the wealth of Ireland proved? Is it by the naked, idle, suffering savages, who are slumbering on the mud floor of their cabins? In what does the loyalty of Ireland consist? Is it in the eagerness with which they would range themselves under the hostile banner of any invader, for your destruction and for your distress? Is it liberty when men breathe and move among the bayonets of English soldiers? Is their happiness and their history anything but such a tissue of murders, burnings, hanging, famine, and disease, as never existed before in the annals of the world? This is a system which, I am sure, with very different intentions, and different views of its effects, you are met this day to uphold. These are the dreadful consequences which those laws your petition prays may be continued have produced upon Ireland. Telemachus to the Allied Chiefs. FENELON. Fellow-soldiers and confederated chiefs. I grant you, if ever man deserved to have the weapon of stratagem and deceit turned against him, it is he who has used it himself so often the faithless Adrastus! But shall it be said that we, who have united to punish the perfidy of this man,—that we are ourselves perfidious? Shall fraud be counteracted by fraud? Is a promise never to be kept but when a plausible pretence to break it is wanting? Shall an oath be sacred. only when nothing is to be gained by its violation? If you are insensible to the love of virtue, and the fear of the gods, have you no regard to your interest and reputation? If, to terminate a war, you violate your oath, how many wars will this impious conduct excite? Who will hereafter trust you? What security can you ever give for your good faith? A solemn treaty?-You have trampled one under foot! An oath? You have committed perjury when perjury was profitable, and have defied the gods. What have you to fear? Is not your courage equal to victory, without the aid of fraud? Your own power joined to that of the many under your command, is it not sufficient? Let us fight, let us die, if we must-but let us not conquer unworthily. Adrastus, the impious Adrastus, is in our power, provided-provided we disdain to imitate the cowardice and treachery which have sealed his ruin. Shylock's Justification. WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. He hath disgraced me, and hindered me half a million; laughed at my losses, mocked at my gains, scorned my nation, thwarted my bargains, cooled my friends, heated mine enemies; and what's his reason? I am a Jew. Hath not a Jew eyes? hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer, as a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed? if you tickle us, do we not laugh? if you poison us, do we not die? and if you wrong us, shall we not revenge? If we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that. If a Jew wrong a Christian, what is his humility? Revenge. If a Christian wrong a Jew, what should his sufferance be by Christian example? Why, revenge.-M. V., iii., 1. TONE OF SOLEMNITY. (See Tone Drill No. 189.) [The tone of Solemnity denotes the appreciation of the gravity of a situation or thing. The ego is humble or is submerged in sympathetic contemplation.] Death of Copernicus. EDWARD EVERETT. At length he draws near his end. He is seventy-three years of age, and he yields his work on "The Revolutions of the Heavenly Orbs" to his friends for publication. The day at last has come on which it is to be ushered into the world. It is the 24th of May, 1543. On that day-the effect, no doubt, of the intense excitement of his mind, operating upon an exhausted frame-an effusion of blood brings him to the gates of the grave. His last hour has come; he lies stretched upon the couch from which he will never rise. The beams of the setting sun glance through the Gothic windows of his chamber; near his bedside is the armillary sphere which he has contrived to represent his theory of the heavens; his picture painted by himself, the amusement of his earlier years, hangs before him; beneath it are his astralobe and other imperfect astronomical instruments; and around him are gathered his sorrowing disciples. The door of the apartment opens; the eye of the departing sage is turned to see who enters: it is a friend who brings him the first printed copy of his immortal treatise. He knows that in that book he contradicts all that has ever been distinctly taught by former philosophers; he knows that he has rebelled against the sway of Ptolemy, which the scientific world has acknowledged for a thousand years; he knows that the popular mind will be shocked by his innovations; he knows that the attempt will be made to press even religion into the service against him; but he knows that his book is true. He is dying, but he leaves a glorious truth as his dying bequest to the world. He bids the friend who has brought it place himself between the window and his bedside, that the sun's rays may fall upon the precious volume, and he may behold it once more before his eye grows dim. He looks upon it, takes it in his hands, presses it to his breast, and expires. But no, he is not wholly gone. A smile lights upon his dying countenance; a beam of returning intelligence kindles in his eye; his lips move; and the friend who leans over him can hear him faintly murmur the beautiful sentiments which the Christian lyrist of a later age has so finely expressed in verse: "Ye golden lamps of heaven, farewell, with all your feekle light; Farewell, thou ever-changing moon, pale empress of the night; And thou, effulgent orb of day, in brighter flames arrayed; My soul, which springs beyond thy sphere, no more demands thy aid. Ye stars are but the shining dust of my divine abode, The pavement of these heavenly courts where I shall reign with God." So died the great Columbus of the heavens. From Thanatopsis. WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT. Yet a few days, and thee The all-beholding sun shall see no more Nor in the embrace of ocean, shall exist Thy image. Earth, that nourished thee, shall claim And, lost each human trace, surrendering up To mix forever with the elements; To be a brother to the insensible rock, And to the sluggish clod, which the rude swain Shalt thou retire alone,-nor couldst thou wish That make the meadows green; and, poured round all, Old ocean's gray and melancholy waste,— Are but the solemn decorations all Of the great tomb of man! The golden sun, |