resent minister of that kingdom had already subscribed his name? To
what other cause can you ascribe, what in my mind is still more
astonishing, in such a country as Scotland--a nation, cast in the happy
medium between the spiritless acquiescence of submissive poverty, and
the sturdy credulity of pampered wealth--cool and ardent, adventurous
and persevering, winging her eagle flight against the blaze of every
science, with an eye that never winks, and a wing that never tires;
crowned, as she is, with the spoils of every art and decked with the
wreath of every muse, from the deep and scrutinizing researches of her
Hume, to the sweet and simple, but not less sublime and pathetic,
morality of her Burns--how, from the bosom of a country like that,
genius and character and talents [Muir, Margarot, &c.,] should be
banished to a distant and barbarous soil, condemned to pine under the
horrid communion of vulgar vice, and base-born profligacy, twice the
period that ordinary calculation gives to the continuance of human life!
But I will not further press any idea that is painful to me, and I am
sure must be painful to you; I will only say, you have now an example of
which neither England nor Scotland had the advantage; you have the
example of the panic, the infatuation, and the contrition of both. It is
now for you to decide whether you will profit by their experience of
idle panic and idle regret, or whether you meanly prefer to palliate a
servile imitation of their frailty by a paltry affectation of their
repentance. It is now for you to show that you are not carried away by
the same hectic delusions, to acts of which no tears can wash away the
fatal consequences or the indelible reproach."

He thus speaks of the Volunteers of Ireland:--

"Gentlemen, Mr. Attorney-General has thought proper to direct your
attention to the state and circumstances of public affairs at the time
of this transaction: let me also make a few retrospective observations
on a period at which he has but slightly glanced. You know, gentlemen,
that France had espoused the cause of America, and we became thereby
involved in a war with that nation.

'_Heu, nescia mens hominum futuri_!'

"Little did that ill-fated monarch know that he was forming the first
cause of those disastrous events that were to end in the subversion of
his throne, in the slaughter of his family, and the deluging of his
country with the blood of his people. You cannot but remember