treaty, and no signature could bind, and who were the determined enemies of human intercourse itself, he decreed to make a country, possessed by these incorrigible and predestinated criminals, a memorable example to mankind. -He resolved, in the gloomy recesses of a mind capacious of such things, to leave the whole Carnatic an everlasting monument of his vengeance, and to put perpetual desolation as a barrier between him and those against whom the faith which holds the moral elements of the world together, was no protection. He became at length so confident of his force, so collected in his might, that he made no secret whatever of his dreadful resolution. Having terminated his disputes with every enemy and every rival, who buried their mutual animosities in their common detestation against the creditors of the nabob of Arcot, he drew from every quarter, whatever a savage ferocity could add to his new rudiments in the arts of distress, and compounding all the materials of fury, havoc, and desolation, into one black cloud, he hung for a while on the declivities of the mountains. Whilst the authors of all these evils were idly and stupidly gazing on this menacing meteor, which blackened all their horizon, it suddenly burst, and poured down the whole of its contents on the plains of the Carnatic. Then ensued a scene of woe, the like of which no eye had seen, no heart conceived, and which no tongue can adequately tell. All the horrors of war before known or heard of, were mercy to that new havoc. A storm of universal fire blasted every field, consumed every house, and destroyed every temple. The miserable inhabitants, flying from their flaming villages, in part were slaughtered; others, without regard to sex, to age, to the respect of rank, or sacredness of function, fathers torn from children, husbands from wives, enveloped in a whirlwind of cavalry, and amidst the goading spears of drivers, and the trampling of pursuing horses, were swept into captivity, in an unknown and hostile land. Those who were able to evade this tempest, fled to the walled cities. But escaping from fire, sword, and exile, they fell into "The jaws of Famine." The alms of the settlement, in this dreadful exigency, were certainly liberal; and all was done by charity, that private charity could do; but it was a people in beggary: it was a nation that stretched out its hands for food. For months together these creatures of sufferance, whose very excess and luxury in their most plenteous days, had fallen short of the allowance of our austerest fasts, silent, patient, resigned, without sedition or disturbance, almost without complaint, perished by a hundred a-day in the streets of Madras; every day seventy at least laid their bodies in the streets, or on the glacis of Tanjore, and expired of famine in the granary of India. I was going to awake your justice towards this unhappy part of our fellowcitizens, by bringing before you some of the circumstances of this plague of hunger. Of all the calamities which beset and waylay the life of man, this comes the nearest to the heart, and is that wherein the proudest of us all feels himself to be nothing more than he is; but I find myself unable to manage it with decorum; these details are of a species of horror so nauseous and disgusting, they are so degrading to the sufferers and to the hearer, they are so humiliating to human nature itself, that, on better thoughts, I find it advisable to throw a pall over this hideous object, and leave it to your general conceptions. EDMUND BURKE. QUARREL BETWEEN FLOOD AND GRATTAN. IN a debate in the Irish Parliament, October 28, 1783, on a resolution for declaring that the condition of the kingdom required every practicable retrenchment consistent with the honour and safety of the state, Mr Grattan made some strong personal allusions to Mr Flood, who supported the resolution, accusing him particularly of having affected an indisposition, and being guilty of apostacy: Mr Flood rose, and replied in these words: "THE right honourable member can have no doubt of the propriety of my saying a word in reply to what he has delivered. Every member of the house can bear witness of the infirmity I mentioned, and therefore it required but little candour, to make a nocturnal attack upon that infirmity. But I am not afraid of the right honourable member; I will meet him anywhere, or upon any ground, by night or by day. I should stand poorly in my own estimation and in my country's opinion, if I did not stand far above him. I do not come here dressed in a rich wardrobe of words to delude the people. I am not one who has promised repeatedly to bring in a bill of rights, yet does not bring in that bill, or permit any other person to do it. I am not one who threatened to impeach the Chief Justice of the King's Bench, and afterwards shrunk from the charge. I am not one who would come at midnight, and attempt a vote of this house to stifle the people whom my egregious folly had raised against me. not the gentleman who subsists upon your accounts. am not the mendicant patriot who was bought by his country for a sum of money, and then sold my country for prompt payment (alluding to the grant of £100,000 I am I to Mr Grattan for his public services, the half of which sum he accepted). I never was bought by the people, nor ever sold them. The gentleman says he never apostatised; but I say I never changed my principles. Let every man say the same, and let the people believe it if they can. "I have now done, and give me leave to say, if the gentleman enters often into this kind of colloquy with me, he will not have much to boast of at the end of the session." Mr Grattan." In respect to the house, I could wish to avoid personality, but I must request liberty to explain some circumstances alluded to by the honourable member." After making this explanation, he proceeded. "It is not the slander of the bad tongue of a bad character that can defame me. I maintain my reputation in public and in private life; no man who has not a bad character, can say I ever deceived him; no country has called me cheat. I will suppose a public character—a man not, of course, in the house, but who formerly might have been here. I will suppose it was his constant practice to abuse every man who differed from him, and to betray every man who trusted him. I will suppose him active; I will begin from his cradle, and divide his life into three stages. the first, he was intemperate; in the second, corrupt; and in the third, seditious. Suppose him a great egotist; his honour equal to his oath; and I will stop him, and say, 'Sir, your talents are not so great as your life is infamous. You were silent for years, and you were silent for money; when affairs of consequence to the nation were debating, you might be seen passing by these doors like a guilty spirit just waiting for the moment of putting the question, that you might pop in and give your venal vote; or you In might be seen hovering over the dome like an ill-omened bird of night, with sepulchral notes, with cadaverous aspect, and broken beak (alluding to a personal defect of Mr Flood's), ready to stoop and pounce upon your prey. You can be trusted by no man; the people cannot trust you; the ministers cannot trust you; you deal out the most impartial treachery to both; you tell the nation it is ruined by other men, when it is sold by yourself; you fled from the embargo; you fled from the mutiny bill; you fled from the sugar bill. I therefore tell you in the face of your country, before all the world, and to your very beard, you are not an honest man.” Mr Flood. "I have heard very extraordinary language indeed, and I challenge any man to say that anything half so unwarrantable was ever uttered in this house. The right honourable gentleman set out with declaring, he did not wish to use personality; and no sooner had he opened his mouth, than forth issued all the venom that ingenuity and disappointed vanity for two years brooding over corruption have been able to produce. But taint my public character it cannot; four and twenty years employed in your service have established that; and as to my private, let that be learned from my friends, and those under my own roof. To these I appeal, and this appeal I boldly make with an utter contempt of insinuations, false as they are illiberal.” * * Mr Flood was proceeding, when the Speaker rose, and called for the support of the house to keep the gentlemen in order. Mr John Burke then moved, that the gentlemen might be made to promise that nothing farther should pass between them; and this being resolved, the house was cleared. But in the meantime, both Mr Flood and Mr Grattan had disappeared. Next morning Mr Flood and Mr Grattan were brought in custody before Lord Chief Justice Annaly R |