In the absence of any real history of Ireland, the memoirs of its distinguished persons are of the first importance. They are the landmarks within which the broad and general track of historic narrative must be led. They fix character-the most necessary aid to the larger views of the historian. They disclose to us those secret springs which regulate the great social machinery; and by an especial faculty, more valuable than all, they bring us face to face with minds of acknowledged eminence, teach us the course which the known conquerors of difficulties have pursued, and exhibit the training by which the championship of nations is to be sustained. As the old lawgiver commanded that beautiful statues should be placed before the Spartan wives, to impress their infants with beauty of countenance and stateliness of form, the study of greatness has a tendency to elevate our nature; and though camps and councils may be above our course, yet the light shed from those higher spheres may guide our steps through the tangled paths of our humbler world.

The present memoir gives evidence of an additional merit in biography: it assists justice; it offers the power of clearing character, which might have been refused to the living; it brings forward means of justification, which the dignity of the injured, his contempt of calumny, or the circumstances of his time, might have locked up in his bosom. It is an appeal from the passion of the hour to the soberness of years. It has the sincerity and the sanctity of a voice from the world of the future.

The Stewarts, ancestors of the Marquis of Londonderry, came originally from Scotland, and, settling in Ireland in the reign of James I., obtained large possessions among the forfeited lands in Ulster. The family were Protestants, and distinguished themselves by Protestant loyalty in the

troubled times of Ireland—a country where trouble seems to be indigenous. One of those loyalists was Colonel William Stewart, who, during the Irish war, under James II., raised a troop of horse at his own expense, and skirmished vigorously against the Popish enemy at the siege of Londonderry. For this good service he was attainted, with all the chief gentry of the kingdom, in the confiscating parliament of James. But the confiscation was not carried into effect, and the estate remained to a long line of successors.

The father of the late Marquis of Londonderry was the first of the family who was ennobled. He was an active, intelligent, and successful man. Representing his county in two parliaments, and, acting with the government, he partook of that golden shower which naturally falls from the treasury. He became in succession the possessor of office and the possessor of title

baron, viscount, earl, and marquis -and wisely allied himself with English nobility, marrying, first, a daughter of the Earl of Hertford, and, secondly, a sister of Lord Camden. The subject of this [memoir was a son of the first marriage, and was born in Ireland on the 18th of June 1769. From boyhood he was remarkable for coolness and intrepidity, and was said to have exhibited both qualities in saving a young companion in the lake of Strangford. At the age of seventeen he was entered of St John's College, Cambridge, where he seems to have applied himself actively to the general studies of the place-elementary mathematics, classics, logic, and moral philosophy. This sufficiently answers the subsequent taunts at the narrowness of his education.

As his father had been a politician, his son and heir was naturally intended for political life. The first step of his ambition was a costly one. County elections in those days were formidable affairs. The Hillsborough

family had formerly monopolised the county. Young Stewart was put forward, according to custom, as "the champion of independence." He gained but half the day, for the Hillsboroughs still retained one nominee. The young candidate became a member of parliament, but this step cost £60,000.

The sacrifice was enormous, and perhaps, in our day, might startle the proudest rent-roll in England: but, seventy years ago, and in Ireland, the real expenditure was probably equivalent to £100,000 in our day. And it must have been still more distressing to the family, from the circumstance, that the sum had been accumulated to build a mansion; that the expense of the election also required the sale of a fine old collection of family portraits; and that the old lord was forced to spend the remainder of his life in what the biographer states to be an old barn, with a few rooms added. But his son was now launched on public life-that stream in which so many dashing swimmers sink, but in which talent, guided by caution, seldom fails to float along, until nature or weariness finishes the effort, and the man disappears, like all who went before.

The young member, fresh from college, and flushed with triumph over "parliamentary monopoly," was, of course, a Whig. Plutarch's Lives, and the history of the classic commonwealths, make every boy at school a Whig. It is only when they emerge from the cloudy imaginations of republicanism, and the fabulous feats of Greek championship, that they acquire common sense, and act according to the realities of things. The future statesman commenced his career by the ultra-patriotism of giving a "written pledge," on the hustings, to the support of "parliamentary reform."

