country in a manner that makes an Englishman stare. Landlords of consequence have assured me that many of their cottars would think themselves honoured by having their wives and daughters sent for to the bed of their master-a mark of slavery that proves the oppression under which such people must live. Nay, I have heard anecdotes of the lives of the people having been made free with without any apprehension of the justice of a jury. But let it not be imagined that this is common; formerly it happened every day, but the law gains ground. It must strike the most careless traveller to see whole strings of carts whipt into a ditch by a gentleman's footman, to make way for his carriage; if they are overturned or broken in pieces, no matter, it is taken in patience; were they to complain, they would, perhaps, be horsewhipped. The execution of the law lies very much in the hands of justices of the peace, many of whom are drawn from the most illiberal class in the kingdom. If a poor man lodges a complaint against a gentleman, or any animal that chooses to call himself a gentleman, and the justice issues out a summons for his appearance, it is a fixed affront, and he will infallibly be called out. Where MANNERS are in a conspiracy against LAW, to whom are the oppressed people to have recourse? It is a fact that a poor man, having a contest with a gentleman, must-but I am talking nonsense; they know their situation too well to think of it; they can have no defence but by means of protection from one gentleman against another, who, probably, protects his vassal as he would the sheep he intends to eat."

The English House of Lords, in the year 1719, were so indignant, because, in the celebrated case of Sherlock and Annesley, a judgment given by them in favor of the respondent was reversed by the Irish peers, that they passed an act by which the Irish parliament

underwent a degrading humiliation. It was 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 made in any court of the kingdom of Great Britain. The Irish parliament, though thus reduced to a mere grovelling colony, regulated by the avarice or fears of a stranger,"* in which state it continued until the year 1782, yet abated nothing of its hatred and hostility to the "common enemy." Nay, all the previous atrocities of penal legislation were dwarfed into insignificance by a savage clause introduced by them into a bill in the year 1723, for the purpose of still more effectually preventing the further growth of Popery in Ireland. What that clause was, our pen refuses to describe; but, despite its barbarity, it was unanimously agreed to after a short debate, and was ordered to be laid before the Lord Lieutenant, with a prayer that he "would recommend it in the most effectual manner to his majesty." The Irish clergy, horrified at the anticipation of this bill passing into law, deputed the Right Reverend Doctor Lloyd, Bishop of Waterford, to wait on the Duke of Orleans, then Regent of France, and solicit his interference with the King of England on the subject. The relation between England and France at the time was so critical, that the government were only too anxious to conciliate the Duke. The bill accordingly was, at his remonstrance, doomed to the fate it deserved; it never obtained the royal assent.

This was the period when the clergy of Ireland underwent that ordeal of suffering, which justly entitles them to the fame of martyrs for the faith, and to the everlasting gratitude and admiration of the Irish race. Hunted by human bloodhounds, they hid in caves

* Wyse's History of the Catholic Association, p. 28.

and dens, the victims of cold, and hunger, and fear, yet ever faithful to their sacred trust. With the prison, or exile, or the scaffold before their eyes, they celebrated the divine mysteries for their cowering flocks in the lonely mountain gorge, or in the wild sequestered glen; and were frequently dragged from the very altar, exposed, as their Master was, in their vestments, the types of His garments of humiliation, to the derision of a brutal soldiery, re-enacting the Ecce Homo scene in the last terrible drama of redemption, and then doomed, as He was, to the fatal sentence of the law.* Surely there was little temporal inducement then, as there ever has been little, to enter the ranks of the Irish priesthood.

Yet the old religion flourished, for young and brave men crossed the seas, and gathered the treasures of learning denied them at home. Undaunted by persecution, by the cell or the gibbet, they brought home from many a sacred continental shrine the diploma of apostlehood; they cast the fire of their faith upon the land, and it has not been extinguished.

Arthur O'Leary pursued his studies and entered the sacred order of the priesthood at St. Maloe's, where he remained for a period of twenty-four years. It is now impossible to pierce the veil that hides the history of his life during that period. One fact only has come to light. In the course of the so-called "seven years' war" between the French and English, many British prisoners were confined at St. Maloe's; and as by far the greater number of them were Irish and Catholic, the appointment of a chaplain became a matter of necessity. O'Leary was, with the approbation of his superiors, appointed to the chaplaincy of the prisons; and such were the zeal and humanity with which he discharged his sacred functions, that in after life, in his native

* See Plowden's Hist. of Ireland, vol. ii. p. 72.

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country, a handsome acknowledgment of gratitude was made to him by some officers of rank, who had been, on that occasion, the recipients of his charity and kindness. The mode in which that acknowledgment was made shall be recorded in its proper place. In his position of chaplain, O'Leary's integrity of character was put to a very severe test. The Prime Minister of the day, the Duc de Choiseul, a man not overburthened with conscientious scrupulosity, conceived the idea that, if proper influence were used, many of the Irish who were confined in French prisons, and who were traditionally partial to the interests of the Stuarts, some of whom were still in France, might be induced to join the French standard, and take up arms against England, their hereditary foe. O'Leary was solicited by the minister to undertake the work of persuasion, and no inconsiderable premium was offered for the success of his negotiations. But the humble chaplain manfully and indignantly spurned the proposal. “I thought it," says he, in his reply to Wesley, "a crime to engage the King of England's soldiers and sailors in the service of a Catholic monarch against the Protestant sovereign. I resisted the solicitations, and ran the risk of incurring the displeasure, of a minister of state, and losing my pension; and my conduct was approved of by the divines of a monastery to which I then belonged, who unanimously declared that in conscience I could. not have acted otherwise." And on the same subject, in another part of his works,* he writes as follows. Vindicating his loyalty to the British crown, he says: "Nor was my loyalty the effect of imperious necessity or time-serving policy; for in France, where, in consequence of barbarous and Gothic laws, I was forced in

* Address to the Lords Spiritual and Temporal of the Parliament of Great Britain, &c. &c. June 30th, 1800.

my early days to seek for a small portion of the education which I was refused in the land of my fathers, where the youth of Europe had been instructed gratis in the time of Ireland's splendour-in France, where the Catholics of Ireland had seminaries and convents, with full admission to all the degrees and honours of her universities-I resisted every solicitation to enlist any of the subjects of these kingdoms in the French king's service, though I had then every opportunity of doing so, being appointed to superintend prisons and hospitals during the wars of fifty-seven, &c., until about the arrival of the then Duke of Bedford in Paris. It was my interest to recommend myself to the favor of the people in power, and consequently my interest to become a courtier rather than a moralist. St. Paul calls God to witness when he asserts the truth. I can do the same when I assert that conscience was the rule of my conduct; and whatever the uninformed may think of my creed, I would not perjure myself for all the crowns and sceptres on earth.”

The office of chaplain ceased with the termination of the war, which took place in 1763, on the arrival of the Duke of Bedford in Paris; and we hear no more of O'Leary until his appearance in Cork, in the year 1771, when he was forty-two years old.

The first fact which we learn in connexion with Arthur O'Leary, after his settlement in Cork, is that he contributed to the erection of a church in that city, where the clergymen of his order might perform their professional duties for the benefit of the Catholic public. This church was remarkable for its dwarfish dimensions, its utter want of architectural grace, and its perfect seclusion from the public gaze. The priests and people of those days were only too glad to have any kind of decent edifice, where they could perform their devotions without exposure to the elements or