"When Robespierre, in the debates in the National Convention on the mode of murdering their blameless sovereign, objected to the formal and tedious mode of murder called a trial, and proposed to put him immediately to death without trial, 'on the principles of insurrection,' because, to doubt the guilt of the king would be to doubt of the innocence of the Convention, and if the king were not a traitor, the Convention must be rebels; would my learned friend have had an English writer state all this with decorum and moderation?' would he have had an English writer state, that though this reasoning was not perfectly agreeable to our national laws, or perhaps to our national prejudices, yet it was not for him to make any observations on the judicial proceedings of foreign states?

"When Marat, in the same Convention, called for 270,000 heads, must our English writers have said, that the remedy did, indeed, seem to their weak judg ment rather severe; but that it was not for them to judge the conduct of so illustrious an assembly as the National Convention, or the suggestions of so enlightened a statesman as M. Marat?

"When that Convention resounded with applause at the news of several hundred aged priests being thrown into the Loire, and particularly at the exclamation of Carrier, who communicated the intelligence, 'what a revolutionary torrent is the Loire!'-when these suggestions and narratives of murder, which have hitherto been only hinted and whispered in the most secret cabals, in the darkest caverns of banditti, were triumphantly uttered, patiently endured, and even loudly applauded by an assembly of 700 men, acting in the sight of all Europe-would my learned friend have wished that there had been found in England a single writer so base as to deliberate upon the most safe, decorous, and polite manner of relating all these things to his countrymen ?

"When Carrier ordered 500 children under fourteen years to be shot, the greater part of whom escaped the fire from their size-when the poor victims ran for protection to the soldiers, and were bayoneted clinging round their knees, would my friend—but I cannot pursue the strain of interrogation—it is too much ! it would be a violence which I cannot practise on my own feelings-it would be an outrage to my friend-it would be an affront to you-it would be an insult to humanity. No; better, ten thousand times better, would it be that every press in the world were burnt, that the very use of letters were abolished, that we were returned to the honest ignorance of the rudest times-than that the results of civilisation should be made subservient to the purposes of barbarism,-than that literature should be employed to teach a toleration for cruelty, to weaken mòral hatred for guilt, to deprave and brutalise the human mind. I know that I speak my friend's feelings as well as my own, when I say, God forbid that the dread of any punishment should ever make any Englishman an accomplice in so corrupting his countrymen-a public teacher of depravity and barbarity!”

It may be remarked that hitherto he has passed by the period of the Commonwealth and Protectorate. He reserved Cromwell for his conclusion, and concludes with him as follows:

"In the court where we are now met, Cromwell twice sent a satirist on his tyranny to be convicted and punished as a libeller, and in this court, almost in sight of the scaffold streaming with the blood of his sovereign, within hearing of the clash of his bayonets; which drove out parliaments with contumely, two successive juries rescued the intrepid satirist* from his fangs, and sent out with

* Colonel Lilburne.

defeat and disgrace the usurper's Attorney-General from what he had the insolence to call his court; even then, gentlemen, when all law and liberty were trampled under the feet of military banditti; when those great crimes were perpetrated on a high place and with a high hand against those who were the objects of public veneration, which, more than any thing else upon earth, overwhelm the minds of men, break their spirits, and confound their moral sentiments, obliterate the distinctions between right and wrong in their understanding, and teach the multitude to feel no longer any reverence for that justice which they thus see triumphantly dragged at the chariot wheels of a tyrant;-even then, when this unhappy country, triumphant indeed abroad, but enslaved at home, had no prospect but that of a long succession of tyrants wading through slaughter to a throne; even then, I say, when all seemed lost, the unconquerable spirit of English liberty survived in the hearts of English jurors. That spirit is, I trust in God, not extinct; and if any modern tyrant were, in the drunkenness of his insolence, to hope to overawe an English jury, I trust and I believe that they would tell him, 'Our ancestors braved the bayonets of Cromwell; we bid defiance to yours. Contempsi Catilinæ gladios; non pertimescam tuos !'"

This short and vigorous passage, pointed by a classic quotation, and elevated by classic recollections, has been regarded as the happiest movement of the speech. But there appears a fatal deficiency in the citation and the parallel:-it is the want of application. Had the advocate told the jury, in plain English, that they and he were defying poniards or bayonets, they would have stared or laughed and, pleading as the advocate of an apostle of assassination, he talked of defying assassins with a bad grace. Peltier was found guilty; but the war was soon renewed, and he was never called up for judgment.

This celebrated oration should be classed among the political writings of Sir James Mackintosh. It would form an interesting, as well as curious, pendant to the Vindicia Gallicæ. The reader, viewing the same objects and epochs represented under phases of such complete opposition, finds it almost impossible to imagine the personal identity of the writer with the speaker; whilst he, at the same time, discovers in every page the identity of style and faculty.

Sir James Mackintosh was now removed to a new and distant scene. It is necessary to revert for a moment to some incidents in his private life. He was visited by the severest domestic affliction in 1797. His wife died in the month of April of that year. It. would imply an equal want of discretion and taste to say one word of her character and his grief in the same page with the following letter, written on the occasion by himself. It is addressed to Dr. Parr.

