’Tis sweet to rest, from dread of danger free,
And mark the billows of the foaming sea;
’Tis sweet, a little skiff to safely urge
Through the tempestuous ocean’s boiling surge;
To hear the pattering rains against the roof,
And feel your hospitable mansion proof.
But sweeter far the troubled mind’s repose
When of a speech like this, it hears the close.
When I listened to the powerful exordium of my learned friend—and I did listen to him with the most profound attention—I confess my imagination was too highly excited to be satisfied with so lame and impotent a conclusion.—‘What!’ cried I, ‘have the laws of nature been reversed—have demons been disturbed in their infernal revels, and witches called from their dusky caverns, merely because a beautiful woman has excited a tender passion in the breast of a youthful stranger! Is this so extraordinary an occurrence that it should create such excessive wonder? Are our hearts so dead to beauty that such a catastrophe should occasion surprise? Forbid it, Heaven! No, whilst our hearts still throb in our bosoms, may they ever beat responsive to the attractions of the fair! May we never become insensible to the charms of the loveliest objects of creation! May we ever own their witchery, and bend beneath their magic sway! or man, degraded man, would soon sink below the level of the brutes. View man as he degenerates when secluded from the influence of female society;—is he not rough, brutal, and unpolished? Does he not want all those winning graces and those delicate attentions which form so undeniably the charm and solace of life? In proportion as our sensibility, as our goodness, and all the best feelings of our nature are awakened, we become susceptible of love. It is, indeed, excessive sensibility, and a kindly feeling to our fellow-creatures, that creates it. Does there exist a generous or noble mind that has not felt this passion? No, not one! there is, indeed, something generous and ennobling in it. We cannot prefer the welfare of another to our own, nor be completely absorbed in another’s being with the devotedness of true love, without becoming purified in our ideas, and raised from that disgusting selfishness which is ever the inspirer of base and mean actions.
Yes, love indeed is light from Heaven,
A spark of that immortal fire,
With angels shared, by Allah given,
To lift from earth our low desire.
Devotion wafts the mind above,
But Heaven itself descends in love.
And from this heavenly, this inspiring feeling, shall my unfortunate client be debarred? Hear me, ye shades of heroic lovers, who, though dying for the hopeless object of your passion, have still exclaimed, with the enthusiastic devotion of a modern poet—
Lead on, lead on, though horrors wait
In awful fury round thy gate!
And danger, death, and grim despair,
Forbid my hopeless passage there!
If love, still smiling, beckon on,
The path is passed, the gate is won!
And ye poets and philosophers, who have painted love as the oasis of the Desert, the green spot in memory’s waste, where affection still lingers even when hope decays; have you no compassion for my unhappy client, whose only fault was ‘that she was beautiful, and he not blind?’ And is this an offence for which a man deserves to be burnt alive? Forbid it, humanity! forbid it, mercy! No, no! such inhuman cruelty exists not in the breasts of Englishmen. I know, I feel that you must acquit my client on this head.
“But this is not the only charge brought against him; he is accused of having violated the sanctity of a royal palace, by drawing his sword within its precincts. To describe the enormity of this crime, my learned friend has brought forward such an overwhelming torrent of eloquence, that unhappily his meaning was swept away in the current of his words. At least I suppose so, as, with all my industry, I have been totally unable to find it. As, however, I cannot imagine my learned friend could have harangued so long without having some meaning in what he said, I suppose it has slipped undiscovered into some sly corner, where it lies, poor thing! quite concealed, and almost crushed to death by the ponderous weight of metaphors heaped upon it. Gentlemen, my client drew his sword in the Royal Garden. This is the plain statement of the fact, when stripped of the load of ornaments with which my learned friend has encumbered it. My client, a stranger to the English laws and customs, chanced to be walking in the public garden belonging to a Royal palace. He there met a nobleman of the court; from causes irrelevant to the question before us, high words took place between them. My client was grossly insulted in a manner impossible to be borne by a man calling himself a gentleman, or making the least pretensions to honour. He drew his sword to defend himself. Can anything be more simple? And yet for this, all created nature is thrown into confusion, and Neptune and Pluto called shivering from their beds. Gentlemen, my learned friend’s brain was teeming with a monstrous conception; and longing to be delivered, he dragged it into the speech with which we have just been favoured. Not satisfied with piercing us through with the fangs of a mental harrow; plunging us into all the disasters of war, and distracting our imaginations by exhibiting the combined effects of plague, pestilence, and famine—he has entangled, in his snares, these unfortunate deities, whom he has forced to upper earth to bear witness on his behalf, I am afraid, very much against their wills. Nothing, indeed, can be more distressing than to see an unfortunate thought thus hunted through the meandering of a sentence; a crowd of unmeaning words, like a pack of hungry dogs pressing close at its back, till at last worn out and completely exhausted, it sinks feebly away, and gives up the ghost so quietly, that no one can reasonably imagine what can possibly have
