arrived at the noble lord's destination. How- | country; measures the effects of which, I am ever, the tracks of my worthy friend are those I have ever wished to follow, because I know they lead to honour. Long may we tread the same road together, whoever may accompany us, or whoever may laugh at us on our journey! I honestly and solemnly declare I have in all seasons adhered to the system of 1766, for no other reason than that I think it laid deep in your truest interests-and that, by limiting the exercise, it fixes on the firmest foundations a real, consistent, well-grounded authority in parliament. Until you come back to that system there will be no peace for England. CHATHAM AND TOWNSHEND. (FROM THE SPEECH ON AMERICAN TAXATION.) afraid, are for ever incurable. He made an administration so checkered and speckled, he put together a piece of joinery so crossly indented and whimsically dovetailed; a cabinet so variously inlaid; such a piece of diversified mosaic; such a tesselated pavement without cement; here a bit of black stone and there a bit of white; patriots and courtiers, king's friends and republicans; whigs and tories; treacherous friends and open enemies; that it was indeed a very curious show, but utterly unsafe to touch, and unsure to stand on. The colleagues whom he had assorted at the same boards stared at each other, and were obliged to ask, Sir, your name?—Sir, you have the advantage of me-Mr. Such-a-one--I beg a thousand pardons.-I venture to say, it did so happen that persons had a single office divided between them who had never spoken to each other in their lives, until they found themselves, they knew not how, pigging together, I have done with the third period of your policy, that of your repeal, and the return of your ancient system and your ancient tran-heads and points, in the same truckle-bed. quillity and concord. Sir, this period was not as long as it was happy. Another scene was opened, and other actors appeared on the stage. The state, in the condition I have described it, was delivered into the hands of Lord Chatham-a great and celebrated name; a name that keeps the name of this country respectable in every other on the globe. may be truly called, Clarum et venerabile nomen Sir, in consequence of this arrangement, having put so much the larger part of his enemies and opposers into power, the confusion was such that his own principles could not possibly have any effect or influence in the conduct of affairs. If ever he fell into a fit of the gout, or if any other cause withdrew him It from public cares, principles directly the contrary were sure to predominate. When he had executed his plan he had not an inch of ground to stand upon. When he had accomplished his scheme of administration he was no longer a minister. When his face was hid but for a moment his whole system was on a wide sea without chart or compass. The gentlemen, his particular friends, who with the names of various departments of ministry were admitted to seem as if they acted a part under him, with a modesty that becomes all men, and with a confidence in him which was justified even in its extravagance by his superior abilities, had never in any instance presumed upon any opinion of their own. Deprived of his guiding influence they were whirled about, the sport of every gust, and easily driven into any port; and as those who joined with them in manning the vessel were the most directly opposite to his opinions, measures, and char Sir, the venerable age of this great man, his merited rank, his superior eloquence, his splendid qualities, his eminent services, the vast space he fills in the eye of mankind, and, more than all the rest, his fall from power, which, like death, canonizes and sanctifies a great character, will not suffer me to censure any part of his conduct. I am afraid to flatter him; I am sure I am not disposed to blame him. Let those who have betrayed him by their adulation insult him with their malevolence. But what I do not presume to censure I may have leave to lament. For a wise man he seemed to me at that time to be governed too much by general maxims. I speak with the freedom of history, and I hope without offence. One or two of these maxims, flowing from an opinion not the most indul-acter, and far the most artful and powerful of gent to our unhappy species, and surely a little too general, led him into measures that were greatly mischievous to himself, and for that reason, among others, perhaps fatal to his the set, they easily prevailed so as to seize upon the vacant, unoccupied, and derelict minds of his friends; and instantly they turned the vessel wholly out of the course of his policy. As if it were to insult as well as betray him, even long before the close of the first session of his administration, when everything was publicly transacted, and with great parade, in his name, they made an act declaring it highly just and expedient to raise a revenue in America. For even then, sir, even before this splendid orb was entirely set, and while the western horizon was in a blaze with his descending glory, on the opposite quarter of the heavens arose another luminary, and for his hour became lord of the ascendant. This light too is passed and set for ever. You understand, to be sure, that I speak of Charles Townshend, officially the reproducer of this fatal scheme; whom I cannot even now remember without some degree of sensibility. In truth, sir, he was the delight and ornament of this house, and the charm of every private society which he honoured with his presence. Perhaps there never arose in this country, nor in any country, a man of a more pointed and finished wit; and (where his passions were not concerned) of a more refined, exquisite, and penetrating judgment. If