compelled to ask of your country's justice a beggarly retribution of dollars and cents; to solicit the equivalent for affliction, the premium for pain, the indemnity for shame, cast up correctly to a mill in regular federal currency. A fiend in

It

human shape has trampled under foot honor, humanity, friendship, the rights of nature, and the ties of connubial society; but a check upon the bank atones for all his crime; a scrap of silk paper spunges up the whole blot of his infamy. is not here the place to inquire, whether a system of jurisprudence might not be devised, which should secure a more honorable protection to personal rights; but it is manifest that the maxim, which affixes to personal sufferings their stated price in current coin, which estimates honor and shame by troy weight, which balances so many pangs of body with so many ounces of silver, and so much anguish of mind with so many pennyweights of gold, makes avarice the unresisted umpire of the soul. It administers money as the universal potion for healing all the bruises of the mind; and makes extortion the only standard for measuring the merits of virtue.

The passion of the pulpit orator is fear. As the exhortations of the divine have reference prin

cipally to the interests of a future existence, it is natural and proper, that he should often draw from the same source his materials of argument or of persuasion. And as the doctrines of religion are not aided among us by the weapons of secular power, the terrors of futurity are the only instruments, by which numerous classes of people are retained stedfast in their faith, or regulated in their practice. The vengeance of an offended Deity is to many preachers of many denominations the only fountain of motives or of reasoning; and their eloquence can never kindle without resorting to the flames of hell. I would not be understood, my friends, to treat this subject with a trifling hand. It is a serious concern to us all. But mere terror is a base and servile passion; nor should I value at a straw the religion or the morality, which hinges upon nothing else. Let me hope that you, and those who may hereafter enjoy the benefits of your ministry, will ever feel the force and efficacy of some nobler, some more generous stimulus to piety and virtue, than the mere selfishness even of eternity, and the shivering horrors of hell-fire.

We have now gone through the first great division of the rhetorical science. We have succes

sively treated of the state of the controversy, the oratorical topics, the arguments peculiarly adapted to the demonstrative, deliberative, judicial, and religious class of discourses. We have endeav

oured to trace the address and character suitable to an orator, and to point out the true use and proper means of exciting and directing the passions. The subject is copious; and, although it has occupied so large a portion of our time, is very far from being exhausted. My duties have been - to collect and present to your view the materials for the plastic hands of genius to fashion into shape. For the employment of these materials you will naturally look not to me, but to yourselves; not to the lessons of a teacher, but to the fertility of your own invention.

LECTURE XVII.

DISPOSITION. EXORDIUM.

IT will be remembered, that, in making the general distribution of the science of rhetoric into its primary divisions, they were stated to be five; invention, disposition, elocution, memory, and pronunciation or action.

To the first of these divisions, invention, my ten last lectures have been devoted; containing a general view of every thing, which the rhetoricians of antiquity considered as constituting the materials of an oratorical discourse. The formation of these materials was the proper and exclusive function of invention; which was analogous only to the state of chaos in the creation of the world. To shape this chaos into form, to give the original