Imagens das páginas
PDF
ePub

LESSON CXLVI.-MAY THE TWENTY-SIXTH.
The Man of Ross.

BUT all our praises why should lords engross?
Rise, honest muse, and sing the man of Ross;
Pleas'd Vaga echoes through her winding bounds,
And rapid Severn hoarse applause resounds.
Who hung with woods yon mountain's sultry brow?
From the dry rock who bade the waters flow?
Not to the skies in useless columns toss'd,
Or in proud falls magnificently lost,

But clear and artless, pouring through the plain,
Health to the sick, and solace to the swain.

Whose causeway parts the vale with shady rows?
Whose seats the weary traveller repose?
Who taught that heaven-directed spire to rise?
"The Man of Ross," each lisping babe replies.
Behold the market-place with poor o'erspread!
The man of Ross divides the weekly bread :
He feeds yon alms-house, neat, but void of state,
Where age and want sit smiling at the gate:
Thin portion'd maids, apprenticed orphans bless'd,
The young who labour, and the old who rest.

Is any sick? the man of Ross relieves,
Prescribes, attends, the medicine makes, and gives.
Is there a variance? Enter but his door,
Baulk'd are the courts, and contest is no more.
Despairing quacks with curses fled the place,
And vile attorneys, now a useless race.

Thrice happy man! enabled to pursue
What all so wish, but want the power to do!
0
say, what sums that generous hand supply?
What mines to swell that boundless charity? -
Of debts, and taxes, wife, and children clear,
This man possess'd five hundred pounds a year.
Blush, grandeur, blush! proud courts withdraw your blaze!
Ye little stars hide your diminish'd rays!

And what! no monument, inscription, stone!
His race, his form, his name almost unknown!
Who builds a church to God, and not to fame,
Will never mark the marble with his name.
Go search it there, where to be born and die,
Of rich and poor, makes all the history;
Enough, that virtue fill'd the space between;
Proved by the ends of being to have been.

CHARACTER OF SIR JOHN MOORE.

209

LESSON CXLVII. MAY THE TWENTY-SEVENTH.

Character of Sir John Moore.

THE tall and graceful person of Sir John Moore, his dark searching eyes, strongly defined forehead, and singularly expressive mouth, indicated a noble disposition and a refined understanding; while the lofty sentiments of honour habitual to his mind, being adorned by a subtle playful wit, gave him, in conversation, an ascendancy that he always preserved by the decisive vigour of his actions. He maintained the right with a vehemence bordering upon fierceness, and every important transaction in which he was engaged increased his reputation for talent, and confirmed his character as a stern enemy to vice, a steadfast friend to merit, a just and faithful servant of his country. The honest loved him, the dishonest feared him; for while he lived he did not shun, but scorned and spurned the base, and, with characteristic propriety, they spurned at him when he was dead.

A soldier from his earliest youth, Moore thirsted for the honours of his profession, and feeling that he was worthy to lead a British army, hailed the fortune that placed him at the head of the troops destined for Spain. As the stream of time passed, the inspiring hopes of triumph disappeared, but the austerer glory of suffering remained, and with a firm heart he accepted that gift of a severe fate. Confiding in the strength of his genius, he disregarded the clamours of presumptuous ignorance, and conducted his long and arduous retreat with sagacity, intelligence, and fortitude: no insult disturbed, no falsehood deceived him, no remonstrance shook his determination; fortune frowned without subduing his constancy; death struck, but the spirit of the man remained unbroken when his shattered body scarcely afforded it a habitation. Having done all that was just towards others, he remembered what was due to himself: neither the shock of the mortal blow, nor the lingering hours of acute pain which preceded his dissolution, could quell the pride of his gallant heart, or lower the dignified feeling with which, conscious of merit, he at the last moment asserted his right to the gratitude of the country he had served so truly.

If glory be a distinction, for such a man death is not a leveller!

1. When, how, and where did Sir John Moore die? [See January 16.]

2. In what did he confide when assailed by the clamours of presumptuous ignorance ?

3. When is death said to be not a leveller?

LESSON CXLVIII.-
-MAY THE TWENTY-EIGHTH.

Extract from the concluding Speech of the celebrated
Edmund Burke, on the Impeachment of Warren
Hastings.

