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smelling-bottles were handed round, hysterical sobs and screams were heard, and Mrs. Sheridan was carried out in a fit.

15. At length the orator concluded. Raising his voice till the old arches of Irish oak resounded-" Therefore," said he, "hath it with all confidence been ordered by the Commons of Great Britain, that I impeach Warren Hastings of high crimes and misdemeanors. I impeach him in the name of the Commons House of Parliament, whose trust he has betrayed. I impeach him in the name of the English nation, whose ancient honor he has sullied. I impeach him in the name of the people of India, whose rights he has trodden under foot, and whose country he has turned into a desert. Lastly, in the name of human nature itself, in the name of both sexes, in the name of every age, in the name of every rank, I impeach the common enemy and oppressor of all!”

[After his acquittal, Warren Hastings lived in retirement. His death occurred in 1818, in the eighty-sixth year of his age.]

Hyder Ali.-Burke.

[Hyder Ali (ah'le), one of the greatest Mohammedan princes of India, waged a fierce war against the British during the administration of Warren Hastings, displaying wonderful resolution and perseverance. Although a determined and merciless warrior, he was a mild and beneficent ruler, and was much loved by his people. The following description of some of the effects of this war is extracted from Edmund Burke's famous speech against Hastings.]

1. WHEN, at length, Hyder Ali found that he had to do with men who either would sign no convention, or whom no treaty and no signature could bind, and who were the determined enemies of human intercourse itself, he decreed to make the country possessed by these incorrigible and predestinated criminals a memorable example to mankind. He resolved, in the gloomy recesses of a mind capacious of such things, to leave the whole Carnatic an everlasting monument of vengeance, and to put perpetual desolation as a barrier between him and those against whom the faith which holds the mortal elements of the world together was no protection.

2. He became at length so confident of his force, and so

collected in his might, that he made no secret whatever of his dreadful resolution. Having terminated his disputes with every enemy and every rival, who buried their mutual animosities in their common interest against the creditors of the Nabob of Arcot, he drew from every quarter whatever a savage ferocity could add to his new rudiments in the art of destruction; and compounding all the materials of fury and havoc and desolation into one black cloud, he hung for a while on the declivities of the mountains.

3. Whilst the authors of all these evils were idly and stupidly gazing on this menacing meteor, which blackened all the horizon, it suddenly burst and poured down the whole of its contents upon the plains of the Carnatic. Then ensued a scene of woe, the like of which no eye had seen, nor heart conceived, and which no tongue could adequately tell. All the horrors of war, before known or heard of, were mercy to that new havoc. A storm of universal fire blasted every field, consumed every house, and destroyed every temple.

4. The miserable inhabitants flying from their flaming villages, in part were slaughtered; others without regard to sex, to age or rank, or sacredness of function, fathers torn from children, husbands from wives, enveloped in a whirlwind of cavalry, and amidst the goading spears of drivers, and the trampling of pursuing horses, were swept into captivity in an unknown and hostile land. Those who were able to evade this tempest fled to the walled cities. But escaping fire, sword, and exile, they fell into the jaws of famine.

5. For eighteen months, without intermission, this destruction raged from the gates of Madras to the gates of Tanjore; and so completely did these masters in their art, Hyder Ali, and his more ferocious son, absolve themselves of their impious row, that when the British armies traversed, as they did, the Carnatic for hundreds of miles in all directions, through the whole line of their march they did not see one man, not one woman, not one child, and not one four-footed beast, of any description whatever. One dead uniform silence reigned over the whole region.

Mirabeau.-Lamartine.

[The great French Revolution broke out in 1789, durin; the reign of Louis XVI., who became its most illustrious victim. Mirabeau (me-rah-bo') was the most influential of the popular leaders in the National Assembly, being distinguished for his eloquence and address. His death occurred in 1791. The following extract is from Lamartine's "History of the Girondists."]

1. MIRABEAU had just died. The instinct of the people led them to press around the house of their tribune, as if to demand inspiration even from his coffin; but had Mirabeau been still living, he could no longer have given it; his star had paled its fires before that of the Revolution; hurried to the verge of an unavoidable precipice by the very chariot he had himself set in motion, it was in vain that he clung to the tribune. The last memorial he addressed to the king, which the Iron Chest* has surrendered to us, together with the secret of his venality, testify the failure and dejection of his mind.

