more ardently they love liberty, the more perfect will be their obedience. Slavery they can have anywhere. It is a weed that grows in every soil. They may have it from Spain, they may have it from Prussia. But, until you become lost to all feeling of your true interest and your natural dignity, freedom they can have from none but you. This is the commodity of price, of which you have the monopoly. This is the true act of navigation, which binds to you the commerce of the Colonies, and through them secures to you the wealth of the world. Deny them this participation of freedom, and you break that sole bond which originally made, and must still preserve, the unity of the empire. Do not entertain so weak an imagination, as that your registers and your bonds, your affidavits and your sufferances, your cockets and your clearances, are what form the great securities of your commerce. Do not dream that your letters of office, and your instructions, and your suspending clauses, are the things that hold together the great contexture of this mysterious whole. These things do not make your government. Dead instruments, passive tools as they are, it is the spirit of the English communion that gives all their life and efficacy to them. It is the spirit of the English constitution, which, infused through the mighty mass, pervades, feeds, unites, invigorates, vivifies every part of the empire, even down to the minutest member.

Is it not the same virtue which does everything for us here in England? Do you imagine, then, that it is the land tax act which raises your revenue? that it is the annual vote in the committee of supply, which gives you your army? or that it is the mutiny bill, which inspires it with bravery and discipline? No! surely no! It is the love of the people; it is their attachment to their government, from the sense of the deep stake they have in such a glorious institution, which gives you your army and your navy, and infuses into both that liberal obedience, without which your army would be a base rabble, and your navy nothing but rotten timber.

All this, I know well enough, will sound wild and chimerical to the profane herd of those vulgar and mechanical politicians, who have no place among us; a sort of people who think that nothing exists but what is gross and material; and who therefore, far from being qualified to be directors of the great movement of empire, are not fit to turn a wheel in the machine. But to men truly initiated and rightly taught, these ruling and master principles, which, in the

opinion of such men as I have mentioned, have no substantial existence, are in truth everything, and all in all. Magnanimity in politics is not seldom the truest wisdom; and a great empire and little minds go ill together. If we are conscious of our situation, and glow with zeal to fill our places as becomes our station and ourselves, we ought to auspicate our public proceedings on America with the old warning of the Church, Sursum Corda ! * We ought to elevate our minds to the greatness of that trust to which the order of Providence has called us. By adverting to the dignity of this high calling, our ancestors have turned a savage wilderness into a glorious empire; and have made the most extensive, and the only honorable conquests, not by destroying, but by promoting the wealth, the number, the happiness of the human race. Let us get an American revenue as we have got an American empire. English privileges have made it all that it is; English privileges alone will make it all it can be.

THE DECAY OF CHIVALROUS SENTIMENT. †

It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the Queen of France, then the Dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she just began to move in, glittering like the morning star, full of life and splendor and joy. O, what a revolution! and what a heart must I have, to contemplate without emotion that elevation and that fall! Little did I dream when she added titles of veneration to those of enthusiastic, distant, respectful love, that she should ever be obliged to carry the sharp antidote against disgrace concealed in that bosom; little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fallen upon her in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor, and of cavaliers. I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards to avenge even a look that threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone. That of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded; and the glory of Europe is extinguished forever. Never,

* SURSUM CORDA, Lift up your hearts.

This is justly estimated as one of the finest rhetorical passages in our language. It refers to the execution of Marie Antoinette, wife of Louis XVI., and Queen of France. She was guillotined by the Jacobins in 1793, during the celebrated French Revolution. The remarks about the "age of chivalry" and the "cheap defense of nations" have become famous.

never more shall we behold that generous loyalty to rank and sex, that proud submission, that dignified obedience, that subordination of the heart, which kept alive, even in servitude itself, the spirit of an exalted freedom. The unbought grace of life, the cheap defense of nations, the nurse of manly sentiment and heroic enterprise, is gone! It is gone, that sensibility of principle, that chastity of honor, which felt a stain like a wound, which inspired courage whilst it mitigated ferocity, which ennobled whatever it touched, and under which vice itself lost half its evil, by losing all its grossness.

