portunity, they readily concurred in passing, together with the clauses against the catholics, that mortifying one against themselves." Thus was the presbyterian, in the reign of Queen Anne, sacrificed to his own prejudice against his catholic countrymen; and the liberty of our country voluntarily offered up on the altar of bigotry. For a long time the presbyterian was doomed to smart under his folly. The house of Brunswick, however, has connived at the relaxation of the penalty; and the enlightened spirit of toleration which distinguishes the age we now live in, has given to that connivance all the force of an actual repeal. In vain did the principal catholics of Ireland petition against this infamous violation of the faith of nations. The eloquence of Sir Theobald Butler and Anthony Malone, made their fruitless appeal to the reason and sensibility of the lords and commons of Ireland. Such a tribunal was deaf to the voice of pity, of reason and truth; " and thus, on the 7th March, 1704," says Dr Curry, "the royal assent was given to an act, which, besides its being a violation of national faith, has been hitherto productive of every species of private, as well as public injury, by stripping men of their property for not parting with their integrity; by fining and imprisoning them for conscientious dissent from settled forms of worship, or holding tenets merely spiritual, and totally foreign from any interference with the civil government of the state: so that our courts of justice and equity resembled, in these respects, the Roman tribunal punishing the primitive

Christians, for not disavowing the doctrine of Jesus Christ, and embracing that of human institution.” It is not easily credited by the liberal understanding of the present age, that any assembly of human beings, possessing the light and charity of Christianity, could have been so barbarized by bigotry and avarice, as the lords and commons of Ireland were, in the reign we are now recording; or that man should have sunk so low from the proud characteristic of his nature, as to wreath the laurel around the brow of that wretch, whom mankind have ever devoted to the pillory or the scaffold! It will not be credited, that the Irish legislature should have conferred dignities and honours on the common informer; and that a solemn resolution can now be found on its journals, to the following effect," that the prosecuting and informing against papists, was an honourable service to the government of Ireland." The same rewards that civilized society are in the practice of offering for the appre hension of the most abandoned members of the community, the robber, or the murderer, were, in the Augustan age of Queen Anne, offered by the Irish legislature, for the apprehension of the Roman catholic clergy of Ireland. The price of the archbishop's or the bishop's head was L. 50, and that of the regular and secular clergyman, was estimated so low as L. 20. Thus did the legislature provide for the religion and the morals of Ireland. Yet still the work of desolation was not complete: Irish poor, distinguished as much by the persecution under which they suffered, as by the elastic power

with which their acute and sagacious understandings repelled the struggles of despotism, were found in the ditches and fields of their beloved country, imbibing that instruction which the un conquered courage of their clergy was daily com. municating. The catholic priest was pursued even to this humble refuge. The Irish peasant would be a formidable personage, were he suffered to arm himself in his wilderness, with the terrific weapons which he could draw from the half understood writings of Greece and Rome. The schoolmaster, however humble his acquirements, was deemed a furious enemy to the constitution in church and state, and even him, the guardian genius of Queen Anne's government pursued with all its terrors. A reward, therefore, of L.10, was held out for the discovery and conviction of every catholic schoolmaster, usher, or private tutor.

The calamities which must necessarily flow from such infernal legislation, poured abundantly rapid upon the unfortunate inhabitants of our country. Their task-masters often felt and experienced the recoil of their own barbarous folly, because they robbed the hands which might have enriched themselves. The furious and insatiable spirit of monopoly preferred the government of a desert to that of a happy and contented people; and the constitution in church and state was pronounced secure against its enemies, when the people of Ireland were stripped of every privilege and every right which separates humanity from the brute creation. Mr Matthew O'Connor has summed up the effects

of the ferocious law of Queen Anne, in a strong and comprehensive description, creditable to the sensibility which dictated it, and worthy of the spirit of his ancient and respected family. "The immediate effect of this law," he writes, " was the emigration of vast numbers of the inhabitants, who sought shelter in distant exile, and found a refuge in the armies of the catholic powers of the conti nent. The sentiment of persecution was completed by this act, and never was system attended with more effectual success; private manners were de bauched, public sentiment debased, and every faculty of the mind enervated. The contrast of the sudden and certain acquisition of landed property by the obvious and easy method of discovery, with the slow and uncertain acquirement of wealth by the laborious pursuits of industry, nourished the principle of dishonesty, and a total disregard of shame and infamy. The rewards of conformity cherished the seeds of rebellion in the minds of children against parents, and of distrust in the minds of parents against children. The penalties attached to an open and conscientious discharge of religious duties, fomented dissimulation and hypocrisy. Habits of oppression, and the exercise of lawless power, debased the minds of the upper classes from a love of country, of fame, and glory, to mean servility to the court, and a tame acquiescence in the stern mandates of English supremacy. The loss of rights and property extinguished every spark of patriotism, and infused the spiritless indifference of submissive poverty into the great mass

of the people, who barely existed in their native soil, strangers to its natural blessings, the patient victims of its wrongs, the insensible spectators of its ruin. Here they vegetated on the potatoe root, decayed in the prime of life, destitute of solid nourishment, and sinking to untimely graves; their vigour prematurely exhausted by hard labour, and the spark of life at last extinguished by famine."

It is perhaps as unprofitable to the reader as it is painful to the writer, to read the vile and profligate system of legislation which blackened the reign of Queen Anne in this country; which must excite as much astonishment as sorrow, in the bosom of the philosopher, when he reflects how little the human mind had advanced in the useful and efficient government of mankind; and how strongly the barbarities of Queen Anne's laws, after an interval of seventeen hundred years, resembled the remorseless persecutions of paganism against the mild and charitable religion of Christianity. It is not easy to assign any rational grounds for the devastating laws which were enacted against the catholics of Ireland. The lust of torture, which seems to be the natural offspring of monopoly, is the only incentive which posterity can asssign for the barbarities so long practised against our unoffending countrymen.

Dr Curry has collected the reasons which the despots of Ireland sometimes gave for their perse. cution of the human mind. This able and honest man, whose labours have so powerfully contributed to rescue the millions that are yet unborn, from the