n
upon the place of their rest. For this ideal they have died--"in their
youth," to borrow the phrase of a Greek orator, "torn from us like the
spring from the year."

Fallen in this cause, in battle for this ideal, behold them advance to
greet the great dead who fell in the old wars! See, through the mists
of time, Valhalla, its towers and battlements, uplift themselves, and
from their places the phantoms of the mighty heroes of all ages rise to
greet these English youths who enter smiling, the blood yet trickling
from their wounds! Behold, Achilles turns, unbending from his deep
disdain; Rustum, Timoleon, Hannibal, and those of later days who fell
at Brunanburh, Senlac, and Trafalgar, turn to welcome the dead whom we
have sent thither as the _avant-garde_ of our faith, that in this cause
is our destiny in this the mandate of our fate.

[1] The Latin work of Osorius, _De rebus gestis Emmanuelis regis
Lusitaniae_, appeared in 1574, two years later than _Os Lusiadas_. The
twelve books of Osorius cover the twenty-six years between 1495 and
1521, thus traversing parts of the same ground as Camoens. But the
hero of Osorius is Alboquerque. His affectation of Ciceronianism, the
literary vice of the age, casts a suspicion upon the sincerity of many
of his epithets and paragraphs, yet the work as a whole is composed
with his eyes upon his subject. Seven years after the Latin, a French
translation, a beautifully printed folio from Estienne's press, was
published, containing eight additional books, by Lopez de Castanedo and
others, bringing the history down to 1529.

[2] The first of Pitt's two remarkable speeches in the great debate of
April, 1792, on the Abolition of the Slave-trade was made on April and
Pitt, according to a pamphlet report printed by Phillips immediately
afterwards, rose after an all-night sitting to speak at four o'clock on
Tuesday morning (April 3rd). The close of the speech is thus reported:
"If we listen to the voice of reason and duty, and pursue this night
the line of conduct which they prescribe, some of us may live to see a
reverse of that picture, from which we now turn our eyes with pain and
regret. We may live to behold the natives of Africa engaged in the
calm occupations of industry, in the pursuits of a just and legitimate
commerce. We may behold the beams of science and philosophy breaking
in upon their land, which at some happy period in still later times may
blaze with full lu