from considerations of what is due to my own country. I give Hungary my best wishes, my earnest sympathy; but I.prefer my own country to any other, and I cannot sacrifice its interests for those of another. I was sent here to legislate, not for foreign nations, but my own. I will not abandon my own duties in the attempt to discharge those of another. It would doubtless be pleasing to any generous mind to indulge the demands of sympathy; yet, sir, truth and justice are of higher obligation, and ought to be of higher consideration still.

From "Speech in the Senate."

་

CATILINE DENOUNCED.

CICERO.

You see this day, O Romans, the republic, and all your lives, your goods, your fortunes, your wives and children, this home of most illustrious empire, this most fortunate and beautiful city, by the great love of the immortal gods for you, by my labors and counsels and dangers, snatched from fire and sword, and almost from the very jaws of fate, and preserved and restored to you.

And if those days on which we are preserved are not less pleasant to us, or less illustrious, than those on which we are born, because the joy of being saved is certain, the good fortune of being born uncertain, and because we are born without feeling it, but we are preserved with great delight; ay, since we have, by our affection and by our good report, raised to the immortal gods that Romulus who built this city, he, too, who has preserved this city, built by him, and embellished as you see it, ought to be held in honor by you and your posterity; for we have extinguished flames which were almost laid under and placed around the temples and shrines, and houses and walls of the whole city; we have turned the edge of swords drawn against the republic, and have turned aside their points from your throats. And since all this has been displayed in the senate, and made manifest, and detected by me, I will now explain it briefly, that you, O citizens, that are as yet ignorant of it, and are in suspense, may be able to see how great the danger was, how evident and by what means it was detected and arrested. First of all, since Catiline, a few days ago, burst out of the city, when he had left behind the companions of his wickedness, the active leaders of this infamous war, I have continually watched and taken care, O Romans, of the means by which we might be safe amid such great and such carefully concealed treachery.

From "Third Oration against Catiline."

BENEFICIAL EFFECTS OF THE WAR.

E. A. WASHBURNE, D. D.

DISCIPLINE is the law of all mental and moral growth; but war teaches it as a first necessity. It is there the visible organ of law. The well-ordered camp, the daily drill, the rigid penalty of transgression, cannot be neglected without loss of power in the battle-field. It is hard to cashier an officer for a slight misdemeanor; to shoot a sleeping sentinel; but it is worse to bear the defeat of an army. Even the little matters of dress and soldierly bearing have their essential uses. The trim private, with his shining musket and pipe-clayed belt, will feel more fully his responsibility than in a rusty uniform; and the touch of his hat to the officer is the symbol of duty. There is power in such military rule that must enter into character. It is easy to say that it makes men machines; but, apart from the fact that there is in the army far less of the high-collared stiffness of old time, it is difficult to change the free-and-easy American into a machine. It may be done with the stolid Russian, but not with us. Nay, we are told that our soldiers are better, because they are never mere guns and bayonets, but retain their individual intelligence. They want only the training. A living man with the accuracy of the machine is the very ideal of discipline. And this education will, we are assured, pass into our social character. It is a wholesome change for our young men of luxurious habits to leave for a while their lounge in the street, their tailors, and the solemn ritual of the dining-table, with its ten courses and closing glass of Curaçoa, for the city of tents, where they must sleep hardly, and brave the storm without an umbrella, and themselves wash their few flannel shirts, and say over their rations of beef and black coffee, like the Persian over his figs, "Of how great pleasure have I been ignorant!"

*

*

*

*

*

But again, we are a boastful people,—a people of vain and hasty experiment in trade, in social institutions. War is a terrible destroyer of all shams. It deals in sharp realities. The epauletted Bobadil is soon cashiered; the blunder of a pretentious general is visited with a speedy reward. Lamachus said to a captain who asked a second trial, "No room in war for a miscarriage." We may in time of peace have our quacks in medicine, and religion, and trade; we can afford to live on an inflated credit, and once in seven years have a general explosion ; but not so now. This necessity of the times has had already its admirable effect on the business world,-has done away with promissory notes and brought us to the cash-basis of honesty. But it will, we believe, enter most fully into the very texture of the national mind. It will give us a severer education in science, and art, and legislation. It will change us into a people of solid aims and abiding habits.

HISTORICAL, BIOGRAPHICAL, AND

DESCRIPTIVE.

HISTORY PROPERLY WRITTEN.

LORD MACAULAY.

THE instruction derived from history properly written would be of a vivid and practical character. It would be received by the imagination as well as by the reason. It would be not merely traced on the mind, but branded into it. Many truths, too, would be learned, which can be learned in no other manner. As the history of states is generally written, the greatest and most momentous revolutions seem to come upon them like supernatural inflictions, without warning or cause. But the fact is, that such revolutions are almost always the consequence of moral changes, which have gradually passed on the mass of the community, and which ordinarily proceed far before their progress is indicated by any public measure. An intimate knowledge of the domestic history of nations is therefore absolutely necessary to the prognosis of political events. A narrative defective in this respect is as useless as a medical treatise which should pass by all the symptoms attendant on the early stage of a disease, and mention only what occurs when the patient is beyond the reach of remedies.

