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the other a stronger reasoner, and possessing more masterly powers of analysis.

In cross-examining witnesses, Mr. Mason, whose skill in this respect was perhaps unequalled in this country, laid his plans far back, getting all that he wished before his design was suspected; while Mr. Smith, with piercing eye, watched his opportunity, and darted with sudden surprise on the unhappy man who was laboring to conceal the truth. Yet either could apply the other's method. Severity with the one smote down its victim by a single blow; with the other, it was oftener a cutting irony, from its exceeding sharpness hardly felt till the mischief was done. Wit, in the one, had the pungency that only awakes a smile; in the other, it was the ludicrous association, or the joyous humor, that convulses men with laughter. But here, too, either could use the other's weapons.

In pathos, they were perhaps equally deficient; and equally remarkable for the contemptuous indignation which they could excite against whatever was mean or dishonest. As an advocate, each was ready to take all the advantage of his adversary that professional adroitness and the rules of the bar would allow; but they were both men of personal honor, and of a proud, unbending integrity; and as either spoke of those high virtues, he seemed a fitting champion and representative of his cause. Neither of them laid claim

When they met at the of massive intellectual

to the charm or graces of oratory. bar, it was the stern encounter strength, in which they dealt their heaviest and sharpest blows. In legal acquirements and logical skill, they were the not unworthy associates and antagonists of Daniel Webster; while in that combination of gifts which makes the commanding orator, he stood with them, as he has done every where else, like Mount Washington among the mountains of New England.

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LESSON CLXV.

A Paraphrase on Psalm LXXIV. MISS WILLIANS.

MY GOD, all nature owns thy sway;

Thou giv'st the night, and thou the day.
When all thy loved creation wakes,
When Morning, rich in lustre, breaks,
And bathes in dew the opening flower,
To thee we owe her fragrant hour;
And when she pours her choral song,
Her melodies to thee belong.
Or when, in paler tints arrayed,

The Evening slowly spreads her shade,
That soothing shade, that grateful gloom,
Can, more than day's enlivening bloom,
Still every fond and vain desire,
And calmer, purer thoughts inspire;
From earth the pensive spirit free,
And lead the softened heart to thee.
In every scene thy hands have dressed,
In every form by thee impressed,
Upon the mountain's awful head,

Or where the sheltering woods are spread;
In every note that swells the gale,
Or tuneful stream that cheers the vale;
The cavern's depth, or echoing grove,
A voice is heard of praise and love.
As o'er thy works the seasons roll,
And soothe, with change of bliss, the soul,
O, never may their smiling train
Pass o'er the human soul in vain!
But oft, as on the charm we gaze,
Attune the wondering soul to praise;
And be the joys that most we prize
The joys that from thy favor rise!

LESSON CLXVI.

Tribute to the enterprising Spirit of the New England Colonists. Burke.

As to the wealth, Mr. Speaker, which the colonies have drawn from the sea by their fisheries, you had all that matter fully opened at your bar. You surely thought those acquisitions of value, for they seemed even to excite your envy; and yet the spirit by which that enterprising employment has been exercised ought rather, in my opinion, to have raised your esteem and admiration. And pray, sir, what in the world is equal to it? Pass by the other parts, and look at the manner in which the people of New England have of late carried on the whale fishery.

While we follow them among the tumbling mountains of ice, and behold them penetrating into the deepest frozen recesses of Hudson's Bay and Davis's Straits, whilst we are looking for them beneath the Arctic Circle, we hear that they have pierced into the opposite region of polar cold, that they are at the antipodes, and engaged under the frozen serpent of the south. Falkland Island, which seemed too remote and romantic an object for the grasp of national ambition, is but a stage and resting-place in the progress of their victorious industry.

Nor is the equinoctial heat more discouraging to them, than the accumulated winter of both the poles. We know that whilst some of them draw the line and strike the harpoon on the coast of Africa, others run the longitude and pursue their gigantic game along the coast of Brazil. No sea but what is vexed by their fisheries. No climate that is not witness to their toils. Neither the perseverance of Holland, nor the activity of France, nor the dexterous and firm sagacity of English enterprise, ever carried this most perilous mode of hardy industry to the extent to which it has

been pushed by this recent people-a people who are still, as it were, but in the gristle, and not yet hardened into the bone of manhood.

When I contemplate these things, when I know that the colonies in general owe little or nothing to any care of ours, and that they are not squeezed into this happy form by the constraints of a watchful and suspicious government, but that, through a wise and salutary neglect, a generous nature has been suffered to take her own way to perfection; when I reflect upon these effects, when I see how profitable they have been to us, I feel all the pride of power sink, and all presumption in the wisdom of human contrivances melt and die away within me. My rigor relents. I pardon something to the spirit of liberty.

LESSON CLXVII.

Apostrophe to the Queen of France. BURKE.

Ir 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 splendor, and joy.

O, what a revolution! and what a heart must I have, to contemplate without emotion that elevation and that fall !

Little did I dream that when she added titles of veneration to those of enthusiastic, distant, respectful love, she should ever be obliged to carry the sharp antidote against disgrace concealed in that bosom; little did I dream that I should live to see such disasters fallen upon her in a nation of gallant men; in a nation of men of honor 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 calculators, has succeeded; and the glory of Europe is extinguished forever. 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 honor, 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.

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COULD I call around me, in one vast assembly, the temperate young men of our land, I would say, Hopes of the nation, blessed be ye of the Lord now in the dew of your youth. But look well to your footsteps; for vipers, and scorpions, and adders, surround your way. Look at the generation who have just preceded you: the morning of their life was cloudless, and it dawned as brightly as your own: but behold them bitten, swollen, enfeebled, inflamed, debauched, idle, poor, irreligious, and vicious, with halting step dragging onward to meet an early grave! Their bright prospects are clouded, and their sun is set never to rise! No house of their own receives them, while from poorer to poorer tenements they descend, and to harder and harder fare, as improvidence dries up their resources. And now,

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