him by Bayard, after the battle of Marignano, September, 1515. When the ceremony had been performed, the Chevalier apostrophized his sword, "Glorious sword, who hast been honored by conferring knighthood on the greatest king in the world, I will never use thee again, save against the infidel, the enemy of the Christian name!"- After his surrender at Pavia, Francis exclaimed, “Ah, Bayard! if I had you, I should not be here now!" It was a similar cry to that of Gordon of Glenbucket, at the battle of Sheriffmuir, Nov. 13, 1715, between the Scotch rebels under the Earl of Mar, and the royalists commanded by Argyle. During the heat of the conflict, Gordon called for the terrible Grahame of Claverhouse, Viscount Dundee, who fell at the pass of Killiecrankie, 1689, "Oh for an hour of Dundee !" which Wordsworth has versified,

"Oh for a single hour of that Dundee

Who on that day the word of onset gave!"

Sonnet in the Pass of Killiecrankie.

Several maxims and proverbial expressions are recorded of Bayard; as, "What the gauntlet gains, the gorget consumes" (Ce que le gantelet gagne, le gorgerin le mange).

Being asked the difference between a wise man and a fool, he replied, "The same that there is between a sick man and his doctor."

He said to two boys whom he was punishing for swearing, "A bad habit contracted in youth is no little thing, but a great thing indeed."

He answered the question, “What should a father leave his children?" by saying, "The father should leave that which fears no rain, tempest, or the force of man, or the weakness of human justice, that is, wisdom and virtue; like indeed unto him who would plant a garden, and put therein good seed and sound trees."

'No place is weak," he said, "where there are men capable of defending it."

A man who fights against his country deserves pity more than I.

His last words; to the Duc de Bourbon, of the opposing army, who had abandoned the cause of France for the service of the

Emperor Charles V., and visited Bayard upon the battle-field, under the tree where the wounded knight had directed himself to be placed, saying, "Let me die facing the enemy."

Francis Marion, an American general of the Revolution, replied to a British officer who pitied the half-starved condition of the partisan leader and his men, " Pity me not. I am happier than you; for I am fighting to be free, while you are striving to enslave your countrymen.”

Thiers called Marshal MacMahon "the Bayard of our time."

CLAUDE BAZIRE.

[A member of the French Convention, born 1764; voted for the death of Louis XVI.; having become a partisan of Danton, was executed, 1794.]

We have made a compact with death.

When, in a debate in the Convention, on foreign affairs, he was asked if a treaty had been made with victory.

EARL OF BEACONSFIELD.

[Benjamin Disraeli, an English statesman and author, born in London, 1805; produced his first work, 1826; entered Parliament, 1837; Chancellor of the Exchequer, 1852, 1858-59, 1866-68; became premier in the latter year, and again in 1874; raised to the peerage, 1876; attended the Berlin Congress, 1878; died April 19, 1881.]

I have begun several times many things, and have often succeeded at last. I will sit down now, but the time will come when you will hear me.

The close of his unsuccessful maiden speech in the House of Commons, Dec. 7, 1837, on an Irish-election petition. The prophecy, after its fulfilment, became famous.

Richard Brinsley Sheridan, being told by Woodfall the printer, after his first speech, which was on a petition against his election for Stafford, Nov. 20, 1780, that speaking was not in his line, and that he had better stick to his former pursuits, rested his head on his hand a few minutes, and then vehemently exclaimed, "It is in me, however, and, by G-, it shall come out!"— MOORE: Life, I. 228.

Disraeli's attempts, in 1832 and 1835, to enter Parliament as a radical, were unsuccessful. To the electors of High Wycombe he spoke, in 1831, of "the people, that bewildering title under which a miserable minority contrive to coerce and plunder the nation." At Taunton, in 1835, he assailed Daniel O'Connell, who had favored his candidature at High Wycombe, and who now said of the ungrateful radical, "I cannot divest my mind of the belief that if this fellow's genealogy were traced, it would be found that he is the lineal descendant and true heir-at-law of the impenitent thief who atoned for his crimes upon the cross." During this time the Hon. Mrs. Norton brought about an interview between Disraeli and Lord Melbourne, who asked him what he really wanted to be. "I want to be prime minister," was the unabashed reply. When asked by an elector of Taunton, after his opponent had made a dull speech, upon what he was standing as a parliamentary candidate, he answered, “Upon my head."

