off in breaking the chains of Ireland; it was seen three thousand miles off in communicating freedom to the Americans; it was visible, I know not how far off, in ameliorating the condition of the Indian; it was discernible on the coast of Africa, in accomplishing the abolition of the slave trade. You are to measure the magnitude of his mind by parallels of latitude. His heart was as soft as that of a woman; his intellect was adamant; his weaknesses were virtues; they protected him against the hard habit of a politician, and assisted nature to make him amiable and interesting." And of Burke: "On the French subject, speaking of authority, we cannot forget Mr. Burke. Mr. Burke, the prodigy of nature and acquisition. He read everything, he saw everything, he foresaw everything. His knowledge of history amounted to a power of foretelling; and when he perceived the wild work that was doing in France, that great political physician, intelligent of symptoms, distinguished between the access of fever and the force of health; and what other men conceived to be the vigor of her constitution, he knew to be no more than the paroxysm of her madness, and then, prophet-like, he pronounced the destinies of France, and, in his prophetic fury, admonished nations." The passage which followed in this eloquent appeal for the continuance of the European contest on the part of England was worthy, in its picturesque power of illustration, the genius of Burke himself. "Gentlemen speak of the Bourbon family. I have already said, we should not force the Bourbon upon France, but we owe it to departed (I would, rather say to interrupted) greatness, to observe, that the house of Bourbon was not tyrannical; under her, everything, except the administra tion of the country, was open to animadversion; every subject was open to discussion, philosophical, ecclesiastical and political, so that learning, and arts, and sciences, made made progress. progress. Even England consented to borrow not a little from the temperate meridian of that government. Her court stood controlled by opinion, limited by principles of honor, and softened by the influence of manners: and, on the whole, there was an amenity in the condition of France which rendered the French an amiable, an enlightened, a gallant and accomplished race. Over this gallant race you see imposed an oriental despotism. Their present court (Bonaparte's court) has gotten the idiom of the East as well as her constitution; a fantastic and barbaric expression: an unreality which leaves in the shade the modesty of truth, and states nothing as it is, and everything as it is not. The attitude is affected, the taste is corrupted, and the intellect perverted. Do you wish to confirm this military tyranny in the heart of Europe? A tyranny founded on the triumph of the army over the prin ciples of civil government, tending to universalize throughout Europe the domination of the sword, and to reduce to paper and parchment, Magna Charta, and all our civil constitutions. An experiment such as no country ever made, and no good country would ever permit; to relax the moral and religious influences; to set heaven and earth adrift from one another, and make sonally assaulted, and his life endan gered by the attack of a desperate gang. His face was cut open by a severe blow. He confronted his assailants with that bold courage which was part of his nature, and when the affair was over, with characteristic magnanimity, refused to entertain any feelings of hostility against the party opposed to him, submitting himself in all things to his paramount love of his country. "A few individuals," he wrote, in answer to a public address from the citizens of Dublin-"a sudden and inexplicable impulse-a momentary infat God Almighty a tolerated alien in his own creation; an insurrectionary hope to every bad man in the community, and a frightful lesson to profit and power, vested in those who have pandered their allegiance from king to emperor, and now found their pretensions to domination on the merit of breaking their oaths, and deposing their sovereign. Should you do any thing so monstrous as to leave your allies, in order to conform to such a system; should you forget your name, forget your ancestors, and the inheritance they have left you of morality and renown; should you astonish Eu- uation-anything-everything--might rope, by quitting your allies to render immortal such a composition, would not the nations exclaim, 'You have very providently watched over our interests, and very generously have you contributed to our service, and do you falter now? In vain have you stopped in your own person the flying fortunes of Europe; in vain have you taken the eagle of Napoleon, and snatched invincibility from his standard, if now, when confederated Europe is ready to march, you take the lead in the desertion, and preach the penitence of Bonaparte and the poverty of England.'" account for that violence of which you complain. It is not worth your inves tigation.' Broken in health, at the age of seventy, he made his last journey to London, to advocate in parliament a petition from his Roman Catholic fellow citizens. He was warned of the danger to his health, but simply replied, "I should be happy to die in the discharge of my duty." He reached London in a state of great debility, and expired in that city before he could accomplish the object of his mission, on the 14th of May, 1820. He had expressed a wish in his last illness to be buried in a retired churchyard at Moyanne, in Queens County, on the He was no friend to disorgan- estate given him by the Irish people, izing or insurrectionary proceedings, but yielded to a request from the and was steadily opposed to French Duke of Sussex, that his remains propagandism in the revolutionary ex- should be placed in Westminster Ab citements of a portion of his country. bey. A letter, signed by members of men. For his course on this point, to- the liberal party was, after his death, wards the close of his life, when he addressed to his sons renewing the rewas chaired after his election to par- quest. It was from the pen of the poet liament, in Dublin, in 1818, he was per- Rogers. "Filled with veneration for | Pure as was the patriotism of Grattan, he more than once experienced the ingratitude of his turbulent country men. the character of your father, we venture to express a wish, common to us with many of those who most admired and loved him, that what remains of him should be allowed to continue among us. It has pleased Divine Providence to deprive the empire of his services, while he was here in the neighborhood of that sacred edifice where great men from all parts of the British dominions have been for ages interred. We are desirous of an opportunity of joining in the due honors to tried virtue and genius. Mr. Grattan belongs to us also, and great would be our consolation, were we to be permitted to follow him to the grave, and to place him where he would not have been unwilling to lie-by the side of his illustrious fellow-laborers in the cause of freedom." The remains of Grattan were accordingly deposited in the north transept of the Abbey, by the side of Chatham, Pitt, and his beloved friend, Charles James Fox. "What Irishman," wrote Sydney Smith in an article in the "Edinburgh Review" shortly after the event, "does not feel proud that he has lived in the days of Grattan? Who has not turned to him for comfort, from the false friends and open enemies of Ireland? Who did not remember him in the days of its burnings, and wastings, and murders? No government ever dismayed him-the world could not bribe him -he thought only of Ireland-lived for no other object-dedicated to her his beautiful fancy, his elegant wit, his manly courage and all the splendor of his astonishing eloquence. He was so born and so gifted, that poetry, forensic skill, elegant literature and all the highest attainments of human genius, were within his reach; but he thought the noblest occupation of a man was to make other men happy and free; and in that straight line he went on for fifty years, without one side-look, without one yielding thought, without one motive in his heart which he might not have laid open to the view of God and man. He is gone!