breast of Loch Katrine, not a river, not a lake, but has swelled with the life-tide of freedom. Would you witness greatness? Contemplate a Wallace and a Bruce! They fought not for honors, for party, for conquest; 't was for their country and their country's good, religion, law, and liberty. Would you ask for chivalry that high and delicate sense of honor, which deems a stain upon one's country as individual disgrace; that moral courage which measures danger and meets it against known odds; that patriot valor which would rather repose on a death-bed of laurels than flourish in wealth and power under the nightshade of despotism? Citizen soldier, turn to Lochiel, the "proud bird of the mountain"! Though pierced with the usurper's arrow, his plumage still shines through the clouds of oppression, lighting to honor all who nobly dare "to do or die." Where, then, can we better look for all that is worthy of honest ambition, than to Scotland' POMPEII. ANON. ROLL back the tide of eighteen hundred years. At the foot of the vine-clad Vesuvius stands a royal city. The stately Roman walks its lordly streets, or banquets in the palaces of its splendors. The bustle of busied thousands is there; you may hear it along the thronged quays; it rises from the amphitheatre and the forum. It is the home of luxury, of gayety, and of joy. There toged royalty drowns itself in dissipation, the lion roars over the martyred Christian, and the bleeding body of the gladiator dies at the beck of applauding spectators. It is a careless, a dream. ing, a devoted city. Lo! there is blackness in the horizon, and the earthquake is rioting in the bowels of the mountains! Hark! a roar! a crash! and the very foundations of the eternal hills are belched forth in a sea of fire! Woe for that fated city! The torrent comes surging like the mad ocean! It boils above wall and tower, palace and fountain, and Pompeii is a city of tombs ! Ages roll on. Silence, darkness, and desolation are in the halls of buried grandeur. Lo! other generations live above the dust of long lost glory, and the slumber of the dreamless city is forgotten. And lo a voice from Italy! Let the nations hearken, for the slumber of ages is broken, and the buried voice of antiquity speaks again from the gray ruins of Pompeii! Pompeii beholds a resurrection! As summoned by the blast of the first trumpet, she hath shaken from her beauty the ashes of centuries, and once more looks forth upon the world sullied and sombre, but interesting still. There, in their gloomy boldness, stand her palaces, but the song of carousal is hushed forever. You may behold the places of her fountains, but you will hear no murmur; they are as the water-courses of the desert. There too are her gardens, but the barrenness of long antiquity is theirs. You may stand in her amphitheatre, and you shall read utter desolation on its bare and dilapidated walls. Pompeii! mouldering relic of a former world! Strange redemption from the sepulchre! How vivid are the classic memories that cluster around thee ! Venerable and eternal city! The storied urn to a nation's memory! A disentombed and risen witness for the dead! Every stone of thee is consecrate and immortal! Rome was, Thebes was, Sparta was, thou wast, and art still! No Goth or Vandal thundered at thy gates or revelled in thy spoil. Man marred not thy magnificence. Thou wert scathed by the finger of Him who alone knew the depth of thy violence and crime. Babylon of Italy! thy doom was not revealed to thee. No prophet was there, when thy towers were tottering, and the ashy darkness obscured thy horizon, to construe the warning. The wrath of God was upon thee heavily, in the volcano was the hiding of his power, and, like thine ancient sisters of the plain, thy judgment was sealed in fire. WHAT IS A MINORITY? JOHN B. GOUGH. WHAT is a minority? The chosen heroes of this earth have been in the minority. There is not a social, political, or religious privilege that you enjoy to-day, that was not bought for you by the blood and tears and patient sufferings of the minority. It is the minority that have vindicated humanity in every struggle. It is the minority that have come out as iconoclasts to beat down the Dagons their fathers have worshipped, the old abuses of society. It is the minority that have stood in the van of every moral conflict, and achieved all that is noble in the history of the world. You will find that each generation has been always busy in gathering up the scattered ashes of the martyred heroes of the past, to deposit them in the golden urn of a nation's history. Look at Scotland, where they are erecting monuments -to whom? to the Covenanters. Ah, they were in a minority! Read their history, if you can, without the blood tingling to the tips of your fingers! WHAT IS A MINORITY? 165 Look at that girl, of whose innocent stratagem the legend has come down to us, and see how persecution sharpens the intellect as well as gives power to faith! She was going to the conventicle. She knew the penalty of that deed was death. She met a company of troopers. "My girl, where are you going?" She could not tell them a lie; she must tell the truth. It was death to go to that conventicle; to tell that she was going there was to reveal its place to these soldiers; and the lives of her friends were in her hands. "Let me go!" she said; "I am going to my father's house. My elder brother is dead and he has left a will, and I am in it; and it is to be read to-day." "Go, my girl," said he, "and I hope you will have something handsome." These were the minority, that through blood and tears and scourgings-dyeing the waters with their blood, and staining the heather with their gore-fought the glorious battle of religious freedom. Minority! if a man stand up for the right, though the right be on the scaffold, while the wrong sits in the seat of government; if he stand for the right, though he eat, with the right and truth, a wretched crust; if he walk with obloquy and scorn in the by-lanes and streets, while falsehood and wrong ruffle it in silken attire, let him remember, that, wherever the right and truth are, there are always "troops of beautiful, tall angels" gathering round him, and God himself stands within the dim future, and keeps watch over his own! If a man stands for the right and the truth, though every man's finger be pointed at him, though every woman's lips be curled at him in scorn, he stands in a majority; for God and good angels are with him, and greater are they that are for him than all they that be against him! MACGREGOR'S DEFENCE. WALTER SCOTT. You speak like a boy,- like a boy who thinks the old, gnarled oak can be twisted as easily as the young sapling. Can I forget that I have been branded as an outlaw, stigmatized as a traitor, a price set on my head as if I had been a wolf, my family treated as the dam and cubs of the hill-fox, whom all may torment, vilify, degrade, and insult; the very name, which came to me from a long and noble line of martial ancestors, denounced as if it were a spell to conjure up the devil with? And they shall find that the name they have dared to proscribe, that the name of MacGregor, is a spell to raise the wild devil withal. They shall hear of my vengeance, that would scorn to listen to the story of my wrongs. The miserable Highland drover, bankrupt, barefooted, stripped of all, dishonored, and hunted down, because the avarice of others grasped at more than that poor all could pay, shall burst on them in an awful change! The land might be at peace and in law for us, did they allow us the blessings of peaceful law. But we have been a persecuted people, and if persecution maketh wise men mad, what must it do to men like us, living as our fathers did a thousand years since, and possessing scarce more lights than they did? Can we view the bloody edicts against us, the hanging, heading, hounding, and hunting down an ancient and honorable name, as deserving better treatment than that which enemies give to enemies? Here I stand, have been in twenty frays and never |