cow. Incapable of offering any resistance, his only apprehension was concerning his Rouskaya pravida, or work on Russian jurisprudence. Siberia melted before his book. We close this string of illustrations by one that may be hung up with the story of Thomson picking with his mouth sunny plums from the garden wall. Cuvier tells an anecdote of Werner, a name united in science with Saussure, that, in order to avoid the trouble of writing, he resolutely determined never to, open any letters. This arrangement succeeded for some time, and a messenger, sent from Dresden by his sister to obtain his signature to important family papers, was obliged to wait two months at an inn before Werner could be induced to open the packet. This straw is a whole commentary. We shall not linger upon the importance of these straws in historical or poetical description.* An account of them would fill a volume. They tell a story better than an episode. A Latin writer, speaking of the fatal eruption of Vesuvius, remarks that the chariot in which he hoped to escape was so agitated by the heaving ground, that the wheels could not be kept steady, even though large stones were placed beneath them. Thucydides or Livy could not have worked out so vivid a description as this little touch of truth presents without labour. And we really doubt whether the following picturesque example of a straw be not one of the most beautiful passages in Dryden's poetry : "This careful husband had been long away, Whom his chaste wife and little children mourn, Who on their fingers learn to tell the day On which their father promised to return." Perhaps these simple verses are the more remarkable from the general absence of the pictorial in Dryden. Atterbury, in his proposed epitaph, said that our poetry was indebted to him for its strength and its graces (vim suam ac veneres debet); but he brought the Minerva, not the Venus. When our dictionary is published, as it will be in about seven volumes -a true Conversations-Lexiconwe shall be able to follow the history of straws into the bypaths of our daily life. How slight and unimportant incidents stamp the grace or deformity of a character! There is a beautiful instance in the Heart of Mid-Lothian, where the two sisters weep in each other's arms, in the presence of the turnkey of the Tolbooth. "The unglazed window of the miserable chamber was open, and the beams of a bright sun fell upon the bed where the sufferers were seated. With a gentleness that had something of reverence in it, Ratcliffe partly closed the shutter, and seemed thus to throw a veil over a scene so mournful." The veil of the Greek painter was not more beautiful than this. But a straw will exhibit the storm as well as the calm of the wind; will represent the temper of the many as well as of the one. Let us go to Scott again. In the famous riot at Edinburgh, when the Tolbooth was broken open, and Porteous was hanged, while the rioters were carrying him to the gallows, one of his slippers fell off; they halted, picked it up, and quietly replaced it on his foot. Scott heard this singular incident from a lady who had seen it, having been drawn to her window by the tumult. What a still atmosphere of rage must that have been in which so light a straw floated! And the name of Scott recalls another straw of a different kind, i.e. * And, in like manner, a single touch defaces and darkens the picture, as the word correspondent in the following lines of Mr. Wordsworth : "Soon as the ready marge Was clear'd, I dipp'd with arms accordant oars That, disentangled from the shady boughs Of some thick wood, her place of covert, cleaves With correspondent wings the abyss of air."-Excursion, b. ii. Much better is the classic idiom of Southey, "The green bird guided Thelaba, Now oaring with slow wing his upland way." the power of a minute and trifling circumstance to soothe the troubled bosom. We allude to the admirable scene in Peveril, where Sir Geoffrey pays his daily visit to Moultrassie Hall, with his word of salutation and good-by. A deep sigh, sometimes coupled with, "I thank you, Sir Geoffrey, my grateful duty waits on Lady Peveril," was generally Bridgenorth's only answer. Time endeared this short expression of sympathy to the mourner. It broke his day; it gave him something to look to:"The lattice window was never closed, nor was the leathern easy chair which stood next to it, ever empty, when the usual hour of the baronet's momentary visit approached. At length the expectation of that passing minute became the pivot upon which the thoughts of poor Bridgenorth turned during all the rest of the day." This is a beau tiful and touching glance into the secrets of the heart. The collection of such straws shews a hand that had been busy with the harvest of humanity. A sentence, an image, a thought, distinguishes and identifies an author; a straw in Milton shews the air blowing towards the paradise of fancy; and it is so in painting. You may recognise one of Raffaelle's popes by the ring on his finger. Reynolds used to say that the history-pieces of the Dutch school were properly portraits of themselves; and this inability to go out of themselves always assigns them their due place in the catalogue. If they build Babylon, it is upon piles. But the greatest masters have also their little marks of peculiarity, their straws in colour or design. You distinguish Tintoretto by the dark face of his Moor, or the dignified glance of the Venetian nobleman, or the high birth of his dog; whatever may be the subject of the picture, you are almost certain to find in it one of these elements, and so admirably introduced and managed as not to offend the eye. Mengs remarked of Titian, that he had studied deeply the character and suitableness of every colour, and the exact place and time for employing them. The science of selection, that is, of preferring a red cloth to a blue, was possessed in its extremest capacity by this founder of the Venetian school. You determine his pencil at once by the handling of these hues. Who ever dropped a velvet of so lustrous a purple round the white limbs of Beauty? You may