PART SECOND

Selections for Intermediate Course

Note: The prose oratorical models, selected for this, the Intermediate Course, are, as will be readily seen, more difficult than those of the Beginners' Course, while the lyrics and ballads and other poems are less difficult than those of the Advanced Course; hence the student should not be permitted to draw on Course III for selections for class-reading until he has attained

1.

Considerable proficiency in force (expulsive and explosive), pauses, inflections, modulation, and pitch, the orotund and guttural qualities of voice, and gesture; and

2. The ability to adapt, for the purpose of proper impersonation, voice, attitude, and gesture to the characters in the ballads and other pieces where such impersonation is required.

THE SUFFERINGS OF IRELAND SHEIL

The population of Ireland has doubled since the Union. What is the condition of the mass of the people? Has her capital increased in the same proportion? Behold the famine, the wretchedness and pestilence, of the Irish hovel, and, if you have the heart to do so, mock at the calamities of the country and proceed in your demonstrations of the pros

perity of Ireland. The mass of the people are in a condition more wretched than that of any nation in Europe; they are worse housed, worse covered, worse fed, than the basest boors in the provinces of Russia; they dwell in habitations to which your swine would not be committed; they are covered with rags which your beggars would disdain to wear, and not only do they never taste the flesh of the animals which crowd into your markets, but, while the sweat drops from their brows, they never touch the bread into which their harvests are converted. For you they toil, for you they delve; they reclaim the bog and drive the plow to the mountain's top for you. And where does all this misery exist? In a country teeming with fertility and stamped with the beneficent intents of God. When the famine of Ireland prevailed, when her cries crossed the Channel and pierced your ears and reached your hearts, the granaries of Ireland were bursting with their contents, and, while a people knelt down and stretched out their hands for food, the business of deportation, the absentee tribute, was going on. Talk of the prosperity of Ireland! Talk of the external magnificence of a poor-house, gorged with misery within!

But the Secretary for the Treasury exclaims: "If the agitators would let us alone, and allow Ireland to be tranquil!" The agitators, forsooth! Does he venture, has he the intrepidity, to speak thus? Agitators! Against deep potations let the drunkard rail: at Crockford's let there be homilies against the dice-box; let every libertine lament the progress of licentiousness, when his Majesty's ministers deplore

the influence of demagogues and Whigs complain of agitation. How did you carry the Reform? Was it not by impelling the people almost to the verge of revolution? Was there a stimulant for their passions, was there a provocative for their excitement, to which you did not resort? If you have forgotten, do you think that we shall fail to remember your meetings at Edinburgh, at Paisley, at Manchester, at Birmingham? Did not three hundred thousand men assemble? Did they not pass resolutions against taxes? Did they not threaten to march on London? Did not two of the cabinet ministers indite to them epistles of gratitude and of admiration? And do they now dare, have they the audacity, to speak of agitation? Have we not as good a title to demand the restitution of our Parliament, as the ministers to insist on the reform of this House?

IMMORTALITY-MASSILLON.

If we wholly perish with the body, what an imposture is this whole system of laws, manners, and usages, on which human society is founded! If we wholly perish with the body, these maxims of charity, patience, justice, honor, gratitude, and friendship, which sages have taught and good men have practised,-what are they but empty words, possessing no real and binding efficacy? Why should we heed them, if in this life only we have hope? Speak not of duty. What can we owe to the dead, to the living, to ourselves, if all are or will be nothing? Who shall dictate our duty, if not our own

pleasures, if not our own passions? Speak not of morality. It is a mere chimera, a bugbear of human invention, if retribution terminate with the grave.

If we must wholly perish, what to us are the sweet ties of kindred? What the tender names of parent, child, sister, brother, husband, wife, or friend? The characters of a drama are not more illusive. We have no ancestors, no descendants; since succession cannot be predicated of nothingness. Would we honor the illustrious dead? How absurd to honor that which has no existence! Would we take thought for posterity? How frivolous to concern ourselves for those whose end, like our own, must soon be annihilation! Have we made a promise? How can it bind nothing to nothing? Perjury is but a jest: The last injunctions of the dying,—what sanctity have they more than the last sound of a chord that is snapped, of an instrument that is broken?

To sum up all: If we must wholly perish, then is obedience to the laws but an insensate servitude; rulers and magistrates are but the phantoms which popular imbecility has raised up; justice is an unwarrantable infringement upon the liberty of men, an imposition, a usurpation; the law of marriage is a vain scruple; modesty, a prejudice; honor and probity, such stuff as dreams are made of; and incests, murders, parricides, the most heartless cruelties, and the blackest crimes, are but the legitimate sports of man's irresponsible nature; while the harsh epithets attached to them are merely such as the policy of legislators has invented and imposed on the credulity of the people.

Here is the issue to which the vaunted philosophy of unbelievers must inevitably lead. Here is that social felicity, that sway of reason, that emancipation from error, of which they eternally prate as the fruit of their doctrines. Accept their maxims, and the whole world falls back into a frightful chaos; and all the relations of life are confounded: and all ideas of vice and virtue are reversed; and the most inviolable laws of society vanish; and all moral discipline perishes; and the government of states and nations has no longer any cement to uphold it; and all the harmony of the body politic becomes discord; and the human race is no more than an assemblage of reckless barbarians, shameless, remorseless, brutal, denaturalized, with no other law than force, no other check than passion, no other bond than irreligion, no other god than self! Such would be the world which impiety would make. Such would be this world, were a belief in God and immortality to die out of the human heart.

ABOU BEN ADHEM-LEIGH HUNT.

Abou Ben Adhem (may his tribe increase!)
Awoke one night from a sweet dream of peace,
And saw within the moonlight in his room
Making it rich and like a lily in bloom,
An angel, writing in a book of gold.
Exceeding peace had made Ben Adhem bold,
And to the Presence in the room he said:

"What writest thou?" The vision raised its head, And, with a look made all of sweet accord,