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for us, and for our country, it seems glory sufficient, to escape from his fury-to find an asylum from his sword.

Long, very long, before this late hour, ought I, the consul, to have doomed this ringleader of sedition to an ignominious death;-ought I to have overwhelmed you, Cataline, in the ruins of your own machinations. What!

did not that great man, the high priest, Publius Scipioalthough at the time, in private station-sacrifice Tiberius Gracchus for daring even to modify our constitution? and shall we, clothed as we are with the plenitude of consular power, endure this nuisance of our nation, and our name? Shall we suffer him to put the Roman empire to the sword, and lay waste the world, because such is his horrid fancy? With the sanction of so late a precedent, need I obtrude the fate of the innovator, Spurius Melius, immolated at the altar of the constitution, by the hand of Servilius Ahala? There has-yes, there has been, and lately been, a vindicatory virtue, an avenging spirit in this republic, that never failed to inflict speedier and heavier vengeance on a noxious citizen, than on a national foe. Against you, Cataline, and for your immediate condemnation, what, therefore, is wanting? Not the grave sanction of the senate-not the voice of the countrynot ancient precedents-not living law. But we are wanting-I say it more loudly-wE, the consuls themselves.

When the senate committed the republic into the hands of the consul, L. Opimius, did presumptive sedition palliate the punishment of Caius Gracchus? or could his luminous line of ancestry yield even a momentary protection to his person? Was the vengeance of the executive power on the consular Fulvius and his children, arrested for a single night? When similar power was delegated to the consuls, C. Marius and L. Valerius, were the lives which the prætor Servilius, and the tribune Saturninus, had forfeited to their country, prolonged for a single day? But, now, twenty days and nights have blunted the edge of our axes, and our authorities. Our sharp-pointed decree sleeps, sheathed in the record that very decree, which, a moment after its promulgation, was not to find you a living man. You do live; and live, not in the humiliating depression of guilt, but in the exultation and triumph of insolence. Mercy, Conscript Fathers, is my dearest delight, as the vindication of the constitution is

my best ambition; but I now stand self-condemned of guilt in mercy, and I own it as a treachery against the

state.

Conscript Fathers, a camp is pitched against the Roman republic, within Italy, on the very borders of Etruria. Every day adds to the number of the enemy. The leader of those enemies, the commander of that encampment, walks within the walls of Rome; takes his seat in this senate, the heart of Rome; and, with venomous mischief, rankles in the inmost vitals of the commonwealth. Cataline, should I, on the instant, order my lictors to seize and drag you to the stake; some men might, even then, blame me for having procrastinated punishment: but no man could criminate me for a faithful execution of the laws. They shall be executed. But I will neither act, nor will I suffer, without full and sufficient reason. Trust me, they shall be executed; and then, even then, when there shall not be found a man so flagitious, so much a Cataline, as to say, you were not ripe for execution. You shall live, as long as there is one who has the forehead to say you ought to live; and you shall live, as you live now, under our broad and wakeful eye, and the sword of justice shall keep waving round your head. Without the possibility of hearing, or of seeing, you shall be seen, and heard, and understood.

What is it now you are to expect, if night cannot hide you, nor your lurking associates; if the very walls of your own houses resound with the secret, and proclaim it to the world; if the sun shines, and the winds blow upon it? Take my advice: adopt some other plan, wait a more favourable opportunity for setting the city in flames, and putting its inhabitants to the sword. Yet, to convince you, that you are beset on every side, I shall enter, for a little, into the detail of your desperations, and my dis

coveries.

Do you not remember, or is it possible you can forget my declaration on the 21st October last, in the senate, that Caius Manlius, your life-guards-man, and confidential bravo, would, on a certain day, take up arms, and this day would be before the 25th? Was I mistaken in the very day selected for a deed so atrocious-so apparently incredible? Did not I, the same man, declare, in this house, that you had conspired the massacre of the principal men in the state, upon the 28th; at which time they

withdrew, for the sake of repressing your design, rather than on account of safety to themselves? Are you daring enough to deny your being, on that very day, so manacled by my power-so entangled by my vigilance, that you durst not raise your finger against the stability of the state; although, indeed, you were tongue-valiant enough to say, that you must even be content with the heads which the runaways had left you? What! with all your full-blown confidence of surprising Preneste, in the night, on the 1st of November, did you not find me in arms, at the gate? did you not feel me in watch on the walls?Your head cannot contrive, your heart cannot conceive, a wickedness of which I shall not have notice; I measure the length and breadth of your treasons, and I sound the gloomiest depths of your soul.

Was not the night before the last, sufficient to convince you, that there is a good genius protecting that republic, which a ferocious demoniac is labouring to destroy? I aver, that, on that same night, you and your complotters assembled in the house of M. Lecca. Can even your own tongue deny it? Yet secret! speak out, man; for, if you do not, there are some I see around me, who shall have an agonizing proof that I am true in my assertion.