With this act of boyishness he was, of course, taunted in after-life by the Whigs. But his answer was natural and just: it was in substance, that he had been, in 1790, an advocate for Irish reform; and if the Irish parliament had continued under the same circumstances, he would be an advocate for its reform still. But in 1793 a measure had been carried,

VOL. LXIV.-NO. CCCXCVII.

which made all change perilous: the Popish peasantry had been suffered to obtain the right of voting; and thenceforward he should not aid parliamentary reform.

It is to be observed, that this language was not used under the temptation of office, for he did not possess any share in administration until four years afterwards, in 1797.

The forty-shilling franchise was the monster evil of Ireland. Every measure of corruption, of conspiracy, and of public convulsion, originated in that most mischievous, factious, and false step. It put the whole parliamentary power of the country into the hands of faction; made public counsel the dictation of the populace; turned every thing into a job; and finally, by the pampering of the rabble, inflamed them into civil war, and, by swamping the constituency, rendered the extinction of the parliament a matter of necessity to the existence of the constitution.

To this measure-at once weak and ruinous, at once the triumph of faction and the deathblow of Irish tranquillity; at once paralysing all the powers of the legislature for good, and sinking the peasantry into deeper degradation-we must give a few words.

The original condition of the peasantry in Ireland was serfdom. A few hereditary chiefs, with the power of life and death, ruled the whole lower population, as the master of the herd rules his cattle. English law raised them from this condition, and gave them the rights of Englishmen. But no law of earth could give the Celt the industry, frugality, or perseverance of the Englishman. The result was, that the English artificer, husbandman, and trader, became men of property, while the Celt lingered out life in the idleness of his forefathers. Robbery was easier than work, and he robbed; rebellion was more tempting than loyalty, and he rebelled: the result was the frequent forfeiture of the lands of chiefs, who, prompted by their priests, excited by their passions, and urged by the hope of plunder, were continually rebelling, and necessarily punished for their rebellion. Portions of their lands were distributed as the pay of the soldiery

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who conquered them; portions were given to English colonists, transplanted for the express purpose of establishing English allegiance, arts, and feelings in Ireland; and portions devolved to the crown. But we are not to imagine that these were transfers of smiling landscapes and propitious harvests-that this was a renewal of the Goth and Vandal, invading flowery shores, and sacking the dwellings of native luxury. Ireland, in the 16th and 17th centuries, was a wilderness; the fertility of the soil wasted in swamps and thickets; no inns, no roads; the few towns, garrisons in the midst of vast solitudes; the native baron, a human brute, wallowing with his followers round a huge fire in the centre of a huge wigwam, passing from intoxication to marauding, and from beaten and broken marauding to intoxication again. A few of those barons had been educated abroad, but even they, on their return, brought back only the love of blood, the habit of political falsehood, and the hatred to the English name, taught in France and Spain. The wars of the League, the government of the Inquisition, the subtlety of the Italian courts, thus added their share of civilised atrocity, to the gross superstitions and rude revenge of Popish Ireland.

We must get rid of the tinsel which has been scattered by poetry over the past ages of Ireland. History shows, under the embroidered cloak, only squalidness. Common sense tells us what must be the condition of a people without arts, commerce, or agriculture; perpetually nurturing a savage prejudice, and exhibiting it in the shape of a savage revenge; ground to the dust by poverty, yet abhorring exertion; suffering under hourly tyranny, yet incapable of enjoying the freedom offered to them; and oking on the vigorous and growing prosperity of the English colonist, with only the feeling of malice, and the determination to ruin him. The insurrection of 1641, in which probably 50,000 Protestant lives were sacrificed, was only one of the broader scenes of a havoc which every age was exemplifying on a more obscure, but not less ferocious scale. The evidence of this indolent

misery is given in the narrowness of the population, which, at the beginning of the last century, scarcely reckoned a million of souls and this, too, in a country of remarkable fertility, free from all habitual disease, with a temperate climate, and a breadth of territory containing at this hour eight millions, and capable of supporting eight millions more.

