McGuffey's Sixth Eclectic Reader

by William Holmes McGuffey

LVI. RIENZI'S ADDRESS TO THE ROMANS. (221)

Mary Russell Mitford, 1786-1855. She was the daughter of a physician, and was born in Hampshire, England. At twenty years of age, she published three volumes of poems; and soon after entered upon literature as a lifelong occupation. She wrote tales, sketches, poems, and dramas. "Our Village" is the best known of her prose works; the book describes the daily life of a rural people, is simple but finished in style, and is marked by mingled humor and pathos. Her most noted drama is "Rienzi." Miss Mitford passed the last forty years of her life in a little cottage in Berkshire, among a simple, country people, to whom she was greatly endeared by her kindness and social virtues. ###

I come not here to talk. You know too well
The story of our thraldom. We are slaves!
The bright sun rises to his course, and lights
A race of slaves! He sets, and his last beams
Fall on a slave; not such as, swept along
By the full tide of power, the conqueror led
To crimson glory and undying fame;
But base, ignoble slaves; slaves to a horde
Of petty tyrants, feudal despots, lords,
Rich in some dozen paltry villages;
Strong in some hundred spearmen; only great
In that strange spell,—a name.

Each hour, dark fraud,
Or open rapine, or protected murder,
Cries out against them. But this very day,
An honest man, my neighbor,—there he stands,—
Was struck—struck like a dog, by one who wore
The badge of Ursini; because, forsooth,
He tossed not high his ready cap in air,
Nor lifted up his voice in servile shouts,
At sight of that great ruffian! Be we men,
And suffer such dishonor? men, and wash not
The stain away in blood? Such shames are common.
I have known deeper wrongs; I that speak to ye,
I had a brother once—a gracious boy,
Full of all gentleness, of calmest hope,
Of sweet and quiet joy,—there was the look
Of heaven upon his face, which limners give
To the beloved disciple.

How I loved
That gracious boy! Younger by fifteen years,
Brother at once, and son! He left my side,
A summer bloom on his fair cheek; a smile
Parting his innocent lips. In one short hour,
That pretty, harmless boy was slain! I saw
The corse, the mangled corse, and then I cried
For vengeance! Rouse, ye Romans! rouse, ye slaves!
Have ye brave sons? Look in the next fierce brawl
To see them die. Have ye fair daughters? Look
To see them live, torn from your arms, distained,
Dishonored; and if ye dare call for justice,
Be answered by the lash.

Yet this is Rome,
That sat on her seven hills, and from her throne
Of beauty ruled the world! and we are Romans.
Why, in that elder day, to be a Roman
Was greater than a king!

And once again,—
Hear me, ye walls that echoed to the tread
Of either Brutus! Once again, I swear,
The eternal city shall be free.

NOTES.—Rienzi (b. about 1312, d. 1354) was the last of the Roman tribunes. In 1347 he led a successful revolt against the nobles, who by their contentions kept Rome in constant turmoil. He then assumed the title of tribune, but, after indulging in a life of reckless extravagance and pomp for a few months, he was compelled to abdicate, and fly for his life. In 1354 he was reinstated in power, but his tyranny caused his assassination the same year.

The Ursini wore one of the noble families of Rome.

This lesson is especially adapted for drill on inflection, emphasis, and modulation.

LVll. CHARACTER OF THE PURITAN FATHERS OF NEW ENGLAND. (223)

One of the most prominent features which distinguished our forefathers, was their determined resistance to oppression. They seemed born and brought up for the high and special purpose of showing to the world that the civil and religious rights of man—the rights of self-government, of conscience, and independent thought—are not merely things to be talked of and woven into theories, but to be adopted with the whole strength and ardor of the mind, and felt in the profoundest recesses of the heart, and carried out into the general life, and made the foundation of practical usefulness, and visible beauty, and true nobility.

Liberty, with them, was an object of too serious desire and stern resolve to be personified, allegorized, and enshrined. They made no goddess of it, as the ancients did; they had no time nor inclination for such trifling; they felt that liberty was the simple birthright of every human creature; they called it so; they claimed it as such; they reverenced and held it fast as the unalienable gift of the Creator, which was not to be surrendered to power, nor sold for wages.

