Lectures Delivered in America in 1874 — John Shaqi
Lectures Delivered in America in 1874Kingsley, Charles
History
Lectures Delivered in America in 1874
Kingsley, Charles
Speeches, addresses, etc.
Holland, Tierney, Mackintosh, Grattan, Peel, Canning, Palmerston, Isaac
Watts, Bell, Wilberforce, Sharp, the Macaulays, Fowell Buxton, Francis
Horner, Charles Buller, Cobden, Watt, Rennell, Telford, Locke, Brunel,
Grote, Thackeray, Dickens, Maurice—men who, each in his own way, toiled
for freedom of some kind; freedom of race, of laws, of commerce, of
locomotion, of production, of speech, of thought, of education, of human
charity, and of sympathy—these are the men whom England still delights to
honour; whose busts around our walls show that the ancient spirit is not
dead, and that we, as you, are still, as 1500 years ago, the sons of
freedom and of light.
But, beside these statesmen who were just and true to you, and therefore
to their native land, there lie men before whose monuments I would ask
thoughtful Americans to pause—I mean those of our old fighters, by land
and sea. I do not speak merely of those who lived before our Civil Wars,
though they are indeed our common heritage. And when you look at the
noble monuments of De Vere and Norris, the fathers of the English
infantry, you should remember that your ancestors and mine, or that of
any other Englishman, may have trailed pike and handled sword side by
side under those very men, in those old wars of the Netherlands, which
your own great historian, Mr. Motley, has so well described; or have
sailed together to Cadiz fight, and to the Spanish Main, with Raleigh or
with Drake.
There are those, again, who did their duty two and three generations
later—though one of the noblest of them all, old Admiral Blake, alas!
lies we know not where—cast out, with Cromwell and his heroes, by the
fanatics and sycophants of the Restoration—whom not only we, but Royalty
itself, would now restore, could we recover their noble ashes, to their
rightful resting-place.
And these, if not always our common ancestors, were, often enough, our
common cousins, as in the case of my own family, in which one brother was
settling in New England, to found there a whole new family of Kingsleys
while the other brother was fighting in the Parliamentary army, and
helping to defeat Charles at Rowton Moor.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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