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CONTRAST OF A YOUNG PRINCE AND AN OLD KING.

I

NSTEAD of a monarch, jealous, severe, and avaricious, who, in proportion as he advanced in years, was sinking still deeper in these unpopular vices, a young prince of eighteen had succeeded to the throne, who even in the eyes of men of sense gave promising hopes of his future conduct, much more in those of the people, always enchanted with novelty, youth, and royal dignity. The beauty and vigour of his person, accompanied with dexterity in every manly exercise, was further adorned with a blooming and ruddy countenance, with a lively air, with the appearance of spirit and activity in all his demeanour. His father, in order to remove him from the knowledge of public business, had hitherto occupied him entirely in the pursuits of literature, and the proficiency which he made gave no bad prognostic of his parts and capacity. Even the vices of vehemence, ardour, and impatience, to which he was subject, and which afterwards degenerated into tyranny, were considered only as faults, incident to unguarded youth, which would be corrected when time had brought him to greater moderation and maturity.

SUETONIUS, Caligula, c. 3, 4.

TACITUS, Hist. iv. c. 86. i. c. 14. LIVY, xxiv. c. 4, 5.

CLEOPATRA.-HER ACCOMPLISHMENTS.

HOUGH her own security had been her first object, and
her ambition the second, the inspirer of so many

ΤΗ
THOUGH her licentious

passions was at last enslaved herself. She might disdain the fear of a rival potentate, and defy the indignation of Octavius, but her anxiety about his sister was the instinct of the woman rather than of the queen. She could not forget that a wife's legitimate

influence had once detained her lover from her side for more than two whole years; she might still apprehend the awakening of his reason, and his renunciation of an alliance which at times he felt she well knew to be bitterly degrading. To retain her grasp of her admirer, as well as her seat upon the throne of the Ptolemies, she must drown his scruples in voluptuous oblivion, and invent new charms to revive and amuse his jaded passion. Her personal talents were indeed of the most varied kind; she was an admirable singer and musician; she was skilled in many languages, and possessed intellectual accomplishments. rarely found among the staidest of her sex, combined with the archness and humour of the lightest. She pampered her lover's grosser appetites by rank and furious indulgences; she stimulated his flagging zest in them by ingenious surprises; nor less did she gratify every reviving taste for nobler enjoyments with paintings and sculptures and works of literature. She amused him with sending divers to fasten salt-fish to the bait of his angling-rod; and when she had pledged herself to consume the value of ten million sesterces at a meal, amazed him by dissolving in the humble cup of vinegar before her a pearl of inestimable price.-Merivale.

SALLUST, Catilin. c. 25.

CICERO, pro Cluentio, § 12-16.
HORACE, Od. I. xxxvii. Epod. ix.

PART III.

ORATORICAL.

INVECTIVE AGAINST MINISTERS, AND DENUNCIATION OF WAR.

I

AM not, nor did I ever pretend to be, a statesman; but that character is so tainted and so equivocal in our day, that I am not sure that a pure and honourable ambition would aspire to it. I have not enjoyed for thirty years, like these noble lords, the emoluments of office. I have not set my sails to every passing breeze. I am a plain and simple citizen, sent here by one of the foremost constituencies of the Empire, representing feebly, perhaps, but honestly, the opinions of very many, and the true interests of all that have sent me here. Let it not be said that I am alone in my condemnation of this war, or of an incompetent and guilty Ministry. And, even if I were alone, if my voice were the solitary one raised amid the din of arms and the clamours of a venal press, I should have the consolation I have to-night—and which I trust will be mine to the last moment of my existence-the priceless consolation that I have never uttered one word that could promote the squandering of my country's treasure, or the spilling of one single drop of my country's blood.-J. Bright.

SALLUST, Jugurth. c. 31.

HORACE, Od. III. iii. 1-8.
LIVY, vi. c. 40. xxii. c. 34.

PASSIONATE CONDEMNATION OF THE POLICY, AND PARTY OF PITT.

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ENTLEMEN, I stand up in this contest against the friends

and followers of Mr. Pitt, or as they partially designate him, the immortal statesman now no more. Immortal in the miseries of his devoted country! Immortal in the cruel wars which sprang from his cold miscalculating ambition! Immortal in the intolerable taxes, the countless loads of debt which these wars have flung upon us-which the youngest man amongst us will not live to see the end of! Immortal in the triumphs of our enemies, and the ruin of our allies, the costly purchase of so much blood and treasure! Immortal in the afflictions of England, and the humiliation of her friends, through the whole results of his twenty years' reign, from the first rays of favour with which a delighted court gilded his early apostasy, to the deadly glare which is at this instant cast upon his name by the burning metropolis of our last ally !* But may no such immortality ever fall to my lot-let me rather live innocent and inglorious; and when at last I cease to serve you, and to feel for your wrongs, may I have a humble monument in some nameless stone, to tell that beneath it there rests from his labours in your service, an enemy of the immortal statesman—a friend of peace and of the people!"

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Friends! you must now judge for yourselves and act accordingly. Against us and against you stand those who call themselves the successors of that man. They are the heirs of his policy; and if not of his immortality too, it is only because their talents for the work of destruction are less transcendent than his. They are his surviving colleagues. His fury survives in them, if not his fire; and they partake of all his infatuated principles, if they have lost the genius that first made those principles triumphant. If you choose

* The news of the burning of Moscow had arrived by that day's post.

them for your delegates, you know to what policy you lend your sanction—what men you exalt to power. Should you prefer me, your choice falls upon one who, if obscure and unambitious, will at least give his own age no reason to fear him, or posterity to curse him—one whose proudest ambition it is to be deemed the friend of Liberty and of Peace.--Lord Brougham.

CICERO, Philipp. ii. § 110, sqq. LIVY, xxi. c. 10. ix. c. 33.
SALLUST, Bell. Jugurth. c. 31.

APPEAL DEPRECATING THE PERNICIOUS INFLUENCE OF INDIAN RICHES UPON ENGLISH HONESTY.

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ND now, my lords, in what a situation are we all placed! This prosecution of the Commons (I wish to have it understood, and I am sure I shall not be disclaimed in it) is a prosecution not merely for preventing this and that offence, but it is a great censorial prosecution, for the purpose of preserving the manners, characters, and virtues that characterize the people of England.

The situation in which we stand is dreadful. These people pour in upon us every day. They not only bring with them the wealth which they have acquired, but they bring with them into our country the vices by which it was acquired: formerly the people of England were censured, and perhaps properly, with being a sullen, unsocial, cold, unpleasant race of men, and as inconstant as the climate in which they are born. These are the vices which the enemies of the kingdom charged them with, and people are seldom charged with vices of which they do not in some measure partake. But nobody refused them the character of being an openhearted, candid, liberal, plain, sincere people; qualities which would conceal a thousand faults if they had them. But if, by conniving at these faults, you once teach the people of England a concealing, narrow, suspicious, guarded conduct; if you teach them qualities directly the contrary to those by which they have hitherto

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