comfortable inns, and are scrupulously clean in their households, however lax in that respect in regard to their persons, and the hotel d'Angleterre, at Rotterdam, is about as snug and cosy an inn as one might wish to stay at; but the English, with all their mismanagement, and in spite of the opinion of poor Albert Smith and Mr. Augustus Sala, have by far the best hostelries in the world. Who that has been in sunny Devonshire does not remember those pretty little inns, with thatched roof and quaint ivy-covered porch, the windows almost hidden behind the profusion of honeysuckle and jasmine; the neat parlour with its sand sprinkled floor, and walls decorated with queer impossible prints of the Holy Family and Abraham and Isaac; with the large pike that was caught in the stream hard by, stuffed and displayed in a glass case on the sideboard; with the rustic display of old china, and the silver tea urn, the heir-loom of the family; those pleasant inns where you hear all the simple country gossip; where you sleep in sheets scented with lavender and sweet briar, and where you have trout-fresh caught-new laid eggs, home-baked bread, cream that is cream, and strawberries fit for a Cleopatra for your breakfast-who that has ever partaken of the simple pleasures of these rustic inns, will ever forget them, and deny that England alone offers the like. But if in England we find the snuggest, cosiest, most comfortable and best conducted inns in the world, it cannot be said that the hotel -keepers in Australia have kept up the reputation of their brethren at home. Australian hotels are modelled too much upon the American type to carry out the English notions of that comfort and those home like attributes, which should be the distinguishing attraction of an inn. Too much attention is paid to the bar trade, and too little to the other arrangements in the management of our colonial hotels, to render them by any means a desirable place of abode. In the city proper of Melbourne we have no less than 239 licensed hotels, and of these it is safe to say that more than thirty or forty are really anything more than mere tap-rooms. The eternal nobbler is the ruling feature of hotel keeping in Victoria, and whether it be a pint of colonial in an obscure public, or a cocktail at the Albion, the bar trade of Melbourne hotels is the chief reliance of the landlord; and this is one reason that so few of our Melbourne hostelries are comfortable and pleasant places at which to put up. True, we have some hotels in Melbourne, that, considering the youth as yet of the colony, are in point of accomodation and size, marvels-Scott's hotel, the Port Philip Club, the Criterion, the Albion, Bignell's, and several others are worthy in every respect of our city—and these chief hotels are, moreover, managed admirably; but the majority are anything but tempting places of abode. You miss the clean, well furnished chamber with its patriarchal four post bedstead, its thick carpet, its cosy curtains, its general air of invitation to rest, of the inns at home; and you find substituted an ill-ventilated room, with a truckle bed, a broken pitcher probaby, for a washing jug; two or three cane-bottomed chairs covered with dust, and a small piece of tattered carpet some four feet by two, nailed carefully in the centre of the floor; and for further accommodation you have a diminutive towel, a small piece of Windsor soap, and a brush and comb in the last stage of decay. In all probability the window won't open, and you consequently have to breathe an atmosphere of dust and mustiness during the night; then you will be sure to be visited by several patriarchal musquitoes, who have been bred and born on the establishment-fellows who go to work skilfully and systematically, and who so improve the opportunity that you rise in the morning with a face like the lid of a pepper-box. You are lucky also if you are not visited by some jolly old cockroaches or beetles, or a few playful rats, not to speak of other pleasant specimens of animated nature. You pay 2s. 6d. in all probability for this, and having breakfast in the morning either take that meal in solitary grandeur, and feast on tough chops, doubtful steaks, eggs that are not new laid, and toast that is sodden; or, being of a social turn, you sit down to the table with the landlord, who presides in a free and easy manner in his shirt sleeves and unshaven chin. Your attendant is most likely an insolent, dirty-sleeved scamp, smelling of gin and bitters, who has no scruple in handling your viands with his dirty paws, and carries in the milk jug with his thumb in the milk. You nowhere in Melbourne, but in the first-class hotels-see that smart, airy gentleman-the London waiter with his white napkin flung across his arm, his pumps, his “Yes, sir-chops, sir-yes, sir-coming, sir." We have few of these inimitable fellows amongst us, and we have either to put up with the fast young barman, who