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this country has sometimes granted Ireland much from terrorbut never any thing from justice or benevolence: and those measures for breaking up the English mercantile monopoly, which had been opposed year after year by legions of petitions from the people, and contemptuous refusals from the ministers, were now yielded of necessity, to the bold demands of the Irish volunteers. But still much was to be done: Ireland still wanted securities for good government-it still wanted the blessings of religious equality. It had not yet effaced the vestiges of its penal code; it had not yet established the responsibility of the legislature to the people. The tottering mass of evil institutions; the barbarous establishments of aristocracy, still encumbered and overshadowed the soil. Their strength, however, departed from them every hour; and the new-found energies of the people must speedily have hurled to earth the weight that so long had crushed them. But the government of England had too much at stake in the permanence of Irish misrule, and by a mixture of perfidy and cruelty, almost without example, it drove the country into rebellion.

Then came again that scene of rapine and butchery, which has so often desolated Ireland. The legions of England, and the Orangemen, whose enormities those legions protected, burnt the cabins of the peasantry, and tortured the miserable inhabitants, till from shore to shore of the island there was one wide arena of famine and of war, of flame and massacre. After we had accumulated against ourselves the record of a tremendous amount of suffering, the rebellion was extinguished; and then followed, in no long period, the shame and the guilt of our crowning iniquity. Then, by the exertions of the governments both of England and of Ireland, by all the secret influence of the crown, and all the open power of the aristocracy,-by intimidating the weakness of some, and by acting on the corruption of others,-by the clamours of every menial of power,-by largesses which ought never to have been given, and promises which ought long ago to have been performed, the Irish parliament was at once bribed and bullied into the surrender of its country's independence. From a nation, that could have been stopped by no external authority in working out her own happiness, Ireland became an oppressed and degraded province, in which every effort for the improvement of her own condition is punished as rebellion against a foreign supremacy. The race whom seven centuries ago we found barbarous, we have left barbarous until now: we found them ignorant, and ignorant we have kept them: we found them turbulent, and turbulent they remain; but we did not find them what they are the victims of religious intolerance; the helots of foreign tyranny; the most miserable people of Europe.

When we consider the circumstances in which this state of things has arisen, there is abundant cause for the astonishment of the crowd, and the inquiry of the reflecting. For Ireland is not

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a country branded with the curse of heaven. Its sky is not the home of the tempest-nor a vault of eternal cloud-nor a parching atmosphere of fire. Its soil is not as iron to the husbandman, and no vapours of death brood upon its verdure. We gaze from its mountains over a land of beauty and fertility; and when we trace its shore, from the channel to the Atlantic, and from its northern crags to the disastrous spot where the first English invader reared his standard, we measure out as choice a portion of this goodly world as ever repaid the labour, or cheered the eye of man. Neither is it in the character of Irishmen that we are to look for the causes of Irish misery; they are laborious when labour will procure subsistence, and persevering when perseverance is not hopeless.

And what if, among the manifestations of these qualities, of a generosity which knows no bounds, of a courage which recoils from no obstacle, of an enthusiasm which, though sometimes erroneous in its object, yet is always pure in its motive,-of fancy and feeling alike admirable and amiable; what if, in the aspect of the national character, we may find vestiges of those tremendous convulsions which have so long agitated the people? A wretched peasantry may be made suspicious by the habit of enduring, and treacherous in the attempt to elude oppression; or they may sometimes be maddened by injustice, till they condense into one moment of fury the accumulated vengeance of ages. They may be creatures of impulse, because they have never been taught to act upon principle, and are victims of all that is unfavourable in circumstances; they may be superstitious, because they are ignorant; they may be improvident, because they have nothing to hope for; they may be discontented, for with them contentment is despair; they may be brutal, for we have treated them as brutes. But these things no more belong to their nature, than the bruises of his chains to the captive, or the traces of the lash to the slave.

But we turn from this, to a picture of brighter prospects. We hope much from the improvement of public opinion; above all, the recent changes in the government, seem to warrant us in calculating on the expectation that justice will, at length, be done to Ireland. There are, at present, two great sources of evil in that country-civil misgovernment, and religious disputes. The various forms in which the peasantry pay away the produce of their labours, have been made instruments of the most grievous and general misery. We do not now speak of the actual want of necessaries which results from their poverty. This proceeds from the growth of a population, whose increase is opposed by no moral restraint ;and from the want of capital, which is kept out of the country by the perpetual turbulence of the poorest orders, and the fearful insecurity of property. But the mere external modes of levying money from the people-the processes by which every thing is wrung from them beyond a bare subsistence, have become irresistible engines for the tyranny of the more powerful classes. The cess

the tithe-the rent-each has been uniformly employed to make and to keep the mass of the population the unresisting serfs of an aristocracy. In the memorable words of Lord Redesdale, "there is in Ireland one law for the rich, and another for the poor." And this has gone on so long, and has so lately begun to be remedied, that the people have the habit of looking at the laws as a system and code of tyranny. They see in them, not the rules of war to which both they and their enemies must conform; but the plan of operations agreed upon by their oppressors. They have no confidence in the administration of justice, and we have taken care that they should have none. For those on whom alone they are likely to rely for protection-the educated and wealthy of their own faith, have been till very lately debarred from the office of magistrate, and are still excluded from the honours of the judicial bench. It has been, till the administration of the present viceroy, the unvarying system of Irish government to depress and discountenance the Catholics; to support the Protestant interest, by giving its members an absolute monopoly of privilege, authority, and place; to heap all distinction and all wealth, on the heads of an engrossing and encroaching oligarchy, and to deny to the people the use of the scales, while it waved over their heads the reeking sword of justice. We have been instructing them for three centuries, to feel themselves an inferior caste;-and it will not now be sufficient to say to them-unlearn the bitter lesson we have taught you, without, at the same time, doing away for ever with that machinery of pain and disgrace, which is still darkening their hearts, and weighing down their spirits. It is a cruel mockery to say to the slave that he is free, while you are brandishing the whip, and riveting the gyves and the collar.

