been provoked to wrath, it must needs follow that he expects
honor should be given to them by whom he has chosen to work as his
instruments. For which cause, nothing doubting of my warrant, I shall
proceed to that which more particularly concerns the present occasion,
the discovery of my Lord Archon's virtues and merit, to be ever placed
by this nation in their true meridian.

"My lords, I am not upon a subject which persuades me to balk, but
necessitates me to seek out the greatest examples. To begin with
Alexander, erecting trophies common to his sword and the pestilence: to
what good of mankind did he infect the air with his heap of carcasses?
The sword of war, if it be any otherwise used than as the sword of
magistracy, for the fear and punishment of those that do evil, is as
guilty in the sight of God as the sword of a murderer; nay more, for if
the blood of Abel, of one innocent man, cried in the ears of the Lord
for vengeance, what shall the blood of an innocent nation? Of this kind
of empire, the throne of ambition, and the quarry of a mighty hunter, it
has been truly said that it is but a great robbery. But if Alexander
had restored the liberty of Greece, and propagated it to mankind, he had
done like my Lord Archon, and might have been truly called the Great.
Alexander cared not to steal a victory that would be given; but my Lord
Archon has torn away a victory which had been stolen, while we went
tamely yielding up obedience to a nation reaping in our fields,
whose fields he has subjected to our empire, and nailed them with his
victorious sword to their native Caucasus.

"Machiavel gives a handsome caution: 'Let no man,' says he, 'be
circumvented with the glory of Caesar, from the false reflection of
their pens, who through the longer continuance of his empire in the name
than in the family, changed their freedom for flattery. But if a man
would know truly what the Romans thought of Caesar, let them observe
what they said of Catiline.'" And yet by how much he who has perpetrated
some heinous crime is more execrable than he who did but attempt it, by
so much is Caesar more execrable than Catiline. On the contrary, let
him that would know what ancient and heroic times, what the Greeks and
Romans would both have thought and said of my Lord Archon, observe what
they thought and said of Solon, Lycurgus, Brutus, and Publicola. And yet
by how much his virtue, that is crowned with the perfection of his work,
is beyon