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gesture proceeded from his right arm, and consisted merely in a vehement, perpendicular swing of it, from about the elevation of his head to the bar, behind which he was accustomed to stand.

As to Fancy, if she hold a seat in his mind at all, which I very much doubt, his gigantic Genius tramples with disdain on all her flower-decked plats and blooming parterres How, then, you will ask, with a look of incredulous curiosity, how is it possible that such a man can hold the attention of an audience enchained through a speech of even ordinary length? I will tell you.

He possesses one original, and almost supernatural faculty, the faculty of developing a subject by a single glance of his mind, and detecting at once the very point on which every controversy depends. No matter what the question: though ten times more knotty than "the gnarled oak," the lightning of heaven is not more rapid nor more resistless than his astonishing penetration. Nor does the exercise of it seem to cost him an effort. On the contrary, it is as easy as vision. I am persuaded that his eyes do not fly over a landscape, and take in its various objects with more promptitude and facility, than his mind embraces and analyzes the most complex subject.

Possessing while at the bar this intellectual elevation, which enabled him to look down and comprehend the whole ground at once, he determined, immediately, and without difficulty, on which side the question might be most advantageously approached and assailed. In a bad cause, his art consisted in laying his premises so remotely from the point directly in debate, or else in terms so general and specious, that the hearer, seeing no consequence which could be drawn from them, was just as willing to admit them as not; but, his premises once admitted, the demonstration, however distant, followed as certainly, as cogently, and as inevitably, as any demonstration of Euclid.

All his eloquence consists in the apparently deep selfconviction and emphatic earnestness of his manner; the correspondent simplicity and energy of his style; the close and logical connexion of his thoughts; and the easy gra dations by which he opens his lights on the attentive minds of his hearers.

The audience are never permitted to pause for a moment. There is no stopping to weave garlands of flowers to be hung in festoons around a favourite argument On the contrary, every sentence is progressive; every idea sheds new light on the subject; the listener is kept perpetually in that sweetly pleasurable vibration, with which the mind of man always receives new truths; the dawn advances in easy but unremitting pace; the subject opens gradually on the view; until, rising in high relief in all its native colours and proportions, the argument is consummated by the conviction of the delighted hearer.

His political adversaries allege that he is a mere lawyer; that his mind has been so long trammelled by judicial precedent, so long habituated to the quart and tierce of forensic digladiation, (as Dr. Johnson would probably have called it,) as to be unequal to the discussion of a great ques tion of state. Mr. Curran, in his defence of Rowan, seems to have sanctioned the probability of such an effect from such a cause, when he complains of his own mind as having been narrowed and circumscribed by a strict and technical adherence to established forms; but, in the next breath, an astonishing burst of the grandest thought, and a power of comprehension, to which there seems to be no earthly limit, proves that his complaint, as it relates to himself, is entirely without foundation.

Indeed, if the objection to the chief justice mean any thing more than that he has not had the same illumination and exercise in matters of state as if he had devoted his life to them, I am unwilling to admit it. The force of a cannon is the same, whether pointed at a rampart or a man of war, although practice may have made the engineer more expert in one case than in the other. So it is clear that practice may give a man a greater command over one class of subjects than another; but the inherent energy of his mind remains the same whithersoever it may be directed. From this impression, I have never seen any cause to wonder at what is called a universal genius: it proves only that the man has applied a powerful mind to a great variety of subjects, and pays a compliment rather to his superior industry than his superior intellect. I am very certain that the gentleman of whom we are speaking

possesses the acumen which might constitute him a universal genius, according to the usual acceptation of that phrase But if he be the truant, which his warmest friends represent him to be, there is very little probability that he will ever reach this distinction.

Moral Sublimity illustrated.-WAYLAND.

PHILOSOPHERS have speculated much concerning a process of sensation, which has commonly been denominated the emotion of sublimity. Aware that, like any other simple feeling, it must be incapable of definition, they have seldom attempted to define it; but, content with remarking the occasions on which it is excited, have told us that it arises in general from the contemplation of whatever is vast in nature, splendid in intellect, or lofty in morals: or, to express the same idea somewhat varied, in the language of a critic of antiquity, "That alone is truly sublime, of which the conception is vast, the effect irresistible, and the remembrance scarcely, if ever, to be erased."