The existing condition of Ireland, even with all the difficulties of its own creation, is opulence, peace, and security, compared with its wretchedness at the period of the English revolution.

The measure of giving votes for members of parliament to the Popish peasantry was the immediate offspring of faction, and, like all its offspring, exhibited the fallacy of faction. It failed in every form. It had been urged, as a means of raising the character of the peasantry-it instantly made perfidy a profession. It had been urged, as giving the landlord a stronger interest in the comforts and conciliation of his tenantryit instantly produced the splitting of farms for the multiplication of votes, and, consequently, all the hopeless poverty of struggling to live on patches of tillage inadequate for the decent support of life. It had been urged, as a natural means of attaching the peasantry to the constitution-it instantly exhibited its effects in increased disorder, in nightly drillings and daylight outbreaks; in the assassination of landlords and clergy, and in those more daring designs which grow out of pernicious ignorance, desperate poverty, and irreconcilable superstition. The populace-beginning to believe that concession had been the result of fear; that to receive they had only to terrify; and that they had discovered the secret of power in the pusillanimity of parliament-answered the gift of privilege by the pike; and the

forty-shilling freeholder" exhibited his new sense of right in the insurrection of 1798-an insurrection which the writer of these volumes-from his intelligence and opportunities a competent authority-calculates to have cost 30,000 lives, and not less than three millions sterling!

The forty-shilling franchise has since been abolished. Its practical

abominations had become too glaring for the endurance of a rational legislature, and it perished. Yet the "snake was scotched, not killed." The spirit of the measure remained in full action it was felt in the force which it gave to Irish agitation, and in the insidiousness which it administered to English party. In Ireland it raised mobs; in England it divided cabinets. In Ireland it was felt in the erection of a rabble parliament; in England it was felt in the pernicious principle of" open questions;" until the leaders of the legislature, like all men who suffer themselves to tamper with temptation, gave way; and the second great stage of national hazard was reached, in the shape of the bill of 1829.

If the projected measure of "endowing the popery of Ireland "-in other words, of establishing the worship of images, and bowing down to the spiritual empire of the papacy shall ever, in the fatuity of British rulers and the evil hour of England, become law; a third great stage will be reached, which may leave the country no farther room for either advance or retrogression.

In the year 1796, the father of the young member had been raised to the earldom of Londonderry, and his son became Viscount Castlereagh. In the next year his career as a statesman began; he was appointed by Lord Camden, (brother-in-law of the second Earl of Londonderry,) Keeper of the Privy Seal of Ireland.

The conduct of the Irish administration had long wanted the first quality for all governments, and the indispensable quality for the government of Ireland,-firmness. It has been said that the temper of the Irish is Oriental, and that they require an Oriental government. Their wild courage, their furious passion, their hatred of toil, and their love of luxury, certainly seem but little fitted to a country of uncertain skies and incessant labour. The Saracen, transported to the borders of the Atlantic, might have been the serf, and, instead of waving the Crescent over the diadems of Asia, might have been cowering over the

turf-fire of the Celt, and been defrauded of the pomps of Bagdad and the spoils of Jerusalem. The decision of one of the magnificent despotisms of the East in Ireland might have been the true principle of individual progress and national renown. The scimitar might have been the true talisman.

But the successive British administrations took the false and the fatal step of meeting the wild hostility of Ireland by the peaceful policy of England. Judging only from the habits of a country trained to the obedience of law, they transferred its quiet formalities into the midst of a population indignant at all law; and, above all, at the law which they thought of only as associated with the swords of the soldiers of William. The government, continually changing in the person of the Viceroy, fluctuated in its measures with the fluctuation of its instruments; conceded where it ought to have commanded; bartered power, where it ought to have enforced authority; attempted to conciliate, where its duty was to have crushed; and took refuge behind partisanship, where it ought to have denounced the disturbers of their country. The result was public irritation and cabinet incapacity-a continual rise in the terms of official barter, pressing on a continual helplessness to refuse. This could not last-the voice of the country was soon an uproar. The guilt, the folly, and the ruin, had become visible to all. The money-changers were masters of the temple, until judicial vengeance came, and swept away the traffickers, and consigned the temple to ruin.

