had vanished; the manners, and with few exceptions, the families of the old oligarchy of both races, had become extinct; the surface of society had been every where broken up, and arranged anew upon the English model; and nearly the whole proprietary of the island was now a body of British Protestants, of recent transplantation. At a change so striking, one is prompted to imagine that the power and consequent responsibility of England may be dated at least from this æra; but the impression is weakened by a nearer survey. We can discover, beneath these superficial changes, the original principles of Irish calamity; a titular sovereign; a despotic aristocracy; a population debased, and unfit for freedom if the laws had made them free.

The new race of landlords, English and Scotch adventurers of a revolutionary age, were surcharged with the spirit of the times and countries which had given them birth. Liberty, if not the ruling passion, was at least the prevailing cry, in the greater island, during nearly the whole of the seventeenth century; an undefined liberty, which the peaceful were willing to limit to freedom from oppression, but the bold would interpret into freedom from responsibility. It was only natural that these new men, soldiers of fortune, flushed with victory and pampered with its rewards, should cherish the more licentious signification. The liberty which animated their language and their conduct, was a restless, petulant, and ag

a

gressive spirit; liberty taken with others as well as vindicated for themselves; an impatience of restraint and appetite for power. They professed, indeed, to respect England-as their model, not their mistress: though the country of their birth, it was now a foreign state, whose interference would be an insult to their emulous love of freedom; and in the country of their choice, these fortunate Whigs were exempt from control or competition. On the one side, there was no resident viceroy to offend them by his harmless pageant of monarchy; on the other, the longevity of the colonial parliament, and the necessary restrictions upon all civil franchises, relieved them from annoyances of a more popular nature. Ireland had as yet no public opinion to shame them into circumspection; and the constitutional forms which the crown had prematurely given, were a barrier against English influence, behind which they could pursue their domestic schemes. Thus, the circumstances from which they had risen, and those in which they were placed, combined to give them a mixed character, between the baronial insolence of their predecessors in Ireland, and the levelling intolerance of their more honest cotemporaries, who sowed the seeds of democracy on the farther shore of the Atlantic. Ireland under their government was, in its relations with

a A parliament lasted for the life of the sovereign :—it was proved by the evidence of Dr. Doyle and Mr. O'Connell, before the parliamentary committees, that restrictions were necessary.

England, a separate, jealous, and almost hostile power; in its internal economy, an abortive and anomalous lusus of political nature, partly a close borough and partly a plantation.

The last flight of these adventurers had scarcely alighted upon the soil, when a novel species of patriotism, "a graft," as it is aptly called, "of English faction upon an Irish stock," shot out into a precocious luxuriancy of sedition. In the month of October, 1692, within one year from the surrender of Limerick, the Commons of Ireland rejected a money bill, because it had not originated in their house. Many of the members were the well-paid followers of William; the rest had been the destined victims of the sweeping proscription of his rival; the supply was wanted, probably, to pay off the foreign army whose valour had contributed to raise or to uphold them; yet the omission of a doubtful etiquette was fatal to the application of their patron and deliverer. The celebrated "Case of Ireland," which appeared six years after, led to another and more dangerous controversy between the colony and the mother country. Whatever may have been the merits of these, now fortunately obsolete questions, the daring and obstinate vehemence with which they were maintained by the colonists is abundant proof of the weakness of England. The mass of the population, dissembling their fierce and recently exasperated animo

a By the author of the Memoirs of Captain Rock.

sities, were induced, for their own reasons, to favour the intrigues of their new masters: the murmur of independence gradually swelled into a storm, until, in 1724, the æra of Wood's halfpence, and Swift's greatest popularity, it reached the uproar, if not the dignity of a hurricane. But it was far from the intention of those who had excited the commotion, to brave the perils of independence: they had raised a popular clamour that they might be employed to put it down, and that the minister,

1 After all due credit is given to the factious talents of Swift, it will still remain one of the mysteries of party, that not only Whigs and Jacobites, but Protestants and Roman Catholics, should have joined in the outcry, of which Wood's patent was the ostensible cause. Dr. Curry, sixty years ago, and Mr. Plowden lately, have been very angry with archbishop Boulter for avowing his alarm at this strange coalition. Mr. Hardy is even sentimental in his expressions of regret, "that Protestants and Catholics could not unite in Christian charity" without drawing down the censure of a Christian prelate. Finally, the ingenious author of the Memoirs of Captain Rock, who has too much spirit to indulge in the morbid querulousness of Mr. Hardy, has given to his complaint the bolder tone of patriotism.

"The affair of Wood's halfpence," says that ingenious gentleman, " though magnified at the time into more than its due importance, is interesting even now, as having been the first national cause round which the people of Ireland had ever been induced to rally. What neither Christian charity nor the dictates of sound policy could effect, an influx of brass halfpence brought about at once; and Catholic, Protestant, and Presbyterian, uniting for the first time, opposed themselves to their English governors, and triumphed over them and their halfpence. The danger of such a union, momentary and important as it was, to the precious palladium of the Protestant interest, did not escape the observation of those who, as usual, founded that interest on the eternal disunion and division of the people. Accordingly we find primate Boulter complaining thus in a letter to the duke of Newcastle: "I find that the people of every religion, country and party here, are alike set against Wood's halfpence; and that their agreement in this has had a most unhappy influence on the state

alarmed for his own or the public safety, might acquiesce in that local despotism which they were labouring to establish. The device succeeded. "It required," as we are told by respectable authority, "the superior good sense of Sir Robert Walpole, his conciliating wisdom, and the result of that wisdom, his pacific system, to effect what he did; and it is a plain proof that he well knew, and duly esti

of this nation, by bringing on intimacies between Papists and the Whigs, who before had no correspondence with them."

Three pages before, the dashing biographer had written thus of the penal laws: "The penal code, enacted at this period, will for ever remain a monument of the atrocious perfection, to which the art of torturing his fellow-creatures may be brought by civilized man." It was truly, as Burke calls it, "a machine of wise and elaborate contrivance, and as well fitted for the oppression, impoverishment, and degradation of a people, and the debasement in them of human nature itself, as ever proceeded from the perverted ingenuity of

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man.

These are severe terms: but no language can be too bitter to denounce the refined malignity of the penal system; nor, although its most fiendish characters had been traced long before in the papal canon law, is there any reason to withhold the infamy of originality from our Protestant inquisitors. But the writer might have remembered that these inquisitors were no other than the patriots of the day, the Whig aristocracy of Ireland; that the inhuman measures against the Roman Catholics were their exclusive work; that the English cabinet did all that it dared—all that it could do, unless it went the desperate length of interposing the royal Veto-to prevent their enactment; and that when they passed into law, it studied to repress the punctilious ferocity which insisted upon having "its bond" to the letter. Surely then, there was enough in the coalition to startle any observing man.

This one consideration is so abundantly decisive that it is unnecessary to urge a point which the biographer, in his candour, does not hesitate to admit. "The affair of Wood's halfpence was magnified into more than its due importance:" Ireland confessedly wanted a copper currency, and the fallacy of the objections to Wood's coinage was demonstrated by Sir Isaac, then master of the mint. So much for the merits of our first "national cause," and the collective wisdom of "the people of Ireland."