nal King, EXCELS ALL THE POWER OF EARTHLY KINGS. It passes uncontroulable sentence upon them all!"

The famous bull of Pope Pius against Elizabeth thus declares the will of this self-constituted master of all nations.

"He that reigneth on high, to whom all power is given in heaven and earth, hath committed the one Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church, out of which there is NO SALVATION! to one alone on earth, namely, to Peter, the Prince of the Apostles, and TO THE ROMAN PONTIFF, successor of St. Peter, to be governed with a

PLENITUDE OF POWER.

"This one he hath constituted PRINCE over all nations and all kingdoms, that he might pluck up, destroy, dissipate, overturn, plant, and

build!"

There is not a Popish priest in Ireland who may not become a Cardinal or a Pope: What distinction can they have in Ireland like this? They have none of those connections, which are a pledge at once to the soil and to the laws. Their dignities come from Rome. Where a man's treasure is, there will his heart be also, They are, in spirit, strangers and Italians; they have seen, in our own day, a turbulent and ambitious priest among themselves made a

Prince of Rome, for an inflammatory publication*, in 1797, on the very eve of the Rebellion. With this bribe before them, with the consciousness that the Popedom looks upon England as the great antagonist, and Ireland as the most devoted auxiliary, they must be irreconcileable to any policy which brings the Protestant and the Papist closer together. If they should change their coldness into zeal in the present cause, it must be from the conviction that it will fix the bonds of Popery more firmly on the neck of the empire. If there should be a prospect of power through violence, there are no men on earth who ought more strenuously to put up the prayer against temptation!

Why this lonely and suspected adventure should have been left to the piety of the Bar, may be worth a moment to ascertain.

it

In England, the bar is but one of the professions; in Ireland, it is the profession par excellence, and slippery as the path is, it is almost the only one by which a well-bred Irishman will condescend to scramble up to honours. The land swarms with barristers, a formidable counterbalance to St. Patrick's pro

* See Dr. Hussey's Pastoral Letter.

hibitory blessing. In the sight of this untivalled armoury of litigation, the Irish are litigious, as naturally as children born in a barrack toss the firelock and follow the drum. But the purses of the Irish are, unfortunately, as light as their hearts; the Terms are, in the professional phrase, lean, and a Lancashire Assize is said to produce as much profitable parchment as the whole four Courts of Ireland. Yet there have been on the Irish bar-book little less than a thousand contemporary names of learned gentlemen proposing to make a livelihood out of the Irish pocket:-as the French chemists proposed to make sugar out of rags, and the philosophers of Laputa extracted sunbeams out of cucumbers.

In this state of things, a man, not determined to starve, must look about him. While the Irish Parliament existed, this work was easier; in a land where all was party, the simplest way to business at the bar, was notoriety in the House. In that extraordinary subversion of the laws of nature, where even attorneys had bowels for their country, an ardent patriot, waiting till conviction was brought home to his bosom by the generous wisdom of the treasury, was secure of being refreshed by little daily proofs of his country's confidence, in the form most congenial to the professional palm.

But the Parliament, at length, went down to the common place of all corruption; and from that time forth other means must be tried. Some now lay their foundation in the excellence of their tables, and plead by the jurisprudent virtues of claret and cookery; others build on alliance, and the daughters of solicitors, in a thriving business, have for years been at a premium; but the most successful, as the boldest of all, are those who, disdaining all slowness and scrupulosity of expedient, heroically turn the flow of their elocution through the Augean stable of aggregate meetings, Catholic Conventions, and mob Parliaments, and convey off the whole rich result to cover the barrenness of their own farm.

If there be a spot on earth where the whole of this factitious Papist bustle is looked on with peculiar scorn, it is in the place where it is most thoroughly known, the place of its birth, the city of Dublin. There the notorious political distortion of its contrivers, the miserable artifices to pack an audience, the paltry system of puffing and placarding themselves into notice, the regular publishing of their own harangues, with their own notes of admiration, the tricks of subscriptions and rents, and the

dubious purposes of their application, render them the common scorn and ridicule.

The general profession look upon it as merely a characteristic expedient to keep up an influx of briefs; The citizens will not waste their time in listening to the same factious foolery repeated a hundred times in the same words; The Government goes quietly through its business of putting down more formidable aggressors; and but for the printers of placards and newspapers, a race of gentlemen who live, like a Bow Street Magistrate, on the pugnacious propensities of mankind, the Popish parliament would have been long since wrapped in the pall of utter oblivion.

Even in its most palmy state, it bore the symptoms of decay. The facies hippocratica was on it from its cradle. It was obvious that the story of grievance must soon become stale, and incapable of commotion. The fact justified the physiognomy of this turbulent and short-lived experiment on the credulity of the empire. The boasted Rent had for some weeks been rapidly running down. The English legislature stepped in, and, by a forcible extinction, saved its honour, when it was on the eve of perishing by the course of nature. Like a