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people dead, with their mouths all coloured green by eating nettles, docks, and all things they could rend above ground." It would appear that the famine created by lord Clive and the English in India, was nothing so terrible as this.

It is curious to see how the English historians blind themselves upon these subjects. I do not merely speak of writers, such as sir Richard Musgrave, whose absurdities defeat their own purpose. The Irish owe some obligation to the government that pays such historians to write against them. But it is incredible that a Scotch historian, liberal, enlightened, and learned, such as Laing, should not have shaken off such antiquated prejudices; and that he should, at the same time that he accuses, with becoming spirit, the cruelties and massacres committed by the English in his own country, be guilty of the inconsistency of justifying the same crimes when committed upon the Irish. He has drawn a picture of the massacres by the army of O'Neil, with all the glowing colours of a poet, and yet has neither cited time, place, nor person. He has contradicted the most circumstantial, correct, and authentic Irish historians, upon no better authority than certain manuscripts in Trinity College, of all other things the most suspicious, as this university was endowed with the very confiscations that took place. These manuscripts are moreover the same from which Temple derived his information, when he says, "that hundreds of the ghosts of Protestants that were drowned by the rebels at Portnadown-bridge, were seen in the river, bolt upright, and were heard to cry out for revenge on these rebels. One of these ghosts," says he,

was seen with hands lifted up, and standing from the 29th of December to the latter end of the following Lent." A principal deposition was by Maxwell, bishop of Kilmore, whose credit is principally relied on; he has described the different postures and gestures of the ghosts, 66 as sometimes having been seen by day and night, walking upon the river, sometimes bran

dishing their naked swords, sometimes singing psalms, and at other times shrieking in a most fearful and hideous manner." He adds, "that he never so much as heard any man doubt the truth thereof." But he was candid enough to say, "he obliged no man's faith, in regard he saw them not with his own eyes, otherwise he had as much certainty as could morally be required of such matters.'

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One word more, and I shall have wound up the history of the popery code.

In the reign of George I. (A. D. 1723.) heads of a bill were framed for explaining and amending the act to prevent the growth of popery, into which was introduced a clause for the castration of all the Irish priests, and presented on the 15th of November, 1724, to the lord-lieutenant, by the commons at the castle, who most earnestly requested his grace to recommend the same in the most effectual manner to his majesty, humbly hoping, from his majesty's goodness, and his grace's zeal for his service, and the Protestant interest of the kingdom, that the same might be passed into a law.

It was said to have been owing to the interposition of cardinal Fleury, and his interest with Mr. Walpole, that this bill, which was transmitted with such recom mendation to England, was there thrown out. The duke of Grafton (lord-lieutenant) condoled with the Irish parliament upon the loss of their favourite bill, apologized for its rejection upon the ground that it was brought forward too late in the session, and recommended a more vigorous execution of the laws against the growing evil.

I believe you will be now convinced that the history of the universe contains nothing more atrocious than the persecutions of the Irish by the English, nothing more repugnant to civilization, nothing more base or

* Borlase, History of the Irish Rebellion, Ap. fol. 392, Surely Mr. Laing is too wise to believe in ghosts.

more flagitious, nothing more blasphemous or more profane, bidding a bold defiance to every attribute by which the Creator has distinguished the human species from the ravening beasts of prey.

With this remark I shall close my letter. I have snatched from repose and from my daily occupations, the hours devoted to this task. The night is nearly wasted, the historic muse begins to droop her wing, and sleep sits heavy, heavy on her votary's eye-lids. Good night.

LETTER XXXV.

Theobald Wolf Tone-Of my own crimes-Of the crimes of the Irish Rebels-Union of Ireland with England-Irishmen with Irishmen.

FOUR-FIFTHS of the Irish people being now annulled, it can be of little importance what the other fifth may do. Still more absurd do their actions appear when we see them divided into religious and political feuds, scarcely less rancorous against each other than they had all been against the ill-fated Catholics.

The dissenters in their zeal to proscribe their countrymen, had gulped down the sacramental test with the bill of discovery, and found themselves dupes of their own bigotry, and excluded from every honourable privilege, and every office of trust or emolument, civil or military. They found themselves oppressed with tithes for the payment of the Hierarchy; and obliged to contribute out of what remained for the support of their own clergy; they clamoured, they remonstrated, they resisted in vain; they were said to be a stiffnecked faction," whom no king could govern, nor no

God could please." It was said, and I was told by my nurse, that they were black in the mouth; they were ridiculed and reviled, and would probably have been Gurmonded, but that the fear and hatred of the Catholics threw a kind of protection over them. It is not my intention to state all the arts of envy, hatred, and malice, which distinguished these latter times. Whoever wants the history of the succeeding reigns, will find it in the nicknames of the times, Whig, Tory, High Church, Low Church, Highflyer, Leveller, October Club, Church and State, Protestant Ascendancy, and a hundred others, insignificant enough to be forgotten, but ridiculous and mischievous enough to be remembered. The parliament was a market where men sold themselves and their country to servitude, and the commodities by which this slave-trade was carried on, were places, pensions, and peerages; the staple was the people's misery, the tactic only was changed. To confiscations had succeeded taxes, and to violence corruption; and as to religion, there were, besides the great politico-religious sects, so many subdivisions, that it seemed, to use the words of the witty author of Hudibras,

"As if religion was intended

For nothing else but to be mended."

However commerce, printing, and the universal growth of reason and philosophy had opened the way to nobler ideas. The American revolution had reduced the theories of the great philosophers of England, France, and other countries, into practice; and persecutors began to find themselves surprised like owls overtaken by the day. Something I might say of the Irish volunteers, not for their resistance to England, for that was not much; but for this, that they did make some honourable offers of conciliation to their Catholic brethren. I might say much of the unrivalled eloquence of so many Irish orators, but that there was in

every one of them something short of the true patriot, something tending to exclusion or party.

At length, however, a young man appeared, whose clear and comprehensive mind seized, at one view, the whole range of this wild field of disorder and strife, developed the cause, and proposed the remedy for the maladies of his long suffering country.

Theobald Wolfe Tone*

Was born June 20, 1763. His grandfather was a Protestant freeholder in the county of Kildare, his father a coachmaker in Dublin. His infancy gave promise of such talents that the cultivation of his mind was considered the best fortune his parents could bestow.

He studied in the university of Dublin, where he was early and eminently distinguished; in the Historical Society he twice carried off the prize of oratory, once that of history; and the speech he delivered from the chair, when auditor, was deemed the most finished on the records of the society.

During his attendance on the inns of court in London, he had opportunities of comparing the state of the English nation with that of his own, of perceiving all the advantages of a national, and the degradation of a colonial government, and there imbibed that principle which governed him through the remainder of his life, and to which his life was at length a sacrifice.

In the year 1790, on his return from the Temple, he wrote his first pamphlet, under the signature of an Irish Whig, where he thus declared his principles: "I am no occasional Whig, I am no constitutional Tory, I am addicted to no party but the party of the nation."

*See his Autobiography, No. XIX. of this series.

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