the spirits of the just made perfect, descending from their golden thrones on high, break forth into songs like this:

"Tears are not now thy due. From the world's toil,

Come to assume in heaven the brighter birth:

A wingéd angel, from thy mortal coil

Escaped! Thy glory lingers yet round earth.

Christ's hallowed warrior, living, thou went'st forth;

Christ's champion didst thou die. And now, blest shade!

The crown and palm of righteousness and worth

Thou wear'st, with joys unspeakable repaid.”

The priesthood of Genoa, grateful for the honor of dismissing the lofty spirit from its mortal conflict, cover the departing bier with sad funereal weeds.

Rome, ever avaricious of relics, though she has gathered into her urn the ashes of the great and good of nearly thirty centuries, reverently claims aud embalms, and shrines with her soul-subduing litanies, the heart of yet another—

"Who through the foes has borne her banished gods."

Behold now a nation which needeth not to speak its melancholy precedence. The lament of Ireland comes forth from palaces deserted, and from shrines restored; from Boyne's dark water, witness of her desolation, and from Tara's lofty hill, ever echoing her renown. But louder and deeper yet that wailing comes from the lonely huts on mountain and on moor, where the people of the greenest island of all the seas are expiring in the midst of insufficient though world-wide charities. Well indeed may they deplore O'Connell, for they were his children. And he bore them

"A love so vehement, so strong, so pure,

That neither age could change nor art could cure."

Again and again, as if they feared to disturb him with excess of sorrow, they plead:

-"If yet we keep

Vigils of grief, and echo groan for groan,
"Tis not for thee; but for ourselves we weep,
Whose noblest pillar lies in thee o'erthrown."

The pageant pauses. Next to the chief mourner, space is opened for America, eldest of the new-born nations. Why shall not America accept that distinguished privilege? O'Connell was a champion of universal constitutional freedom. That is her own

cause

-all her own. She arms, and instructs, and sends forth, all its chieftains; and when one of them falls in the ever-continuing conflict-be his faith, his tongue, or his lineage, what it may-whether he die on the snowy plains of Poland, among the classic islands of Greece, under the bright skies of Italy, among the vine-clad hills of France, or in the green valleys of Ireland — be he Kosciusko, or Bozzaris, or Lafayette, or O'Connell-America hastens to bear witness that he was her soldier, citizen, and representative.

Panegyric commonly begins its picture by calling up revered ancestral shadows from long-forgotten graves, to fill the background; and then surrounds its hero with cotemporaneous forms of kindred greatness. But there are figures so majestic as to exclude from the canvass all living companionship, while they derive no grandeur from being grouped with even the awful forms of the illustrious dead. Such is every one who, by permission of Providence, the devotion of his own sonl, and the consent given by his fellow-men, or extorted from them, losing his own individuality, becomes for a period the representative of a race, a people, a nation, or it may be of many races, peoples, or nations. You recognise Napoleon in the brilliant scene of his coronation in Nôtre Dame, or when taking leave of his veterans at Fontainebleau; but you are transported with awe or pity when you contemplate him among the solitudes of the frozen Alps, or looking off on the imprisoning sea from the inaccessible cliffs of St. Helena. You perceive the serene dignity of Washington in the picture that commemorates his acceptance of his dangerous commission in the halls of the continental Congress; and you weep when he is seen dismissing his unrewarded though triumphant army on the heights of the Hudson. But your soul is overpowered with his greatness when you come to the uncanopied place where Greenough's accurate taste, banishing even the drapery of the living age, presents to you the Father of his Country in colossal marble alone.

From the beginning there have been two conditions of man, and these in perpetual opposition, force and resistance; two agencies working out his destiny, power and freedom, and these in unceasing conflict; two elements of government, aristocracy and democracy, and these in everlasting war. Nations inspire us with awe, or hate, or reverence, or sympathy, as they sustain one

or the other of these conditions, exert one or the other of these agencies, manifest one or the other of these elements. The man who for a time becomes substituted for a nation, is clothed in our regard with the national attributes. The people of Ireland, during nearly seven hundred years, have maintained a conflict for our common race, of resistance against force, freedom against power, right against usurpation. Through more than twenty years of that conflict, Daniel O'Connell was the impersonation of that people

"A nation in a man compris'd."

In this consists the secret of the interest he excited while living, and of all his fame now that he lives no more. It is his country, therefore, and only his country-as she was, as she is, and as she is to be—that must be regarded, if we would fully comprehend and truly know the character of O'Connell.

Ireland was long ago an independent nation, governed by a king and council or parliament, and was divided into inferior kingdoms and subordinate sects or clans. It had population and revenues equal to what were generally possessed by other states in the same age. One of its inhabitants thus described the kingdom a thousand years ago:

"Far westward lies an isle of ancient fame,
By Nature blest— Hibernia is her name
Enrolled in books-exhaustless is her store
Of veiny silver and of golden ore.

