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THE ACADEMICAL SPEAKER.

Ham. Indeed, indeed, Sir, but this troubles me.

Hold you the watch to-night?

Hor. We do, my lord.

Ham. Armed, say you?

299

Hor. Armed, my lord.
Ham. From top to toe?

Hor. My lord, from head to foot.

Ham. Then saw you not his face.

Hor. O, yes, my lord; he wore his beaver up.

Ham. What, looked he frowningly?

Hor.

A countenance more

In sorrow than in anger.

Ham. Pale, or red?

Hor. Nay, very pale.

Ham. And fixed his eyes upon you?
Hor. Most constantly.

Ham. I would I had been there!

Hor. It would have much amazed you.

Ham. Very like, very like.-Staid it long?

Hor. While one with moderate haste might tell a hundred.

Ham. His beard was grizzled ?-no?

Hor. It was, as I have seen it in his life,

A sable silvered.

Ham. I will watch to-night; Perchance 't will walk again. Hor. I warrant 't will.

If

Ham. If it assume my noble father's person,
I'll speak to it, though hell itself should gape,
And bid me hold my peace. I pray you, Sir,
you have hitherto concealed this sight,
Let it be tenable in your silence still;
And whatsoever else shall hap to-night,
Give it an understanding, but no tongue;
I will requite your love: so, fare you well.
Upon the platform, 'twixt eleven and twelve,
I'll visit you.

EXTRACT FROM CICERO'S ORATION AGAINST CATILINE.

How far wilt thou, O Catiline! abuse our patience? How long shall thy madness outbrave our justice? To what ex

of guilt! Canst thou behold the nocturnal arms that watch the Palatium, the guards of the city, the consternation of the citizens; all the wise and worthy clustering into consultation; this impregnable situation of the seat of the senate, and the reproachful looks of the fathers of Rome? Canst thou, I say, behold all this, and yet remain undaunted and unabashed? Art thou sensible that thy measures are detected?

Art thou insensible that this senate, now thoroughly informed, comprehend the full extent of thy guilt? Point me out the senator ignorant of thy practices, during the last and the preceding night; of the place where you met, the company you summoned, and the crime you concerted. The senate is conscious, the consul is witness to this: yet, mean and degenerate ! the traitor lives! Lives! did I say? He mixes with the senate; he shares in our counsels; with a steady eye he surveys us; he anticipates his guilt; he enjoys his murderous thoughts, and coolly marks us out for bloodshed. Yet we, boldly passive in our country's cause, think we act like Romans if we can escape his frantic rage.

Long since, O Catiline! ought the consul to have doomed thy life a forfeit to thy country; and to have directed upon thy own head the mischief thou hast long been meditating for our's. Could the noble Scipio, when sovereign pontiff, as a private Roman, kill Tiberius Gracchus for a slight encroachment upon the rights of his country; and shall we, her consuls, with persevering patience endure Catiline, whose ambition is to desolate a devoted world with fire and sword?

There was there was a time, when such was the spirit of Rome, that the resentment of her magnanimous sons more sternly crushed the Roman traitor, than the most inveterate enemy. Strong and weighty, O Catiline! is the decree of the senate we can now produce against you; neither wisdom is wanting in this state, nor authority in this assembly; but we (let me here take shame to myself), we, the consuls, are defective in our duty.

Mercy, Conscript Fathers, is my delight; but never, in the hour of danger to my country, may that mercy degenerate into weakness. Yet even now my conscience tells me that I have been negligent. Within Italy, upon the very borders of Tuscany, a camp is pitched against the republic. The numbers of the enemy daily increase; but the captain

THE ACADEMICAL SPEAKER.

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of that camp, the leader of those enemies, we behold within our walls; nay, amidst this assembly, daily working up some intestine calamity for Rome.

Should I at this instant, Catiline, command thee to be seized, to be dragged away to death; the censure, which I am afraid I have to dread from every good man, would be, not that I acted with too much severity, but with too much tardiness. Yet this necessary piece of justice, though long required, a certain reason prevails with me still to delay. Thou shalt suffer death-trust me thou shalt; but it shall be at a time, when there cannot be found a man on earth so much a traitor, so much a villain, so much a Catiline, as not to applaud the justice of the stroke. Thou shalt live while there breathes a man, who dares defend thee; but thou shalt live, as thou livest now, beset by my numerous, my trusty guards, so that thou shalt have no power, so much as to stir against the state: for many shall be the eyes, and many the ears, as they have hitherto been, who, unperceived by thee, shall continue to watch thy motions, and suffer none of thy actions to pass unobserved.

