fortunes of Charles sacrificed to his old and inveterate enemies; and those acts of parliament, which completed the settlement of Ireland, are at the present day the foundation of the titles to the great majority of landed property in this country.

So enormous was the injustice which was now done by the English monarch against the poor people of Ireland, that we find the compassion of Louis XIV. was excited by the bitterness of Irish lamentation. He wrote the King of England a letter, in which he remonstrates with his unprincipled abandonment of his best and sincerest friends, and calls upon him to imitate that toleration which Louis himself then allowed to his subjects of the reformed religion. Such interposition, however important, was in vain; the king had taken his measures, and indolence, if not vice, would not suffer him to retrace his steps. As yet, we have for the most part confined ourselves to those authorities in favour of Ireland, whose impartiality will not be suspected. Lord Clarendon, Carte, Hume, Leland, and the accurate Dr Curry, have borne testimony to the infamy of the act of settlement, to its unparalleled cruelty and injustice. Time, however, has given to that proceeding a stability and a strength which it never could enjoy from its own intrinsic merit; and the catholics of the present day have devoted their industry and their wealth to the purchase of those properties which derive their titles from the foulest record in the history of any legislature. They are therefore

deeply interested in the permanency of that settlement which their ancestors most naturally would have struggled to overturn. The encouragement which has been given, for some years back, under a more wise and generous policy, to the numerous population of Ireland, has caused a great revolution in property. The Irish catholics of the present day can boast of extensive landed proprietors among their body; of rich and powerful merchants; active, skilful, and prosperous manufacturers; every class of human industry, and every department of science, are filled with catholics of great and prominent celebrity. Catholic wealth is daily accumulating, and the various sects of Ireland are rapidly becoming one people, by the powerful operation of mutual interest, as well as mutual charity.

The infamy of Charles is lost in the consideration that all his successors have not imitated his example; and though the devoted people of Ireland were again doomed to experience the lash of persecution under the hand which deposed the house of Stuart; yet a better order of things has risen up during the last thirty years; and some compensation, though not half what is due, has been made to the Roman catholics of Ireland, for the unmerited sufferings of their ancestors. One of the ablest men, perhaps the very ablest man, to whom Ireland ever gave birth, has vindicated the character of the Irish catholics against the ignorant calumnies of English usurpation and prejudice. Dean Swift, whose orthodoxy the established church will

not refuse to acknowledge, thus gives his opinion of the merits of the catholics and of their enemies, after the passing of the act of settlement.

"These insurrections, wherewith the catholics are charged, from the beginning of the seventeenth century to the great English rebellion, were occasioned by many oppressions they lay under. They had no intention to introduce a new religion, but to enjoy the liberty of preserving the old; the very same which their ancestors professed from the time that christianity was first introduced into this island, which was by catholics; but whether mingled with corruptions, as some pretend, doth not belong to the question. They had no design to change the government; they never attempted to fight against, to imprison, to betray, to sell, to bring to a trial, or to murder, their king. The schismatics acted by a spirit directly contrary. They united in a solemn league and covenant to alter the whole system of spiritual government, established in all christian nations and of apostolic institution, concluding the tragedy with the murder of the king in cold blood, and upon mature deliberation, at the same time changing the monarchy into a commonwealth. The catholics of Ireland, in the great rebellion, lost their estates for fighting in defence of their king; the schismatics, who cut off the father's head, forced the son to fly for life, and overturned the whole ancient frame of government, religious and civil, obtained grants of those very estates which the catholics lost in defence of the ancient constitution-many of which estates are at this day

possessed by those schismatics; and thus they gained by their rebellion what the catholics lost by their loyalty." This is a brief and comprehensive picture of the acts and fortunes of both parties; and such a one as will not be denied by any honest or dispassionate reader,

Notwithstanding the palpable cruelty and injustice with which the Irish were treated by Charles in his settlement of the claims of the various parties in Ireland, we find the ascendancy spirit of the Cromwellians most grievously pained by the consideration, that even a single individual case of protection to the innocent Irish or catholic claimant, should be suffered to exist by the commissioners appointed to put the act of settlement into execution. They not only menaced a rebellion, but actually formed a conspiracy to seize the castle of Dublin, overturn the government, and again plunge the nation into blood; so offended was the rapacious sensibility of those adventurers, whose numbers, as compared with the people of Ireland, were, in the opinion of Lord Ormond and Mr Carte, as one to ten. So true is it, that the property is the strength of the country; and that those few who can wield it, may bid defiance to the angry menaces of a disarmed and beggared multitude. Before the rebellion of 1641, the Irish were, (according to a Colonel Lawrence, quoted by Dr Curry,) proprietors of ten acres to one that the English had in Ireland; but after the act of settlement, those English were in possession, by that act, of four millions, five hundred and sixty thousand, and thirty-seven

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acres; so that, (adds my author), if the majority of proprietors may give the denomination to a country, which usually it doth, Ireland' may be called west England. Walsh, the author of the famous remonstrance, says, that they, "the Roman catholics of Ireland, were the lawful proprietors, and had' been lately the possessors, of nineteen parts in twenty of the lands of that kingdom." The act of settlement banished thousands of those families which had lived in affluence and comfort; and the hand which executed it, was that of the king, for whose restoration they had brought their lives, their properties, and their children to the altar. Yet all this royal treason to humanity and justice, could not satisfy or conciliate the Cromwellian adventurers. All or none was their motto; and a feeble experiment was made by those insatiable fanatics to devour even the miserable pittance assigned to the original proprietors of the country. There was a point, however, beyond which Charles could not be driven; and the activity of Ormond in his Irish government soon extinguished the impotent efforts of insurrection.

Whenever the English parliament were inclined to amuse themselves with the torture of their fellow creatures, or to make experiments on human sensibility, Ireland was a convenient subject on which their malicious genius could be displayed, and with the approbation too of the whole English nation. If a royal favourite like Clarendon or Ormond, at this period were to be hunted down, Ireland was the road through which their pursuers were to pass.