to a brace of naked, irreverent Englishmen, and the snow-white mews who stared and screamed at us from aloft.

We have left Venice, and as the bells of the churches on her scattered islands answer each other through the night, journey on toward the west. For here, where Verona in the lap of the Alps guards the rich plains of Lombardy, ends our Italian pilgrimage. There is a great storm up yonder in the Tyrol-serried columns of foam-like mist hurry along the sides of the Helvetian mountains a mysterious cloud hangs low down upon the valley, and out of it come smothered and muffled sounds, as of voices among the hills. To the old Italian these mountain recesses, with their mysterious clouds and tempests, formed the barrier between his sumptuous refinement, and the uncouth and barbarous nations who lay beyond the pale of his civilisation. This is now changed. The Italian has become the slave of the barbarian, the Goth has inherited his liberty and his culture. Beneath a wintry and inclement sky, and upon a barren and inhospitable soil, have arisen a humaner culture, a more powerful and generous liberty. Our age is somewhat intolerant of the past, and is often not unwisely content that the dead should bury its dead. But surely it will one day attempt to repay the debt it owes to Italy and the Italians?

THE Great Commoner is the most imposing

figure which the last century produced. His shadow stretches across it like the shadow of a colossus. Chatham was by no means, indeed, a completely-furnished or well-balanced statesman. A certain splendour and slovenliness mingle in his character. His sister used to say that her brother knew nothing accurately except the Faery Queen. But a politician who, in the eighteenth century, could muse with delight over the purest and most noble work of the English imagination, probably

stood very much alone among his contemporaries, and must have owned certain rare and elevated virtues, and a generous and vivid genius. What his speeches were can now be at best vaguely guessed; but even yet these "shreds of unconnected eloquence" remain in their way unrivalled. They are struck with the authentic fire of the imagination of the imagination in the full sweep of excited and eloquent emotion. Half a dozen of these "luminous sentences" are almost all that continue notable to us in fifty years of political history. They are the masterful words of a great man-haughty and arrogant words often-but haughty and arrogant because the speaker, in the pride of his integrity, scorned all meanness and baseness, and finesse. "I come not here armed at all points with law cases and acts of parliament, with the statute-book doubled down in dogs-ears, to defend the cause of liberty," he exclaimed, with fine scorn, in answer to Grenville's argument on our right to tax the colonies. "Such are your wellknown characters and abilities," he said, addressing the Government of Lord North, "that sure I am that any plan of reconciliation, however moderate, wise, and feasible, must fail in your hands. Who, then, can wonder that you should put a negative on any measure which must annihilate your power, deprive you of your emoluments, and at once reduce you to that state of insignificance for which God and nature designed you?" Again, when Lord Rockingham's Administration solicited his support "Pardon me, gentlemen," he said, bowing to them with that reserved and haughty

courtesy with which, more than with any other characteristic, we identify him; "confidence is a plant of slow growth in an aged bosom." Most

In

of the speeches he made in defence of the revolted colonists are grand and vehement. "As an Englishman by birth and principle, I recognise to the Americans their supreme inalienable right to their property a right which they are justified to defend till the last extremity. To maintain this principle is the common cause of the Whigs on the other side of the Atlantic and on this. ''Tis liberty to liberty engaged,' that they will defend themselves, their families, and their country. this cause they are immovably allied; it is the alliance of God and nature-immutable, eternalfixed as the firmament of heaven." The assurance which he entertained of our ultimate failure was pressed home with the earnestness of supreme conviction. "I say we must necessarily undo these violent oppressive acts; they must be repealed; you will repeal them; I pledge myself for it, that you will in the end repeal them; I stake my reputation on it; I will consent to be taken for an idiot if they are not finally repealed!" Yet he would not consent to compromise the Imperial authority, nor agree to Franklin's proposal, that the King's troops should not be quartered in America without the consent of the provincial Legislatures; and he enshrined his argument in a noble metaphor. "Such a condition," he exclaimed, "plucks the master feather from the eagle's wing."

Yet Lord Chatham's career, judged of by the

ordinary criterion of Ministerial success, may be said to have comparatively failed. He was far oftener in opposition than in office: his own Ministry was feeble: on many of the most important questions of the day the king and the nation refused to sanction his policy. But Chatham, during the four years between 1757 and 1761, when with splendid firmness and sagacity he conducted the great war against France, did what no other statesman of his age did, or could have done. For seventy years England had been a nation divided against itself. The affections of one half of the people were fixed upon an exiled housesava Pelopis domus. The spirit of active rebellion had been at length extinguished, but the old animosities still burnt on; and the winning party itself did not feel very proud of the throne it had gained for an alien and unpopular dynasty. It was Chatham who revived the old national feeling. He made the Englishman again proud of his country. He recalled the sense of patriotism, of national union, of a combined corporate life. The restoration of that spirit of loyal obedience and dutiful attachment to the State, without which, as Burke eloquently said, "Your army would be a base rabble, and your navy nothing but rotten timber," was directly due to the genius and character of Lord Chatham. He was a great man, and he communicated his strong manhood to the nation. The picture of the Great Minister wielding the thunderbolts of war, and again, as in the old times, vindicating the authority of the English name, fired the imagination of the people, and