EXTRACT FROM R. H. LEE'S SPEECH IN FAVOUR OF THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE.

THE Americans may become faithful friends to the English, but subjects, never. And even though union could be restored without rancour, it could not without danger. There are some who seem to dread the effects of the resolution. But will England, or can she, manifest against us greater vigour and rage than she has already displayed? She deems resistance against oppression no less rebellion than independence itself. And where are those formidable troops that are to subdue the Americans? What the English could not do, can it be done by Germans? Are they more brave, or better disciplined? The number of our enemies is increased; but our own is not diminished, and the battles we have sustained have given us the practice of arms and the experience of war.

America has arrived at a degree of power, which assigns her a place among independent nations: we are not less entitled to it than the English themselves. If they have

they are more numerous, our population will soon equal theirs; if they have men of renown as well in peace as in war, we likewise have such; political revolutions produce great, brave and generous spirits. From what we have already achieved in these painful beginnings, it is easy to presume what we shall hereafter accomplish; for experience is the source of sage counsels, and liberty is the mother of great men.

Have you not seen the enemy driven from Lexington, by thirty thousand citizens armed and assembled in one day? Already their most celebrated generals have yielded, in Boston, to the skill of ours; already their seamen, repulsed from our coasts, wander over the ocean, where they are the sport of tempest, and the prey of famine. Let us hail the favourable omen, and fight, not for the sake of knowing on what terms we are to be the slaves of England, but to secure to ourselves a free existence,—to found a just and independent government. Animated by liberty, the Greeks repulsed the innumerable army of Persians; sustained by the love of independence, the Swiss and the Dutch humbled the power of Austria by memorable defeats, and conquered a rank among nations. The sun of America also shines upon the heads of the brave; the point of our weapons is no less formidable than theirs; here also the same union prevails, the same contempt of dangers and of death, in asserting the cause of country.

Why then do we longer delay, why still deliberate ? Let this most happy day give birth to the American republic. Let her arise, not to devastate and conquer, but to reestablish the reign of peace and of the laws. The eyes of Europe are fixed upon us; she demands of us a living example of freedom, that may contrast, by the felicity of the citizens, with the ever increasing tyranny which desolates her polluted shores. She invites us to prepare an asylum, where the unhappy may find solace, and the persecuted repose. She entreats us to cultivate a propitious soil, where that generous plant which first sprung up and grew in England, but is now withered by the poisonous blasts of Scottish tyranny, may revive and flourish, sheltering, under its salubrious and interminable shade, all the unfortunate of the human race.

'This is the end presaged by so many omens, by our first victories, by the present ardour and union, by the flight of Howe, and the pestilence which broke out amongst

Dunmore's people, by the very winds which baffled the enemy's fleets and transports, and that terrible tempest which ingulfed seven hundred vessels upon the coast of Newfoundland. If we are not this day wanting in our duty to country, the names of the American legislators will be placed, by posterity, at the side of those of Theseus, of Lycurgus, of Romulus, of Numa, of the three Wiliams of Nassau, and of all those whose memory has been, and will be forever dear to virtuous men and good citizens.

INFLUENCE OF THE BIBLE.-Mason.

THE man who reads and reverences the Bible, is not the man of violence and blood: he will not rise up from the study of lessons which the Holy Ghost teaches, to commit a burglary: he will not travel with a Bible under his arm, meditating upon its contents as forming the rule of his conduct, to celebrate the orgies of Bacchus, or the rights of the Cyprian Venus. Assuredly they were not the leaves of the Bible, which, in 1780, kindled the flames of Newgate; nor is it from stores of inspired eloquence, the apostles of mischief draw those doctrines and speeches, which delude the understanding, and exasperate the passions of an ignorant and ill-judging multitude.

The influence of the Bible, upon the habits of community, is calculated to set up, around every paternal government, a rampart better than walls, and guns, and bayonets,—a rampart of human hearts. From the same reasons, the Bible, in proportion as it is known and believed, must produce a generally good effect upon the condition of the world. In forming the character of the individual and the nation, it cannot fail to mould also, in a greater or less degree, the conduct of political governments toward each other.

It is not in the Bible, nor in the spirit which it infuses, that the pride, which sacrifices hecatombs and nations of men to its lawless aggrandisement, either finds or seeks for its aliment; and had Europe been under the sway of this Book of God, this age had not seen a monster of ambition endeavouring to plant one foot on the heights of Montmartre, and the other on the hills of Dover :-and while he scowled on the prostrate continent, stretching with his right

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