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varying from I cwt. to 2 cwt., the height ascended and the distance along the roads, added together, exceeded in each journey the height of St. Paul's cathedral.'

"Is it not enough to announce these things to an assembly of Christian men and British gentlemen? For twenty millions of money you purchased the liberation of the negro; and it was a blessed deed. You may, this night, by a cheap and harmless vote, invigorate the hearts of thousands of your country people, enable them to walk erect in newness of life, to enter on the enjoyment of their inherited freedom, and avail themselves (if they will accept them) of the opportunities of virtue, or morality, and religion. These, Sir, are the ends that I venture to propose: this is the barbarism that I seek to restore."

-House of Commons, Earl of Shaftesbury.

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CATHOLIC EMANCIPATION (1808).

"I have been in every corner of Ireland, and have studied its present strength and condition with no common labour. Be assured Ireland does not contain at this moment less than five millions of people. There were returned in the year 1791 to the hearth tax 701,000 houses, and there is no kind of question that there were about 50,000 houses omitted in that return. Taking, however, only the number returned for the tax and allowing the average of six to a house (a very small average for a potato-fed people), this brings the population to 4,200,000 people in the year 1791: and it can be shown from the clearest evidence (and Mr. Newenham in his book shows it), that Ireland for the last fifty years has increased in its population at the rate of 50,000 or 60,000 per annum; which leaves the present population of Ireland at about five millions, after every possible deduction for existing circumstances, just and necessary wars, monstrous and unnatural rebellions, and other sources of human destruction. Of this population, two out of ten are Protestants; and the half of the Protestant population are Dissenters, and as inimical to the Church as the Catholics themselves. In this state of things thumbscrews and whipping-admirable engines of policy as they must be considered to be-will not ultimately prevail. The Catholics will hang over you; they will watch for the moment, and compel you hereafter to give them ten times as much, against your will, as they would now be contented with, if it were voluntarily surrendered. Remember what happened in the American war, when Ireland compelled you to give her everything she asked, and to renounce, in the most explicit manner, your claim of sovereignty over her. God Almighty grant the folly of these present men may not bring on such another crisis of public affairs!

"Whatever you think of the Catholics, there they are you cannot get rid of them; your alternative is to give them a lawful place for stating their grievances, or an unlawful one: if you do not admit them to the House of Commons, they will hold their Parliament in Potatoe-place, Dublin, and be ten times as violent and inflammatory as they would be in Westminster. Nothing would give me such an idea of security

as to see twenty or thirty Catholic gentlemen in Parliament, looked upon by all the Catholics as the fair and proper organ of their party. I should have thought it the height of good fortune that such a wish existed on their part, and the very essence of madness and ignorance to reject it. Can you murder the Catholics? Can you neglect them? They are too numerous for both these expedients. What remains to be done is obvious to every human being-but to that man* who, instead of being a Methodist preacher, is, for the curse of us and our children, and for the ruin of Troy and the misery of good old Priam and his sons, become a legislator and a politician."

*Mr. Perceval, Chancellor of the Exchequer.

Sydney Smith.

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ENGLISH LITERATURE

CHAPTER VII.

GENERAL SURVEY.

Na consideration of English literature, however brief, what a fantastic pageant seems to pass before us! How true it is that as the years, the centuries, go by, the historians, the poets, the ballad singers, the weavers of romance, grow less and less the mere chroniclers of the ages and the manners, and become in themselves types of characters and participants in scenes associated with their fancies and their pens. Not yet six centuries have passed since Chaucer gave to the English-speaking people the first important glimpse of a literature of their own, and within that period how imposing the procession and how comprehensive its work in passing! Human nature, it is maintained, has been the same since the beginning of time, and human experience runs largely in the same parallel. So the makers of literature-the monks patiently transcribing and illuminating in their cells, the poor scribbler dependent on royal recognition and favor, the man of genius fighting poverty and his own passions, the starving poet, the proscribed philosopher, all played their parts, not distantly removed from those who to-day wear or would wear their mantle.

The literature of a nation marks the development and progress of a nation as it reflects the manners and customs of the age. The barbarous, the rude, the uncivilized, have no literature. They have their oral traditions, their legends and superstitions, handed down from father to son, and magnified and expanded in the passing, and in this crude and imperfect way some glimpses of their earlier generations are revealed. So also with a new country, a new people. In the formative stages of a nation, in the period of settlement, of establishment, the material necessities of life always have proved an impediment to arts and letters. This was illustrated in our own country, where for many years the colonists were dependent on the litera49

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ture of their mother land and the old world. And so it was in England, from the invasion of the Romans practically until the thirteenth century; the slow assimilation of antagonistic peoples, the constant conflicts, wars foreign and civil, the bewilderment of varying languages and dialects-all these retarded a national literature as well as a national sentiment.

In this darkness and confusion of the early centuries of English awakening there is something fanciful and pleasing that printing in England, in the efforts of William Caxton, gave almost its first attention to the glorious fables and knightly adventures of the Arthurian legends. In the fourteenth century Chaucer, departing from the spirit and impulse of his time, had portrayed the civilization and manners of his generation, but even Chaucer had been influenced in much of his writing by the glamour of the heroic past. So much relating to early Britain was visionary and legendary, and so greatly was the age influenced by other literature that strongly affected romance and folk and fairy lore, that even a spirit of the independence of Chaucer's could not be reasonably expected to depart wholly from the custom of his day. But to all save the diligent and plodding scholar this adhesion to translation or adaptation has been neglected or forgotten, and Chaucer lives through the "Canterbury Tales," the first masterly exhibition of contemporaneous English character.

And it is hardly to be wondered at that in these beginnings of a real literature only the supreme masters are remembered, and that from Wycliffe and Chaucer to Spenser there were few names with which to conjure. Let us be candid and admit that with the later tremendous growth of English literature, the constant changing and development of the language, much that may have been significant and impressive at the beginnings of five and six centuries ago has become in the flight of time a mere confused memory of names even among those who pretend to literary study and research. The Arthurian legends indeed survive, but where one student pores over Malory's "Morte D'Arthur" a thousand readers find delight in Tennyson's "Idylls of the King," and where the "Canterbury Tales," in veneration of the first great master and in interest of the England of the Chaucer period, is prescribed in schools and colleges, who reads the "Romaunt of the Rose"? Who so bold

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