But while the Catholics have been thus chained by our laws to the consciousness, that they are outcasts from the advantages of civil equality-the degraded step-children of the constitution-a new peculiarity has been added to their circumstances, by the recent determination to convert them. It is worth while to consider for a moment, how singular in every respect is this attempt. We have, in Ireland, a government of one religion, and a people of another. The people have been clamouring for years to be admitted to an equality with their Protestant brethren, as framers and ministers of the laws. The Irish aristocracy say, no-we will not grant your desire, but we will change your opinions and so, under the shadow of 25,000 bayonets, the missionaries of the reformed faith go forth on their errand of converting a famished and discontented nation! Of the motives of the zealous Protestants

*The administration of Lord Wellesley, has done much towards making a due proportion of Catholics justices of the peace. The recent rejection of Sir Patrick Bellew, will be an indelible blot on the fame of Lord Manners.

engaged in this great task, we desire to speak with nothing but the most sincere respect. Yet we much fear, that they have not well weighed the delicacy of addressing the people of Ireland on the subject of religion, that they have not much considered, how deep will be their guilt if they do, what it will be so hard to abstain from doing-if they hold out to their audiences any the slightest inducement to a change of creed, beyond the mere preponderance of evidence. Till Catholic emancipation is carried, the attempt to proselytise Ireland can do nothing more than heap upon that unhappy country new subjects for angry feeling, and open up new fountains of bitterness.

ART. VIII. Cécile, ou Les Passions. Par M. Jouy, de l'Académie Française. 5 vols. 12mo. Paris: Chez l'Editeur. London: Treüttel & Wurtz. 1827.

THIS tale is a detestable production: but fortunately its immorality is, if possible, even yet more disgusting than licentious; for it consists in the complacent exhibition, not of ordinary profligacy, but of incest and blasphemy. The absurdity of the story, the utter want of interest and probability in the characters and fortunes of its actors, and the intolerable dullness of its miserable rhapsodies, all combine, with the loathsome depravity of the invention, to neutralise the tendency of the author's descriptions and sentiments. If the book, therefore, were the work of an anonymous or obscure individual, we should abstain altogether from polluting our pages with the explanation of its contents. We should cautiously avoid the possibility of directing public curiosity to so abominable a composition; and should be satisfied that, if silently left to its fate, it would possess no attraction, and rapidly into a desirable oblivion.

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But our duty does not here leave us the option of silence: for Cécile is avowedly the offspring of one of the most popular French writers of the age. As the well-known "Hermit of the Chaussée d'Antin," M. Jouy has acquired some reputation, by his lively and humorous caricatures of the Parisian manners and follies of the hour, and has had a whole tribe of imitators, French, German, and English hermits, among the small fry of ephemeral literature. He has hitherto contributed, without offence, to the purposes of public amusement; and his sketches, if not exactly favourable to the cause of morality, have never before positively sinned against it. Any work from his pen might hence unsuspiciously be admitted into the circles of families; and therefore it is, that we feel bound to expose the real character of the infamous performance before us, if only for the sake of cautioning every parent of daughters against admitting into his house, under the guise of a novel, so revolting a farrago of impurity.

The deliberate purpose with which M. Jouy has thus insulted all the decent feelings of society, is not the least remarkable evidence which these volumes betray of an imbecile judgment, as well as a corrupt heart and depraved fancy. Actuated by a degree of self conceit, which amounts almost to fatuity, he has produced this work with the serious and formal design of effecting a new revolution in the taste of the world for romantic literature! Having composed Cécile in letters, nearly a fourth part of his first volume is occupied with an introductory essay on the origin and progress of fiction, in which it is his object to prove, that the epistolary form is essential to the nature of the romance; and that the partiality of the times for the historical novel, is a vitiated caprice d'un goût dépravé. He then, in publishing this series of letters in opposition to the opinion of his age,' declares his conviction, that the reigning preference for scenes which are borrowed from the low melo-drama of the Boulevards,' must before long give way to the faithful picture of the movements of the human heart:'-contained, of course, in this delineation of Les Passions!

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The mixture of false critcism and drivelling vanity in this introductory essay, sufficiently initiates us into the condition of M. Jouy's intellect. Perhaps so unnatural and cumbrous a machinery of fiction as the epistolatory never was invented. The ungraceful appearance of egotism which it entails upon the favourite personages of the story, the troublesome necessity of frequent repetition, the unavoidable interruptions which break the continuous flow of events, the awkward transfer of the narration from one writer to another, and the absurdity of supposing the whole business and minute details of life to be represented in an eternal interchange of letters-all these inconveniences completely dissipate the illusions of fiction, and destroy that air of reality which is its principal charm. M. Jouy, however, insists that the author of a romance should never appear in his proper person, and that when a tale assumes this form of narrative, all semblance of truth disappears. But in fact, there is no such necessity for the obtrusion of the narrator: if his story be skilfully constructed, we lose him altogether in the interest which he excites by his subject; and our illusion is no more disturbed by his presence, than our belief in authentic history is affected, by the knowledge that we receive its details through the agency of the historian. In epistolary fiction, on the contrary, our credulity is unavoidably shocked at the commencement of every new letter; and we believe, that no person ever succeeded in toiling through half a volume of an epistolary novel, without being repeatedly and provokingly reminded of the defective construction of the vehicle of action.

M. Jouy endeavours to fortify his paradoxical theory, by the example and the success of Richardson: as if there were any thing in common, between the graceful purity of that writer's sentiment,

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