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II. CHARACTER OF WASHINGTON.

(PHILLIPS.)

George Washington, first President of the United States, was born in 1732, and died in 1799.

SIR, it matters very little what immediate spot may have been the birth-place of such a man as WASHINGTON. No people can claim, no country can appropriate him. The boon of Providence to the human race, his fame is eternity, and his residence creation. Though it was the defeat of our arms, and the disgrace of our policy, I almost bless the convulsion in which he had his origin. If the heavens thundered, and the earth rocked, yet, when the storm had passed, how pure was the climate that it cleared! how bright, in the brow of the firmament, was the planet which it revealed to us!

In the production of Washington it does really appear as if Nature was endeavouring to improve upon herself, and that all the virtues of the ancient world were but so many studies preparatory to the patriot of the new. Individual instances, no doubt, there were, splendid exemplifications of some single qualification: Cæsar was merciful, Scipio was continent, Hannibal was patient; but it was reserved for Washington to blend them all in one, and, like the lovely masterpiece of the Grecian artist, to exhibit, in one glow of associated beauty, the pride of every model, and the perfection of every master.

As a general, he marshalled the peasant into a veteran, and supplied, by discipline, the absence of experience; as a statesman, he enlarged the policy of the cabinet into the most comprehensive system of general advantage; and such was the wisdom of his views, and the philosophy of his counsels, that, to the soldier and the statesman, he almost added the character of the sage! A conqueror, he was untainted with the crime of blood; a revolutionist, he was free from any stain of treason,-for aggression commenced the contest, and his country called him to the command. Liberty unsheathed his sword, necessity stained, victory returned it.

If he had paused here, history might have doubted what station to assign him; whether at the head of her citizens or her soldiers, her heroes or her patriots. But the last glorious act crowns his career, and banishes all hesitation. Who, like Washington, after having emancipated a hemisphere, resigned its crown, and preferred the retirement of domestic life to the adoration of a land he might be almost said to have created?

III.-SCIENCE AND ART.

(SIR D. BREWSTER.)

Sir D. Brewster, LL.D., K.H., one of the most distinguished philosophers of modern times, was born in Jedburgh in 1781. The following specimen is from the address delivered by him in opening the winter session of the University of Edinburgh, in the first year of his incumbency as Principal (1859–60).

In the study of natural philosophy, chemistry, and natural history, a wide field of knowledge will be spread out before you, in which every fact you observe, and every truth you learn, will surprise and delight you. Creations of boundless extent, displaying unlimited power, matchless wisdom, and overflowing beneficence, will at every step surround you. The infinitely great and the infinitely little will compete for your admiration; and in contemplating the great scheme of creation which these inquiries present to your minds, you will not overlook the almost superhuman power by which it has been developed. Fixed upon the pedestal of his native earth, and with no other instrument but the eye and the hand, the genius of man has penetrated the dark and distant recesses of time and space. The finite has comprehended the infinite. The being of a day has pierced backwards into primeval time, deciphering the subterranean monuments, and inditing its chronicle of countless ages. In the rugged crust and shattered pavement of our globe he has detected those gigantic forces by which our seas and continents have changed places-by which our mountain ranges have emerged from the bed of the ocean-by which the gold, and the silver, the coal, and the iron, and the lime, have been thrown into the hands of man as the materials of civilization—and by

which mighty cycles of animal and vegetable life have been embalmed and entombed.

In your astronomical studies, the Earth on which you dwell will stand forth in space a suspended ball, taking its place as one of the smallest of the planets, and like them pursuing its appointed path-the arbiter of times and seasons. Beyond our planetary system, now extended, by the discovery of Neptune, to three thousand millions of miles from the sun, and throughout the vast expanse of the universe, the telescope will exhibit to you new suns and systems of worlds, infinite in number and variety, sustaining, doubtless, myriads of living beings, and presenting new spheres for the exercise of divine power and beneficence..

.....

