impaired remembrance reigns,
Resentment of my country's fate
Within my filial heart shall beat,
And spite of her insulting foe,
My sympathizing verse shall flow;--
'Mourn, helpless Caledonia, mourn,
Thy banished peace, thy laurels torn!'"

If there is nothing in Belhaven's oration which equals this in
intensity, there is power and pathos, as well as Ciceronian syntax,
in the period: "Hannibal, my lord, is at our gates; Hannibal is come
within our gates; Hannibal is come the length of this table; he is
at the foot of this throne; if we take not notice he'll seize upon
these regalia, he'll take them as our _spolia_ _opima_, and whip us
out of this house, never to return."

It is unfortunate for Belhaven's fame as an orator that his most
effective passages are based on classical allusions intelligible at
once to his audience then, but likely to appear pedantic in times
when Latin has ceased to be the "vulgar tongue" of the educated, as
it still was in the Scotland of Queen Anne's time.

The text of his speech here used is from 'The Parliamentary
Debates,' London 1741.

A PLEA FOR THE NATIONAL LIFE OF SCOTLAND (Delivered 1706 in the
Scotch Parliament)

My Lord Chancellor:--

When I consider the affair of a union betwixt the two nations, as it
is expressed in the several articles thereof, and now the subject of
our deliberation at this time I find my mind crowded with a variety
of melancholy thoughts, and I think it my duty to disburden myself
of some of them, by laying them before, and exposing them to, the
serious consideration of this honorable house.

I think I see a free and independent kingdom delivering up that
which all the world hath been fighting for since the days of Nimrod;
yea, that for which most of all the empires, kingdoms, states,
principalities, and dukedoms of Europe, are at this very time
engaged in the most bloody and cruel wars that ever were, to-wit, a
power to manage their own affairs by themselves, without the
assistance and counsel of any other.

I think I see a national church, founded upon a rock, secured by a
claim of right, hedged and fenced about by the strictest and most
pointed legal sanction that sovereignty could contrive, voluntarily
descending into a plain, upon an equal level with Jews, Papists,
Socinians, Arminians, Anabaptists, and other sectaries, etc. I think
I see the noble and honorable peerage of Scotland, whose valiant
predecessors led armies ag