the government. I will not ask you whether you think they are so with reason or without; certainly there is danger of an open insurrection."

MOUNTJOY. "Lord Edward, when a dog is mad, I do not ask what drove him mad; I defend my own dogs and myself from his fury as well as I can." LORD EDWARD. "Sometimes it is wiser to get out of his way."

MOUNTJOY. "I neither can nor would get out of the way, gladly as I should see every root of grievance torn up from a country but too fertile in them." LORD EDWARD. "We were together in the association of Dublin volunteers, which, supported by others throughout the kingdom, was then strong enough to have set at defiance the battered and broken arms of our oppressor, and could have accomplished all that was wanting for the permanent good of Ireland. The English government no longer had money or credit; the English people, exhausted by the expenditure of the war, alienated by the misconduct of it, began at last to perceive and to acknowledge the justice of the American cause. Ours was the same under much longer and much worse irritations; we had a larger and a better army to assert it; more within our reach to confiscate justly for the support of it; and we should have had the same allies. When we could have done every thing for our country, what did we? We sat down again, contented with paltry concessions and empty promises. England thought herself generous for granting them; Ireland for her easy acceptance of the grant. In England, every generosity is called a folly; in Ireland, every folly is called a generosity. We are now told that too much has been done for us, and truly I believe it, since every thing is too much for us which we do not for ourselves."

MOUNTJOY. Lord Edward, our country endures no injury to which I am not as sensitive as you are; we differ only in the expediency of resistance; we have lost the only opportunity we ever had of being the confederates rather than the subjects of England, or, what is yet better than confederacy, a part. Britons, Saxons, Danes, Normans, have united; what hinders the Irish?" LORD EDWARD. English policy."

MOUNTJOY. "I see no reason why salt water rather than fresh should separate those whom affections and interests draw together."

LORD EDWARD. "Nor do I; but the wholesale butchers, who have turned Ireland into their slaughter-house, have so ensanguined the knot that it will hold no longer."

MOUNTJOY. "Nothing, in the whole of our misfortunes, is so deplorable as that it should continue to be the policy of our rulers to bind us rather by restrictions than by generosity—a bad policy with any nation, but worse with the Irish than with any other, for among the Irish the very vilest and the most inconsiderate are brought over and attached to you by one kind action, and alienated by one effort of control. Who would imagine that the English aristocracy and the Irish democracy should be equally strenuous in producing the same result? Yet so it is; if you can not lead the blind man, do not mock him, my dear Lord Edward. The trick may bring about the calamity.

It now appears to be the intention of certain men that we should throw ourselves into the arms of France, and thus render our country the arena for all the battles of the English with all their enemies."

LORD EDWARD. " How much better would it have been, as you remarked, to identify the two countries, and to render every man in each the neighbor of his neighbor. It seems an absurdity, a contradiction, an impossibility, that it should not be so; yet, where all men, with equal wishes and knowledge, may not aspire to equal rank and estimation-where a thought on God is a crime in the eyes of him who has another thought on the same God-where a son, if he follow his father, is stripped of his civic rights for it, and interdicted his natural, what hope, then, can we have of justice, or what desire of reconciliation?"

MOUNTJOY. "I will not discourse with you on open war.”

LORD EDWARD. "But show me, if you can, in all the records of history, a war of nation against nation more manifestly just.”*

MOUNTJOY. “The cause of justice is but little forwarded by compromising the cause of humanity; we are hardly the people that can teach the English to be wiser, or that can compel them to be more equitable. I wish we were: we would then begin the first lesson to-morrow. As matters stand, by any attempt at resistance we should only make the brutal more brutal, and the suffering more suffering; and the end of it would be, that every peaceable man would leave the kingdom by choice, and every brave man by proscription. I think it criminal to contend without a chance of success, unless it be where, by the sacrifice of our lives, as well as theirs under us, we can give time for others to come on, who may continue or renew the contest with better hopes. In that case our bodies may well fill up the straits, and the idlest of strangers will never write fool above our epitaphs. I see clearly the expectations of the United Irishmen, and no less clearly the disappointment and delusion of them. The French and Irish can never cordially agree."

LORD EDWARD. "Why do you think so?"

