SENTIMENTS BECOMING THE CRISIS

Nor are sentiments of elevation in themselve turgid and unnatural. Nature is never more truly herself than in her grandest form. The Apollo of Belvidere (if the universal robber has yet left him at Belvidere) is as much in nature as any figure from the pencil of Rembrandt, or any clown in the rustic revels of Teniers. Indeed, it is when a great nation is in great diffi

also, by their personal service in the fleets and their country may demand the certain sacrifice armies of their country. They do contribute, of thousands. and in their full and fair proportion, according to the relative proportion of their numbers in the community. They contribute all the mind that actuates the whole machine. The fortitude required of them is very different from the rnthinking alacrity of the common soldier, or common sailor, in the face of danger and death; it is not a passion, it is not an impulse, it is not a sentiment; it is a cool, steady, deliberate principle, always present, always equable; having no connection with anger; tempering honor with prudence; incited, invigorated, and sus-culties that minds must exalt themselves to the tained by a generous love of fame; informed, moderated, and directed by an enlarged knowledge of its own great public ends; flowing in one blended stream from the opposite sources of the heart and the head; carrying in itself its own commission, and proving its title to every other command, by the first and most difficult command, that of the bosom in which it resides; it is a fortitude which unites with the courage of the field the more exalted and refined courage of the council; which knows as well to retreat as to advance; which can conquer as well by delay as by the rapidity of a march or the impetuosity of an attack; which can be, with Fabius, the black cloud that lowers on the tops of the mountains, or with Scipio, the thunderbolt of war; which, undismayed by false shame, can patiently endure the severest trial that a gallant spirit can undergo, in the taunts and provocations of the enemy, the suspicions, the cold respect, and "mouth honor" of those from whom it should meet a cheerful obedience; which, undisturbed by false humanity, can calmly assume that most awful moral responsibility of deciding when victory may be too dearly purchased by the loss of a single life, and when the safety and glory of

occasion, or all is lost. Strong passior., under the direction of a feeble reason, feeds a low fever, which serves only to destroy the body that entertains it. But vehement passion does not always indicate an infirm judgment. It often accompanies, and actuates, and is even auxiliary to a powerful understanding; and when they both conspire and act harmoniously, their force is great to destroy disorder within, and to repel injury from abroad. If ever there was a time that calls on us for no vulgar conception of things, and for exertions in no vulgar strain, it is the awful hour that Providence has now appointed to this nation. Every little measure is a great error; and every great error will bring on no small ruin. Nothing can be directed above the mark that we must aim at; every thing below it is absolutely thrown away.

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Who knows whether indignation may not suc ceed to terror, and the revival of high sent ment, spurning away the delusion of a safety purchased at the expense of glory, may not yet drive us to that generous despair, which has often subdued distempers in the state, for which no remedy could be found in the wisest councils?

MISCELLANEOUS.

WILLIAM III. FORMING THE GRAND ALLIANCE
AGAINST LOUIS XIV.

held on his course. He was faithful to his ob ject; and in councils, as in arms, over and over again repulsed, over and over again he returned to the charge. All the mortifications he had suffered from the last Parliament, and the great

The steps which were taken to compose, to reconcile, to unite, and to discipline all Europe against the growth of France, certainly furnisher he had to apprehend from that newly chosen to a statesman the finest and most interesting were not capable of relaxing the vigor of his part in the history of that great period. It form- mind. He was in Holland when he combined ed the master-piece of King William's policy, the vast plan of his foreign negotiations. When dexterity, and perseverance. Full of the idea he came to open his design to his ministers in of preserving, not only a local civil liberty unit- England, even the sober firmness of Somers, the ed with order, to our country, but to embody it undaunted resolution of Shrewsbury, and the adin the political liberty, the order, and the inde- venturous spirit of Montague and Orford, were pendence of nations united under a natural head, staggered. They were not yet mounted to the the King called upon his Parliament to put itself elevation of the King. The cabinet (then the into a posture "to preserve to England the weight regency) met on the subject at Tunbridge Wells and influence it at present had on the councils the 28th of August, 1698; and there, Lord Sum and affairs ABROAD. It will be requisite Eu- ers holding the pen, after expressing doubts rope should see you will not be wanting to your- the state of the continent, which they ultimately selves." refer to the King, as best informed, they give Baffled as that monarch was, and almost heart-him a most discouraging portrait of the spirit broken at the disappointment he met with in the mode he first proposed for that great end, he

this nation. "So far as relates to England, say these ministers, "it would be want of d

workman died; but the work was formed on true mechanical principles; and it was as truly wrought. It went by the impulse it had receiv

Bot to give your majes y this clear account, that there is a deadness and want of spirit in the nation universally, so as not to be at all disposed to entering into a new war. That they seemed from the first mover. The man was dead; to be tired out with tires to a degree beyond what was discerned, till it appeared upon occasion of the late elections. This is the truth of the fact upon which your majesty will determine what resolution ought to be taken."

