with duty, and suffered for the mistake, yet that one prevailing object
of my life, which with so startling a truth you say it has pleased Heaven
to frustrate, I cannot hold an error in itself. You have learned enough
from your uncle, seen enough of me yourself, to know what that object has
been. You are scholar enough to concede to me that it is no ignoble
homage which either nations or persons render to the ancestral Dead--that
homage is an instinct in all but vulgar and sordid natures. Has a man no
ancestry of his own--rightly and justly, if himself of worth, he
appropriates to his lineage all the heroes, and bards, and patriots of
his fatherland! A free citizen has ancestors in all the glorious chiefs
that have adorned the State, on the sole condition that he shall revere
their tombs and guard their memory as a son! And thus, whenever they who
speak trumpet-tongued to grand democracies would rouse some quailing
generation to heroic deed or sacrifice, they appeal in the Name of
Ancestors, and call upon the living to be worthy of the dead! That which
is so laudable--nay, so necessary a sentiment in the mass, cannot be a
fault that angers Heaven in the man. Like all high sentiments, it may
compel harsh and rugged duties; it may need the stern suppression of many
a gentle impulse--of many a pleasing wish. But we must regard it in its
merit and consistency as a whole. And if, my eloquent and subtle friend,
all you have hitherto said be designed but to wind into pleas for the
same cause that I have already decided against the advocate in my own
heart which sides with Lionel's generous love and yon fair girl's
ingenuous and touching grace, let us break up the court; the judge has no
choice but the law which imperiously governs his judgment."

GEORGE MORLEY.--"I have not hitherto presumed to apply to particular
cases the general argument you so indulgently allow me to urge in favour
of my theory, that in the world of the human heart, when closely
examined, there is the same harmony of design as in the external