When we now hear the cry for the return of the Irish legislature, we feel a just surprise that the memory of the old legislature should have ever been forgotten, or that it should ever be recorded without national shame. We should as soon expect to see the corpse of a criminal exhumed, and placed on the judgment-seat of the court from which he was sent to the scaffold.

The Marquis of Buckingham, once a popular idol, and received as viceroy with acclamation, had no sooner dared to remonstrate with this imperious parliament, than he was over

whelmed with national rebuke. The idol was plucked from its pedestal and the Viceroy, pursued by a thousand libels, was glad to escape across the Channel. He was succeeded by the Earl of Westmoreland, a man of some talent for business, and of some determination, but by no means of the order that "rides the whirlwind, and directs the storm." He, too, was driven away. In this dilemma, the British cabinet adopted the most unfortunate of all courses-concession; and for this purpose selected the most unfitting of all conceders, the Earl Fitzwilliam-a man of no public weight, though of much private amiability; sincere, but simple; honest in his own intentions, but perfectly incapable of detecting the intentions of others. His lordship advanced to the Irish shore with conciliation embroidered on his flag. His first step was to take the chief members of Opposition into his councils; and the immediate consequence was an outrageousness of demand which startled even his simple lordship. The British cabinet were suddenly awakened to the hazard of giving away the constitution by wholesale, and recalled the Viceroy. He returned forthwith, made a valedictory complaint in parliament, to which no one responded; published an explanatory pamphlet, which explained nothing; and then sat down on the back benches of the peerage for life, and was heard of no nore. The Earl was succeeded by Lord Camden, son of the celebrated chief-justice, but inheriting less of the law than the temperament of his father. Graceful in manner, and even aristocratic in person, his councils

were

as undecided as his mission was undefined. The aspect of the times had grown darker hour by hour, yet his lordship speculated upon perpetual serenity. Conspiracy was notorious throughout the land, yet he moved as tranquilly as if there were not a traitor in the earth; and on the very eve of a conflagration, of which the materials were already laid in every county of Ireland, he relied on the silent spell of the statute-book! The secretary, Mr Pelham, after wards Lord Chichester, wanted the meekness, or disdained the shortsightedness of his principal; and, on

the first night of his official appearance in the House, he gave at once the strongest evidence of his own opinion, and the strongest condemnation of the past system; by boldly declaring that "concessions to the Catholics seemed only to increase their demands; that what they now sought was incompatible with the existence of a British constitution; that concession must stop somewhere; and that it had already reached its utmost limit, and could not be allowed to proceed. Here he would plant his foot, and never consent to recede an inch further."

The debate on this occasion continued during the night, and until eight in the morning. All that fury and folly, the bitterness of party and the keenness of personality, could combine with the passionate eloquence of the Irish mind, was exhibited in this memorable debate. The motion of the popish advocates was lost, but the rebellion was carried. The echo of that debate was heard in the clash of arms throughout Ireland; and Opposition, without actually putting the trumpet to their lips, and marshalling conspiracy, had the guilty honour of stimulating the people into frenzy, which the Irishman calls an appeal to the god of battles, but which, in the language of truth and feeling, is a summons to all the sanguinary resolves and satanic passions of the human mind.

The secretary, perhaps foreseeing the results of this night, and certainly indignant at the undisciplined state of the legislative council, suddenly returned to England; and Lord Castlereagh was appointed by his relative, the Viceroy, to fill the post of secretary during his absence. The rebellion broke out on the night of the 23d of May 1798.

In the year 1757, a committee was first established for the relief of Roman Catholics from their disabilities by law. From this justifiable course more dangerous designs were suffered to follow. The success of republicanism in America, and the menaces of war with republican France, suggested the idea of overthrowing the authority of government in Ireland. In 1792, his Majesty's message directed the repeal of the whole body of anti