“I use the first moment of composure to return my thanks to you for having thought of me in my affliction. It was impossible

for you to know the bitterness of that affliction; for I, myself, scarce knew the greatness of my calamity till it had fallen upon me; nor did I know the acuteness of my own feelings till they had been subjected to this trial. Alas! it is only now that I feel the value of what I have lost. In this state of deep but quiet melancholy, which has succeeded to the first violent agitations of sorrow, my greatest pleasure is to look back with gratitude and pious affection on the memory of my beloved wife; and my chief consolation is the soothing remembrance of her virtues. Allow me, in justice to her memory, to tell you what she was, and what I owed her. I was guided in my choice only by the blind affection of my youth, and might have formed a connexion in which a short-lived passion would have been followed by repentance and disgust; but I found an intelligent companion, a tender friend, a prudent monitress; the most faithful of wives, and as dear a mother as ever children had the misfortune to lose. Had I married a woman who was easy or giddy enough to have been infected by my imprudence, or who had rudely and harshly attempted to correct it, I should, in either case, have been irretrievably ruined: a fortune, in either case, would, with my habits, have been only a shorter cut to destruction. But I met a woman, who by the tender management of my weaknesses gradually corrected the most pernicious of them, and rescued me from the dominion of a degrading and ruinous vice. She became prudent from affection; and, though of the most generous nature, she was taught economy and frugality by her love for me. During the most critical period of my life, she preserved order in my affairs, from the care of which she relieved me; she gently reclaimed me from dissipation; she propped my weak and irresolute nature; she urged my indolence to all the exertions that have been useful and creditable to me; and she was perpetually at hand to admonish my heedlessness and improvidence. To her I owe that I am not a ruined outcast; to her whatever I am; to her whatever I shall be. In her solicitude for my interest, she never, for a moment, forgot my feelings or my character. Even in her occasional resentment,—for which I but too often gave just cause (would to God that I could recall these moments!), she had no sullenness or acrimony: her feelings were warm and impetuous, but she was placable, tender, and constant: she united the most attentive prudence with the most generous and guileless nature, with a spirit that disdained the shadow of meanness, and with the kindest and most honest heart.

This, my dear Sir, cannot repair. To

Such was she whom I have lost; and I have lost her when her excellent natural sense was rapidly improving, after eight years of struggle and distress had bound us fast together, and moulded our tempers to each other; when a knowledge of her worth had refined my youthful love into friendship, before age had deprived it of much of its original ardour. I lost her, alas! (the choice of my youth and the partner of my misfortunes) at a moment when I had the prospect of her sharing my better days. is a calamity which the prosperity of the world expect that any thing on this side of the grave can make it up, would be a vain and a delusive expectation. If I had lost the giddy and thoughtless companion of prosperity, the world could easily repair the loss; but I have lost the faithful and tender partner of my misfortunes; and my only consolation is in that Being under whose severe but paternal, chastisement I am cut down to the ground. The philosophy which I have learned only teaches me that virtue and friendship are the greatest of human blessings, and that their loss is irreparable. It aggravates my calamity, instead of consoling me under it. My wounded heart seeks another consolation; governed by these feelings, which have, in every age and region of the world, actuated the human mind, I seek relief and I find it in the soothing hope and consolatory opinion, that a benevolent wisdom inflicts the chastisement, as well as bestows the enjoyments of human life; that superintending goodness will one day enlighten the darkness which surrounds our nature, and hangs over our prospects; that this dreary and wretched life is not the whole of man; that an animal so sagacious and provident, and capable of such proficiency in science and virtue, is not like the beasts that perish; that there is a dwelling place prepared for the spirits of the just; and that the ways of God will yet be vindicated to man. The sentiments of religion which were implanted in my mind in my early youth, and which were revived by the awful scenes which I have seen passing before my eyes in the world, are, I trust, deeply rooted in my heart by this great calamity. I shall not offend your rational piety by saying that modes and opinions appear to me matter of secondary importance; but I can sincerely declare, that Christianity, in its genuine purity and spirit, appears to me the most amiable and venerable of all the forms in which the homage of man has ever been offered to the Author of his being. These sentiments have served somewhat to tran

quillise me since I have been in this place (which is at present. solitary enough for the state of my spirits), and will, I trust, soon enable me to resume my exertions in active life, which I owe to the hapless children of my dearest Catherine, and which I am fully sensible will be a truer performance of the sacred duty which I owe to her memory, than vain and barren lamentation. You will not wonder that I sometimes find a pleasing employment for my mind in thinking of those honours which are due to the memory of her whom I have lost. I have given directions for a marble tablet, on which it is my wish to inscribe a humble testimonial of her virtues; but I am divided in opinion whether the inscription shall be in Latin or English. English seems more unostentatious and more suitable to her sex, but Latin is better adapted to inscription, and I think it difficult to compose an English inscription, which shall be simple enough, without being meagre. I could judge better if I saw the attempt made in both languages. I shall myself try it in English. Will you, my dear Sir, send me a sketch of a Latin inscription? It is a thing of great moment in the hour of my affliction, and I hope you will not refuse to aid me in this labour of love. If I fix on the English, I shall send it to you for correction. The topics are so obvious that I need not suggest them: her faithful and tender discharge of the duties of a wife and a mother, my affliction, the irreparable loss to her orphans; these are the topics, with a solemn colouring of religion given to the whole. I cannot suppress my desire to expatiate on her worth, at greater length than may, perhaps, be consistent with the severe simplicity of a classical inscription; yet my feelings are too sincere to relish any thing rhetorical or ostentatious.

"I never," says Dr. Parr, in reply, "received from mortal man a letter which, in point of composition, can be compared with that which you wrote me the other day; and were you to read it yourself at some very remote period, you would be charmed with it as I have been, and you would say, as Cicero did of his work De Senectute, Ipse, mea legens, sic afficior interdum, ut Catonem, non me, loqui existimem.' I have myself sometimes experienced a similar effect from the less exceptionable parts of my own writing, long after their publication. I have read them as if they were the production of some other man, and the delight they give me in this calm and ripened state of the mind, is far more exquisite than the confused and tumultuous joy which I feel in the first ardour of