His majesty did determine, and did take and pursue his resolution. In all the tottering imbecility of a new government, and with Parliament totally unmanageable, he persevered.

He per

but the Grand Alliance survived, in which King William lived and reigned. That heartless and dispirited people, whom Lord Somers had repre sented, about two years before, as dead in ener、 gy and operation, continued that war, to which i was supposed they were unequal in mind and in means, for near thirteen years.

ERTY.1

severed to expel the fears of his people by his THE DUKE OF BEDFORD'S HOLD ON HIS PROPfortitude-to steady their fickleness by his constancy-to expand their narrow prudence by his enlarged wisdom-to sink their factious temper in his public spirit. In spite of his people, he resolved to make them great and glorious; to make England, inclined to shrink into her narrow self, the arbitress of Europe, the tutelary angel of the human race. In spite of the ministers, who staggered under the weight that his mind imposed upon theirs, unsupported as they felt themselves by the popular spirit, he infused into them his own soul; he renewed in them their ancient heart; he rallied them in the same cause. It required some time to accomplish this work. The people were first gained, and through them their distracted representatives. Under the influence of King William, Holland had rejected the allurements of every seduction, and had resisted the terrors of every menace. With Hannibal at her gates, she had nobly and magnanimously refused all separate treaty, or any thing which might for a moment appear to divide her affection or her interest, or even to distinguish her in identity from England.

The Crown has considered me after long serv. ice, the Crown has paid the Duke of Bedford by advance. He has had a long credit for any services which he may perform hereafter. He is secure, and long may he be secure, in his advance, whether he performs any services or not. But let him take care how he endangers the safety of that Constitution which secures his own utility or his own insignificance; or how he discourages those who take up even puny arms to defend an order of things, which, like the sun of heaven, shines alike on the useful and the worthless. His grants are ingrafted on the public law of Europe, covered with the awful hoar of innumerable ages. They are guarded by the sacred rules of prescription, found in that full treasury of jurisprudence from which the jejuneness and penury of our municipal law has, by degrees, been enriched and strengthened. This prescription I had my share (a very full share) in bringing to its perfection. The Duke of Bedford will stand as long as prescriptive law endures; as long as the great stable laws of property, common to us with all civilized nations, are kept in their integrity, and without the smallest intermixture of laws, maxims, principles, or precedents of the grand revolution. They are secure against all changes but one. The whole revolutionary system, institutes, digest, code, novels, text, gloss, comment, are not only not the same, but they are the very reverse, and the reverse, fundamentally, of all the laws on which civil life has hitherto been upheld in all the gov ernments of the world. The learned professors of the rights of man regarded prescription, not as a title to bar all claim, set up against all possession-but they look on prescription as itself a bar against the possessor and proprietor. They hold an immemorial possession to be no more than a long-continued, and therefore an ag gravated injustice.

The English House of Commons was more reserved. The principle of the Grand Alliance was not directly recognized in the resolution of the Commons, nor the war announced, though they were well aware the alliance was formed for the war. However, compelled by the returning sense of the people, they went so far as to fix the three great immovable pillars of the safety and greatness of England, as they were then, as they are now, and as they must ever be to the end of time. They asserted in general terms the necessity of supporting Holland; of keeping united with our allies; and maintaining the liberty of Europe; though they restricted their vote to the succors stipulated by actual treaty. But now they were fairly embarked, they were obliged to go with the course of the vessel; and the whole nation, split before into an hundred adverse factions, with a king at its head evidently declining to his tomb, the whole nation -Lords, Commons, and people-proceeded as one body, informed by one soul. Under the Britsh union, the union of Europe was consolidated; and it long held together with a degree of cohetion, firmness, and fidelity, not known before or since in any political combination of that extent. Just as the last hand was given to this inmense and complicated machine, the master-pus Act.

Such are their ideas, such their religion; and such their law. But as to our country and our race, as long as the well-compacted structure of our church and state, the sanctuary, the holy of

This passage is taken from a letter to a Noble Lord, which was called forth by an insulting attack from the Duke of Bedford when Mr. Burke receiv ed his pension.