2. His counsels are versatile, incoherent, and almost childish-now he will arrest the Revolution with a grain of sand— now he places the salvation of the Monarchy in a proclamation of the crown and a regal ceremony which shall revive the popularity of the king,—and now he is desirous of buying the acclamations of the tribune, and believes the nation, like himself, to be purchasable at a price. The pettiness of his means of safety is in contrast with the vast increase of perils; there is a vagueness in every idea; we see that he is impelled by the very passions he has excited, and that unable any longer to guide or control them, he betrays, whilst he is yet unable to crush, them.

3. The prime agitator is now but the alarmed courtier seeking shelter beneath the throne, and though still stuttering out terrible words in behalf of the nation and liberty, which are in the part set down for him, has already in his soul all the pal

This was a secret closet which Louis XVI. had cansed to be constructed in the wall of one of his apartments. The door being of iron, it was afterward called the Iron Chest. The workman employed to construct it gave information of its existence to Roland, a leading member of the National Convention and a stern republican; and thus the royal papers and documents which were secreted therein were discovered and abstracted.

triness and the thoughts of vanity which are proper to a court. We pity genius when we behold it struggling with impossibility. Mirabeau was the most potent man of his time; but the greatest individual contending with an enraged element appeared but a madman. A fall is only majestic when accompanied by virtue.

4. Poets say that clouds assume the form of the countries over which they have passed, and moulding themselves upon the valleys, plains, or mountains, acquire their shapes, and move with them over the skies. This resembles certain men, whose genius being as it were acquisitive, models itself upon the epoch in which it lives, and assumes all the individuality of the nation to which it belongs. Mirabeau was a man of this class: he did not invent the Revolution, but was its manifestation. But for him it might perhaps have remained in a state of idea and tendency. He was born, and it took in him the form, the passion, the language which make a multitude say when they see a thing-There it is.

5. He was born a gentleman and of ancient lineage, refugee and established in Provence, but of Italian origin; his progenitors were Tuscan. The family was one of those whom Florence had cast from her bosom in the stormy excesses of her liberty, and for which Dante reproaches his country in such bitter strains for her exiles and persecutions. The blood of Machiavel and the earthquake genius of the Italian republics were characteristics of all the individuals of this race. The proportions of their souls exceed the height of their destiny; vices, passions, virtues are all in excess. The women are all angelic or perverse, the men sublime or depraved, and their language even is as emphatic and lofty as their aspirations. There is in their most familiar correspondence the color and tone of the heroic tongues of Italy.

6. The ancestors of Mirabeau speak of their domestic affairs as Plutarch of the quarrels of Marius and Sylla, of Cæsar and Pompey. We perceive the great men descending to trifling matters. Mirabeau inspired this domestic majesty and virility in his very cradle. I dwell on these details, which may seem

foreign to this history, but explain it. The source of genius is often in ancestry, and the blood of descent is sometimes the prophecy of destiny.

7. Mirabeau's education was as rough and rude as the hand of his father, who was styled the friend of man, but whose restless spirit and selfish vanity rendered him the persecutor of his wife and the tyrant of all his family. The only virtue he was taught was honor; for by that name, in those days, they dignified that ceremonious demeanor which was so frequently but the show of probity and the elegance of vice. Entering the army at an early age, he acquired nothing of military habits except those alone of licentiousness and play. The hand of his father was constantly extended, not to aid him in rising, but to depress him still lower under the consequences of his errors. His youth was passed in the prisons of the State; his passions becoming envenomed by solitude, and his intellect being rendered more acute by contact with the irons of his dungeon, where his mind lost that modesty which rarely survives the infamy of precocious punishments.

He

8. From the moment of his entry into the National Assembly he filled it: he was the whole people. His gestures were commands; his movements coups d'état (koo det-ah').* placed himself on a level with the throne, and the nobility felt itself subdued by a power emanating from its own body. The clergy, which is the people, and desires to reconcile the democracy with the church, lends him its influence, in order to destroy the double aristocracy of the nobility and bishops.

9. All that had been built by antiquity and cemented by ages fell in a few months. Mirabeau alone preserved his presence of mind in the midst of this ruin. His character of tribune ceases; that of the statesman begins, and in this he is even greater than in the other. There, when all else creep and crawl, he acts with firmness, advancing boldly. The revolution in his brain is no longer a momentary idea-it is a settled plan. The philosophy of the eighteenth century, moderated

Adroit acts of statesmanship.

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