It was theirs, as men; without it, they did not esteem themselves men; more than any other privilege or possession, it was essential to their happiness, for it was essential to their original nature; and therefore they preferred it above wealth, and ease, and country; and, that they might enjoy and exercise it fully, they forsook houses, and lands, and kindred, their homes, their native soil, and their fathers' graves.

They left all these; they left England, which, whatever it might have been called, was not to them a land of freedom; they launched forth on the pathless ocean, the wide, fathomless ocean, soiled not by the earth beneath, and bounded, all round and above, only by heaven; and it seemed to them like that better and sublimer freedom, which their country knew not, but of which they had the conception and image in their hearts; and, after a toilsome and painful voyage, they came to a hard and wintry coast, unfruitful and desolate, but unguarded and boundless; its calm silence interrupted not the ascent of their prayers; it had no eyes to watch, no ears to hearken, no tongues to report of them; here, again, there was an answer to their soul's desire, and they were satisfied, and gave thanks; they saw that they were free, and the desert smiled.

I am telling an old tale; but it is one which must be told when we speak of those men. It is to be added, that they transmitted their principles to their children, and that, peopled by such a race, our country was always free. So long as its inhabitants were unmolested by the mother country in the exercise of their important rights, they submitted to the form of English government; but when those rights were invaded, they spurned even the form away.

This act was the Revolution, which came of course and spontaneously, and had nothing in it of the wonderful or unforeseen. The wonder would have been if it had not occurred. It was, indeed, a happy and glorious event, but by no means unnatural; and I intend no slight to the revered actors in the Revolution when I assert that their fathers before them were as free as they—every whit as free.

The principles of the Revolution were not the suddenly acquired property of a few bosoms: they were abroad in the land in the ages before; they had always been taught, like the truths of the Bible; they had descended from father to son, down from those primitive days, when the Pilgrim, established in his simple dwelling, and seated at his blazing fire, piled high from the forest which shaded his door, repeated to his listening children the story of his wrongs and his resistance, and bade them rejoice, though the wild winds and the wild beasts were howling without, that they had nothing to fear from great men's oppression.

Here are the beginnings of the Revolution. Every settler's hearth was a school of independence; the scholars were apt, and the lessons sunk deeply; and thus it came that our country was always free; it could not be other than free.

As deeply seated as was the principle of liberty and resistance to arbitrary power in the breasts of the Puritans, it was not more so than their piety and sense of religious obligation. They were emphatically a people whose God was the Lord. Their form of government was as strictly theocratical, if direct communication be excepted, as was that of the Jews; insomuch that it would be difficult to say where there was any civil authority among them entirely distinct from ecclesiastical jurisdiction.

Whenever a few of them settled a town, they immediately gathered themselves into a church; and their elders were magistrates, and their code of laws was the Pentateuch. These were forms, it is true, but forms which faithfully indicated principles and feelings; for no people could have adopted such forms, who were not thoroughly imbued with the spirit, and bent on the practice, of religion.

God was their King; and they regarded him as truly and literally so, as if he had dwelt in a visible palace in the midst of their state. They were his devoted, resolute, humble subjects; they undertook nothing which they did not beg of him to prosper; they accomplished nothing without rendering to him the praise; they suffered nothing without carrying their sorrows to his throne; they ate nothing which they did not implore him to bless.

Their piety was not merely external; it was sincere; it had the proof of a good tree in bearing good fruit; it produced and sustained a strict morality. Their tenacious purity of manners and speech obtained for them, in the mother country, their name of Puritans, which, though given in derision, was as honorable an appellation as was ever bestowed by man on man.

That there were hypocrites among them, is not to be doubted; but they were rare. The men who voluntarily exiled themselves to an unknown coast, and endured there every toil and hardship for conscience' sake, and that they might serve God in their own manner, were not likely to set conscience at defiance, and make the service of God a mockery; they were not likely to be, neither were they, hypocrites. I do not know that it would be arrogating too much for them to say, that, on the extended surface of the globe, there was not a single community of men to be compared with them, in the respects of deep religious impressions and an exact performance of moral duty. F. W. P. Greenwood.

NOTE.—The Pentateuch is the first five books of the Old Testament. The word is derived from two Greek words, (pente), five, and (tenchos), book.