THE AMENDE HONORABLE.

69

cedar. The spiritual vitality in them, their faith, their love, their reverence, self-respect, adoration of qualities that seemed noble, have triumphed over the wild elements about them, and made them invulnerable to outward assault. These are the people of character. The discoverers and inventors, the men illustrious in art, music, statesmanship, literature, are less numerous than these. The fine saints outnumber the fine sages. Character is a larger fact than genius. O. B. FROTHINGHAM.

Note 28.

THE AMENDE HONORABLE.

(By permission.)

CAPTAIN MCQUACK was a warlike man,
And a positive man was he:

He had travelled from Carrick to Killtogran,
From Ballyknocknolly to Ballyboshan,

And all that he did not see

You might pack in a thimble or hide in the pod
Of the tiniest kind of a pea.

He was a warrior, through and through,
And always ready to fight;

But never trained with the cowardly crew
That war upon women and children, too,
With deadly dynamite.

Like many a warrior, brave as he,

As facile in feats of war,

Whose nouns and verbs do better agree,

Who has travelled three times as far,
The Captain would sometimes tell a tale-
And many a tale he told―

Hard to believe, for, like a sieve,

The water it would not hold.

He would tell of gondolas flying about

In the forest of Turkestan :

Of gargoyles shot in the very spot
Where he lassoed a catamaran :
Of the seal he captured at Jubbulpoor,
And an hour later lost

In the diamond mine near Kindookoor,
A hundred and seventeen miles, or more,
Below the limit of frost.

One day, in covering the ground
Of gastronomic art,

From the roasting of an ibex round
To the baking of a tart,

Of anchovies he chanced to speak.

"You will find," said the travelled man, "No better, if through the world you seek, From Mulligan's meadow to Mozambique, Than thim that grows, in thropical snows, On the threes all over Soudan."

To him a hearer dared to say, "Nay,
Thim does not grow on threes;
Thim is a fish that swums the say:
And the lave of the wealth I own to-day—
That's four-and-siven-pence-I will lay
That Father Coyle agrees."

"Bother the praist!" said brave McQuack,
"It's that I lie, ye'd hint."

To the field forthwith they took the track,
And each man picked his flint.
Then, at the word, two bullets sped;
One through the viewless air
Over the gallant Captain's head;

One, meeting an obstacle rare,

Was cleverly caught, as it were, on the fly, By the Captain's rash antagonist's thigh. Then followed a season of spring and swear ;

THE POWER OF THE GOSPEL.

For it's very hard, you can't deny, The pain of a bullet's sting to bear, Without a yell and a spring in air,

E'en with your foeman standing by.

The Captain's second was first to speak.
"How he capers!" said he, with a smile.
"Holy Moses!" cried Mac, with a blaze on his cheek;
"It was Capers I mint all the while!"

Then, like a gentleman true that he was,
He offered his hand to his foe.

"Shake, sir," said he, "I ax pardon, because

Of a blunder I'm guilty, I know.

71

You war right: I war wrong, sir, but what should we care?

In calling it up there's no profit.

I've called you out, and we'll both call it square,

And nayther will think more of it."

"But what," said the wounded man, "what of my thigh? And what of the bullet that's in it?"

"Niver moind,” said McQuack; "there's a docthor near by, And he'll twist out the ball in a minute."

R. W. MCALPINE, IN HARPERS' Monthly.

Note 29.

THE POWER OF THE GOSPEL.

Of all the powers and faculties of the human mind, the noblest is the one which God has created for Himself; and if that reverential or adoring faculty do not exist or be by suicidal hands extirpated, the world will soon cease to feel the man who had no fear of God. And thus, while the Voltaires and Rousseaus of Atheist memory are waxing old, and vanishing from the firmament of letters, names of less renown, but more religion, brighten to a greater lustre.

No man can long keep a hold of his fellow-men, unless he himself has hold of God. But if a sincere and strenuous theism be thus important, such natural faith in God as buoyed the wing of Plato in his long and ethereal flights, or sustained the Saxon muscle of Shakespeare in his mightiest efforts, incomparably more prevalent is that intellectual prowess which a spiritual faith produces.

The Gospel, beyond all controversy, was Milton's poetic might; and the Gospel was the torch which, on the hills of Renfrewshire, fired a Pollock till Britain spied the light and wondered at the glowing beacon.

Digging in the Pompeii of the Middle Age, Lorenzo and Leo found the lamps in which the old classic fires had burned; but they had long since gone out. For models of candelabra and burners, there could be found no better than Livy and Horace, and Plato and Pindar; but the faith which once filled them, the old pagan fervor, was long since extinct, and the lamps were only fit for the antiquary. It was then that, in the crypt of the convent, Luther and Zwingli and Melancthon saw a line of supernatural light, and with lever and mattock lifted the gravestone, and found the gospel which had long been buried. There it had flamed, "a light shining in a dark place," through unsuspected ages, the long-lost lamp in the sepulchre. Jupiter was dead, and Minerva had melted into ether, and the most elegant idols of antiquity had gone to the moles and bats.

But there is One who cannot die, and does not change; and the fountain of learning is He who is also the fountain of life. From His book it was that the old classic lamps were again kindled; and from that book it was that Bacon and Locke and Milton, and all the mighty spirits of modern Europe, caught the fire which made them blaze the meteors of our firmament, the marvels of our favored time.

If any one is ambitious to be the lasting teacher or the extensive light of society, to paint, to think, or to sing for a wider world than our railway readers, let him remember that nothing can immortalize the works of genius if there

THE TRUSTWORTHINESS OF THE PEOPLE. 73

be no Gospel in them. The facts of that Gospel are the world's main stock of truth. The fire of that Gospel is the only Promethean spark which can ignite our dead truths into quenchless and world-quickening powers.

JAMES HAMILTON.

THE TRUSTWORTHINESS OF THE PEOPLE.

OUR public affairs have never been controlled, or even shaped, by our great men. We have had no Cæsar or Cromwell or Napoleon or Luther. Even Washington's influence is hard to trace. Neither he nor John Adams nor Franklin looked for separation from England three months before Lexington and Concord, as neither Lincoln nor Seward anticipated a long war at the outbreak of the Rebellion. Popular sentiment never has been, with us, the voice of great leaders. The eloquence of Otis and Patrick Henry, the wisdom of Hamilton and Madison, the consecration of Samuel Adams and of Washington, if not kindled at the hearths of the people, found there the prepared material without which they would have spoken in vain. The farmers who hastened to Concord Bridge needed no call of a trumpet. The rattling fire of their flint-locks proclaimed the spontaneous uprising of the people, as the first lapping of the wave on the beach proclaims the oncoming rush of the tide. Many of you will remember the attempt made, a few years ago, to repudiate the obligation to pay our national debt in gold. It was an attempt so plausible as to beguile statesmen like Senator John Sherman. It seemed to be about to carry the nation into the abyss of liars and cheats. What delivered us? I listened, one evening, to the reasoning of General Butler, as, in the town hall of a Massachusetts village, he tried to persuade the people to support repudiation. Coming out, I walked behind a farmer and his wife. The woman was much perplexed. "What will they