'Behold your Cherubina; behold the most celebrated woman in our island.
Need I recount to you all her accomplishments? Her impassioned
sensibility, her exquisite art in depicting the delicate and affecting
relations between the beauties of nature, and the deep emotions of the
soul? Need I dwell on those elegant adventures, those sorrows, and
those horrors, which she has experienced; I might almost say, sought?
Oh! no. The whole globe already resounds with them, and their fame will
descend to the most remote posterity.
'Need I portray her eloquence, the purity of her style, and the
smoothness of her periods? Are not her ancestors illustrious? Are not
her manners fascinating? Alas! to this question, some of our hearts
beat audible response. Her's is the head of a Sappho, deficient alone
in the voluptuous languor, which should characterize the countenance of
that enamoured Lesbian.
'To CROWN her, therefore, as the patroness of arts, the paragon of
charms, and the first of heroines, is to gratify our feelings, more
than her own; by enabling us to pay a just homage to beauty and to
virtue.'
He ceased amidst thunders of applause. I rose;--and in an instant, it
was the stillness of death. Then with a timorous, yet ardent air, I
thus addressed the assembly.
'My countrymen, my countrywomen!
'I will not thank you, for I cannot. In giving me cause to be grateful,
you have taken from me the means of expressing my gratitude, for you
have overpowered me.
'How I happen to deserve the beautiful eulogium just pronounced, I am
sure I cannot conceive. Till this flattering moment, I never knew that
the grove resounds with my praises, that my style is pure, and my head
a Sappho's. But unconsciousness of merit is the characteristic of a
heroine.
'The gratitude, however, which my words cannot express, my deeds shall
evince; and I now pledge myself, that neither rank nor riches (which,
from my pursuits, I am peculiarly liable to) shall ever make me
unmindful of what I owe to adversity. For, from her, I have acquired
all my knowledge of the world, my sympathy, my pensiveness, and my
sensibility. Yes, since adversity thus adds to virtue, it must be a
virtue to seek adversity.
'England, my friends, is now the depository of all that remains of
virtue;--the ark that floats upon the waters of the deluge. But what
preserves her virtuous? Her women. And whence arises their purity? From
education.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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