The advances which have recently been made in the mechanical and useful arts have already begun to influence our social condition, and must affect still more deeply our systems of education. The knowledge which used to constitute a scholar, and fit him for social and intellectual intercourse, will not avail him under the present ascendency of practical science. New and gigantic inventions mark almost every passing year-the colossal tubular bridge, conveying the monster train over an arm of the sea-the submarine cable, carrying the pulse of speech beneath 2000 miles of ocean the monster ship freighted with thousands of livesand the huge rifle gun throwing its fatal and unchristian charge across miles of earth or of ocean. New arts, too, useful and ornamental, have sprung up luxuriantly around us. New powers of nature have been evoked, and man communicates with man across seas and continents with more certainty and speed than if he had been endowed with the velocity of the race-horse, or provided with the pinions of the eagle. Wherever we are, in short, art and science surround us. They have given birth to new and lucrative professions. Whatever we purpose to do, they help us. In our houses they greet us with light and heat. When we travel we find them at every stage on land, and at every harbour on our shores. They stand beside our board by day, and beside our couch by night. To our thoughts they give the speed of lightning, and to our time-pieces the punctuality of the sun; and though they cannot provide us with the

boasted lever of Archimedes to move the earth, or indicate the spot upon which we must stand could we do it, they have put into our hands tools of matchless power by which we can study the remotest worlds; and they have furnished us with an intellectual plummet by which we can sound the depths of the earth, and count the cycles of its endurance. In his hour of presumption and ignorance man has tried to do more than this; but though he was not permitted to reach the heavens with his cloud-capt tower of stone, and has tried in vain to navigate the aërial ocean, it was given him to ascend into the Empyrean by chains of thought which no lightning could fuse, and no comet strike; and though he has not been allowed to grasp with an arm of flesh the products of other worlds, or tread upon the pavement of gigantic planets, he has been enabled to scan, with more than an eagle's eye, the mighty creations in the bosom of space to march intellectually over the mosaics of sidereal systems, and to follow the adventurous Phaethon in a chariot which can never be overturned.

IV.-MOUNTAINS.

(WILLIAM HOW ITT.)

He excels as a

William Howitt was born at Heanor in Derbyshire in 1795. poet, as a descriptive writer, and as a novelist. Mrs. Howitt has been associated with him in some of his publications.

THANKS be to God for mountains! The variety which they impart to the glorious bosom of our planet were no small advantage; the beauty which they spread out to our vision in their woods and waters, their crags and slopes, their clouds and atmospheric hues, were a splendid gift; the sublimity which they pour into our deepest souls from their majestic aspects,-the poetry which breathes from their streams, and dells, and airy heights, from the sweet abodes, the garbs and manners of their inhabitants,-the songs and legends which have awoke in them, were a proud heritage to imaginative minds. But what are all these when the thought comes, that without mountains the spirit of man

must have bowed to the brutal and the base, and probably have sunk to the monotonous level of the unvaried plain?

When I turn my eyes upon the map of the world, and behold how wonderfully the countries where our faith was nurtured, where our liberties were generated, where our philosophy and literature, the fountains of our intellectual grace and beauty, sprang up, were as distinctly walled out by God's hand with mountain ramparts, from the eruptions and interruptions of barbarism, as if at the especial prayer of the early fathers of man's destinies, I am lost in an exalting admiration. Look at the bold barriers of Palestine! See how the infant liberties of Greece were sheltered from the vast tribes of the uncivilized north by the heights of Hæmus and Rhodope! Behold how the Alps describe their magnificent crescent, inclining their opposite extremities to the Adriatic and Tyrrhene Seas, locking up Italy from the Gallic and Teutonian hordes till the power and spirit of Rome had reached their maturity, and she had opened the wide forest of Europe to the light, spread far her laws and language, and planted the seeds of many mighty nations!

Thanks to God for mountains! Their colossal firmness seems almost to break the current of time itself. The geologist in them searches for traces of the earlier world; and it is there, too, that man, resisting the revolutions of lower regions, retains through innumerable years his habits and his rights. While a multitude of changes has remoulded the people of Europe-while languages, and laws, and dynasties, and creeds, have passed over it, like shadows over the landscape-the children of the Celt and the Goth, who fled to the mountains a thousand years ago, are found there now, and show us, in face and figure, in language and garb, what their fathers were; show us a fine contrast with the modern tribes dwelling below and around them; and show us, moreover, how adverse is the spirit of the mountain to mutability, and that there the fiery heart of Freedom is found for

ever.

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