engaged in, I am astonished that any portion of the kingdom should be suffered to hang like a dead weight upon the rest. I will not, on the present occasion, discuss the heart-burnings which have reduced Ireland to her present calamitous condition. I may discuss them elsewhere; but, in lamenting them, I will state that, to my conviction, these discontents arose from a mistaken application of severities. I have myself been a witness in Ireland to cases of the most absurd and the most disgusting tyranny." He was answered by Lord Grenville and outvoted. In the February of the following year, he brought the subject before the Irish House of Lords, in a truly spirited and patriotic speech. He had, since his previous reference to the subject in England, been heartily abused by letters and speeches, on platforms and press, and had been upbraided with giving a factious and disaffected opposition to the government. His reply was as crushing as it was

eloquent :

"Slander," he said, "is like the mephitic vapors of the Grotto del Cane at Naples-it suffocates the animal that grovels, but cannot reach the man that stands upright."

He then drew a touching picture of the series of cruel disappointments to which the hopes of the Irish had been for fifteen years subjected, and pointed to reform of parliament, and concessions to the Catholics, as the political measures that should express to the people a change in the sentiments of the government of England towards them.*

* See the Life of Lord Plunket, by his Grandson, vol. i. p. 84.

CHAPTER XIV.

O'Leary's "Address to the Lords Spiritual and Temporal of the Parliament of Great Britain; to which is added, an Account of Sir Henry Mildmay's Bill relative to Nuns"-Extracts from the Address-His Hopes of what the Union would Effect for Ireland— Two Dangerous Papists-Two Thousand Servant-maids Converted in London by French Priests in one Year !—Father O'Leary cannot Convert One--He is Attacked by Sir Richard Musgrave—Collects Materials for a History of all the Irish Rebellions-His Health Fails-His Part in Plowden's "Historical Review,"

ON the 30th of June, 1800, there appeared from the pen of O'Leary his last literary production, which equals, if it does not surpass, all that went before it for vigor and effect. It was entitled "The Reverend Arthur O'Leary's Address to the Lords Spiritual and Temporal of the Parliament of Great Britain; to which is added, an Account of Sir Henry Mildmay's Bill relative to Nuns." The chief ground for issuing this publication, was the appearance, shortly before, of a scurrilous pamphlet, bearing the name of a "very considerable person," in which the Catholic clergy of Ireland were assailed with a violence worthy of a pot-house politician. Enumerating the advantages likely to accrue from the legislative union of Great Britain and Ireland, the author had said: "It will entice the clergy (Protestant) to more constant residence, by which means the pernicious influence of the vagrant Catholic priest, who goes about selling absolution for felonies, and all sorts of crimes, even murder itself, would be lessened, and in a great measure done away." "If our lineaments," writes O'Leary, "bear even the slightest resemblance to the portrait he has drawn, we ought to be swept from

society, as serpents horrid to the sight, and pests deadly to human nature.”

From the following extract we will learn the advantages, to the enjoyment of which O'Leary, and politicians of his stamp, looked forward as necessarily resulting from the Union as it was proposed to them,—we will see a thorough justification for his conduct in accepting the condition before alluded to, imposed on his receipt of a government pension,—we will have presented to us a striking specimen of the perfidy that characterized the statesmen who brought about the Act of Union; and, if I am not mistaken, we will conclude, that, were O'Leary alive to-day, to witness the results of that nefariously-concocted measure, he would outdo the most strenuous efforts of the O'Connell agitation in favor of the cause of Repeal!

"I am," he writes, "as great a friend to the Union, and have reconciled, I believe, as many to it as the person to whom this publication is attributed. I am a friend of it from, as I imagine, a well-founded expectation that it will close the tumultuary scenes which have distracted my ill-fated country for ages, and make the natives, of every religious description, happy-a people united, not in league against Great Britain, but united with her and amongst themselves in interest, prosperity, and power, by a free and equal participation of all benefits and advantages arising in the State, and by the removal of those jealousies which ever subsist between kingdoms or states standing in the same relation to each other as England has stood hitherto in respect to Ireland-the one subordinate to the other, and governed by viceroys, and both_but_half_united.* Divisions, jealousies, and their concomitant evils must be the natural consequence. Such was the state of

*The italics are ours. O'Leary clearly never contemplated a continuance of the viceroyalty.

Norway with regard to Denmark, until united. Such was the state of Portugal with regard to Spain, and of Flanders with regard to Austria, until separated. And such would be the state of Ireland with regard to England, until wedded together in the bands of a close and intimate union, or divorced from each other by a solemn irrevocable deed of separation."

"For," he continues, "the calamities of Ireland are not originally and radically owing to difference in religious opinions. The kingdoms and states above mentioned professed the same creed. There is nothing unsociable in the character of Irishmen any more than in the character of the Germans, amongst whom, in some places, Lutherans, Calvinists, and Catholics perform their respective worship on Sundays in the same church. Amidst such a multiplicity of penal laws, some of which persecuted the dead body to the grave, in forbidding, under certain penalties, to bury any Catholic in the ruins of an old abbey, though built ages before by his ancestors; a Catholic could scarcely have breathed outside the bars of a jail, had it not been for the liberality of our Protestant neighbours, who were too generous to enforce them. All the

liberal-minded Protestants in Ireland are for the Emancipation of the Catholics to this very day. And such as are under any bias now, would soon give up their prejudice, or rather would never have indulged any, if the law had made no distinction.

Long before the magic sound of Protestant and Papist, like the Trojan trumpet, had given the signal to marshal them as hostile armies against each other on account of their creeds, an insidious and destructive policy was at a loss how to divide the natives of Ireland, after they had sheathed the sword, and coalesced into one extensive and friendly family. It had not then the plea of difference of religion, for their religion

was the same, nor the plea of interest, for it is the interest of the inhabitants of the same land to live in peace and harmony. At last, it compassed, by playing on the passions, what it could not have effected by religion or interest." O'Leary refers to the Glib Act, passed in the twenty-eighth year of the reign of Henry VIII., by which Irish noblemen, whether of English or Norman descent, were to forfeit the privileges of their original country if they did not shave the upper lip. Thus, those warlike fools renewed their bloody contests "for the splitting of a hair!" "And I,” says O'Leary, "consider such of the Protestants and Catholics of Ireland full as great fanatics and fools as the former, if their creed be the cause of their quarrel; not that I am such a latitudinarian as to believe all religions alike. But true religion, instead of inspiring rancour and hatred, commands us to love and pity those who are in error.

"The fleecy beard and the glib or smooth lip were both forgotten a few years after the Reformation, in the appellation of Protestant and Papist: and thus the same sanguinary system has been continued, with few interruptions, for too long a time, to the destruction of a kingdom, which, from its happy situation, the commodiousness of its harbours, the temperature of its climate, the fertility of its soil, the manly and generous disposition of its inhabitants, would realize whatever poets have feigned concerning Fortunate Islands and Hesperian Gardens. To do away the jealousy which may hereafter operate to the same destructive effect, by playing off the natives against each other, to their mutual provocation and obstruction to the happiness and prosperity of their common country, was the chief motive which influenced my mind in recommending the Union as the only effectual preventive.

"As to the happy effect of the Union, by making the