MOUNTJOY. "Because the one will no longer be ruled by priests; the other will be ruled by none else."

LORD EDWARD. "It must, indeed, be a tremendous curse that can render them endurable. We may want them for a time."

MOUNTJOY. "Their time will be longer than ours; hopes, fears, consciences, are tossed about, and distributed by their hands."

LORD EDWARD. "Too true; throw in likewise a moiety of the wives, present and future; they find spouses both for God and man, with good accommodation; and not only do they bring about marriages, but they can make heavy ones light and light ones heavy, and can put other horns above the devil's in any doorway they have once entered."

MOUNTJOY.

If England had the equity and wisdom to place Ireland by her

* That such is not the case at present is quite certain, on the authority of the Duke of Wellington and of nearly all the principal men in the cabinet.-W. S. L.

side in the same level, and no lower; if she would grant to the Irish all the rights of citizens, as she hath done to the Canadians-"

LORD EDWARD. "Which renders it the more galling, the more iniquitous, the more intolerable."

MOUNTJOY. "Then, indeed, the priesthood could make no further appeals to the passions of the ignorant, and the contest for mastery would shortly lie between the people and it. Popery would lose her hold on the latter's ignorance; for among the Irish, if the acutest sense is that of injustice, the quickest is that of ridicule-the expression of which two feelings can never exist together. Ireland will grow more Catholic every day she continues to be oppressed; less Catholic every day after she is relieved from oppression. Faction will cease within the first century of this real Reformation, which it seems wonderful that the Protestant clergy should be reluctant to bring about."

LORD EDWARD. "Not at all; the Protestant clergy leap from the goat-fold to the sheep-fold; from the sheep-fold to the ox-stall, and being there, grow too lazy to budge. Who among them would not abandon parishioners for a vicarage for a deanery, a bishopric for an archbishopric, and the house of God for the House of Lords? The government-be the party what it may, Whig or Tory-never wished our pacification; a state of discontent, of discord, and of turbulence, kept up artificially and sedulously by them, is necessary as a plea to keep up likewise a large establishment here, both military and civil, and the people of England are induced to pay taxes for it, on which many hundred dependents of every administration rear their families. Were Ireland flourishing, as she must be under any other system, the rival oligarchies would lose a large portion of their patronage; England wavers perpetually in every branch of her policy, excepting this. The Horatii and Curatii, who contend for supremacy, instead of three, are about nine on a side, and in the families of these we are to look for the secret. Why, by their consent we are never to meliorate our condition: the people of England would gain some millions yearly by our freedom, by our mere equality with the French-Canadians. The means of keeping them in subjection to these ruling families would be lost by leaving us unbound."

MOUNTJOY. "The English would benefit in wealth by it quite as much as we should, and greatly more in the reduction of taxes; all that they would lose would be the sentiment of contempt for the generality of us, and of hatred for the remainder."

LORD EDWARD. "If they persist, my life for it, they shall lose one of these sentiments, and very soon."

MOUNTJOY. "I see nothing but a divided people and a corrupt Parliament." LORD EDWARD. "You shall see neither much longer. Those who separate themselves from the people are no part of it, and what is corrupt will drop off, or must be cut off: who could regret it? Was there ever an association, even an assemblage in any lane of the worst city, or in any forest of the wildest

country, so profligate and shameless, so barbarous and rapacious as our Irish peers?"

MOUNTJOY. "Little better, I confess it, than the Poles."

Lord Edward. "In Poland, every thing is noble that is not a slave; in Ireland, every thing that is—"

MOUNTJOY. "Our peerage, with the exception of six or seven."

LORD EDWARD. "Take the six, give me the seventh, and I pay you down his weight in rubies: such scrapings from sugar-casks and tobacco-wrappers never was flung among the muscle-shells and skate-tails of Kelvoc slugs of Flushing-so disorderly a gang of cut-throats and cut-purses never sat on the same benches in any galley of Tripoli or Marseilles.* The poor are sent back to their parishes; it were greater equity to send back the rich, who, without some gross injustice, some intolerable grievance, ought not to live away. Have we no cart to carry, no constable to escort our packed peddlery! Wonderful it must appear, that England, as a residence, is preferable to Ireland among those who, in the London gaming-houses, are liable to be mistaken for the candle-snuffers whenever, in the hurry of their rapacity, they forgot to put a star before them for a light to steer by."