[ocr errors]

MY LORDS, at this awful close, in the name of the Commons, surrounded by them, I attest the retiring, I attest the advancing generations, between which, as a link in the great chain of eternal order, we stand. -We call this nation, we call this world to witness, that the Commons have shrunk from no labour; that we have been guilty of no prevarication; that we have made no compromise with crime; that we have not feared any odium whatsoever, in the long warfare which we have carried on with the crimes with the vices-with the exorbitant wealthwith the enormous and overpowering influence of eastern corruption. This war, my Lords, we have waged for twentytwo years, and the conflict has been fought at your Lordships' bar for the last seven years. My Lords, twenty-two years is a great space in the scale of the life of man; it is no inconsiderable space in the history of a great nation. A business which has so long occupied the councils and tribunals of Great Britain cannot possibly be huddled over in the course of vulgar, trite, and transitory events. Nothing but some of those great revolutions, that break the traditionary chain of the human memory, and alter the very face of nature itself, can possibly obscure it. My Lords, we are all elevated to a degree of importance by it; the meanest of us will, by means of it, more or less, become the concern of posterity; if we are yet to hope for such a thing in the present state of the world, as a recording retrospective civilised posterity; but this is in the hands of the great Disposer of events; it is not ours to settle how it shall be.

My Lords, your House yet stands; it stands as a great edifice; but let me say, that it stands in the midst of ruins; in the midst of the ruins that have been made by the greatest moral earthquake that ever convulsed and shattered this globe of ours. My Lords, it has pleased

SPEECH OF EDMUND BURKE.

211

Providence to place us in such a state, that we appear every moment to be upon the verge of some great mutations. There is one thing, and one thing only, which defies all mutation; that which existed before the world, and will survive this fabric of the world itself: I mean justice; that justice, which, emanating from the Divinity, has a place in the breast of every one of us, given us for our guide with regard to ourselves, and with regard to others, and which will stand, after this globe is burned to ashes, our advocate or our accuser before the great Judge, when He comes to call upon us for the tenour of a well-spent life.

My Lords, the Commons will share in every fate with your Lordships; there is nothing sinister which can happen to you, in which we shall not be involved; and if it should so happen that we shall be subjected to some of those frightful changes which we have seen; if it should happen that your Lordships, stripped of all the decorous distinctions of human society, should, by hands at once base and cruel, be led to those scaffolds and machines of murder, upon which great kings and glorious queens have shed their blood, amidst the prelates, amidst the nobles, amidst the magistrates who supported their thrones, may you in those moments feel that consolation which I am persuaded they felt in the critical moments of their dreadful agony.

1. Upon what occasion did Burke make this celebrated speech? 2. How long had this trial occupied the attention of the Houses of Parliament ?

3. What is that one thing which defies all mutation?

LESSON CXLIX.

MAY THE TWENTY-NINTH.

King Charles II. Restored.

66

THIS was the birth-day of Charles the Second, and on this day, in 1660, he made his magnificent entry into London. The merry monarch," as he is familiarly styled, was a confirmed voluptuary, with little delicacy or selection in his pleasures; and his reign, as well from his example, as from the discredit that everything serious was fallen into in consequence of its connection with Puritanism, was the era of the most dissolute manners

ever prevalent in England. The stage was an avowed school of gross licentiousness; and polite literature in general was tainted with the same vice.

The king was a man of wit, and a judge of good writing in certain walks, but was totally void of sensibility to the sublime or beautiful. Neither was he a munificent patron even of the writers he applauded. With a kind of familiar easy good nature, he united a perfect indifference to every thing but his own pleasure and interest; and few men were ever more destitute of the sentiments of honour and real generosity. He had a degree of mildness and gentleness in his temper, which seems, however, to have been more owing to want of vigour, than to any consistent principle of humanity.

The following fine moral stanzas are said to have been a favourite song of Charles II.:

"The glories of our blood and state

Are shadows, not substantial things;
There is no armour against fate;
Death lays his icy hands on kings;
Sceptre and crown

Must tumble down,

And in the dust be equal made

With the poor crooked scythe and spade.

"Some men with swords may reap the field,
And plant fresh laurels where they kill;
But their strong nerves at last must yield,
They tame but one another still.

Early or late

They stoop to fate,

And must give up their murmuring breath,
When they, pale captives, creep to Death.

"The garlands wither on your brow;

Then boast no more your mighty deeds:
Upon Death's purple altar now

See where the victor-victim bleeds;
All heads must come

To the cold tomb;

Only the actions of the just

Smell sweet and blossom in the dust."

1. What took place on this day in 1660?

2. What causes contributed to render the reign of Charles the Second an era of dissolute manners in England?

« AnteriorContinuar »