he had not so great a stock, as some have had who flourished formerly, of knowledge long treasured up, he knew better by far than any man I ever was acquainted with how to bring together within a short time all that was necessary to establish, to illustrate, and to decorate that side of the question he supported. He stated his matter skilfully and powerfully. He particularly excelled in a most luminous explanation and display of his subject. His style of argument was neither trite nor vulgar, nor subtle and abstruse. He hit the house just between wind and water. And not being troubled with too anxious a zeal for any matter in question, he was never more tedious or more earnest than the preconceived opinions and present temper of his hearers required; to whom he was always in perfect unison. He conformed exactly to the temper of the house; and he seemed to guide, because he was always sure to follow it. THE DESOLATION OF THE CARNATIC.1 When at length Hyder Ali found that he had to do with men who either would sign no convention, or whom no treaty and no signature could bind, and who were the determined 1 From the speech on the Nabob of Arcot's Debts, delivered February, 1785. | enemies of human intercourse itself, he decreed to make the country possessed by these incorrigible and predestinated criminals a memorable example to mankind. He resolved, in the gloomy recesses of a mind capacious of such things, to leave the whole Carnatic an everlasting monument of vengeance; and to put perpetual desolation as a barrier between him and those against whom the faith which holds the moral elements of the world together was no protection. He became at length so confident of his force, so collected in his might, that he made no secret whatsoever of his dreadful resolution. Having terminated his disputes with every enemy and every rival, who buried their mutual animosities in their common detestation against the creditors of the nabob of Arcot, he drew from every quarter whatever a savage ferocity could add to his new rudiments in the arts of destruction; and compounding all the materials of fury, havoc, and desolation into one black cloud, he hung for a while on the declivities of the mountains. Whilst the authors of all these evils were idly and stupidly gazing on this menacing meteor, which blackened all their horizon, it suddenly burst, and poured down the whole of its contents upon the plains of the Carnatic. Then ensued a scene of woe the like of which no eye had seen, no heart conceived, and which no tongue can adequately tell. All the horrors of war before known or heard of were mercy to that new havoc. A storm of universal fire blasted every field, consumed every house, destroyed every temple. The miserable inhabitants flying from their flaming villages in part were slaughtered; others, without regard to sex, to age, to the respect of rank, or sacredness of function; fathers torn from children, husbands from wives, enveloped in a whirlwind of cavalry, and amidst the goading spears of drivers, and the trampling of pursuing horses, were swept into captivity in an unknown and hostile land. Those who were able to evade this tempest fled to the walled cities. But escaping from fire, sword, and exile, they fell into the jaws of famine. The alms of the settlement in this dreadful exigency were certainly liberal; and all was but it was a people in beggary; it was a done by charity that private charity could do: nation which stretched out its hands for food. For months together these creatures of sufferance, whose very excess and luxury in their most plenteous days had fallen short of the allowance of our austerest fasts, silent, patient, will support this assertion in its full extent. That hurricane of war passed through every part of the central provinces of the Carnatic. Six or seven districts to the north and to the south (and these not wholly untouched) escaped the general ravage. The Carnatic is a country not much inferior in extent to England. Figure to yourself, Mr. Speaker, the land in whose representative chair you sit, figure to yourself the form and fashion of your sweet and cheerful country, from Thames to Trent north and resigned, without sedition or disturbance, al- | three witnesses, above all exception, who most without complaint, perished by an hundred a day in the streets of Madras; every day seventy at least laid their bodies in the streets, or on the glacis of Tanjore, and expired of famine in the granary of India. I was going to awake your justice towards this unhappy part of our fellow-citizens, by bringing before you some of the circumstances of this plague of hunger. Of all the calamities which beset and waylay the life of man this comes the nearest to our heart, and is that wherein the proudest of us all feels himself to be nothing more than he is: but I find my-south, and from the Irish to the German Sea self unable to manage it with decorum; these details are of a species of horror so nauseous and disgusting; they are so degrading to the sufferers and to the hearers; they are so humiliating to human nature itself, that, on better thoughts, I find it more advisable to throw a pall over this hideous object, and to leave it to your general conceptions. For eighteen months without intermission this destruction raged from the gates of Madras to the gates of Tanjore; and so completely did these masters in their art, Hyder Ali and his more ferocious son, absolve themselves of their impious vow, that when the British armies traversed, as they did, the Carnatic for hundreds of miles in all directions, through the whole line of their march they did not see one man, not one woman, not one child, not one four-footed beast of any description whatever. One dead uniform silence reigned over