mixes American drinks with the tumblers in the air, and always makes a mistake in the change, or with a half boots, half hostler lout, who smells of the stables and bad tobacco, and asks you to "shout." You have no comfort; no privacy. You must either nobblerise continually, or be voted and considered a nuisance; and a residence in a second-class hotel in Melbourne is replete with annoyances and discomfort. Certainly if you take up your temporary abode in one of the few first-class establishments of the city, you have nothing to complain of with regard to attention and comfort; but it is not everyone that has the means to pay for that attention and comfort, which may be thus obtained. These luxuries, however, should be procurable also, considering the general high charges in the second-class inn. Then the landlord: why are not Melbourne landlords stout and jolly-looking? Why are they thin and miserable-looking creatures, who put up for aldermen, and make fools of themselves in council? Why have we not the jovial, corpulent, white-aproned, bald-headed old gentlemen of London inns? Alas! innkeeeping in Melbourne is a failure, and we sigh in vain for the George and the Marquis of Granby, and all those dear old hostelries, the memory of which is so precious to the Londoner. DUFFY'S HIBERNIAN SIXPENNY MAGAZINE. No. 30. JUNE. 1864. A WORD ABOUT GRATTAN. 66 An interval of over forty years since the death of Henry Grattan places him at a sufficient distance to enable us to see his character in its proper light--to judge correctly of its dimensions, and to record that judgment in language which shall be totally uninfluenced by the passions and prejudices, the inveterate, unreasoning hatred of political opponents, and the equally inveterate and unreasoning prejudices of political partisans. Every man who has attained to eminence, particularly political eminence, has lived under the constant action of the opposite poles of the social magnet-attracted by the one, repelled by the other. Even little great men, and in fact everybody who is somebody, feels the effects of these opposing influences. Your honest poor fellow, who never says nothing to nobody," who goes through life as if he had no elbows, jostling nobody and by nobody jostled, is no object for either attraction or repulsion. Round, smooth, soft, and blubbery, he passes over life's journey without causing any friction; nor is there any angularity in his character to leave an impress on the "sands of time" over which he passess. The accumulated biographies of all the individuals of that species who have lived since the days of Noe or Adam could not, by any patent process which the inventive children of men bave yet discovered, be made to yield as much wholesome, nutritious pabulum as might be cooked in a tailor's thimble. Whatever humble uses and purposes they may have served in their own day, history has only to record of them that They ate and drank and slept. What then? But such is not the case with those who have been eminently distinguished n their day and generation. They may all truly apply to themselves the Horatian line, Non omnis moriar, &c. Time may, and in truth often does, effect wonderful changes in their regard. The debts which contemporaries should have readily and proudly paid are too often left to be discharged by succeeding times, which VOL. V. NEW SERIES. Succeeding times can also judge more accurately of a man's real merits and abilities than the epoch or generation in which he flourished, and that both for intrinsic and extrinsic reasons. Outside the minute analysis and tittle tattle of biography (of which everyone is not thought worthy) nothing but what is really great and immortal in character descends to posterity. It is with this alone it is concerned, and leaving the follies, the frailties, and littleness, which may have been associated with great men, to repose in the silence of the tomb, it judges of the merits of the great departed by their endeavours and achievements in their respective spheres. This is what we shall endeavour to do with the character of Henry Grattan. Henry Grattan was born in the city of Dublin, on the 3rd of July, 1746. His father, James Grattan, was for many years recorder of Dublin, and represented that city for some time in Parliament. His mother-daughter of Chief Justice Marlay-was a lady of considerable talent, for which her family was rather distinguished. One of her brothers was Bishop of Waterford, and another gained military renown on many a hard-fought field on the continent. Henry appears to have inherited a full share of the courage and talent of the family. During his school-boy days he was known amongst his playfellows as a lad of mettle, and of those who had the pleasure of going to school with him, there were few, even of the extreme peace party, who had not the additional pleasure of receiving practical illustration of the hardness of Grattan's knuckles. His