MOUNTJOY. "Your estimation of our peerage is pretty correct, and you are as little to be accused of envy as of ambition; you yourself are likely to be, one day, the first nobleman in the empire; for where there is only one duke, surely that one is above any, where there is fifteen or twenty."

LORD EDWARD. "I have never permitted the contingency to enter into my calculations. Were I a duke to-morrow, and every thing went on well and prosperously both with me and with our country, I declare, before you and before God, I could throw my dukedom off my back, if by so doing I could run the quicker to raise up one honest and brave fellow from oppression."

MOUNTJOY. "I believe you, and you are the only man I could believe who should make me a similar protestation."

LORD EDWARD. "The better of the lords are very hostile to me, not for what I think about the rest, but for what I would do in regard to all." MOUNTJOY. "No wonder."

LORD EDWARD. “And yet, Mountjoy, such men as yourself, for instance, ought to rejoice at being no longer confounded with brokers, and bankers, and bullock-drivers-ought to rejoice at that personal distinctness which alone is true distinction-ought to rejoice at that superiority as gentleman which is seen more advantageously when people are not standing upon stilts about you. Is it not a shame to hold by favor from another what we can take to ourselves by right? Reason has a long time lain fermenting in the canker of society, and must soon cast off the froth. The generous juice, I swear by

* Lord Edward Fitzgerald may be imagined to have formed this erroneous opinion on the Irish peers, whom (equally erroneous) he deemed actuated by corruption in the business of the Union; he spoke unguardedly of all whom he thought rogues, and it would have been well for him if he had been more suspicious than he was.-W. S. L.

God and my country! shall be distributed by a hand both steady and unsparing."

MOUNTJOY. "I will not irritate you nor myself by discussing the views of a political body so universally hated and despised, yet I hope, Lord Edward, you do not believe the invidious and spiteful story raised about them by the factions, that Mr. Pitt intends a union of the two nations, by means of their giving each member of the peerage a thousand pounds a year, and other indemnities for loss of privilege."

LORD EDWARD. "No, no, my lord, what I have said of them I think is pretty near enough the truth. The Irish would tear them in pieces as betrayers; the English would feed the eels of the Thames with them, rather than endure such bloodsuckers on their shoulders. I am no visionary in evil; I see enough of it. I know its proximity and magnitude; I distinguish its form and color. I want neither telescope nor darkened glass."

MOUNTJOY. Let us attempt to allay the passions of the multitude, and to enlighten the prejudices of the rest."

LORD EDWARD. "The only chance of assuaging the multitude is in their being used to suffer. Weak as a hope, and weaker as an argument; and what are the prejudices of the rest? and where do they exist? Take from them the prospect of living on the plunder of their country, and what you call prejudices vanish. I came to your house, my dear Mountjoy, with intentions which I ardently wish may not be quite so fruitless. The people are more angry with those whom they know to be patriotic, and yet who will not join them when they are with the old stagers on the king's highway of oppression and speculation. Hence their love for you, which was unrivaled, is converted into acrimony!"

MOUNTJOY. "Whatever I could do, constitutionally and conscientiously, I have always done for them, and will do always. It would not become me to throw up my commission in the hour of danger; would you yourself commend me if I did! Your silence shows me that, if any thing were necessary to show it, my resolution is right."

LORD EDWARD. "There are questions that might involve my security, my life itself, which I could answer you at the first appeal; this I can not. Let me guard as warmly as I wish, and as effectually as I can, the safety of a citizen and a soldier more widely and more worthily esteemed than any other in Ireland. I need not inform you of armed bands in every part of the kingdom-I have already told you of their exasperation against you. Let me now come to that point which pains me, and warn you that I have heard your life threatened should you appear in any array against them. Why do you laugh?"

MOUNTJOY. "What man's life is not threatened who appears in arms, and in the face of an enemy?”

LORD EDWARD. "Faith, I did not think about life or danger in the common accidents of war; but in America there began a custom which nothing short