"I will not be answered by a public lie in the shape of an amendment: neither, speaking for the subjects' freedom, am I to hear of faction. I wish for nothing but to breathe in this our island, in common with my fellow-subjects, the air of liberty. I have no ambition, unless it be the ambition to break your chains, and contemplate your glory. I never will be satisfied as long as the meanest cottager in Ireland has a link of the British chain clanking in his rags: he may be naked, he shall not be in irons. And I do see the time is at hand, the spirit is gone forth, the declaration is planted: and though great men should apostatise, yet the cause will live: and though the public speaker should die, yet the immortal fire shall outlast the organ which conveyed it, and the breath of liberty, like the word of the holy man, shall not die with the prophet, but survive him."[19] We shall add only to these copious and interesting quotations two passages from the greatest masters of French eloquence. Bossuet, in his funeral oration on Henrietta, daughter of France and Queen of England, the consort of Charles I., thus expresses himself:-- "Christians!" says he, in the exordium of his discourse, "it is not surprising that the memory of a great queen--the daughter, the wife, the mother of monarchs--should attract you from all quarters to this melancholy ceremony; it will bring forcibly before your eyes one of those awful examples which demonstrate to the world the vanity of which it is composed. You will see in her single life the extremes of human things: felicity without bounds, miseries without parallel; a long and peaceable enjoyment of one of the most noble crowns in the universe--all that birth and grandeur could confer that was glorious--all that adversity and suffering could accumulate that was disastrous; the good cause attended at first with some success, then involved in the most dreadful disasters. Revolutions unheard of, rebellion long restrained, at length reigning triumphant; no curb there to license, no laws in force. Majesty itself violated by bloody hands--usurpation and tyranny, under the name of liberty--a fugitive queen, who can find no retreat in her three kingdoms, and was forced to seek in her native country a melancholy exile. Nine sea voyages undertaken against her will by a queen, in spite of wintry tempests--a throne unworthily overturned, and miraculously re-established. Behold the lessons which God has given to kings! thus does He manifest to the world the nothingness of its pomps and its grandeur. If our words fail, if language sinks beneath the grandeur of such a subject, the simple narrative is more touching than aught that words can convey. The heart of a great queen,