swear to his Venus by that straw. Could you hesitate to assign that dewy umbrage, with the delicious twilight walk, to Hobbima? or do you require a second glance to assure you that the white horse, in yonder corn-field, came from the stable of Wouvermans? And passing into a purer atmosphere of meditation, we still find that the footsteps of Wisdom may be tracked by the light motions of straws; and that the doctrine of a special Providence becomes valuable in proportion as we extend it to what the world calls trifles, to things of every-day occurrence. A violet under the hedge points the road to Eden and angels. One who wrote of old has put this inquiry in his own rich light of illustration when he described the Architect of the universe as being "glorified in the sun and moon, in the rare fabric of the honeycomb, in the economy of ants, in the little houses of birds; God being pleased to delight in those little images and reflexes of Himself from those pretty mirrors, which, like a crevice in a wall, though a narrow perspective transmit the species of a vast excellence." And so one, who in modern times follows the glowing path of the English Chrysostom with distant yet not undignified steps, has happily told us that in the little turns and shiftings of every-day things, in the flutterings of leaves, and in the falling of dew, we may trace the unwearied action of the Providential oversight, and read the lesson which each and all teach to ourselves. "These are His glance, the expressions of His countenance, the glance of His eye." Men go down into deep waters to bring up mysteries of philosophy and truth; but the commonest fact teaches a higher lesson. Take only a straw -the conversation of two friends. The adaptation of the voice to society is the miracle of the world. A cicada in South America may be Bishop Taylor. heard a mile off. The most ingenious of entomologists, Kirby, has calculated that if the powers of the human voice increased in the ratio of the size of the body, it would be heard all over the world! And if this be so with the ordinary five-feet-nine, what would it be with six-feet-six? Think of Mr. Carus Wilson in the little island of Jersey! It would become one enormous bell, with the iron tongue rebellowing in frightful iteration.* Or, most terrible of all, imagine the world one vast reflection of the Conciliation Hall; the voice of Mr. O'Connell omnipresent; and the Repeal of the Union in every family! Then, indeed, the designation of "The Agitator" would be properly bestowed. Hermetically-sealed apartments would be advertised in The Times; the Royal Society would bestow a medal upon the easiest method of promoting deafness; Mesmerists, like postmen, would be under the direction of government; every round would be anxiously watched; and there would be a competition to pay "extra" for an early delivery! We talk of the delicacy of the eye, but the ear exceeds it in quick sympathy and sensitiveness. The annoyances endured by the sense of vision, if transferred to that of hearing, would either benumb or destroy it. Lord Bacon mentions (Nat. Hist. 128) an instance of this kind of suffering endured by himself, when, "standing near one that lured loud and shrill," he had suddenly an offence, as if somewhat had been broken and dislocated in his ear: he adds, "and immediately after a loud ringing, not an ordinary singing or hissing, but far louder and differing, so as I feared some deafness; but, after some half-quarter of an hour, it vanished." Wonderful power of little things! Tremendous agency of straws! * Pope has not overlooked the wise provision for the true happiness of the constitution of man : "No pow'rs of body or of soul to share, But what his nature and his state can bear. Why has not man a microscopic eye? For this plain reason, Man is not a fly. Say, what the use, were finer optics given, Tinspect a mite, not comprehend the heaven? To smart and agonise at every pore? Or quick effluvia darting through the brain, Die of a rose in aromatic pain? If Nature thunder'd in his opening ears, And stunn'd him with the music of the spheres, How would be wish that Heaven had left him stiil The whisp'ring zephyr and the purling rill !" CONTEMPORARY ORATORS, No. VII. THE RIGHT HON, SIR JAMES GRAHAM. WHATEVER may be suggested to the contrary by personal or political antipathy, it will be very generally admitted by men of all parties, who are conversant with the subject, that Sir James Graham stands next to Sir Robert Peel and Lord John Russell in the degree of influence he exercises over the debates in the House of Commons. It is not as an orator, more than respectable though his pretensions be, that he ranks thus high; for there are many, even among his inferiors as statesmen, who in eloquence far transcend him. Nor is it because he has, in the course of his long and chequered career, developed those higher qualities, either of character or of intellect, which lead men in the aggregate to wait upon the judgment of the individual, yielding themselves to his guidance; for the public life of Sir James Graham has been singularly unpropitious to the accomplishment of that glorious distinction. Nor is it that his reputation has grown with the growth or identified itself with the successes of any great national party, whose gratitude would have given him a following, and that following an audience prepossessed in his favour; for there is scarcely a public man of the day who has been so deeply and irrecoverably inconstant to political alliances, or the virulence of whose temporary opposition may with more precision be guaged by the fervency of his former support. On none of the received grounds, in fact, can his influence-popularity it cannot be called-with the House of Commons be accounted for. Such as it is, it depends on himself alone. It is anomalous, like his position. The solitary, self-created, almost undisputed sway wielded by Sir Robert Peel, one can understand. He has been the foremost man of his time. Always the leader of, even in adversity, the most powerful party of his countrymen, he has never, except, perhaps, in the single