Her fruitful soil for ever teems with wealth,
With gems her waters, and her air with health;
Her verdant fields with milk and honey flow,
Her woolly fleeces vie with virgin snow;
Her waving furrows float with bended corn,
And arms and arts her envied sons adorn.
No poison there infects, nor scaly snake
Creeps through the grass or settles in the lake.
A nation worthy of its pious race-

In war triumphant, and unmatched in peace."

Ireland had then a court in which learning was honored next to royalty; a church that sent forth missionaries who converted a large portion of western Europe; laws that divided estates of the dead with equal justice; that gave the trial by jury-the Anglo-Saxon's boast; that ordained inns for the entertainment of travellers at the public expense, and that knew only one capi

tal or unpardonable crime. And it was treason and sacrilege to
change those laws. There were trained bands which were sworn
to resist even a seven-fold foe; knights who won renown for valor
and courtesy on the plains of Palestine, and dames who were
honored by admiring bards and minstrels in strains like these:
"The daughter of Moran seized the harp!

And her voice of music praised the strangers.
Their soul melted at the song

Like a wreath of snow before the eye of the sun."

I speak no interested, no partial, no imaginative eulogy. It is the testimony of general history, as accredited by modern learning.

Alas, how unlike is this picture to Ireland now, in an age tenfold more enlightened and humane! What has wrought this change? Has Ireland degenerated, or has she been degraded and debased by foreign power? Did Ireland struggle, or did she resign herself to ruin? Listen, and you shall hear.

Separated by only an ocean-channel, and colonized originally by the same Celtic race, the islands of Britain and Ireland have been distinguished by fortunes as wide as the poles. Britain, conquered by the Romans, the Danes, the Saxons, and the Normans, derived from that severe experience the consolidation, discipline, ambition, and energy, which have enabled it to grasp the empire of the world. Ireland, devoted to piety and learning, remaining long unconquered and unconquerable, and unmoved by cupidity or ambition, was early distracted by factions, and finally betrayed by them to a conqueror.

In the twelfth century, Henry II., a Norman king of England, who held the refinements of life in much contempt, "cast in his mind" to conquer the adjoining island, "because it was commodious for him, and its people seemed to him savage and rude." Invited by a native prince who had been dethroned, he appeared in Ireland with a real or forged grant under the seal of Breakspeare, an Englishman, who occupied the papal see at Rome, under the name of Adrian IV. Early converted to Christianity without the blood of martyrs, the Irish had nevertheless been the last to acknowledge the supremacy of Rome. Having received that article of faith, they have held it fast at the cost of ages of want, of millions of lives, and even of national existence. Ireland denied the pretensions of the pope to temporal power, and

resisted the invader. Henry did not reinstate the Irish king, but established on the coast a martial colony; and by virtue of this acquisition, which was henceforth called the Pale, he claimed to be conqueror of the whole island. A royal deputy governed the Pale with a council of nobles and clergy, which afterward became a parliament, and the little domain was parcelled out by the king in great estates to court-favorites and military adventurers. The aristocracy of England was thus by fraud and force planted in the Island of Saints, as it was then reverently called. Thenceforth its veins of silver and its dust of gold, the rubies of its lakes, the grain in its waving furrows, and the flocks on its thousand hills, were to pass away from its harmless people, to pamper despotic and insatiable lords. That august court, those ancient seminaries, those valiant bands, those chivalrous knights, that cynosure of beauty, and the bards who so worthily celebrated it, faded, declined, and were lost for ever!

The establishment of the Pale enfeebled Ireland, although the colony was utterly incompetent to subjugate the kingdom. The colonists claimed to be masters of the island. The Irish, with the British power in the heart of the country, asserted their sovereignty and independence. Hence resulted a division which, perpetuated until now, has involved both in a common ruin. The distinction between the natives and the invaders was graven broad and deep by these conflicting titles, and by perpetual wars, inveterate policy, and clashing codes. The government of England acknowledged only the English inhabitants of the Pale as lawful subjects, and denounced the natives as "aliens," "wild Irish," and "enemies." Magna Charta and the common law were introduced within the Pale, but their protection was denied to the natives, while they were subjected to the power of the English courts. The Irish language and costume were inhibited, intermarriages forbidden, and naturalization under English laws denied. It was made lawful to kill an Irishman on suspicion, without trial or process, and unlawful to entertain an Irish minstrel, to keep an Irish servant, or to feed an Irish horse. The native princes, nobles, and knights, within the colony, were trodden down, and the wretched people, expelled on the one hand as aliens and rebels from their rightful possessions, and on the other by the native Septs into whose hands they were driven, were thus rendered houseless and desperate. Outlaws by statute and by VOL. III.-4