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Talk not of Wellesley! who that saw his day
Of more than regal pomp, and sovereign sway;
Who that hath marked him in his time of pride,
Of hosts the leader, and of realms the guide;
When the crushed Nabobs shuddered at his name,
And millions bowed before him as he came ·
The source of power, the organ of the laws,
The mark at once for envy and applause-
Who that hath viewed him in his past career
Of hard-earned fame, could recognise him here;
Changed, as he is, in lengthened life's descent,
To a mere instrument's mere instrument—'
Begirt with bigots, and beset with fools,
Crippled by Canning's fears, and Eldon's rules;
Sent out to govern, in his sovereign's name,

Yet clogged with those that thwart each liberal aim;

A mournful mark of talent misapplied—

A handcuffed leader, and a hoodwinked guide;
The lone opposer of a lawless band—

The fettered chieftain of a fettered land!”

Mr. Plunkett was then Attorney-General, and received a considerable share of antithetical couplets, but the portrait was not so finished as Lord Wellesley's. After an enumeration of various evils, the author thus continues:

"To thee all trivial must these sounds appear,

But circumstances make them mighty here;

For thee these names small interest must possess,

And every hour must make that interest less;

These names-these sounds are trifling true! but still
We find them potent in produciug ill.

The Guilds still teach old bigotry to thrive,

And Corporations yet keep theft alive;

Of base-born scoundrels Lodges form the care,
While titled ruffians to the Clubs repair.
Of tithes, perchance, 'tis childish to complain,
Since practice proves that still we growl in vain.
And the law shews, though reason may deride,
That mother Church hath wisdom on her side-
That to her laws with liberal hand is given
The tenth of earth- and what they please in heaven

The right to that and this is fixed and clear,

And blood must flow to make us own it here."

Mr. Furlong committed, however, one fault, which greatly deteriorated from his sagacity. He confounded the exertions of the Catholic leaders with the actions of those who were the decided enemies of freedom, and subjected them to a qualified censure amongst the political plagues of Ireland. No excuse can be offered for the ridicule which he directed upon Mr. O'Connell's services: it was senseless criticism to object to the unvarying nature of his public orations, when the theme was necessarily confined to one subject. He versified some of Mr. O'Connell's favourite allusions in the following style, which, although, meant to convey a different impression, now wears all the strength of truth and reality

"Of Ireland's wrongs have all the clap-trap given—
That blot of earth-that master-work of heaven,-
Of God the favourite, but of man the spoil,
The poorest people, and the richest soil;
Her bays, her harbours, and her inlets made
To fix her first in empire, and in trade;
Her wealth still bent to deck a rival's pride,
Her rich resources wasted far and wide,

Even like fountain from a mountain side."

After some very severe sentences upon the demerits of some of the Catholic leaders, the author thus concludes

"But what of this ?-a careless one may sneer,
And blarney there, and bull and blunder here,
The men are public, and the ground they take
Is one that sneers or snarling cannot shake;
They stand for nature's right—in freedom's cause
And even though failing, they deserve applause :
Let them proceed, nor heed the knave who cries—
Keep booing, crawling, cringing, and be wise.
Nay, while to crush them faction seems agreed,
To be quite calm would shew them slaves indeed.
Nor let the mere monopolist grow sore
When truths are told that were not told before;
Let him not cast to Heaven his loyal eyes,
Start at plain words, or feign a strange surprise;

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Let him not blame the lingering law's delay,
Nor dream that wild sedition rules the day;
He hears the meetings vote, the rabble roar-
They tease him, and they yet shall tease him more.
He hears the warning call, the firm request,

And hugs the loaves and fishes to his breast.
The fees, the pickings, that he dared to claim,
Are they to spread ? can Papists have the same?
The freedom, too, of which he stood sole heir,

Must this extend-must mean ones touch him there?
Aye, let them hear-not all the grinding laws,
Not all the tricks that prop a rotten cause;

Not the blind bigot's threat-the placeman's frown,
Not these shall keep the sturdy medlers down;
One wide wild scene of strife the soil shall be,
'Till justice holds the scales, and all are free."