The right honorable gentleman [Sir Robert Peel] caught the Whigs bathing, and walked away with their clothes.

In a debate on the opening of letters at the post-office, Feb. 28, 1815. Disraeli added, of an assumption of Whig principles by the Conservative leader, "He has left them in the full enjoyment of their liberal position, and he is himself a strict conservative of their garments;" and in the same speech, “I look upon him as a man who has tamed the shrew of Liberalism by her own tactics. He is the political Petruchio, who has outbid you all." The violence with which Disraeli attacked Sir Robert Peel is well known. Thus, in a debate on the premier's proposal of an increased grant to Maynooth College in Ireland, Disraeli said that with him "great measures are always rested on small precedents: he always traces the steam-engine back to the teakettle; in fact, all his precedents are tea-kettle precedents." And in the same speech, "We have a great parliamentary middle-man. It is well known what a middle-man is he is a man who bamboozles one party and plunders the other."

He said of Peel, in the same year, "Such a man is no more a great statesman than the man who gets up behind a carriage is

a great whip." Also, in a speech on the Corn Importation Bill, May 5, 1846, "His life has been one great appropriation clause. He is a burglar of others' intellects. There is no statesman who has committed political petty larceny on so great a scale." He compared the conversion of Peel's party to the abolition of the Corn Laws, to the Saxons under Charlemagne, "who, according to the chronicle, were converted in battalions, and baptized in platoons."

An organized hypocrisy.

In a debate in the House of Commons, on agricultural interests, March 17, 1845, Disraeli said, "For me there remains this, at least, the opportunity of expressing thus publicly my belief that a conservative government is an organized hypocrisy." And in the same speech, "There is a difference in the demeanor of the same individual, as leader of the opposition, and as Minister of the Crown. You must not contrast too strongly the hours of courtship with the years of possession."

The blue ribbon of the turf.

Disraeli, in his Biography of Lord George Bentinck, gives an account of an interview with him after Lord George had abandoned horse-racing for statesmanship, and had met a defeat in Parliament, as leader of the Conservative party, a few days before the horse " Serapis," which he had sold, won the Derby: "It was in vain to offer solace. He gave a sort of stifled groan. 'All my life I have been trying for this, and for what have I sacrificed it? You do not know what the Derby is,' he moaned out. Yes, I do: it is the blue ribbon of the turf.'" It is to racing what the ribbon of the garter is in social and political distinction.

Free trade is not a principle: it is an expedient.

A good illustration of the alliterative style of his epigrammatic sayings occurred in the speech on the Maynooth grant, before alluded to: "Why, Hansard [the reporter of the Parliamentary Debates], instead of being the Delphi of Downing Street, is but the Dunciad of politics."

In the debate in answer to the Queen's speech, Jan. 24, 1860, he said, "It is much easier to be critical than to be correct." And at Oxford, Nov. 25, 1864, "I hold that the characteristic of the present age is craving credulity." "Time is precious," he said at Aylesbury, Sept. 11, 1865; "but truth is more precious than time."

"A precedent," he said in a speech on the Expenditures of the Country, Feb. 22, 1848, “embalms a principle."

"Figures," he declared, "are not party men. You may cross the House, yet you cannot convert 15,000 tons into 20,000 tons (Speech on the Sugar Duties, July 28, 1846).

In a speech on the Railway Bill, April 22, 1846, he noticed "the sort of anxiety which seems to exist among the members of the government, that it would be generally supposed that they had a sort of partnership with Providence."

Philosophical ideas in opposition to political principle.

In a speech on the expulsion of the British ambassador from Madrid, June 5, 1848, Disraeli stated his objection to liberalism to be this: "that it is the introduction into the practical business of life of the highest kind- namely, politics-of philosophical ideas instead of political principle."

"There is a great difference," he once declared, “between nationality and race. Nationality is the miracle of political independence. Race is the principle of physical analogy" (Speech on the Navy Estimates, Aug. 9, 1848).

"It is not at all impossible that a man, always studying one subject, will view the general affairs of the world through the colored prism of his own atmosphere" (Speech on Railways-inIreland Bill, Feb. 15, 1847).

He called "the memory of a great name, and the inheritance of a great example, the legacy of heroes" (On the Address in answer to the Queen's speech, Feb. 1, 1849).

He quoted a great writer, who said that "peace was beauty in action:" "I say that justice is truth in action" (Speech on Agricultural Distress, Feb. 11, 1851).