organ of combativeness, as phrenologists would say, must have been fully developed-a development which was proved by the curious bumps, nameless in the nomenclature of phrenological science, which he was accustomed to raise on the heads of his schoolfellows. Leaving Grattan in pursuit of his phrenological recreations for the present, we must go back with the muse of history to a period antecedent to his birth, in order that we may the more clearly understand the position of the Irish Parliament and the circumstances of the time when he entered the political arena. Early in the reign of George I., a contest, which excited a very lively interest, arose between the Irish and English Houses of Lords, on a question of appellate jurisdiction. In the year 1719, a case of property, between Hester Sherlock and Maurice Annesley, was decided for the respondent, by the Court of Exchequer in Ireland; but the judgment was reversed on appeal to the Irish House of Peers. Annesley, the respondent, then brought the case before the House of Peers in England, and they affirmed the judgment of the Irish Court of Exchequer. The Irish Peers strongly denied the legality of the appeal to England, asserting that an appeal to the King in his Irish Parliament was definitive in any case in Ireland, and the Irish Judges pronounced their opinion to that effect. The complications and difficulties of the case were still more increased by the infliction of a fine on Alexander Burrowes, the Sheriff of Kildare, who refused to act upon the orders of the Court of Exchequer and of th English Peers, by putting Annesley in possession of the estate; while, on the other hand, the Irish Peers removed the fine, and voted that the sheriff had acted with becoming courage in the matter. All the right and reason of the case appears to have been on the side of the Irish Peers; but, when a powerful adversary is once determined to have his way, reason and logic are but a poor defence. Though you should drink below him at the stream, you soil his water still. Quod vult, vult; that is the end of it. This the Irish Peers very soon learned from an English enactment, which said: "That whereas attempts have been lately made to shake off the subjection of Ireland unto and her dependance upon the Imperial Crown of this realm; and whereas the Lords of Ireland, in order thereto, have of late, against law, assumed to themselves a power and jurisdiction to examine and amend decrees of the courts of justice in Ireland; therefore, ect., it is declared and enacted, etc., that the said kingdom of Ireland hath been, is, and of right ought to be, subordinate unto and dependent, upon the Imperial Crown of Great Britain, as being inseparably united and annexed thereto; and that the King's Majesty, by and with the advice and consent of the Lords spiritual and temporal, and Commons of Great Britain, in Parliament assembled had, bath, and of right ought to have, full power and authority to make laws and statutes of sufficient force and validity to bind the people of the kingdom of Ireland. And it is further enacted and declared that the House of Lords of Ireland have not, nor of right ought to have, any jurisdiction to judge of, affirm, or reverse, any judgment, &c., made in any court within the said kingdom, &c. This is the celebrated obnoxions statute (6th of George I.) which was repealed by the still more celebrated Declaration of Irish Independence, carried in an epoch inseparably associated with Grattan's enduring fame. By this statute the Irish Parliament was utterly degraded and provincialized. Individual members might occasionally, if they pleased, let off some steam in the shape of rhetorical bluster and figurative rhodomontade; but Ireland had nothing to expect from an assembly as utterly bereft of all dignity and independence as, the "praise God, Barebone's Parliament of England." Well had it been for the character of the Irish Parliament and for the repose of the unfortunate Irish Catholics, if, when that Parliament was thus rendered powerless for good, it had also ceased to be potent for evil. Individuals and bodies of men sometimes act as if they were covetous for their own degradation. In the depths of the humiliation to which the English Parliament had sunk it, the Irish Legislature found for itself a still lower deep, by the penal enactments which its members passed against their Catholic fellow-countrymen. Fortunately, the full and proper treatment of our subject does not require that we should dwell minutely on this disheartening period of our history. We shall, therefore, mention only a few facts, which will sufficiently illustrate the character and spirit of those dreary times. In that same year, 1719, in which the Irish Parliament was degraded to the rank of a provincial assembly, it passed an act exempting Protestant Dissenters from certain penalties, to which they were liable in common with the Catholics, and, as |