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steady hand; and when the rest of the continent crouched under the menaces, and the English court was bought by the gold of France, she stood alone and undaunted, defending the liberties of the world with a perseverance and self-devotion never surpassed by any nation. During the same period she had served the cause of freedom and reason, in another and much more effectual manner, by breaking down the old aristocratic contempt for the mercantile character; and her merchants, while they amazed the world by an exhibition of the wonderful effects of capital and credit, directed by sagacity and enterprise, and operating on a vaster scale, than had ever before been seen, shamed the poor prejudices of their age out of countenance by a high-minded and punctilious honesty, before which, the more lax commercial morality of their degenerate descendants in this country should stand rebuked.

It was about this same remarkable period of her history, that Holland produced many of the most illustrious men of modern Europe. There are no greater names, in politics and arms, than Barneveldt and Dewitt, than Tromp and De Ruyter, than Prince Maurice and the Williams of Orange-none more conspicuous in letters and philosophy than those of Erasmus, Grotius, and Boerhave. In physical and mathematical science, with the single exception of the discoveries of Newton, nearly as much was done in Holland as in all the rest of Europe besides. It was there that were invented the most important and useful instruments of Natural Philosophy; the telescope, by Jansen; the microscope and the thermometer, by Drebell; the pendulum, in its application to clocks and as a standard of measure, by Huyghens; and the Leyden Phial, by Cuneus and Muschenbroek. The Medical School of Leyden, in the time of Boerhave and his immediate successors, was what that of Edinburgh has since become. In ancient literature, the scholars of Holland effected all that learning and industry could accomplish, and prepared the way for that very ingenious and philosophical investigation of the principles of language which has since been so successfully cultivated in the Dutch Universities. Her jurists were the expounders of public and of civil law to the continent, and the theologians of the whole protestant world entered into the controversies of the Dutch divines, and had ranked themselves, on either side, under the banners of Gomar and Arminius.

From "Address before New York Historical Society."

THE USE OF KNOWLEDGE.

CARDINAL WISEMAN.

WHOSOEVER shall try to cultivate a wider field, and follow, from day to day, as humbly we have striven here to do, the constant progress of every science, careful ever to note the influence which it exercises on

his more sacred knowledge, shall have therein such pure joy, and such growing comfort, as the disappointing eagerness of mere human learning may not supply. Such a one I know not unto whom to liken, save to one who unites an enthusiastic love of Nature's charms, to a sufficient acquaintance with her laws, and spends his days in a garden of the choicest bloom. And here he seeth one gorgeous flower, that has unclasped all its beauty to the glorious sun; and there another is just about to disclose its modester blossom, not yet fully unfolded; and beside them, there is one only in the hand-stem, giving but slender promise of much display; and yet he waiteth patiently, well knowing that the law is fixed whereby it too shall pay, in due season, its tribute to the light and heat that feed it. Even so, the other doth likewise behold one science after the other, when its appointed hour is come, and its ripening influences have prevailed, unclose some form which shall add to the varied harmony of universal truth, which shall recompense, to the full, the genial power that hath given it life, and, however barren it may have seemed at first, produce something that may adorn the temple and altar of God's worship.

And if he carefully register his own convictions, and add them to the collections already formed, of various, converging proofs, he assuredly will have accomplished the noblest end for which man may live and acquire learning, his own improvement, and the benefit of his kind. For, as an old and wise poet has written, after a wiser saint:—

"The chief use then in man of that he knowes,

Is his paines-taking for the good of all,

Not fleshly weeping for our own made woes,

Not laughing from a melancholy gall,

Not hating from a soul that overflowes

With bitterness breathed out from inward thrall;

But sweetly rather to ease, loose, or binde,

As need requires, this fraile fallen human kinde."

From "Lectures on Science and Religion."

ENGLISH PRISONS.

SYDNEY SMITH

In this age of charity and of prison improvement, there is one aid to prisoners which appears to be wholly overlooked; and that is, the means of regulating their defence, and providing them witnesses for their trial. A man is tried for murder, or for house-breaking, or robbery, without a single shilling in his pocket. The nonsensical and capricious institutions of the English law, prevent him from engaging counsel to speak in his defence, if he had the wealth of Croesus; but he has no money to employ even an attorney, or to procure a single witness, or to

ness.

take out a subpoena. The judge, we are told, is his counsel;-this is sufficiently absurd; but it is not pretended that the judge is his witHe solemnly declares that he has three or four witnesses who could give a completely different color to the transaction;-but they are sixty or seventy miles distant, working for their daily bread, and have no money for such a journey, nor for the expense of a residence of some days in an assize town. They do not know even the time of the assize, nor the modes of tendering their evidence if they could come. When everything is so well marshalled against him on the opposite side, it would be singular if an innocent man, with such an absence of all means of defending himself, should not occasionally be hanged or transported and accordingly we believe that such things have happened. Let any man, immediately previous to the assizes, visit the prisoners for trial, and see the many wretches who are to answer to the most serious accusations, without one penny to defend themselves. If it appeared probable, upon inquiry, that these poor creatures had important evidence, which they could not bring into court for want of money, would it not be a wise application of compassionate funds to give them this fair chance of establishing their innocence ?-It seems to us no bad finale of the pious labors of those who guard the poor from ill-treatment during their imprisonment, to take care that they are not unjustly hanged at the expiration of the term.

