lied; they enjoyed her whilst they lived, and dying, bequeathed the dear inheritance to your care. And as they left you this glorious legacy, they have undoubtedly transmitted to you some portion of their noble spirit, to inspire you with the virtue to merit her, and courage to preserve her. You surely can not, with such examples before your eyes, as every page of the history of this country affords, suffer your liberties to be ravished from you by lawless force, or cajoled away by flattery and fraud. PUNCH. Ex. CLXIII.-CRITIQUE ON HIAWATHA. You, who hold in grace and honor, Mars he gave the Night's First Watches, Write we as Protracted Fellow, Merely facile flowing nonsense, Should you ask me, What's its nature? From the mountains, moors, and fenlands, Where the heron, the Shuh-shuh-gah, Finds its sugar in the rushes: From the fast-decaying nations, Should you ask me, By what story, You prefer your ears well tickled; There's Nokomis, there's Wenonah— "Barred with streaks of red and yellow And her story's far too touching Once upon a time in London, To the dreadful Northern Wizard, How a scribe, with pen chivalrous, With their Chief, the clean Efmatthews, Came the gracious Mari-Kee-lee, Firing off a pocket-pistol, Singing, too, that Mudjee-keewis (Shortened in the song to "Wild Wind,”) Was a spirit very kindly. Came her sire, the joyous Kee-lee, And the poem which I speak of? Mighty writers-Punch the mightiest ; Read, and learn, and then be thankful Truer poet, better fellow, Than to be annoyed at jesting, From his friend, great Punch, who loves him. Ex. CLXIV.-HAMLET TO THE PLAYERS. SHAKSPEARE. SPEAK the speech, I pray you, as I pronounced it to you, trippingly, on the tongue. But if you mouth it, as many of the players do, I had as lief the town-crier had spoke my lines. And do not saw the air too much with your hand; but use all gently: for in the very torrent, tempest, and, as I may say, whirlwind of your passion, you must acquire and beget a temperance that may give it smoothness. Oh! it offends me to the soul, to hear a robustious, periwig-pated fell w tear a passion to tatters, to very rags, to split the ears of the groundlings; who, for the most part, are capable of nothing but inexplicable dumb shows and noise. Pray, you avoid it. Be not too tame, neither: but let your own discretion be your tutor. Suit the action to the word, the word to the action; with this special observance, that you o'erstep not the modesty of nature: for any thing so overdone is from the purpose of playing, whose end is to hold, as it were, the mirror up to nature; to show virtue her own feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure. Now, this overdone, or come tardy off, though it makes the unskillful laugh, can not but make the judicious grieve; the censure of one of which must, in your allowance, o'erweigh a whole theater of others. Oh! there be players that I have seen play, and heard others praise, and that highly, that, neither having the accent of Christian, nor the gait of Christian, pagan, nor man, have so strutted and bellowed, that I have thought some of Nature's journeymen had made men, and not made them well; they imitated humanity so abominably. Ex. CLXV.-IMPEACHMENT OF HASTINGS. BURKE. My lords, at this awful close, in the name of the commons, and surrounded by them, I attest the retiring, I attest the advancing generations, between which, as a link in the great chain of eternal order, we stand. We call this nation, we call the world to witness, that the commons have shrunk from no labor; that we have been guilty of no prevarication; that we have made no compromise with crime; that we have feared no odium whatsoever, in the long warfare we have carried on with the crimes-with the vices-with the exorbitant wealth—with the enormous and overpowering influence of Eastern corruption. This war, my lords, we have waged for twenty-two years, and the conflict has been fought, at your lordships' bar, for the last seven years. My lords, twenty-two years is a great space in the scale of the life of inan; it is no inconsiderable space in the history of a great nation. A business which has so long occupied the councils and the tribunals of Great Britain, can not possibly be hud |