Irish bulls are Greek, - every one of them. Take the Irishman who carried around a brick as a specimen of the house he had to sell; take the Irishman who shut his eyes and looked into the glass to see how he would look when he was dead; take the Irishman that bought a crow, alleging that crows were reported to live two hundred years, and he meant to set out and try it; take the Irishman who met a friend who said to him, "Why, sir, I heard you were dead." "Well," says the man, "" I suppose you see I'm not." "Oh, no," says he, "I would believe the man who told me a good deal quicker than I would you." Well, those are all Greek. A score or more of them, of a parallel character, come from Athens. IF TOUSSAINT L'OUVERTURE WENDELL PHILLIPS 'I were to tell you the story of Napoleon, I should take it from the lips of Frenchmen, who find no language rich enough to paint the great captain of the nineteenth century. Were I to tell you the story of Washington, I should take it from your hearts-you who think no marble white enough on which to carve the name of the Father of his country. But I am to tell you the story of a negro, Toussaint L'Ouverture, who has left hardly one written line. I am to glean it from the reluctant testimony of his enemies, men who despised him because he was a negro and a slave, hated him because he had beaten them in battle. Cromwell manufactured his own army. Napoleon, at the age of twenty-seven, was placed at the head of the best troops Europe ever saw. Cromwell never saw an army till he was forty; this man never saw a soldier till he was fifty. Crom P - well manufactured his own army-out of what? Englishmen -the best blood in Europe. Out of the middle class of Englishmen - the best blood of the island. And with it he conquered what? Englishmen their equals. This man manufactured his army out of what? Out of what you call the despicable race of negroes, debased, demoralized by two hundred years of slavery, one hundred thousand of them imported into the island within four years, unable to speak a dialect intelligible even to each other. Yet out of this mixed and, as you say, despicable mass he forged a thunderbolt and hurled it at what? At the proudest blood in Europe, the Spaniard, and sent him home conquered; at the most warlike blood in Europe, the French, and put them under his feet; at the pluckiest blood in Europe, the English, and they skulked home to Jamaica. Now, if Cromwell was a general, at least this man was a soldier. Now, blue-eyed Saxon, proud of your race, go back with me to the commencement of the country and select what statesman you please. Let him be either American or European; let him have a brain the result of six generations of culture; let him have the ripest training of university routine; let him add to it the better education of practical life; crown his temples with the silver of seventy years, and show me the man of Saxon lineage for whom his most sanguine admirer will wreathe a laurel, rich as embittered foes have placed on the brow of this negro, rare military skill, profound knowledge of human nature, content to blot out all party distinctions, and trust a state to the blood of its sons, anticipating Sir Robert Peel fifty years, and taking his station by the side of Roger Williams before any Englishman or American had won the right; and yet this is the record which the history of rival states makes up for this inspired black of St. Domingo. Some doubt the courage of the negro. Go to Hayti, and stand on those fifty thousand graves of the best soldiers France ever had, and ask them what they think of the negro's sword. I would call him Napoleon, but Napoleon made his way to empire over broken oaths and through a sea of blood. This man never broke his word. I would call him Cromwell, but Cromwell was only a soldier, and the state he founded went down with him into his grave. I would call him Washington, but the great Virginian held slaves. This man risked his empire rather than permit the slave trade in the humblest village of his dominions. You think me a fanatic, for you read history, not with your eyes, but with your prejudices. But fifty years hence, when Truth gets a hearing, the Muse of history will put Phocion for the Greek, Brutus for the Roman, Hampden for England, Fayette for France, choose Washington as the bright consummate flower of our earlier civilization, then, dipping her pen in the sunlight, will write in the clear blue, above them all, the name of the soldier, the statesman, the martyr, Toussaint L'Ouverture. BR ELOQUENCE OF O'CONNELL WENDELL PHILLIPS ROADLY considered, O'Connell's eloquence has never been equaled in modern times, certainly not in English speech. Do you think I am partial? I will vouch John Randolph of Roanoke, the Virginia slaveholder, who hated an Irishman almost as much as he hated a Yankee, himself an orator of no mean level. Hearing O'Connell, he exclaimed, "This is the man, these are the lips, the most eloquent that speak the English tongue in my day." I think he was right. I remember the solemnity of Webster, the grace of Everett, the rhetoric of Choate; I know the eloquence that lay in the iron logic of Calhoun; I have melted beneath the magnetism of Sergeant S. Prentiss, of Mississippi, who wielded a power few men ever had; it has been my fortune to sit at the feet of the great speakers of the English tongue on the other side of the ocean; but I think all of them together never surpassed, and no one of them ever equaled, O'Connell. Nature intended him for our Demosthenes. Never, since the Great Greek, has she sent forth any one so lavishly gifted for his work as a tribune of the people. In the first place, he had a magnificent presence, impressive in bearing, massive, like that of Jupiter. Webster himself hardly outdid him, in the majesty of his proportions. To be sure, he had not Webster's craggy face and precipice of brow, nor his eyes glowing like anthracite coal. Nor had he the lion roar of Mirabeau. But his presence filled the eye. A small O'Connell would hardly have been an O'Connell at all These physical advantages are half the battle. I remember Russell Lowell telling us, that Mr. Webster came home from Washington at the time the Whig party thought of dissolution, and went down to Faneuil Hall to protest. Drawing himself up to his loftiest proportions, his brow clothed with thunder, before the listening thousands, he said, "Well, gentlemen, I am a Whig, a Massachusetts Whig, a Faneuil Hall Whig, a Revolutionary Whig, a Constitutional Whig; if you break the Whig party, where am I to go?" And says Lowell, "We held our breath, thinking where he could go. If he had been five feet three, we should have said, "Who cares where you go?" So it was with O'Connell; there was something majestic in his presence before he spoke, and he added to it, what Webster had not, but Clay might have lent, grace. Lithe as a boy, at seventy, every attitude a picture, every gesture a grace, he was still all nature, nothing but nature seemed to speak all over him. He had a voice that covered the gamut. I heard him once say, “I send my voice across the Atlantic, careering like the thunder storm against the breeze, to tell the slaveholder of the Carolinas that God's thunderbolts are hot, and to remind the bondman that the day of his redemption is already breaking." You seemed to hear the tones coming back to London from the Rocky Mountains. Then, with the slightest possible Irish brogue, he would tell a story, while all Exeter Hall shook with laughter. The next moment, tears in his voice like a Scotch song, five thousand men wept. His marvelous voice, its almost incredible power and sweetness, "Even to the verge of that vast audience it went, THE RIME OF THE ANCIENT MARINER SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE NOTE TO THE PUPIL. Coleridge was born in Devonshire, England, in 1772. He was the intimate friend of Wordsworth, though wholly unlike him. He formed the opium habit, which he was never able to Overcome. His most notable poems are the one given here, and "Christabel" and "Kubla Khan." IT is an ancient Mariner, And he stoppeth one of three. "By thy long gray beard and glittering eye, "The Bridegroom's doors are opened wide, And I am next of kin; |