infamy: reverence, finally, yourself! and suffer not that liberty, for the attainment of which you have encountered so many perils and have endured so many hardships, to sustain any violation from your own hands, or any from those of others. Without our freedom, in fact, you cannot yourself be free; for it is justly ordained by nature that he, who invades the liberty of others, shall, in the very outset, lose his own and be the first to feel that servitude which he has induced. But if the very patron, the tutelary Deity, as it were, of freedom;—if the man, the most eminent for justice, and sanctity, and general excellence should assail that liberty which he has asserted, the issue must necessarily be pernicious, if not fatal, not only to the aggressor, but to the entire system and interests of piety herself: honour and virtue would, indeed, appear to be empty names; the credit and character of religion would decline and perish under a wound more deep than any, which, since the first transgression, had been inflicted on the race of man.

You have engaged in a most arduous undertaking, which will search you to the quick; which will scrutinize you through and through; which will bring to the severest test

your spirit, your energy, your stability; which will ascertain whether you are really actuated by that living piety, and honour, and equity, and moderation which seem, with the favour of God, to have raised you to your present high dignity. To rule with your counsels three mighty realms; in the place of their erroneous institutions to substitute a sounder system of doctrine and of discipline, to pervade their remotest provinces with unremitting attention and anxiety, vigilance and foresight; to decline no labours, to yield to no blandishments of pleasure, to spurn the pageantries of wealth and of power-these are difficulties in comparison with which those of war are the mere levities of play: these will sift and winnow you; these demand a man sustained by the divine assistance, tutored and instructed almost by a personal communication with his God. These and more than these you often, as I doubt not, revolve and make the subjects of your deepest meditation, greatly solicitous how, most happily, they may be achieved, and your country's freedom be strengthened and secured; and these objects you cannot, in my judgment, otherwise effect than by admitting, as you do, to an intimate share of your counsels those men, who have already

participated your toils and your dangers;― men of the utmost moderation, integrity, and valour; not rendered savage or austere by the sight of so much bloodshed and of so many forms of death; but inclined to justice, to the reverence of the Deity, to a sympathy with human suffering, and animated for the preservation. of liberty with a zeal strengthened by the hazards which, for its sake, they have encountered; men not raked together from the dregs of our own or of a foreign populace-not a band of mercenary adventurers, but men chiefly of superior condition; in extraction, noble or reputable; with respect to property, considerable or competent, or, in some instances, deriving a stronger claim to our regard, even from their poverty itself; men, not convened by the lust of plunder, but, in times of extreme difficulty, amid circumstances generally doubtful and often almost desperate, excited to vindicate their country from oppression; and prompt, not only in the safety of the senate-house to wage the war of words, but to join battle with the enemy on the field. If we will then renounce the idleness of never-ending and fallacious expectation, I see not in whom, if not in these, and in such as these, we can place reliance or trust. Of their FIDELITY We have the surest and most indisputable proof in the

readiness which they have discovered even to die, if it had been their lot, in the cause of their country; of their PIETY, in the devotion with which, having repeatedly and successfully implored the protection of Heaven, they uniformly ascribed the glory to Him from whom they had solicited the victory; of their JUSTICE, in their not exempting even their king from trial or from execution; of their MODERATION, in our own experience and in the certainty, that if their violence should disturb the peace, which they have established, they would themselves be the first to feel the resulting mischiefs, themselves would receive the first wounds in their own bodies, while they were again doomed to struggle for all their fortunes and honours now happily secured; of their FORTITUDE, lastly, in that none ever recovered their liberty with more bravery or effect, to give us the assurance that none will ever watch over it with more solicitous attention and care."

I cannot prevail on myself to leave this interesting production before I present to my readers the striking paragraphs with which it concludes.

Ad me quod attinet, quocunque res redierit, quam ego operam meam maximè ex usu reipublicæ futuram judicavi, haud

in the m

gravatim certè et, ut spero, haud frustrà impendi; meaque arma pro libertate, non solùm ante fores extuli, sed etiam iis ità latè sum usus, ut factorum minimè vulgarium jus atque ratio, et apud nostros et apud exteros, explicata, defensa, atque bonis certè oinnibus probata, et ad meorum civium summam laudem, et posterorum ad exemplum præclarè constet. Si postrema primis non satis responderint, ipsi viderint; ego quæ exiinia, quæ excelsa, quæ oinni laude propè majora fuere, iis testimonium, prope dixerim monumentum perhibui haud citò interiturum; et si aliud nihil, certè fidem meam liberavi. Quemadmodum autem poeta is qui epicus vocatur, si quis paulò accuratior miniméque abnormis est, quem heroem versibus canendum sibi proponit, ejus non vitam omnem, sed unam ferè vitæ actionem, Achillis putà ad Trojam, vel Ulyssis reditum, vel Æneæ in Italiam adventum ornandum sibi sumit, reliquas prætermittit; ita mihi quoque vel ad officium vel ad excusationem satis fuerit unam saltem popularium meorum heroicè rem gestam exornasse; reliqua prætereo-omnia universi populi præstare quis possit? Si post tam fortia facinora fœdiùs deliqueritis, si quid vobis indignum commiseritis, loquetur profectò posteritas, et judi

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