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Henry V. before the Battle of Agincourt,......... Shakspeare, 19

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PAGE

Procrastination,

The Ruined Cottage,...........

. Young, 37

Miss Landon, 43

Shylock, Bassanio, and Antonio,........................................................ Shakspeare, 50 Brutus over the Dead Body of Lucretia,............ ..Payne, 59

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Lord Tinsel and the Earl of Rochdale,................ Knowles, 90

The Snow-Storm,.......

Henry IV.'s Soliloquy on Sleep,............

Tell's Address to his Native Mountains, .............................

Wolsey and Cromwell,

Thomson, 99

Shakspeare, 105

..Knowles, 111

Shakspeare, 117

The American Indian and the Ocean,........B. B. Thatcher, 126

.........

Cassius Instigating Brutus against Cæsar,. Shakspeare, 132 Cato's Soliloquy,..........................

.............

.....Addison, 137

The Pleasure and Benefit of an Improved and Well-Directed

Imagination,.........................

..Akenside, 143

Soliloquy of a Prince in his Dungeon,............ Miss Baillie, 151

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THE

ENGLISH ORATOR.

HAMLET'S ADVICE TO THE PLAYERS.

SPEAK the speech, I pray you, as I pronounced it to you, trippingly on the tongue: but if you mouth it, as many of our players do, I had as lieve the town-crier spoke my lines. Nor do not saw the air too much with your hands, thus; but use all gently; for in the very torrent, tempest, and (as I may say) whirlwind of your passion, you must acquire and beget a temperance, that may give it smoothness. Oh, it offends me to the soul, to hear a robustious periwig-pated fellow tear a passion to tatters, to very rags, to split the ears of the groundlings; who, for the most part, are capable of nothing but inexplicable dumb show and noise. Pray you, avoid it.—Be not too tame neither, but let your own discretion be your tutor. Suit the action to the word, the word to the action; with this special observance, that you o'erstep not the modesty of nature: for any thing so overdone is from the purpose of playing; whose end both at the first, and now, was, and is, to hold as 'twere the mirror up to nature; to show virtue her own feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure. Now this overdone, or come tardy off, though it make the unskilful laugh, cannot but make the judicious grieve; the censure of one of which, must in your allowance, o'erweigh a whole theatre of others.

B

Oh, there be players, that I have seen play—and heard others praise, and that highly (not to speak it profanely)— that, neither having the accent of Christian, nor the gait of Christian, pagan, nor man, have so strutted, and bellowed, that I have thought some of nature's journeymen had made men, and not made them well; they imitated humanity so abominably.

THE DAISY.

NoT worlds on worlds, in phalanx deep,
Need we to prove a God is here;
The daisy fresh from winter's sleep,
Tells of his hand in lines as clear.

For who but He who arch'd the skies,
And pours the day-spring's living flood,
Wondrous alike in all he tries,

Could rear the daisy's purple bud?

Mould its green cup, its wiry stem;
Its fringed border nicely spin;
And cut the gold-embossed gem
That, set in silver, gleams within?—

And fling it, unrestrain❜d and free,

O'er hill and dale and desert sod,
That man, where'er he walks, may see,
In every step, the stamp of God?

THE CONTRAST.

THERE were two Portraits: one was of a Girl

Just blushing into woman; it was not

A face of perfect beauty, but it had

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