THE history of Ireland, like the history of Greece, may be divided into three periods, the age of fable, the age of struggle and comparative success, and the age of decline. The first was that portion which figures only in the imaginations of her romancers, a fairy region of splendid hospitality, adventurous heroism, and universal song, planted by monarchs of unrivalled magnanimity, and sustained by bards, who have left no similar behind. Truth would paint this captivating time with a rather more sombre pencil. The monarchs were savage chiefs, at the head of savage clans; the hospitality was the alternation of barbarian indulgence and barbarian penury; the minstrelsy was that of all the furious tribes of the north and west; fierce exultation over some field of massacre, or some brute scene of intemperance. The art of blazonry can go no further, and we must leave the glories of the palace of Tara to the painter of palaces in the clouds.

The second period was that of which the scenes and men in these pages form the substance, a time of various anxiety and great public exertion, certainly of extraordinary displays of individual genius, and wanting nothing but political honesty to have established the country in the fairest heights of intellectual fame and national happiness. All the calculators of human impulses on the great scale of nations have hitherto failed, and nothing among the libels on the human understanding exists, more fitted to throw it into scorn, than political prophecy. The calculators uniformly omit one element in their process, on which the whole product turns. They omit the will of Heaven. We are not about to di

verge into so solemn a subject, in such sketches as these. But all the political calculators set out with the principle, that man is every thing, that talent is the single essential, and that a popular spirit, however summoned, and great leaders, however stimulated, form the sole and the sufficient materials of national grandeur. A graver and a truer view would refer to the high principle contained in the maxim, that" righteousness exalteth a nation, but sin is a reproach to any people." The political regenerators quicken every thing but the national morals, and, filling the popular mind with extravagant conceptions of popular power, hurry them forward with all their sails spread into the unfathomed waters, and tempestuous winds of political convulsion. With all the disturbers of the past and of the present, the only consideration is the effect. To the haranguer it matters nothing whether his words fall on the generous portions of our nature, like the rain from heaven, or fall like fire on the wild and inflammable. He looks only to the consequence. His business is the overthrow of his obstacle. Whether the building is to be harmlessly and regularly taken down, or flung on the heads of the fools who attempt to drag it down; whether the popular strength is the result of health, or fever; whether the overthrow is to clear the ground for some noble erection, or to leave it heaped with irremoveable wreck,-all is the same to the demagogue. With posterity perpetually on his lips, he never thinks beyond the hour; with professions that grasp nations and ages, his object is the blow at some rival in popular applause, or the security of some point too pitiful to be spoken of, yet too dear to be relinquish

ed for honour or principle. Professing to build up a nation, he is thinking only of rearing a pedestal for himself like the heathen priest, while he is proclaiming the glories of his deity, and filling the temple with the acclamations of worship, he is thinking of nothing but the share which falls to his lot in the flesh of the sacrifice.

Against this class of public characters, we acknowledge our firmest protest, as against the great evil of our day. We look with scorn too strong for words on those gratuitous instruments of evil, who shake the foundations of public security for the pitiful gain of the hour; those political Goths, who would pull down the finest structures of public life for the sake of the nails and studs, the fragments of brass and iron, that they might pilfer from the ruins; or, like the loiterers round the Roman funeral pile, rejoice to see the body of the state flung on, and the pile lighted, for the remnants that they might pick up in the ashes. Towards the close of the last century, the growing opulence of Ireland, the result of a system of laws which allowed nothing for the mock sorrows of trading patriotism, and which hanged the assassin without regard for the motto carved on his knife, gave the people that leisure, on whose good or evil use depends the fate of the generation. A people struggling with narrow circumstances may be happy, but cannot be great. A people suddenly raised to opulence, requires virtue to make this opulence what it was intended to be, the source of national renown. On the means of Ireland we are not to listen to the tropes and metaphors of her demagogues; their vocabulary is equally deterioration and amplification. When they would shew the claims of Ireland, they introduce us into the lazarhouse; when they could assert her rights, they point to the fortress; the same hand that guides us to the cell where their patient lies, startling the eye of charity, with equal ease turns us to look upon the mountain or the morass, where the armed hero, the champion of independence, flourishes his weapons in full defiance of English usurpation. But we are not to fix our faith upon these scene-shifters.

