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rough fare and the rough guests assembled at Fielding's jolly revel. Indeed the cloth might have been cleaner: and the dinner and the company were scarce such as suited a dandy. The kind and wise old Johnson would not sit down with him. But a greater scholar than Johnson could afford to admire that astonishing genius of Harry Fielding: and we all know the lofty panegyric which Gibbon wrote of him, and which remains a towering monument to the great novelist's memory. "Our immortal Fielding," Gibbon writes, "was of the younger branch of the Earls of Denbigh, who drew their origin from the Counts of Hapsburgh. The successors of Charles V. may disdain their brethren of England: but the romance of Tom Jones,' that exquisite picture of human manners, will outlive the palace of the Escurial and the Imperial Eagle of Austria." There can be no gainsaying the sentence of this great judge. To have your name mentioned by Gibbon, is like having it written on the dome of St. Peter's. Pilgrims from all the world admire and behold it.

From "English Humorists."

JOHN LOCKE AND WILLIAM PENN.

GEORGE BANCROFT.

LOCKE says plainly, that, but for rewards and punishments beyond the grave, "it is certainly right to eat and drink, and to enjoy what we delight in ;" Penn, like Plato and Fenelon, maintained the doctrine so terrible to despots, that God is to be loved for his own sake, and virtue practised for its intrinsic loveliness. Locke derives the idea of infinity from the senses, describes it as purely negative, and attributes it to nothing but space, duration, and number; Penn derived the idea from the soul, and ascribed it to truth, and virtue, and God. Locke declares immortality a matter with which reason has nothing to do, and that revealed truth must be sustained by outward signs and visible acts of power; Penn saw truth by its own light, and summoned the soul to bear witness to its own glory. Locke believed "not so many men in wrong opinions as is commonly supposed, because the greatest part have no opinions at all, and do not know what they contend for ;" Penn likewise vindicated the many, but it was truth was the common inheritance of the race. Locke, in his love of tolerance, inveighed against the methods of persecution as "Popish practices;" Penn censured no sect, but condemned bigotry of all sorts as inhuman. Locke, as an American lawgiver, dreaded a too numerous democracy, and reserved all power to wealth and the feudal proprietors; Penn believed that God is in every conscience, his light in every soul; and, therefore, stretching out his arms, he built-such are his own words-" a free colony for all mankind." This is the praise of William Penn, that, in an age which had

seen a popular revolution shipwreck popular liberty among selfish factions; which had seen Hugh Peters and Henry Vane perish by the hangman's cord and the axe; in an age when Sidney nourished the pride of patriotism rather than the sentiment of philanthropy, when Russell stood for the liberties of his order, and not for new enfranchisements, when Harrington, and Shaftesbury, and Locke, thought government should rest on property,-Penn did not despair of humanity, and, though all history and experience denied the sovereignty of the people, dared to cherish the noble idea of man's capacity for self-government. Conscious that there was no room for its exercise in England, the pure enthusiast, like Calvin and Descartes, a voluntary exile, was come to the banks of the Delaware to institute " THE HOLY EXPERIMENT."

From "History of the United States."

MILTON AND DRYDEN.

LORD MACAULAY.

WE are, on the whole, inclined to regret that Dryden did not accomplish his purpose of writing an epic poem. It certainly would not have been a work of the highest rank. It would not have rivalled the Iliad, the Odyssey, or the Paradise Lost; but it would have been superior to the productions of Apollonius, Lucan, or Statius, and not inferior to the Jerusalem Delivered. It would probably have been a vigorous narrative, animated with something of the spirit of the old romances, enriched with much splendid description, and interspersed with fine declamations and disquisitions. The danger of Dryden would have been from aiming too high; from dwelling too much, for example, on his angels of kingdoms, and attempting a competition with that great writer, who in his own time had so incomparably succeeded in representing to us the sights and sounds of another world. To Milton, and to Milton alone belonged the secrets of the great deep, the beach of sulphur, the ocean of fire; the palaces of the fallen dominations, glimmering through the everlasting shade, the silent wilderness of verdure and fragrance where armed angels kept watch over the sleep of the first lovers, the portico of diamond, the sea of jasper, the sapphire pavement empurpled with celestial roses, and the infinite ranks of the Cherubim, blazing with adamant and gold. The council, the tournament, the procession, the crowded cathedral, the camp, the guard-room, the chaise, were the proper scenes for Dryden.

From "Essay on Dryden."

16*

WONDERS OF ENGLISH RULE IN INDIA.

LORD MAHON.

IF in some fairy tale or supernatural legend we were to read of an island, seated far in the northern seas, so ungenial in its climate and so barren in its soil that no richer fruits than sloes or blackberries were its aboriginal growth,-whose tribes of painted savages continued to dwell in huts of sedge, or, at best, pile together altars of rude stone, for ages after other nations widely spread over the globe had already achieved wondrous works of sculpture and design, the gorgeous rocktemples of Ellora, the storied obelisks of Thebes, or the lion-crested portals of Mycenae; if it were added, that this island had afterwards by skill and industry attained the highest degree of artificial fertility, and combined in its luxury the fruits of every clime, that the sea, instead of remaining its barrier, had become almost a part of its empire, that its inhabitants were now amongst the foremost of the earth in commerce and in freedom, in arts and in arms, that their indomitable energy had subdued, across fifteen thousand miles of ocean, a land ten times more extensive than their own, that in this territory they now peacefully reigned over one hundred and twenty millions of subjects or dependants, the race of the builders of Ellora, and the heirs of the Great Mogul!-If, further still, we were told that in this conquest the rule of all other conquests had been reversed; that the reign of the strangers, alien in blood, in language, and in faith, had been beyond any other in that region fraught with blessings, that humanity and justice, the security of life and property, the progress of improvement and instruction, were far greater under the worst of the foreign governors than under the best of the native princes;-with what scorn might we not be tempted to fling down the lying scroll,-exclaiming that even in fiction there should be some decent bounds of probability observed; that even in the Arabian Nights no such prodigies are wrought by spells or talismans,-by the lamp of Aladdin or the seal of Solomon! Yet, such is English rule in India.