Good and great gods! where are we? What city do we inhabit? Under what government do we live? Here, HERE, Conscript Fathers, mixed and mingled with us allin the centre of this most grave and venerable assemblyare men sitting, quietly incubating a plot against my life, against all your lives; the life of every virtuous senator, and citizen: while I, with the whole nest of traitors brooding beneath my eyes, am parading in the petty formalities of debate; and the very men appear scarcely vulnerable by my voice, who ought, long since, to have been cut down with the sword.

In the house of Lecca, you were, on that night. Then and there did you divide İtaly into military stations; did you appoint commanders of those stations; did you specify those whom you were to take along with you, and those whom you were to leave behind; did you mark out the limit of the intended conflagration; did you repeat your resolution of shortly leaving Rome, only putting it off for a little, as you said, until you could have the head of the consul. Two knights-Roman knights--promised to deliver that head to you before sunrise the next morning;

N

but scarcely was this stygian council dissolved, when the consul was acquainted with the result of the whole. I doubted the guards of my house; and, after announcing to a circle of the first men in the state-who were with me at the time-the very minute when these assassins would come to pay me their respects, that same minute they arrived, asked for entrance, and were denied it.

Proceed, Cataline, in your honourable career. Go where your destiny and your desire are driving you. Evacuate the city for a season. The gates stand open. Begone! What a shame that the Manlian army should look out so long for their general! Take all your loving friends along with you; or, if that be a vain hope, take, at least, as many as you can, and cleanse the city for some short time. Let the walls of Rome be the mediators between thee and me; for, at present, you are much too hear me. I will not suffer you. I will not longer undergo you.

Lucius Cataline, away! Begin, as soon as you are able, this shameful and unnatural war. Begin it, on your part, under the shade of every dreadful omen; on mine, with the sure and certain hope of safety to my country, and glory to myself: and, when this you have done, then, do Thou, whose altar was first founded by the founder of our state-Thou, the stablisher of this city, pour out thy vengeance upon this man, and all his adherents. Save us from his fury; our public altars, our sacred temples, our houses, and household gods; our liberties-our lives. Pursue, tutelar god, pursue them-these foes to the gods and goodness-these plunderers of Italy-these assassins of Rome. Erase them out of this life; and, in the next, let thy vengeance pursue them, insatiable, implacable, immortal!

An Extract from Mr. Brougham's Speech on Negro Slavery.

I TRUST that at length the time is come, when parliament will no longer bear to be told, that slave-owners are the best lawgivers on slavery; no longer suffer our voice to roll across the Atlantic, in empty warnings and fruitless orders. Tell me not of rights-talk not of the property of the planter in his slaves. I deny his right-I acknowledge not the property. The principles, the feelings of our common nature, rise in rebellion against it. Be the appeal

made to the understanding or to the heart, the sentence is the same that rejects it. In vain you tell me of laws that sanction such a claim! There is a law above all the enactments of human codes-the same throughout the world -the same in all times; such as it was before the daring genius of Columbus pierced the night of ages, and opened to one world the sources of power, wealth, and knowledge, to another all unutterable woes-such is it at this day: it is the law written by the finger of God on the heart of man; and by that law, unchangeable and eternal-while men despise fraud, and loathe rapine, and hate blood-they shall reject with indignation the wild and guilty fantasy, that man can hold property in man! In vain you appeal to treaties to covenants between nations. The covenants of the Almighty, whether the old covenant or the new, denounce such unholy pretensions. To these laws did they of old refer, who maintained the African trade. Such treaties did they cite-and not untruly; for, by one shameful compact, you bartered the glories of Blenheim for the traffic in blood. Yet, in despite of law and of treaty, that infernal traffic is now destroyed, and its votaries put to death like other pirates. How came this change to pass? Not, assuredly, by parliament leading the way: but the country at length awoke; the indignation of the people was kindled; it descended in thunder, and smote the traffic, and scattered its guilty profits to the winds. Now, then, let the planters beware-let their assemblies beware—let the government at home beware-let the parliament beware! The same country is once more awake-awake to the condition of Negro slavery; the same indignation kindles in the bosom of the same people; the same cloud is gathering that annihilated the slave-trade; and if it shall descend again, they on whom its crash may fall, will not be destroyed before I have warned them: but I that their destruction may turn away from us the more terrible judgments of God.

pray,

Peroration to Sheridan's Invective against Warren Hastings,

BEFORE I Come to the last magnificent paragraph, let me call the attention of those who, possibly, think themselves capable of judging of the dignity and character of justice in this country;-let me call the attention of those

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