cruelty and merciless rapacity of war.

And finally, in the last stage of life, with fourscore win ters upon his head, under the torture of an incurable dis ease, returning to his native land, closing his days as the chief magistrate of his adopted commonwealth, after contributing by his counsels, under the presidency of Washington, and recording his name, under the sanction of devout prayer, invoked by him to God, to that Constitution under the authority of which we are here assembled, as the representatives of the North American people, to receive, in their name and for them, these venerable relics of the wise, the valiant, and the good founders of our great confederated republic, these sacred symbols of our golden age. May they be deposited among the archives of our government! And may every American who shall hereafter behold them, ejaculate a mingled offering of praise to that Supreme Ruler of the Universe, by whose tender mercies our Union has been hitherto preserved, through all the vicissitudes and revolutions of this turbulent world; and of prayer for the continuance of these blessings, by the dispensations of Providence, to our beloved country, from age to age, till time shall be no more!

VII.-RICHARD LALOR SHEIL'S REPLY TO LORD LYNDHURST.

(SHEIL.)

Mr. Sheil was a native of Ireland. He distinguished himself in early life as a writer of dramas. But it was in the political arena that he gained his brighter laurels. He was for some time Master of the Mint, and afterwards British Minister at Florence, where he died in 1851.

The venerable Lord Lyndhurst is of an Irish family, but was born in Boston, United States of America, in 1772. His father was a painter. He has frequently held office in the government, and in 1827 became Lord Chancellor of England.

THE Duke of Wellington is not, I am inclined to believe, a man of excitable temperament. His mind is of a cast too martial to be easily moved; but, notwithstanding his habitual inflexibility, I cannot help thinking, that, when he heard his countrymen (for we are his countrymen), designated by a phrase as offensive as the abundant vocabulary of his eloquent confederate could supply-I cannot help thinking that he ought to have recollected the many fields of fight in which we have been contributors to his renown. Yes, "the battles, sieges, fortunes," that he has passed, ought to have brought back upon him—he ought to have remembered—that, from the earliest achievement in which he displayed that military genius which has placed him foremost in the annals of modern warfare, down to that last and surpassing combat, which has made his name imperishable-from Assaye to Waterloo-the Irish soldiers, with whom our armies are filled, were the inseparable auxiliaries to the glory with which his unparalleled successes have been crowned. Whose were the athletic arms that drove your bayonets at Vimiera through those phalanxes that never reeled in the shock of war before? What desperate valour climbed the steeps and filled the moats of Badajos? All-all his victories should have rushed and crowded back upon his memory:-Vimiera, Badajos, Salamanca, Albuera, Toulouse, and last of all, the greatest! Tell me, for you were there,-I appeal to the gallant soldier before me,* from whose opinions I differ, but who

* Sir Henry Hardinge.