The Rhode Island American, And General Advertiser

FROM THE FEDERAL REPUBLICAN AND BALTIMORE TELEGRAPH.

MR. CURRAN.

The latest intelligence from England gives us to understand that Curran, the celebrated Irish orator, has paid the great debt of nature.

The style of this speaker was splendid, gorgeous, magnificent, and encumbered by ornaments. The reader gazes on the page with much the same sensations that he would look upon a display of pyrotechnick art; he expects to behold nothing but an exhibition of fireworks, and at every pause between the explosion of the rockets, he feels uneasy and impatient. Wherever Curran is not brilliant, we do not feel in our proper element if we are consulting his pages: he has converted us into salamanders, and fire only is our proper element. Such elocution in time destroys itself--the eye aches at the continued spectacle of so much splendour, and turns away to less glaring objects as if to regain its proper tone. It is contrary to nature always to delight in so much radiance. Divine Providence has stationed the most luminous orb in the creation that we inhabit, in a firmament of soothing and tranquilizing blue, by which the eye is invigorated and refreshed when we turn from the gaze of the beams.

The eloquence of Mr. Curran abounds in those coy, severe, and reluctant graces, that like the dryads of fabulous antiquity, occasionally steal out from their retreats, exhibiting to the traveller the most fascinating and graceful forms, and as if terrified, plunging or shelter into their verdant recesses again. If the traveller gazes, astonished at so much grace and beauty so suddenly displayed, they are gone as by enchantment, and no search can find them out; but as he proceeds on his journey, they tantalize him, and at the very moment when he despairs of ever beholding them again.

Models of this kind are peculiarly pernicious, and specially to young writers: They follow such examples, and surround commonplace ideas with a redundancy of ornament. We have the sun, and the stars, and the comets, and all the heavenly bodies, wrought up into metaphors, to bespangle conceptions that are not worthy of so much lustre.

The amorous Suwarrow was once reproached by his sovereign for not attending the royal levee with the various insignia of the orders of Russian nobility, which are very numerous, and all of which he was entitled to wear. The veteran took the hint, and at the next levee day appeared with all his ornaments of nobility: every finger was ornamented with so many rings, that he was deprived of the use of his hands, and he was almost unable to walk, oppressed as he was by the weight of his ornaments.