give much to those who shall have much loved thee! Suffer us, therefore, to offer thee in expiation of their past caree!, both our sorrow and their sacrifices, both our hopes and their regrets. Clasp them with us, I conjure thee, to thy maternal bosom; they will return to thee, they loved thee, they are thy children, do r t curse them!

27

O'CONNELL.*

SCARCE had the brilliant Mirabeau, of a sudden veiled by the vapors of the tomb, gone down in the full splendor of his meridian, than a new luminary was seen to rise upon the horizon of Ireland.

Mirabeau, O'Connell! towering beacons, planted at the two extremities of the revolutionary cycle, as if to open and to close its ever memorable scenes.

If my design was to consider O'Connell but as a parlia mentary orator, I might compare the British nation with ours, and our tribune with the British; I might say that the latter has more country-gentlemen of eccentric and inveterate prejudices, and the former contains more special pleaders and pretentious judgers; that the English deputy does everything for his party, the French deputy everything for himself; that the one is an aristocrat even in his democracy, and the other democratic even in his aristocracy; that the one is more proud of great things, the other more boastful of small; that the one is always systematic in his opposition, and the other almost always individual; that the one is more sensible to interest, to calculation, to expediency, to reason, and the other to imagery, to eloquence, to the sur prises and adventures of political tactics; that the one is more sarcastic and more harsh, and the other more inclined to personality of the keen and scoffing kind; that the one is more grave and more religious, and the other more volatile

This is the only foreigner who has been honored with a place in the Gallery. He was probably intended to exemplify principally the author's idea of the species of oratory which he terms popular.— (TR.'S N.)

and more unbelieving; that the one stuffs his harangues with citations from Virgil, Homer, the Bible, Shakspeare, Milton, and that the other could not mention the names and events of his own national history without making the members yawn, or exciting the laughter of both the spectators and the parliament; that the one acts but with effort, slowly, upon heads of much solidity but massive and heavy, while the other is divined by the intelligence prompt and penetrative of his auditors, before the phrase has quite left his lips; that the one constructs leisurely the scaffolding of his lengthy periods of indefinite argumentations, bristling with science, jurisprudence and literature, whilst the other would shock. the simple and delicate taste of our nation, by a heap of metaphors, however beautiful, and would fatigue our intellect by a contexture too strong and stringent of his reasonings.

* This is a reproach which I am sorry to think more applicable to the speaking in our own Congress than to the oratory of Great Britain, at least of the present day. It is painful, indeed, to good taste, and even to good sense-of which, in truth, taste is but the fine flower to witness the unclassical frequency of classical quotations by even those who are considered among the most respectable of our debaters, and really not illiterate men. But worse still than the frequency is its commonplace crudity: you see the material quite raw from Plutarch's Lives, or Lempriere's Dictionary, or some other of the school books, and in fact worked up like a school-boy's exercise, and no very ripe school-boy's. If I remember, it was no less a personage than Mr. Benton who found or forced occasion to turn into a speech on the "Oregon question" the contents of entire pages of Homer's Odyssey-what translation did not appear. Nor is this primitive passion to deck their nakedness with scraps of finery confined to our orators of the less cultivated party. One, perhaps two, of the Boston representatives, I believe, are remarkable in this way. Probably they deem it called for by the character of the "Athens of America." But that this is not exactly the atticism of the Athens of Attica, they could hardly have failed to know had they really read to any purpose what they so freely quote to quite as little.

Do we find anything of this sort in the severe.y simple style of Webster? Yet Webster has more classical literature in his mere memory than any dozen of those who are most profuse of it probably ever saw in the original. (TR.'S N.)

I might add that the English nation has more force, and the French more grace. There more genius, here more intellect. There more character, here more imagination. There more political prudence, here more impulsive generosity. There, more forecast, here more actuality. There, more profundity of philosophical speculation and more respect for the dignity of the human species, here more propensity to contemplate one's self coquettishly, in the glass of his oratory, without taking account of the merits and perfections of others. The one in fine of these nations more jealous of liberty, the other of equality. The one more proud, the other more vain. The one besotted with bigotry, the other sceptical in almost all things. The one capable of prepar ing and awaiting the triumph of its cause, the other precipitating the occasion and impatient to vanquish, no matter under what leaders. The one retiring into some sequestered corner to indulge its dumps, the other capering about and at the first preludings of the fiddle, mixing in all sorts of quadrilles. The Englishman computing how much his blood should bring him of territory and influence, and his money of interest, the Frenchman squandering the one without knowing where, and the other without knowing why.*

*I do not assent to the justice, in all respects, of this elaborate parallel. The writer seems to me to view the English through the prejudices of his nation, and the French through the prejudices of his party. Not that, in this instance, the error is unfavorable to the English, but the contrary. I allude particularly to the superiority assigned them in point of philosophical profundity. The French are generally underrated, sometimes even by their own writers, in this respect; owing, I think, to the character of comprehensiveness, of method, of completeness, of rotundity, so to speak, of the national intellect. There is an illusory affinity between irregularity and magnitude. Of figures containing equal areas, the more regular appear the smallest. A circle is smaller to the vulgar eye than a scalene triangle of scarce three-fc arths its dimensions. There is in reference to the execution too, perhaps, a confirmative illusion of sentiment; what is gracefully regular, (the circle for example,) suggests ease; what is grandly eccentric, (the triangle,) effect. But the fact is well known to be immeasurably the other way.-(TR.'s N.)

I should say, in conclusion, that both, in spite of their defects and their vices, are the expression of a great people, and that so long as the English tribune shall rise amid the seas in its proud and illustrious island, and so long as the French tribune shall remain erect amid the rubbish of aristocracy and despotism, the liberty of the world is in no danger of perishing.

But it is not the parliamentary orator that I am here to draw; it is not Demosthenes pleading his own cause in the oligarchical forum of Athens; it is not Mirabeau throwing off the splendors of his magnificent language in the hall of Versailles, before the three orders of clergy, nobility, and commons; it is not Burke, Pitt, Fox, Brougham, Canning, shivering the glass-work of Whitehall with the thunders of their academical eloquence: it is another kind of eloquence, an eloquence without name, prodigious, transporting, spontaneous, and the like of which has been never heard by the ancients or the moderns; it is O'Connell, the great O'Connell, erect upon the soil of his country, with the heavens for dome, the boundless plain for tribune, a whole people for auditory, and for subject that people, incessantly that people, and for echo the universal acclamations of the multitude, resembling the hollow-toned mutterings of the tempest, or the dashing of the billows against the rock-barred beach of the ocean.

Never, in any age or any country, has any man obtained over his nation an empire so sovereign, so absolute, so entire. Ireland impersonates herself in O'Connell. He is, in some sort, himself alone, her army, her parliament, her ambassador, her prince, her liberator, her apostle, her god. His ancestors, descendants of the Kings of Ireland, wore at their side the falchion of battles. He, a tribune of the people, carries likewise the falchion of other battles, the falchion of eloquence, more redoubtable than the sword.

Behold O'Connell with his people, for they are veritably his he lives in their life, he smiles in their joys, he bleeds in their wounds, he weeps in their sorrows. He transports them from fear to hope, from servitude to liberty, from the