wiftly away over the
boat-edge coil after coil, till, ere the plummet rested on the ouse
below, all was well-nigh expended. And was it not the _great_ sea,
asks the boy, that was so vastly broad, and so profoundly deep?
Ah! my child, exclaims the father, you have not yet seen aught of its
greatness,--you have sailed over merely one of its little arms. Had
it been out into the wide ocean that the seamen had carried you, you
would have _seen_ no shore, and you would have _found_ no bottom. In
one rare quality of the orator, Mr. Stewart stood alone among his
contemporaries. Pope refers, in one of his satires, to a strange
power of creating love and admiration by just 'touching the brink
of all we hate;' and Burke, in some of his nobler passages,
happily exemplifies the thing. He intensified the effect of his
burning eloquence by the employment of figures so homely, nay,
almost so repulsive in themselves, that a man of lower powers who
ventured their use would find them efficient merely in lowering his
subject and ruining his cause. We may refer, in illustration, to
Burke's celebrated figure of the disembowelled bird, which occurs in
his indignant denial that the character of the revolutionary
French in aught resembled that of the English. 'We have not,' he
says, 'been _drawn_ and _trussed_, in order that we may be filled,
_like stuffed birds in a museum_, with _chaff and rags_, and _paltry
blurred shreds of paper_ about the rights of man.' Into this
perilous but singularly effective department, closed against even
superior men, Mr. Stewart could enter safely and at will. We heard
him, scarce a twelvemonth since, deliver a discourse of singular
power, on the sin-offering of the Jewish economy, as minutely
particularized by the divine penman in Leviticus. He described the
slaughtered animal--foul with dust and blood--its throat gashed
across--its entrails laid open--and steaming in its impurity to
the sun, as it awaited the consuming fire, amid the uncleanness of
ashes outside the camp,--a vile and horrid thing, which no one
could see without experiencing emotions of disgust, nor touch
without contracting defilement. The picture appeared too painfully
vivid, its introduction too little in accordance with the rules of
a just taste. It seemed a thing to be covered up, not exhibited.
But the master in this difficult walk well knew what he was doing.
'And that,' he said, as if pointing to the strongly-coloured picture
he had ju