This mixed system of opinion and sentiment had its origin in the ancient chivalry; and the principle, though varied in its appearance by the varying state of human affairs, subsisted and influenced through a long succession of generations, even to the time we live in. If it should ever be totally extinguished, the loss I fear would be great. It is this which has given its character to modern Europe. It is this which has distinguished it under all its forms of government, and distinguished it to its advantage, from the states of Asia, and possibly from those states which flourished in the most brilliant periods of the antique world. It was this which, without confounding ranks, had produced a noble equality, and handed it down through all the gradations of social life. It was this opinion which mitigated kings into companions, and raised private men to be fellows with kings. Without force, or opposition, it subdued the fierceness of pride and power; it obliged sovereigns to submit to the soft collar of social esteem, compelled stern authority to submit to elegance, and gave a dominating vanquisher of laws, to be subdued by manners.

But now all is to be changed. All the pleasing illusions, which made power gentle and obedience liberal, which harmonized the different shades of life, and which, by a bland assimilation, incorporated into politics the sentiments which beautify and soften private society, are to be dissolved by this new conquering empire of light and reason. All the decent drapery of life is to be rudely torn off. All the superadded ideas, furnished from the wardrobe of a moral imagination, which the heart owns and the understanding ratifies as necessary to cover the defects of our naked, shivering nature, and to raise it to dignity in our own estimation, are to be exploded as a ridiculous, absurd, and antiquated fashion.

COWPER.

1731-1800.

WILLIAM COWPER was born in 1731 and died in 1800. His life was a sad one, and his last years were shadowed by a mental gloom which almost amounted to insanity. His thoughts dwelt on somber themes, and his poems, with a few exceptions, are didactic to an unpleasant degree. It is not easy to understand how the same mind could have given birth to the melancholy imaginings which constitute the staple of his verse, and the warm, free humor of John Gilpin's Ride. Morbid and unsocial though he was, Cowper was able to win and retain the hearty attachment of a few friends, in whose tender care he passed the closing years of his life. Though not one of the greatest English poets, Cowper holds and will hold an honorable place. His sentiments were always elevated, and his expression graceful, if not exceptionally brilliant or vigorous. He is emphatically the poet for thoughtful minds. One of his best-known poems is Alexander Selkirk, of which we give some specimen stanzas.

ALEXANDER SELKIRK.*

'I AM monarch of all I survey,

My right there is none to dispute;
From the center all round to the sea

I am lord of the fowl and the brute.
O Solitude, where are the charms

That sages have seen in thy face?
Better dwell in the midst of alarms
Than reign in this horrible place.

I am out of humanity's reach;

I must finish my journey alone;
Never hear the sweet music of speech

I start at the sound of my own.
The beasts that roam over the plain
My form with indifference see;
They are so unacquainted with men,
Their tameness is shocking to me.

Society, friendship, and love,

Divinely bestowed upon man,

O had I the wings of a dove,

How soon would I taste you again!

* ALEXANDER SELKIRK was a Scottish sailor, who, having quarreled on one of his voyages with his captain, was left, in 1704, on the uninhabited island of Juan Fernandez, where he remained for more than four years before his rescue. Selkirk's adventures, it is said, suggested to Defoe the celebrated romance of Robinson Crusoe, with which all young people are familiar.

My sorrows I then might assuage

In the ways of religion and truth; Might learn from the wisdom of age, And be cheered by the sallies of youth.

Religion! what treasure untold
Resides in that heavenly word!
More precious than silver and gold,
Or all that this earth can afford.
But the sound of the church-going bell
These valleys and rocks never heard,
Never sighed at the sound of a knell,
Or smiled when a Sabbath appeared.

Ye winds that have made me your sport, Convey to this desolate shore

Some cordial endearing report

Of a land I shall visit no more. My friends, do they now and then send A wish or a thought after me? O tell me I yet have a friend,

Though a friend I am never to see.

How fleet is a glance of the mind! Compared with the speed of its flight, The tempest itself lags behind,

And the swift-wingéd arrows of light. When I think of my own native land,

In a moment I seem to be there; But, alas! recollection at hand

Soon hurries me back to despair.

But the sea-fowl is gone to her nest;
The beast is laid down in his lair;
Even here is a season of rest,

And I to my cabin repair.
There's mercy in every place;
And mercy, encouraging thought!
Gives even affliction a grace,

And reconciles man to his lot.