the whole region. With the inconsiderable exceptions of the narrow vicinage of some few forts, I wish to be understood as speaking literally. I mean to produce to you more than east and west, emptied and embowelled (may God avert the omen of our crimes!) by so accomplished a desolation. Extend your imagination a little further, and then suppose your ministers taking a survey of this scene of waste and desolation; what would be your thoughts if you should be informed, that they were computing how much had been the amount of the excises, how much the customs, how much the land and malt tax, in order that they should charge (take it in the most favourable light) for public service, upon the relics of the satiated vengeance of relentless enemies, the whole of what England had yielded in the most exuberant seasons of peace and abundance? What would you call it? To call it tyranny, sublimed into madness, would be too faint an image; yet this very madness is the principle upon which the ministers at your right hand have proceeded in their estimate of the revenues of the Carnatic, when they were providing, not supply for the establishments of its protection, but rewards for the authors of its ruin. ELIZABETH RYVES. DIED 1797. high tone of the piece may have stood in its way. Miss Ryves' next work was The Debt of Honour; but the manager to whom she sent it kept it for some years, when he returned it to her, and it met with no greater success than her previous attempts. [Of the early days of Elizabeth Ryves little | deed, it is possible that the originality and or nothing is known beyond the fact that she was of a good Irish family. While young she lost her property through some trick of the law, and, having received a good education, determined to earn her living by her pen. With this view she removed to London, where in 1777 she wrote her first work, The Prude, a comic opera. The piece was a good one, but through want of proper introductions or from some other cause, it was not acted. In Turning from the unpaying walk of dramatic literature she took to writing verses, a volume of which she published; but finding that she could get any amount of them printed yet with small pay for the best, she turned her back upon poetry as upon the drama, and took to hack-work of another kind. In a garret at Islington she produced in rapid succession translations of Rousseau's Social Compact, Raynal's Letter to the National Assembly, and De la Choix's Review of the Constitutions of Europe. Once again financial success failed to attend her, and leaving Islington she returned to London. Though broken down in health and for a time dispirited, she now engaged on a translation of Froissart, but again had little profit for her labour. Still bearing up under her misfortunes she turned to another field, and in 1794 published The Hermit of Snowden, a novel of high merit and deeply pathetic. When Dodsley gave up the management of The Annual Register, Miss Ryves, being well known as a person of wide reading and attainments, was engaged to conduct the historical and political departments. Notwithstanding this last engagement, however, she began to find it impossible to earn as much as would keep clothes on her body, a roof over her head, and sufficient food to eat. In her there must have been something of the generous improvidence of Goldsmith, for it is said that on one occasion she spent what money she had in buying a joint of meat for a destitute family that lodged in a room above her, while she herself went dinnerless. Desperate and absolute want at last brought on her end, which occurred in Store Street, London, on the 29th of April, 1797. It may seem strange that a person of such powers and culture should have thus succumbed to actual want. But the truth is she was unfitted for business affairs, and had not the courage to seek higher prices for her work, in spite of that masculine strength of mind and breadth of vision which she possessed, and which ought to have helped her more than they did. At the same time she had a womanly sweetness of temper which carried, her through all her trials, and a chastity of nature that kept her perhaps too much to herself, and away from those who might have helped her or directed her career into some surer channel of success.] DIALOGUE IN THE ELYSIAN FIELDS BETWEEN CÆSAR AND CATO. Across the narrowing stream, as Cato's eye Marked the pale train, nor marked without a sigh The shade of Cæsar rushing on his view, With looks of mild benignity, like those Oppose the grace for which he vainly pleads, "Proud shade," exclaimed the indignant ghost again, “Take back the insulting pity I disdain; Great as when throned the master of the world! Oh glorious name! my glowing spirit towers "Nor canst thou, Cato, rigid as thou art, And bow by force of arms her senate to obey."" Smiling calm scorn on Cæsar's vaunting pride, Thus to his vain appeal the sage replied: "How weak that judgment which decides on fame With throats of brass to thunder forth the deeds And from the hackney'd bursts of such applause Deem not that meteor blaze which round thee burned The beams of genuine glory; she displays ODE TO SENSIBILITY.1 The sordid wretch who ne'er has known Give me a generous soul, that glows With others' transports, others' woes, Whose noble nature scorns to bend, Tho' Fate her iron scourge extend, But bravely bears the galling yoke, And smiles superior to the stroke With spirits free and mind unbroke. Yet by compassion touched, not fear, Sheds the soft sympathizing tear 1 This and the following pieces are from Poems on Several Occasions. In tribute to affliction's claim, ODE TO FRIENDSHIP. Fond Love with all his winning wiles To Friendship (sweet benignant power!) Soft Peace descends to guard her reign |