But, although philosophers alone have written about this emotion, they are far from being the only men who have felt it. The untutored peasant, when he has seen the autumnal tempest collecting between the hills, and, as it advanced, enveloping in misty obscurity village and hamlet, forest and meadow, has tasted the sublime in all its reality; and, whilst the thunder has rolled and the lightning flashed around him, has exulted in the view of Nature moving forth in her majesty. The untaught sailor-boy, listlessly hearkening to the idle ripple of the moonlight wave, when on a sudden he has thought upon the unfathomable abyss beneath him, and the wide waste of waters around him, and the infinite expanse above him, has enjoyed to the full the emotion of sublimity, whilst his inmost soul has trembled at the vastness of its own conceptions. But why need I multiply illustrations from nature? Who does not recollect the emotion he has felt while surveying aught, in the material world, of terror or of vastness?

And this sensation is not produced by grandeur in material objects alone. It is also excited on most of those occasions in which we see man tasking to the uttermost the energies of his intellectual or moral nature. Through the long lapse of centuries, who, without emotion, has read of Leonidas and his three hundred's throwing themselves as a barrier before the myriads of Xerxes, and contending unto death for the liberties of Greece?

But we need not turn to classic story to find all that is great in human action; we find it in our own times, and in the history of our own country. Who is there of us that, even in the nursery, has not felt his spirit stir within him, when, with child-like wonder, he has listened to the story of Washington? And although the terms of the narrative were scarcely intelligible, yet the young soul kindled at the thought of one man's working out the delivery of a nation. And as our understanding, strengthened by age, was at last able to grasp the detail of this transaction, we saw that our infantile conceptions had fallen far short of its grandeur. Oh! if an American citizen ever exults in the contemplation of all that is sublime in human enterprise, it is when, bringing to mind the men who first conceived the idea of this nation's independence, he beholds them estimating the power of her oppressor, the resources of her citizens, deciding in their collected might that this nation should be free, and, through the long years of trial that ensued, never blenching from their purpose, but freely redeeming the pledge they had given, to consecrate to it "their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honour."

"Patriots have toiled, and, in their country's cause,
Bled nobly, and their deeds, as they deserve,
Receive proud recompense. We give in charge
Their names to the sweet lyre. The historic Muse,
Proud of her treasure, marches with it down
To latest times: and Sculpture in her turn
Gives bond, in stone and ever-during brass,
To guard them, and immortalize her trust."

It is not in the field of patriotism alone that deeds have been achieved, to which history has awarded the palm of moral sublimity. There have lived men, in whom the name of patriot has been merged in that of philanthropist,

who, looking with an eye of compassion over the face of the earth, have felt for the miseries of our race, and have put forth their calm might to wipe off one blot from the marred and stained escutcheon of human nature, to strike off one form of suffering from the catalogue of human wo. Such a man was Howard. Surveying our world like a spirit of the blessed, he beheld the misery of the captivehe heard the groaning of the prisoner. His determination was fixed. He resolved, single-handed, to gauge and to measure one form of unpitied, unheeded wretchedness, and, bringing it out to the sunshine of public observation, to work its utter extermination. And he well knew what this undertaking would cost him. He knew what he had to hazard from the infection of dungeons, to endure from the fatigues of inhospitable travel, and to brook from the insolence of legalized oppression. He knew that he was devoting himself to the altar of philanthropy, and he willingly devoted himself. He had marked out his destiny, and he hasted forward to its accomplishment, with an intensity, "which the nature of the human mind forbade to be more, and the character of the individual forbade to be less." Thus he commenced a new era in the history of benevolence. hence, the name of Howard will be associated with all that is sublime in mercy, until the final consummation of all things.

And

Such a man is Clarkson, who, looking abroad, beheld the miseries of Africa, and, looking at home, saw his country stained with her blood. We have seen him, laying aside the vestments of the priesthood, consecrate himself to the holy purpose of rescuing a continent from rapine and murder, and of erasing this one sin from the book of his nation's iniquities. We have seen him and his fellow philanthropists, for twenty years, never waver from their purpose. We have seen them persevere amidst neglect and obloquy, and contempt, and persecution, until, the cry of the oppressed having roused the sensibilities of the nation, the "Island Empress" rose in her might, and said to this foul traffic in human flesh, Thus far shalt thou go, and no farther.

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