larger provisions for the gratification of sense? This would be measuring back his steps to savage and brutal life. Shall he turn the force of his faculties to the study of luxury, magnificence, and ostentation? He knows before hand, that the end of all this is vanity and vexation of spirit. There remains nothing then as a safe, a moral, a pleasurable employment of our leisure hours, but the cultivation of the mind, those quiet studies, which are for ever the same, and yet for ever new, which employ without tiring, which exhilarate without intoxicating, which satisfy without satiating the soul.

Ladies and gentlemen of Baltimore, in taking leave of you and of the subject, I can not but express the hope that a brighter day is about to dawn upon the literary condition of our city. A taste for intellectual culture is gradually diffusing itself in our community, from which the best results are to be anticipated. And I call upon all who hope for a better state of things to help forward the cause of letters by every means in their power. The materials, the capacity, the motives, are all here. It only requires the irresistible fiat of the will to accomplish it.

I invoke the aid of all good men and true, to make our beautiful city as distinguished for its literary culture, as it is for its splendid works of art, for the enterprise, the generosity, the urbanity, the hospitality of its inhabitants.

BURKE, FOX, AND PITT, COMPARED WITH CALHOUN,

CLAY, AND WEBSTER.*

I PROPOSE to give you, this evening, some thoughts on the three great cotemporaneous orators and statesmen of England and America, Burke, Fox, and Pitt, and Calhoun, Clay, and Webster. In so doing, I shall develope, as far as my limits will permit, the sphere and importance of popular eloquence, the forms which it takes under different circumstances, and the increasing influence which it is destined to exert upon the condition of mankind.

Popular eloquence is the natural and necessary product of freedom, and of a popular form of government. It is, therefore, a plant exclusively of European and American growth. The literature of Asia has nothing of this species to present, if we except perhaps the speeches of St. Paul, recorded in the New Testament, and those which Josephus puts in the mouths of his historical personages, and they may be said to

* A lecture delivered before the La Fayette Lyceum, 1845.

be rather Grecian than Asiatic. In a despotism, popular eloquence can have no place. Where the affairs of a nation are controlled by the will of one, the ears of power are approached by other language than that of popular eloquence. The soft whispers of flattery are the only species of eloquence ever heard in the courts of princes, and nothing can be more diverse than they from the stern and awful voice of truth, without which eloquence can never exist.

But as mankind have journeyed westward from their cradle in the east, the relative position of government and people has gradually become reversed. The doctrine has been gaining ground, that the government exists for the people, instead of the people for the government, in short, that the government are the servants of the people, instead of the people being servants of the government, that public affairs are to be conducted according to the judgment of the whole, legitimately expressed, rather than according to the arbitrary will of one, or a few. When this change takes place, power changes hands, and the orator becomes the most influential man in the state.

About the middle of the seventeenth century, Louis the fourteenth of France declared, "I am the state," and it was most sadly true; and in the spirit of that declaration, he reigned

without the formality of a prime minister, for fifty-four years, the autocrat of France. At the age of seventeen, he entered the hall of parliament, booted and spurred, whip in hand, and commanded a national edict to be registered. Near the close of the eighteenth century, in the reign of Louis the sixteenth, the people took the government into their own hands, and, at the same moment, eloquence ascended the throne. Mirabeau, by the mere force of oratory, could depose his sovereign, and, by a single word, overthrow a monarchy, which had been consolidating for ages. The king sent his usher to dissolve the national assembly. But Mirabeau, the orator, arose. "The commons of France have resolved to deliberate," said he. "We have listened to the king's exposition of those views which have been suggested to him; and you, who have no claim to be his organ in this assembly, you, who have here no place, nor vote, nor right of speaking, you are not the person to remind us of his discourse. Go, tell your master that we are here by the order of the people, and that nothing shall drive us hence but the bayonet." From that moment till his death, by the mere force of popular eloquence, Mirabeau ruled almost as absolute in France, as Louis the fourteenth had done, one hundred and forty years before. Such, to a greater or less degree,

is the sway which is always given to popular eloquence by the establishment of the government of the people. The power which was thus acquired by the people, has been, in a great measure, retained in that country to the present hour, and France is now governed by public opinion as well as royal prerogative. That public opinion expresses itself in the debates of parliament, and eloquence, by this means, exercises an extensive influence over the course of public affairs, though there are few who venture themselves into the tribunal without a written speech.

In England, power was much earlier and more gradually transferred from the crown to the people. At the commencement of the reformation England was nearly as absolute a monarchy as France. Henry the eighth, on the hesitation of parliament to pass one of his favorite measures, sent for the speaker, reprimanded him severely, and, drawing his hand across his neck, told him, "If my bill does not pass, this must come off." In a little more than a century, a parliament actually treated the head of Charles the first as Henry the eighth had threatened to treat that of the speaker, and England was, for seven years, a republic.

When monarchy was restored, it was with such restrictions as rendered it an entirely dif