Every man who remembers Ireland fifty years ago, and who has had honesty enough to speak without borrowing his words from partisanship, and the poetry of rebels and levellers, will say, that long before the year 1780, the golden era of the traders in patriotism, the country was happier than it has ever been since; that if less money circulated through it, that less was worth much more; that men, who with four times the rental of their fathers find it difficult to live now, found their rental secure all the conveniences, and even all the desirable luxuries, of life then; that with a land abounding in every product necessary for life, with society on a footing of kindly intercourse, with nothing to disturb the current of a hospitable, plentiful, and cheerful existence, the country gentleman of Ireland has good reason to look back on the peace and abundance of the past, even from that envied eminence to which he has been raised by the hands of political orators; with all its glittering features of a peasantry who no sooner lay down the spade than they take up the pike-a gentry vexed, harassed, separated, and bankrupt— a Government perplexed between Protestant and Papist, and taking its colour, chameleon-like, from whichever it has last touched-a Church pauperized, but without even the refuge of the workhouse-a Consti

tution for whose works men look alternately to the Castle and the court-house, the desk of the Secretary and the dungeon-and, crowning all, a professional phalanx of patriotism, a regular trading company of mob orators, a flying camp of verbal redressers of grievances, a banditti of freedom, protecting property by advocating confiscation-freedom by menacing every man who dares to have an opinion of his own-toleration by denouncing Protestantism as tyranny-and allegiance by bowing down, and insisting that all other men shall bow down, before a stranger, who may be the direct enemy, and is always the insidious foe, of his Protestant King and Country. Such are the achievements of patriotism in Ireland. No; such are the labours of political hypocrisy, selfishness, and dishonesty. It is only doing common justice to the Irish character to say, that there is no

come the cause. The disgusts of the English Senate at the incursion of the Huns, which confuses debate, insults manners, and prohibits all deliberation, will conspire with the presumption of the conspirators and the terror of the Cabinet. The measure will be carried,-to the indignation and astonishment of every man, but those who know the powers of impudent perseverance, profligate ambition, and inveterate malignity. It will be carried, and from this hour the ruin of the carriers themselves will have begun. A short interval of triumph will only make their fall the more bitter. It will be but the twinings of the garland round the horns of the animal before sacrifice; the Indian feast before lighting the bed on which the intoxicated devotee is to be burned. The new viceroys of kings of Ireland will be shaken from their temporary thrones by popular fury, inflamed by priestly superstition. The Church of Rome has winked at the assumptions of her laity, only till they have done her work; she will then frown them down, or smite them down. Her hand is strong enough still to fling them into their place, in her old contemptuous system.

country on earth to which baseness is by nature more alien. In no country did the disguise of imposture less screen the impostor from the lash of powerful hands. Ireland had her true patriots, before whose touch the toads and reptiles that poisoned her sleeping ear were often forced to spring up in their full-sized deformity. But time did its work on them as on others-they went 'down to the grave. Their antagonists were more easily reunited; baseness, effrontery, and a determination to do the worst act by the worst means, were all the qualifications required for the ranks that waved over their heads the embroidered fraud and pictured lie of "The Cause of the Country." Pseudopatriotism usurped the parliament; the multitude, for whom they tuned every string, and whose ears they never ventured to offend by any sterner discordancy of manliness or virtue, echoed every sound, and all now fell before them. Their whole career was now less a progress than a race to power; every step was over some trampled right of law, reason, and honour; at length they hurried up the steep in a crowd, and thought themselves masters of place, pelt, and the Constitution. At the moment when they stretched out their hands to touch them, all vanished into air. They had reached the edge of a precipice, and all before them was vision and cloud. Those patriots first impoverished their country. They next ruined their parliament. They have still another act to perform-an "all hail hereafter." The prediction of public mischief that first sent them on their course, has a third stage of fulfilment; and they will not fail to go through with their destiny. The factions are now the virtual masters of Ireland: with the mystic crown won by a career of such resolute intrigue and commerce with evil on their brow, they have but one consummation to effect or to desire. In fact, there is but one step in their power, and that they must take. They must demand from some treacherous Minister or sinking Cabinet, the Repeal of the Union. It will be resisted for a while, but the time will come. Disturbances in Ireland, rather cherished than controlled, will be the plea, till they be

The priest will anathematize the guilt of the rabble leaders, the cardinal Legate will send them to his dungeons, and the triple-crowned Sovereign of the souls and bodies of all the worshippers of Rome will confirm the sentence in this world, and predict it in the world to come. This is their destiny. Once entangled in the folds of the old tyranny, the bird lying under the nets of the fowler might as easily escape. The hare might as well resist the mighty muscle and relentless_circles of the boa. They will struggle, perhaps fiercely, but Rome will be triumphant; and on the spot where the scaffold has left the last gush of their blood, will be written the moral of their ambition.

When politics, in an evil day, began to disturb the quiet of Ireland, the politicians found that they had begun their trade without the great essential, a stock of grievances. For some time no two of the profession were agreed upon the fit subject of a national outcry. They roved the whole map of national good and evil, and roved in vain. Trade,