2 Sir George Savile's Act, cal'ed the Nullum Tem

at all to dispute, has ordained it in another man. ner, and (whatever my querulous weakness might suggest) a far better. The storm has gone over me, and I lie like ne of those old oaks which the late hurrica e has scattered about me. I am stripped of all my honors; 1 am torn up by the roots, and lie prostrate on the earth! There, and prostrate there, I most unfeignedly recognize the divine justice, & ad in some degree submit to it.

CHARACTER OF SIR JOSHUA REYNOLDS.

holies of that ancient law, defended by reverence, to resist, and whose wisdom it behooves us not defended by power, a fortress at once and a temple, shall stand inviolate on the brow of the British Sion-as long as the British monarchy, | not more limited than fenced by the orders of the stato, shall, like the proud Keep of Windsor, rising in the majesty of proportion, and girt with the double belt of its kindred and coeval towers, as long as this awful structure shall oversee and guard the subjected land-so long the mounds and dikes of the low, fat, Bedford level will have nothing to fear from the pick-axes of all the levelers of France. As long as our sovereign lord the King, and his faithful subjects, the lords and commons of this realm-the triple cord, which Last night (February 23, 1792), in the sixty. no man can break; the solemn, sworn, constitu- ninth year of his age, died, at his house in Lei tional frank-pledge of this nation; the firm guar-cester Fields, Sir Joshua Reynolds. antees of each other's being and each other's rights; the joint and several securities, each in its place and order, for every kind and every quality of property and of dignity. As long as these endure, so long the Duke of Bedford is safe; and we are all safe together-the high from the blights of envy and the spoliations of rapacity; the low from the iron hand of oppression and the insolent spurn of contempt. Amen! and so be it, and so it will be,

Dum domus Æneæ Capitoli immobile saxum
Accolet; imperiumque pater Romanus habebit.*

MR. BURKE ON THE DEATH OF HIS SON. Had it pleased God to continue to me the hopes of succession, I should have been, according to my mediocrity, and the mediocrity of the age I live in, a sort of founder of a family; I should have left a son, who, in all the points in which personal merit can be viewed, in science, in erudition, in genius, in taste, in honor, in generosity, in humanity, in every liberal sentiment, and every liberal accomplishment, would not have shown himself inferior to the Duke of Bedford, or to any of those whom he traces in his line. His grace very soon would have wanted | all plausibility in his attack upon that provision which belonged more to mine than to me. HE would soon have supplied every deficiency, and symmetrized every disproportion. It would not have been for that successor to resort to any stagnant wasting reservoir of merit in me, or in any ancestry. He had in himself a salient, liv- | ing spring of generous and manly action. Every day he lived he would have repurchased the bounty of the Crown, and ten times more, if ten times more he had received. He was made a public creature, and had no enjoyment whatever but in the performance of some duty. At this exigent moment, the loss of a finished man is not easily supplied.

But a Disposer whose power we are little able Templum in modum arcis. Tacitus of the temple of Jerusalem.

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• While on the Capitol's unshaken rock,
The Enean race shall dwell, and FATHER JOVE
Rule c'er the Empire.

Virgil's Eneid, book ix., line 448.

His illness was long, but borne with a mild and cheerful fortitude, without the least mixture of any thing irritable or querulous, agreeably tc the placid and even tenor of his whole life. He had from the beginning of his malady a distinct view of his dissolution, which he contemplated with that entire composure, that nothing but the innocence, integrity, and usefulness of his life. and an unaffected submission to the will of Providence, could bestow. In this situation he had every consolation from family tenderness, which his own kindness to his family had indeed well deserved.

Sir Joshua Reynolds was, on very many accounts, one of the most memorable men of his time. He was the first Englishman who added the praise of the elegant arts to the other glories of his country. In taste, in grace, in facility, in happy invention, and in the richness and harmo ny of coloring, he was equal to the greatest mas ters of the most renowned ages. In portrait he went beyond them; for he communicated to that description of the art, in which English artists are the most engaged, a variety, a faney, and a dignity derived from the higher branches, which even those who professed them in a superior manner did not always preserve when they delineated individual nature. His portraits remind the spectator of the invention of history and the amenity of landscape. In painting portraits, he appeared not to be raised upon that platform, but to descend upon it from a higher sphere. His paintings illustrate his lessons, and his lessons seem to be derived from his paintings. He possessed the theory as perfectly as the practice of his art. To be such a painter, be was a profound and penetrating philosopher. In full happiness of foreign and domestic fame, admired by the expert in art and by the learned in science, courted by the great, caressed by sovereign powers, and celebrated by distinguish. ed poets, his native humility, modesty, and can. dor never forsook him, even on surprise or prov ocation; nor was the least degree of arrogance or assumption visible to the most scrutinizing eye, in any part of his conduct or discourse.