instance of the Reform question, run counter to the feelings of the nation. There are principles and sentiments which, even in the hour of the uttermost estrangement, he held in common with his opponents; there was always some neutral ground for reconciliation. If events proved that his advocacy could not always have been sincere, no one could point to habitual virulence and acrimony assumed to give the colour of earnestness. Ile soothed, flattered, cajoled, played off parties and opinions against each other with delicate finesse, but never directly outraged deep-rooted prejudices or long-established opinions. And so, indeed, it is with him in the present hour. While ruling his political contemporaries with a power so absolute as to be almost without parallel in representative assemblies, and, at the same time, so well masked as to require all the envenomed ingenuity of a disappointed partisan ere it could be discovered, much less believed in, Sir Robert Peel has contrived to avoid exhibiting most of the harsher symbols of his sway. Ilis despotism has not been obtrusive, or his tyranny odious. He has made men enslave each other, without himself standing forth as the confessed cause of the general degradation. If he has no natural or personal followers, so also he has no organised opponents,-at least their organisation melts away at his approach; they are valiant only behind his back. The more genial, mild, and natural influence of Lord John Russell with his followers is also to be accounted for; nor is it at all surprising that he should be a favourite as a speaker with the House generally. Of the Whig party, first the protégé, then the pupil, and now the leader, he has always been the firm and consistent supporter. Of one side of the House he possesses the favour by every right of political service, and party is not slow to be grateful, however wanting it may be in other political virtues. To his opponents and the House generally, he has always exhibited a deference and respectful consideration, which, if it sprang from policy, was wise in the extreme, for it has secured a degree of prepossession on personal grounds which is not enjoyed even by Sir Robert Peel himself, and often acts as a counter-balancing makeweight for mental and physical shortcomings in his oratory. Sir James Graham's influence in the representative branch of the legislature is not to be attributed to any of the causes which have secured its favours for these two distinguished men. Like Sir Robert Peel, he has constantly been in antagonism with parties and opinions to which he has at some other time, before or since, given his most hearty support. But his changes of opinion and of policy have been made under very different circumstances, and the tone and character of his advocacy and opposition have been of a very different nature. Sir Robert Peel's first great act of inconsistency, however it may have exasperated his followers at the time, still bore the stamp of statesmanship; inasmuch as it was the application of a great and, in some respects, a desperate remedy to a state of things to which the history of the constitution afforded no parallel. It carried with it, also, to most minds the justification of an overpowering necessity. His subsequent deviations from the line of policy professed by him in early life, and while still the leader of the old Tory party, have, in like manner, been to a great extent the result of circumstances which he could not control. Many compromises of principle are forgiven in the regenerator of a great party. And Sir Robert Peel, too, has always kept his motives so free from suspicions. His ambition is, at least, of an ennobling and exalting character. He has never been the mere partisan, or allowed politics to become a passion with him, but has preserved his dignity amidst all the heats of party strife. Personal motives are seldom assigned to him when he sees fit to change his policy. He has preserved in an eminent degree the respect both of parliament and the public. Not so Sir James Graham; and the fact affects his position with the House of Commons, or it would not be so broadly stated in this paper, which, with the others of the series, treats of public men with reference to their personal position and their influence as speakers, and not with any political bias. Upon the same principle that high praise has been given to Lord John Russell or to Mr. Macaulay, although Whigs, because they are fairly entitled to it, the faults in the character of Sir James Graham, and the flaws in his position, will be dealt with without reserve, notwithstanding that he is so distinguished and so useful a member of a Conservative government. Sir James, we repeat, has not, amidst his many changes of opinion and party, preserved the same high character, the same freedom from the imputation of partisanship, the same presumption of stainless motive, that have upheld Sir Robert Peel, and retained for him the personal favour of the House of Commons, even in the most critical and dangerous periods of his fortunes. Still less has he observed that steady devotion to early received and professed opinions, that tolerant and liberal appreciation of principles and views entertained and professed by opponents, that gently repulsive retirement from stage to stage of party defence in the face of the advancing enemy, which, together with many personal qualities of an amiable character, have secured for Lord John Russell so much of the regard of foes as well as of friends. Sir James Graham has acted on wholly opposite tactics. There has been more (so to speak) of brigandage, more of the loose policy of the Free Lance, in his political life. His attacks have always been fierce and virulent in inverse proportion to what has proved to be the depth of his convictions, and to the apparent necessity of the case; his defences have always been distinguished by a blind and passionate obstinacy; his compromises and abandonments of professed opinions have always been sudden. These are great defects of character in the eyes of Englishmen, and they react upon Sir James Graham, |