Learning that the recreant servants of the State are about to confer the dictatorship of Syracuse on Dionysius, Damon speeds to the capitol, to resist, and, if possible, defeat, the purpose. Undaunted by the studious insolence of his reception, almost single-handed he maintains a long combat with the conspirators, battling their design step by step. It was a most exciting scene on all accounts, and was steadily marked by delicate gradations to a climax of overwhelming power. He wielded by turns all the weapons of argument, invective, persuasion, command, and defiance, exhibiting magnificent specimens of impassioned declamation, towering among the meaner men around him, an illuminated mould of heroic manhood whereon every god did seem to have set his seal. Finally, they pass the fatal vote, and cry,-- "All hail, then, Dionysius the king. _Damon._ Oh, all ye gods, my country! my country! _Dionysius._ And that we may have leisure to put on With fitting dignity our garb of power, We do now, first assuming our own right, Command from this, that was the senate-house, Those rash, tumultuous men, who still would tempt The city's peace with wild vociferation And vain contentious rivalry. Away! _Damon._ I stand, A senator, within the senate-house! _Dion._ Traitor! and dost thou dare me to my face? _Damon._ Traitor! to whom? to thee?--O Syracuse, Is this thy registered doom? To have no meaning For the proud names of liberty and virtue, But as some regal braggart sets it down In his vocabulary? And the sense, The broad, bright sense that Nature hath assigned them In her infallible volume, interdicted Forever from thy knowledge; or if seen, And known, and put in use, denounced as treasonable, And treated thus?--No, Dionysius, no! I am no traitor! But, in mine allegiance To my lost country, I proclaim thee one! _Dion._ My guards, there! Ho! _Damon._ What! hast thou, then, invoked Thy satellites already? _Dion._ Seize him! _Damon._ Death's the best gift to one that never yet Wished to survive his country. Here are men Fit for the life a tyrant can bestow! Let such as these live on." Forrest was so absolutely possessed by the sentiment of these passages, that if, instead of standing in the Senate of Syracuse and representing her little forlorn-hope of patriots, he had been standing in the capitol of the whole republican world as a representative of collective humanity, his delivery could not have been more proudly befitting and competent. Such was the immense contagious flood of inspiration with which he was loaded, that repeatedly his audiences rose to their feet as one man and cheered him till the dust rose to the roof and the very walls seemed to quiver.