It may be supposed, from the levity with which their exertions were treated by Mr. Furlong, how little way the members of the Association had as yet made in the general estimation of the community, when even he, with all his intellectual superiority was induced to notice them almost only for the purpose of mocking their intentions. It furnishes an additional instance of the disposition that too often induces people gifted with talent, either to preserve a sceptic indifference in political affairs, or to engage themselves in them merely for the purpose of depreciating the services of other men, who may be actuated by the purest and noblest motives. Many a race of mankind has been held in subjugation, with the seeming acquiescence of those who were fitted by nature to liberate them, but who shrunk from the attempt, deterred by the suspicions or the ingratitude they were to encounter. progress of every political cause, from its origin to its triumph, is somewhat similar to the career of individual fortune. The world is influenced by the importance, and not by the justice of the claims that may belong to either, and Mr. O'Connell, begirt with eight or ten associators assembled in Capel-street, laboured not in less comparative obscurity than the neglected Martin, while embodying his inspired design of " Belshazzar's Feast," in the solitude of his garret studio

The

In regard to the private character of Mr. O'Connell, it is

only to be caught up, as it were, by glimpses, which exhibit themselves under the most peculiar circmstances, when he falls accidentally into association with men who are strangers to him, and where the real man shoots forth, as if almost against his will, and startling the observer with those flashes, which are the certain characteristics of the presence of a superior genius. The following may be adduced as a specimen :

While on a tour through the south of Ireland, in the autumn of the year 1824, I rested one night in a small town in the county of Cork. As I arrived at a late hour, I received accommodation with some difficulty at the only decent hotel the place boasted. Hunger is proverbially good sauce for hard fare, and fatigue is content to sleep without a bed of down; so I placidly betook myself to repose, without inquiry as to the cause of such unexpected annoyance. I was startled, however, at an early hour in the morning by the reveille and beat to arms of the bugles and drums of a detachment of military which had been quartered in the town the preceding night, on their march to embark for a foreign station, and I soon found that the officers in command had forestalled me in mine inn.

I am Radical enough to detest a standing army, as a great source of evil to the British empire, as the chief agent in retarding the liberties of our people, and the improvement of our institutions, and as the brutal though gaudy badge of lingering barbarism among the nations assuming to be civilized. I confess, however, that I look with interest upon military movements; I feel excited by "the pride, pomp, and circumstance of glorious war," and though a citizen, I have deemed it useful to study something of the science of tactics, as becomes every citizen who dares to strike for the freedom of his country, if tyranny should provoke the blow. I will not say that conquest is always as "easy as lying," but I can assure my countrymen that there is no great mystery in the art of slaughter, where firm hearts animate strong arms.

Independent of speculations like these, however I consider military discipline a subject of curious and instructive study.

It presents a faithful picture of what despotism desires to effect on the large scale: and alas! of what it can accomplish. It presents the lowly ranks of mankind-the thews and sinews, and bulwarks of the state, in an aspect that dare not know itself, were not the mind also humiliated and degraded by the very system that enthrals the body. A badge assumed-a few impious words spoken, and the citizen ceases to be a freeman, that he may become the butcher of mankind, and the scourge of his fellow-countrymen. The precepts of religion and the kindly virtues of our nature must no longer be his law;-humanity in him becomes a crime; the endearments of home must perish within his memory, and the felon lash, inflicted with a frightful rigour, unknown even to the brute, is the reply to a single aspiration for freedom of the soul his God made free. I marvel, therefore, and I mourn, at the thing man may become, when he surrenders the right of thinking and acting for himself, and I find the nation but as the man, in the hands of the despot. The gradations of ranks in a regiment but exemplifies how lowly worth may be abased, and lordly vice pampered-how the fortunate fool may trample on the hero; it presents, in short, a panoramic view of the evil principle that still pervades our social system.

Still, notwithstanding the demoralization inherent in such slavery, and the special incentives to it supplied by the habits of military life, at the present day, in the British service, the better genius of man prevails, and sometimes solicits our esteem. The generous, warm-hearted youth does not always degenerate into the reckless, jovial veteran, nor does manly frankness merge into insolent familiarity. I have seen kindliness, modest chivalry, honest courtesy, and candour, as natural, fresh, and active, in the survivor of fifty well-fought fields, as in the unscarred gallant "seeking for glory, even in the cannon's mouth." But independent of higher attributes, the old soldier is proverbially prudent and careful of all that is his. A conventional code of rude virtues, after their kind, governs their conduct towards each other, modified, of course in its observance according to individual character. On no

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