THE DEFENCE OF HOFER.

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run! The grave opens to receive me, and I sink into its bosom ! I have but one request to make at my departure from this world; it is the charity of its silence. Let no man write my epitaph; for, as no man who knows my motives dare now vindicate them, let not prejudice nor ignorance asperse them. Let them and me repose in obscurity and peace, and my tomb remain uninscribed, until other times, and other men, can do justice to my character. When my country takes her place among the nations of the earth, then, and not till then, let my epitaph be written. I have done.

THE DEFENCE OF HOFER, THE TYROLESE PATRIOT.

You ask what I have to say in my defence, you who glory in the name of France, who wande through the world to enrich and exalt the land of your birth; you demand how I could dare arm myself against the invaders of my native rocks. Do you confine the love of home to yourselves? Do you punish in others the actions which you dignify among yourselves? Those stars which glitter on your breasts, do they hang there as a recompense for patient servitude?

You say,

I see the smile of contempt which curls your lips. "This brute! he is a ruffian! a beggar! That patched jacket, that ragged cap, that rusty belt! Shall barbarians such as he close the pass against us, shower rocks on our heads, and single out our leaders with unfailing aim; these grovelling mountaineers, who know not the joys and brilliance of life, creeping amid eternal snows, and snatching with greedy hand their stinted ear of corn!"

Yet, poor as we are, we never envied our neighbors their smiling sun, their gilded palaces. We never strayed from our peaceful huts to blast the happiness of those who have injured us. The traveller who visited our valleys met every hand outstretched to welcome him; for him every hearth blazed as we listened to his tale of distant lands. Too happy for ambition, we were not jealous of wealth; we have even refused to partake of it.

Frenchmen! you have wives and children. When you return to your beautiful cities, amid the roar of trumpets, the smiles of the lovely, and the multitude shouting their triumphs, they will ask, "Where have you roamed? What have you achieved? What have you brought back to us?" Those laughing babes who climb your knees, will you have the heart to tell them, "We have pierced the barren crags, we have entered the naked cottage to level it to the ground; we found no treasures but honest hearts, and those we have broken because they throbbed with love for the wilderness around them. Clasp this old firelock in your little hands, it was snatched from a peasant of Tyrol, who died in the vain effort to stem the torrent"? Seated by your firesides, will you boast to your generous and blooming wives, that you have extinguished the last ember that lighted our gloom?

Happy scenes! I shall never see you more! In those cold, stern eyes I read my fate. Think not that your sentence can be terrible to me, but, I have sons, daughters, and a wife who has shared all my labors; she has shared, too, my little pleasures, such pleasures as that humble roof can yield, pleasures that you cannot understand. My little ones! should you live to bask in the sunshine of manhood, dream not of your father's doom! Should you live to know it, know, too, that the man who has served his God and

his country with all his heart, can smile at the musket levelled to pierce it!

What is death to me? I have not revelled in pleasures wrung from innocence and want; rough and discolored as these hands are, they are pure. My death is nothing. Oh, that my country could live! Oh, that ten thousand such deaths could make her immortal! Do I despair then? No. We have rushed to the sacrifice, and the offering has been in vain for us; but, our children shall burst these fetters; the blood of virtue was never shed in vain; Freedom can never die. I have heard that you killed your king once because he enslaved you, yet, now, again you crouch before a single man who bids you trample on all who abjure his yoke, and shoots. you if you have courage to disobey.

Do you think that, when I am buried, there shall breathe no other Hofers? Dream you that, if to-day you prostrate Hofer in the dust, to-morrow Hofer is no more? In the distance I see liberty which I shall not taste; behind I look on my slaughtered countrymen, on my orphans, on my desolate fields; but a star rises before my aching sight which points to justice,—and it shall come!

IRISH ALIENS.

R. L. SHIEL.

I SHOULD be surprised, indeed, if, while you are doing us wrong, you did not profess your solicitude to do us justice. From the day on which Strongbow set his foot upon the shore of Ireland, Englishmen were never wanting in protestations of their deep anxiety to do us justice. Even Strafford, the deserter of the people's cause, while he trampled upon our

rights and trod upon the heart of the country, protested his solicitude to do justice to Ireland. What marvel is it, then, that gentlemen opposite should deal in such vehement protestations?

There is, however, one man of great abilities, whose talents and whose boldness have placed him in the topmost place in his party; who, disdaining all imposture, and flinging off the slender veil by which his political associates affect to cover, though they cannot hide their motives, distinctly and audaciously tells the Irish people that they are not entitled to the same privileges as Englishmen; and pronounces them in every particular to be aliens,-to be aliens in race, aliens in country, aliens in religion!

Aliens! Good God! Was Arthur, Duke of Wellington, in the House of Lords, and did he not start up and exclaim, "Hold! I have seen the aliens do their duty"? The Duke of Wellington is not a man of an excitable temperament; his mind is of a cast too martial to be easily moved, but notwithstanding this, I cannot help thinking that, when he heard his Roman Catholic countrymen designated by such a phrase, he ought to have remembered the many fields of fight in which we have been contributors to his renown. "The battles, sieges, fortunes, that he has passed," ought to have come back upon him. He ought to have remembered that, from the earliest achievement, in which he displayed that military genius which has placed him foremost in the annals of warfare, down to the last and surpassing combat, which has made his name imperishable,-from Assaye to Waterloo, the Irish soldiers, with whom your armies are filled, were the inseparable auxiliaries to the glory with which his unparalleled successes have been crowned. Whose were the arms that drove your bayonets at Vimiera, Badajos, Salamanca,

CLOSE OF IMPEACHMENT OF HASTINGS.

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Albuera, Toulouse, and last of all, the greatest, — tell me, for you were there (I appeal to the gallant soldier before me), tell me, if on that day, when the destinies of mankind were trembling in the balance, while death fell in showers, when the artillery of France was levelled with the precision of the most deadly science, when her legions, incited by the voice and inspired by the example of their mighty leader, rushed again and again to the onset,―tell me if for an instant, when to hesitate for an instant was to be lost, the "aliens" blenched? And when the moment for the last and decisive movement had arrived, when, with words familiar but immortal, the great captain cried, "Up, lads, and at them !"- tell me if Catholic Ireland, with less heroic valor than the natives of your own glorious country, precipitated herself on the foe?

The blood of England, Scotland, and Ireland flowed in the same stream, and drenched the same field. When the chill morning dawned, their dead lay cold and stark together. In the same deep pit their bodies were deposited; the dew falls from heaven upon their union in the grave. Partakers in every peril, in the glory shall we not be permitted to participate? And shall we be told, as a requital, that we are estranged from the noble country, for whose salvation our life blood was poured out?

CLOSE OF IMPEACHMENT OF HASTINGS. EDMUND BURKE.

My Lords, I have done; the part of the Commons is concluded. With a trembling solicitude we consign this product of our long, long labors to your charge. Take it! Take it! It is a sacred trust.