From "Reviews," 1821.

IRELAND AND GRATTAN.

SYDNEY SMITH.

THANK God that all is not profligacy and corruption in the history of that devoted people-and that the name of Irishman does not always carry with it the idea of the oppressor or the oppressed-the plunderer or the plundered-the tyrant or the slave. Great men hallow a whole people, and lift up all who live in their time. What Irishman does not feel proud that he has lived in the days of GRATTAN? who has not turned to him for comfort, from the false friends and open enemies of Ireland? who did not remember him in the days of its burnings and wastings and murders? No government ever dismayed him-the world could not bribe him-he thought only of Ireland-lived for no other object-dedicated to her his beautiful fancy, his elegant wit, his manly courage, and all the splendor of his astonishing eloquence. He was so born and so gifted, that poetry, forensic skill, elegant literature, and all the highest attainments of human genius, were within his reach; but he thought the noblest occupation of a man was to make other men happy and free; and in that straight line he went on for fifty years, without one side-look, without one yielding thought, without one motive

in his heart which he might not have laid open to the view of God and man. He is gone!—but there is not a single day of his honest life of which every good Irishman would not be more proud, than of the whole political existence of his countrymen—the annual deserters and betrayers of their native land.

From "Reviews," 1821.

RAPID PROGRESS IN AGRICULTURE.

W. M. MEREDITH.

THE advance is going on. We shall step from improvement to improvement, until agriculture, like the other sciences, will necessarily have had its day. A little explanation will make this obvious. Our chemists have analyzed both the plants, and the animals, and the earth. We are no longer in the dark. For instance, we will suppose there is some individual whose backbone wants a little stiffening-an uncommon case in this quarter, sir. Chemistry tells him that he wants a particular quantity of phosphate of lime, I think. How does he get it? Why, sir, you have to take that phosphate of lime and put it in the earth; then you sow the wheat; then you take it out of the earth, and it must pass through a variety of processes-reaping, threshing, grinding, &c.; you have your machines working away at it by steam-(I acknowledge that you have reduced already all the peasantry of your country to one engineer, and a stoker for each farm, so that a man with his eyes shut cannot tell whether he is on a farm or a steamboat)-you must put the phosphate of lime in the ground and coax it out with wheat, and reap it, and thresh it, and grind it, knead it, bake it, and then cut it into slices and put in your mouth.

The next great inventor,-I hope it may not be you, sir, because I think immortality of that kind is not what you desire-will look to saving all these intermediate processes of labor, and putting the phosphate of lime right into the man's mouth. Like Columbus with the egg, the simplicity of the thing will be so great, that everybody will wonder that it was not thought of sooner. In medicine we have acted upon this principle for centuries. When the doctor wants to administer a little mineral of some sort, some calomel, or magnesia, or anything of that kind, he does not go about planting seed, and reaping a crop, and then making it into bread, but he gives it to you at once; he pops it right down your throat; he thrusts the magnesia right into your gullet, and it will do what it was intended to do. Now, sir, they will apply that to food. I am rather conservative; I do not enter into these questions of progress; I go for things as they are, and I am content to be fed as we have been. Therefore, I hope it will be some

remote successor of yours who will preside at a banquet of this kind. The first course will be a phosphate of lime and carbonate of magnesia; there will be a side dish of super-phosphate of iron, and a sort of omelette souflé of gluten. From "Speech before United States Agricultural Society."

THE WONDERS OF THE DEEP.

ANONYMOUS.

WHO ever gazed upon the broad sea without emotion? whether seen in stern majesty, hoary with the tempest, rolling its giant waves upon the rocks, and dashing with resistless fury some gallant bark on an ironbound coast; or sleeping beneath the silver moon, its broad bosom broken but by a gentle ripple, just enough to reflect a long line of light, a path of gold upon a pavement of sapphire; who has looked upon the sea without feeling that it has power? Perhaps there is no earthly object, not even the cloud-cleaving mountains of an alpine country, so sublime as the sea in its severe and marked simplicity. Standing on some promontory, whence the eye roams far out from the unbounded ocean, the soul expands, and we conceive a nobler idea of the majesty of that God, who holdeth "the waters in the hollow of his hand." But it is only when on a long voyage, climbing, day after day, to the giddy elevation of the masthead, one still discerns nothing in the wide circumference but the same boundless wastes of waters, that the mind grasps anything approaching an adequate idea of the grandeur of the ocean.

Mailed and glittering creatures of strange form suddenly appear, play a moment in our sight, and, with the velocity of thought, vanish into the boundless depths. The very birds that we see in the wide wastes are mysterious; we wonder whence they come, whither they go, how they sleep, homeless and shelterless as they seem to be. The breeze, so fickle in its visitings, rises and dies away; "but thou knowest not whence it cometh and whither it goeth;" the night wind moaning by, soothes the watchful helmsman with gentle sounds, that suggest to him the whisperings of unseen spirits; or the tempest, shrieking and groaning among the cordage, turns him pale with the anticipation of a watery grave.

ASPECTS OF THE OECAN.

ANONYMOUS.

THE Ocean is never perfectly at rest; even between the tropics, in what are called the calm latitudes, where the impatient seaman, for weeks together, looks wistfully but vainly for the welcome breeze to

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