From "History of England."

THE BLACK HOLE OF CALCUTTA.

LORD MAHON.

THE prisoners had been left at the disposal of the officers of the guard, who determined to secure them for the night in the common dungeon of the fort, a dungeon known to the English by the name of "the Black Hole," its size only eighteen feet by fourteen; its airholes only two small windows, and these overhung by a low veranda. Into this cell, hitherto designed and employed for the confinement of some half dozen

malefactors at a time, was it now resolved to thrust an hundred and forty-five European men and one Englishwoman, some of them suffering from recent wounds, and this in the night of the Indian summer solstice, when the fiercest heat was raging! Into this cell accordingly the unhappy prisoners, in spite of their expostulations, were driven at the point of the sabre; the last, from the throng and narrow space, being pressed in with considerable difficulty, and the doors being then by main force closed and locked behind them.

Of the doleful night that succeeded, narratives have been given by two of the survivors, Mr. Holwell and Mr. Cooke. The former, who even in this extremity was still in some degree obeyed as chief, placed himself at a window, called for silence, and appealed to one of the Nabob's officers, an old man, who had shown more humanity than the rest, promising him a thousand rupees in the morning if he would find means to separate the prisoners into two chambers. The old man went to try, but returned in a few minutes with the fatal sentence that no change could be made without orders from the Nabob,-that the Nabob was asleep, and that no one dared to disturb him.

Meanwhile within the dungeon the heat and stench had become intolerable. It was clear to the sufferers themselves that, without a change, few, if any, amongst them would see the light of another day. Some attempted to burst open the door; others, as unavailingly, again besought the soldiers to unclose it. As their dire thirst increased, amidst their struggles and their screams, "Water! Water!" became the general cry. The officer, to whose compassion Mr. Holwell had lately appealed, desired some skins of water to be brought to the window; but they proved too large to pass through the iron bars, and the sight of this relief, so near and yet withheld, served only to infuriate and well-nigh madden the miserable captives; they began to fight and trample one another down, striving for a nearer place to the windows, and for a few drops of the water. These dreadful conflicts, far from exciting the pity of the guards, rather moved their mirth; and they held up lights to the bars, with fiendish glee, to discern the amusing sight more clearly. On the other hand, several of the English, frantic with pain, were now endeavoring by every term of insult and invective to provoke these soldiers to put an end to their agony by firing into the dungeon. "Some of our company," says Mr. Cooke, "expired very soon after being put in; others grew mad, and, having lost their senses, died in a high delirium." At length, and by degrees, these various outeries sunk into silence-but it was the silence of death. When the morning broke, and the Nabob's order came to unlock the door, it became necessary first to clear a lane, by drawing out the corpses, and piling them in heaps on each side, when, walking one by one through the narrow outlet, of the one hundred and forty-six persons who had

entered the cell the evening before, only twenty-three came forth; the ghastliest forms, says Mr. Orme, that were ever seen alive.

From "History of England."

MACAULAY'S ORATORY.

MR. MACAULAY's delivery was always awkward, and his appearance remarkably strange. Usually dressed in a green frock coat, light waistcoat, and dark trowsers, he seemed, as he entered the House, unmindful of all around, and made straight or appeared to straggle on unconsciously to his seat, between Lord John Russell and Mr. Labouchere. There, with his arms unfolded, and a Puritan determination of look, he sat, wrapped in abstraction. When he spoke, which was rarely, it was generally-unlike the other prominent men, who never rise until a late hour at night-early in the evening, before dinner, with the object of preserving his memory fresh and his brain unclouded. He generally bolted straight to the table, and, without any exordium, plunged into the midst of his argument, pouring forth arguments and illustrations, and images, as if an engine was working inside, and throwing them up in profusion from some huge laboratory. His voice was shrill, or rather hard, exhibiting no passion or feeling, and his intonation monotonous, rushing on like the sound of a rapid stream. His conversation had the same fault. He had no winningness of manner, and no graceful ease of direction or deference to others, but poured out sentence upon sentence, until you were gorged and sickened with their riches. His conversation at Brookes' every evening at four o'clock, was an essay, not conversation. Men gathered round to listen, as they do here to a lecture, and those not present always asked in the evening, "Well, what did Macaulay speak about to-day?" As Sydney Smith wittily remarked, "How charming Macaulay would be if he had but a few brilliant flashes of silence!"

From "New York Daily Times," 1856.

THE WOUNDED AFTER A BATTLE.

Ir was agonizing to see the wounded men who were lying there under a broiling sun, parched with excruciating thirst, racked with fever, and agonized with pain-to behold them waving their caps faintly or making signals towards our lines, over which they could see the white flag waving, and not to be able to help them. They lay where they fell, or had scrambled into the holes formed by shells; and

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