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the house in a carriage to Windsor, to see a company of strolling players, and made himself and his juvenile party very merry by his remarks on the performance. From these quiet enjoyments and field musings, death called him away. He returned to town, and died in his lodgings in the Temple. He was privately interred in the Temple burial-ground, and a tabular monument to his honour placed on the walls of Westminster Abbey. That great and noble building does not hold the remains of a nobler or better heart. Oliver Goldsmith was a true Irishman, generous, impulsive, and improvident; but he was more, he was a true man and true poet. Whether we laugh with him or weep with him we are still better for it.

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WE come now to the man who is the great representative of a class which is the peculiar glory of Great Britain; that is, to Robert Burns. It is a brilliant feature of English literature, that the people, the mass, the multitude, call them what you will, have contributed to it their share, and that share a glorious one. We We may look in vain into the literature of every other nation for the like fact. It is true that there may be found in all countries men who, born in the lowest walks of life, orphans, outcasts, slaves even, men labouring under not only all the weight of social prejudices, but under the curse of personal deformity, have, through some one fortunate circumstance, generally the favour of some one generous and superior person, risen out of their original position, and through the advantages of academical or artistic education have taken their place amongst the learned and illustrious of their race. We need not turn back to the Esops and Terences of antiquity for such characters, they are easy to select from the annals of middle age, and modern art and learning; but there is a class, and this

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class is found in Great Britain alone, which belonging to the body of the people, has caught, as it were passingly, just the quantum of education which had come within the people's reach, and who on this slender participation of the general intellectual property, have raised for themselves a renown, great, glorious, and enduring as that of the most learned or most socially exalted of mankind. These extraordinary individuals to whom I have alluded as to be found in the literature of all civilized nations, these men who, admitted from the ranks of the people to the college or the studio, have distinguished themselves in almost every walk of science or letters, these have vindicated the general intellect of the human race from every possible charge of inequality in its endowments. They have shown triumphantly that "God is no respecter of persons." They have thus vindicated not only man's universal capacity for greatness, but the Creator's justice. They have demonstrated that "God has made of one blood all the nations of the earth," and still more, that he has endowed them all with one intellect. Over the whole bosom of the globe its divine Architect has spread fertility; he has diffused beauty adapted to the diversity of climes, and made that beauty present itself in such a variety of forms, that the freshness of its first perception is kept alive by ever occurring novelties of construction, hue, or odour. It is the same in the intellectual as in the physical world. In the universal spirit of man, he has implanted the universal gifts of his divine goodness. Genius, sentiment, feeling, the vast capacity of knowledge and of creative art, are made the common heritage of mankind. But climate and circumstance assert a great and equal influence on the outer and the inner life of the earth. Some nations under the influences of certain causes have advanced beyond others, some individuals under the like causes have advanced beyond the generality of their cotemporaries. But these facts have not proved that those nations, or those individuals, were more highly endowed than the rest; they have rather proved that the soil of human nature is rich beyond all conception; the extent of that wealth, however, becoming only palpable through the operation of peculiar agencies. The causes which developed in Greece, in Rome, in India, in Egypt,

such manifestations of grace, spirit, and power at certain periods, as never were developed even there at any other periods, before or since, present a subject of curious inquiry, but they leave the grand fact the same, and this fact is, that the soul of universal man is endowed with every gift and faculty which any possible circumstances can call upon him to exert for his benefit, and the adornment of his life. He is furnished for every good word and work. He is a divine creature that when challenged can prove amply his divinity, though under ordinary circumstances he may be content to walk through this existence in an ordinary guise. Every great social revolution, every great popular excitement of every age, has amply demonstrated this. There never was a national demand for intellect and energy, from the emancipation of the Israelites from the Egyptian yoke, or the destruction of the Thirty Tyrants of Athens, down to the English or the French Revolution, which was not met, to the astonishment of the whole world, with such a supply of orators, poets, warriors, and statesmen, speakers and actors, inventors and constructors, in every shape of art, wisdom, and ability, as most completely to certify that the powers which slumber in the human bosom, are far beyond those which are ever called into activity. The fertility of the soil of the earth is there in winter, but it lies unnoticed. The sun breaks out, and like a giant alarmist thundering at the doors of the world, he awakens a thousand hidden powers. Life, universal as the earth itself, starts forth in its thousand shapes, and all is movement, beauty, sweetness, hurrying on through a charmed being into an exuberant fruit.

Those men, then, who have risen through the medium of a finished education to literary, artistic, or scientific eminence, have, I repeat, vindicated the universality of intellectual endowment; but there is still another class, and that, as I have said, peculiar to these islands, who have shown that a finished or academical education even is not absolutely necessary to the display of the highest order of genius. Circumstances again have been at work here. The circumstances of this country are different to those of any other. We have preserved our liberties more entire. The British people have disdained from age to

age to suffer the curb and the bit that have been put upon the neck, and into the mouth, of the more pliant nations of the continent. Whether these circumstances are to be looked for in the peculiar mixture of races, or in this particular mixture coexisting with peculiarities of climate and insular position, might afford scope to much argument; enough, these circumstances have existed, and their results do exist in a race, proud, active, free, and indomitable.

"Pride in their port, defiance in their eye,
I see the lords of human kind pass by;
Intent on high designs, a thoughtful band,
By forms unfashioned, fresh from nature's hand,
Fierce in their native hardiness of soul;

True to imagined right, above control;

While e'en the peasant boasts these rights to scan,
And learns to venerate himself as man."

GOLDSMITH, The Traveller.

Thus it is that this free constitution of the British empire; this spirit of general independence; this habit of the peasant and the artizan of venerating themselves as men, has led to an universal awakening of mind in the people. In other countries few think; it is a few who are regularly educated, and arrogate the right to think, and write, and govern. If the poor man become an acknowledged genius, it is only through the passage of the high school. The mass is an inert mass; it is a labouring, or at best a singing and dancing multitude. But in Great Britain, there is not a man who does not feel that he is a member of the great thinking, acting, and governing whole. Without books often he has caught the spark of inspiration from his neighbour. In the field, the workshop, the alehouse, the chartist gathering, he has come to the discussion of his rights, and in that discussion all the powers of his spirit have felt the rousing influence of the sea of mind around, that has boiled and heaved from its lowest depths in billows of fire. Under the operation of this oral and, as it were, forensic education, which has been going on for generations in the British empire, the whole man with all his powers has become wide awake; and it required only the simple powers of writing and

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