An historian, such as we have been attempting to describe, would indeed be an intellectual prodigy. In his mind, powers, scarcely compatible with each other, must be tempered into an exquisite harmony. We shall sooner see another Shakspeare, or another Homer. The highest excellence to which any single faculty can be brought would be less surprising than such a happy and delicate combination of qualities. Yet the contemplation of imaginary models is not an unpleasant or useless employment of the mind. It cannot indeed produce perfection, but it produces improvement, and nourishes that generous and liberal fastidiousness, which is not inconsistent with the strongest sensibility to merit, and which, while it exalts our conceptions of the art, does not render us unjust to the artist.

16

From "Essay on History." (181)

CIVIL AND RELIGIOUS LIBERTY.

WILLIAM SMYTH.

MARK the difference between Europe and Asia. What is it, what has it ever been? Slavery in the one, and freedom in the other. Take another view, more modern and more domestic. Mist is in the valley, and sterility is on the mountain of the Highlander; his land is the land of tempest and of gloom, but there is intelligence in his looks and gladness in his song. On the contrary, incense is in the gale, and the laughing light of Nature is in the landscape of the Grecian island; but

"Why do its tuneful echoes languish,
Mute but to the voice of anguish ?"

Yet where was it that once flourished the heroes, the sages, and the orators of antiquity? What is there of sublimity and beauty in our moral feelings, or in our works of art, that is not stamped with the impression of their genius?

Give civil and religious liberty, you give everything,-knowledge and science, heroism and honor, virtue and power. Deny them, and you deny everything: in vain are the gifts of nature: there is no harvest in the fertility of the soil; there is no cheerfulness in the radiance of the sky; there is no thought in the understanding of man; and there is in his heart no hope: the human animal sinks and withers; abused, disinherited, stripped of the attributes of his kind, and no longer formed after the image of his God.

From "Historical Lectures at Cambridge."

ENGLAND AND AMERICA.

WILLIAM SMYTH.

I KNOW not how any friend to his species, much less any Englishman, can cease to wish with the most earnest anxiety for the success of the great experiment to which I have alluded, for the success of the constitution of America. I see not, in like manner, how any friend to his species, much less any American, can forbear for a moment to wish for a continuance of the constitution of England,-that the Revolution of 1688 should for ever answer all its important purposes for England, as the Revolution of 1776 has hitherto done for America. What efforts can be made for the government of mankind so reasonable as these,a limited monarchy and a limited republic? Add to this that the success of the cause of liberty in the two countries cannot but be of the greatest advantage to each,-a limited monarchy and a limited republic being well fitted, by their comparison and separate happiness, each to correct the peculiar tendencies to evil which must necessarily be found in the

other. Successful, therefore, be both, and while the records of history last, be they both successful! that they may eternally hold up to mankind the lessons of practical freedom, and explain to them the only secret that exists of all national prosperity and happiness, the sum and substance of which must for ever consist in mild government and tolerant religion, that is, rationally understood, in civil and religious. liberty. From "Historical Lectures at Cambridge."

ADDISON'S HYMNS.

W. M. THACKERAY.

WHEN Addison looks from the world whose weaknesses he describes so benevolently, up to the heaven which shines over us all, I can hardly fancy a human face lighted up with a more serene rapture: a human intellect thrilling with a purer love and adoration than Joseph Addison's..

It seems to me his verses shine like the stars. They shine out of a great deep calm. When he turns to heaven, a Sabbath comes over that man's mind: and his face lights up from it with a glory of thanks and prayer. His sense of religion stirs through his whole being. In the fields, in the town: looking at the birds in the trees: at the children in the streets in the morning or in the moonlight: over his books in his own room in a happy party at a country merry-making or a town assembly, good-will and peace to God's creatures, and love and awe of Him who made them, fill his pure heart and shine from his kind face. If Swift's life was the most wretched, I think Addison's was one of the most enviable. A life prosperous and beautiful-a calm death-an immense fame and affection afterwards for his happy and spotless

name.

:

From "English Humorists."

FIELDING'S FAME.

W. M. THACKERAY.

RICHARDSON'S sickening antipathy for Harry Fielding is quite as natural as the other's laughter and contempt at the sentimentalist. I have not learned that these likings and dislikings have ceased in the present day and every author must lay his account not only to misrepresentation, but to honest enmity among critics, and to being hated and abused for good as well as for bad reasons. Richardson disliked Fielding's works quite honestly: Walpole quite honestly spoke of them as vulgar and stupid. Their squeamish stomachs sickened at the