His talents of every kind-powerful from u ture, and not meanl; cultivated by letters-his social virtues in all the relations and all the hab

tudes of life rendered him the center of a very | ousy, too much innocence to provoke any enmigreat and unparalleled variety of agreeable so- ty. The loss of no man of his time can be felt cieties, which will be dissipated by his death. with more sincere, general, and anmixed sorrow He had too much merit not to excite some jeal- HAIL AND FAREWELL!

DETACHED SENTIMENTS AND MAXIMS.'

Never was there a jar or discord between genuine sentiment and sound policy. Never, no, never, did nature say one thing and wisdom say another.

The meditations of the closet have infected senates with a subtle frenzy, and inflamed armies with the brands of the furies.

We are alarmed into reflection; our minds are purified by terror and pity; our weak, unthinking pride is humbled under the dispensations of a mysterious wisdom.

The road to eminence and power, from obscure condition, ought not to be made too easy, nor a thing too much of course. The temple of honor ought to be seated on an eminence. If it be opened through virtue, let it be remembered that virtue is never tried but by some difficulty and some struggle.

Public virtue, being of a nature magnificent and splendid, instituted for great things, and conversant about great concerns, requires abundant scope and room, and can not spread and grow under confinement, and in circumstances straitened, narrow, and sordid.

Al persons possessing any portion of power ught to be strongly and awfully impressed with an idea that they act in trust, and that they are to account for their conduct in that trust to the one great master, author, and founder of society.

They who administer in the government of men, in which they stand in the person of God himself, should have high and worthy notions of their function and destination. Their hope should be full of immortality.

It is with the greatest difficulty that I attempt to separate policy from justice. Justice is itself the great standing policy of civil society, and any eminent departure from it, under any circumstances, lies under the suspicion of being no policy at all.

In all mutations (if mutations must be), the circumstance which will serve most to blunt the edge of their mischief, and to promote what good may be in them, is, that they should find us with our minds tenacious of justice, and tender of property.

A man, full of warm, speculative benevolence, nay wish society otherwise constituted than he inds it; but a good patriot, and a true politician, always considers how he shall make the most of

A few of these sentences have beon very slightdified or abridged, in order to give them the tharacter of distinct propositions, but in no way af lecting the sense.

the existing materials of his country. A dispo sition to preserve, and an ability to improve, taken together, would be my standard of a statesman. Every thing else is vulgar in the conception, perilous in the execution.

It is one of the excellencies of a method, in which time is among the assistants, that its operation is slow, and, in some cases, almost im perceptible.

It can not be too often repeated, line upon line, precept upon precept, until it comes into the currency of a proverb, to innovate is not to reform.

It is the degenerate fondness for taking short cuts, and little fallacious facilities, that has in so many parts of the world created governments with arbitrary powers.

Rage and frenzy will pull down more in half an hour, than prudence, deliberation, and foresight can build up in a hundred years.

I shall always consider that liberty as very equivocal in her appearance, which has not wisdom and justice for her companions, and does not lead prosperity and plenty in her train.

What is liberty without wisdom and without virtue ? It is the greatest of all possible evils; for it is folly, vice, and madness, without tuition or restraint.

The strong struggle in every individual to pre serve possession of what he has found to belong to him and to distinguish him, is one of the securities against injustice and despotism implanted in our nature. It operates as an instinct to sesettled state. cure property, and to preserve communities in a What is there to shock in this? Nobility is a graceful ornament to the civil order. It is the Corinthian capital of polished society.

It is a sour, malignant, envious disposition, without taste for the reality, or for any image or representation of virtue, that sees with joy the unmerited fall of what had long flourished in splendor and in honor.

The perennial existence of bodies corporate and their fortunes, are things particularly suited to a man who has long views; who meditates designs that require time in fashioning, and which propose duration when they are accomplished.

None can aspire to act greatly, but those who are of force greatly to suffer.

Strong instances of self-denial operate power fully on our minds; and a man who has no wants has obtained great freedom and firmness, and even dignity.