-but there is not a single day of his honest life of which every good Irishman would not be more proud, than of the whole political existence of his countrymen-the annual deserters and betrayers of their native land." The prominent characteristics of Grattan's eloquence, representing essentially his moral character, have been happily described by Brougham. "Among the orators," he writes, "as among the statesmen of his age, Mr. Grattan occupies a place in the foremost rank; and it was the age of the Pitts, the Foxes and the Sheridans. His eloquence was of a very high order, all but of the very highest, and it was eminently original. In the constant stream of a diction replete with epigram and point-a stream on which floated gracefully, because naturally, flowers of various hues, was poured forth the closest reasoning, the most luminous statement, the most persua sive display of all the motives that could influence, and of all the details that could enlighten, his audience. Often a different strain was heard, and it was declamatory and vehement-or pity was to be moved, and its pathos was touching as it was simple-or, above all, an adversary, sunk in baseness, or covered with crimes, was to be punished or to be destroyed, and a storm of the most terrible invective raged with all the flights of sarcasm and the thunders of abuse. The critic, led away for the moment, and unable to do more than feel with the audience, could in those cases, even when he came to reflect and to judge, find often nothing to reprehend; seldom in any case more than the excess of epigram, which had yet become so natural to the orator, that his argument and his narrative, and even his sagacious unfolding of principles, seemed spontaneously to clothe themselves in the most pointed terseness, and most apt and felicitous antitheses. From the faults of his country's eloquence, he was, generally speaking, free. Occasionally an over fondness for vehement expression, an exaggeration of passion, or an offensive appeal to heaven, might be noted; very rarely a loaded use of figures, and, more rarely still, of fig. ures broken and mixed. But the perpetual striving after far-fetched quaintness; the disdaining to say any one thing in an easy and natural style; the contempt of that rule, as true in rhetoric as in conduct, that it is wise to do common things in the common way; the affectation of excessive feeling upon all things, without regard to their relative importance; the making any occasion even the most fitted to rouse genuine and natural feeling, a mere opportunity of theatrical display —all these failings, by which so many oratorical reputations have been blighted among a people famous for their almost universal oratorical genius, were looked for in vain when Mr.Grattan rose, whether in the senate of his native country, or in that to which he was transferred by the Union. And if he had some peculiarity of outward appearance, as a low and awkward person, in which he resembled the first of orators, and even of manner, in which he had not like him made the defects of nature yield to severe culture; so had he one excellence of the very highest order, in which he may be truly said to have left all the orators of modern time behind-the severe abstinence which rests satisfied with striking the decisive word in a blow or two, not weakening its effect by repetition and expansion, and another excellence higher still, in which no orator of any age is his equal, the easy and copious flow of most profound, sagacious and original principles, enunciated in terse and striking, but appropriate language. To give a sample of this latter peculiarity would be less easy, and would oc cupy more space; but of the former, it may be truly said that Dante himself never conjured up a striking, a pathetic and an appropriate image in fewer words than Mr. Grattan employed to describe his relation towards Irish independence, when, alluding to its rise in 1782, and its fall twenty years later, he said, 'I sat by its cradle-I followed its hearse.' SARAH VAN BRUGH JAY. ARAH VAN SA STON was thUGH LIVING- Jay, who had been educated for the STON was the youngest daugh- bar, and was already a prominent and ter of William Livingston, of New rising man in the community. Her York, afterwards for many years Gov- husband was some ten years her senernor of New Jersey, and one of the ior, and at the date of her marriage, most active and energetic men of his April 28th, 1774, was not in any pubday in setting forward and sustaining lic office; but within a month, before the cause of liberty and independence. the traditional honey-moon had exThe family was aristocratic and weal-pired, John Jay was imperatively callthy, and noted for its high social and political rank in the province and State of New York; but, notwithstanding all this, it was a family which ardently embraced the cause of our common country, and must always hold a well-deserved place in the annals of the United States. ed to take part in the initiatory movements in the colonies, which led on, as by necessity, to the Revolution and the war of Independence. How severe a trial this was to the young and loving wife can hardly be imagined; for it is to be borne in mind, that Jay, who possessed a clear, logical intellect, and held a pen equalled by few men of that day, was placed on the Committee of Safety in New York, was a member of the first Continental Congress, was actively and zealously occupied in the preparation of papers, addresses, declarations, etc., issued by Congress, and took his full share in sanctioning and carrying forward measures looking to the ultimate ends had in view by the Declaration of Independence. Consesequently, he was compelled to be absent from home the larger part of his The fourth daughter of Governor Livingston was named Sarah Van Brugh, after her great grandmother. She was born in August, 1757, and received as thorough and complete an education as was possible at that time to be obtained. Mental ability of a superior order early manifested itself; and by judicious training and culture, added to the society and intercourse of the best families of her native State, her faculties were rapidly developed. Before she was eighteen, Sarah Livingston was married to John | time. (331) |