ascend. It is equally clear that in the faculty of endurance the Saxon is much inferior to the Celt. The bold Briton damns his own eyes, and those of every one else, whenever he is obliged to take an occasional meal in which potatoes are substituted for bread. The poor Hibernian would consider himself as happy as a prince if he had only potatoes enough all the days of his life. If the people of England were for only one day to be reduced to the condition in which the population of Ireland have existed for centuries, every institution connected with the preservation of private property in this country would be annihilated within four-and-twenty hours. When the English peasantry burn the corn of a whole district for the purpose of punishing or preventing a reduction of the parish allowance, we can easily infer what consequences would result from the existence for even a day of such a state of affairs as that to which we have alluded. Yet persons who have had these matters at their doors, and before their eyes, are astonished at hearing that the Irish peasantry unite occasionally for the commission of outrages, where their very lives and those of their families are at stake, and where, if they continue passive and pacific, they must perish of hunger. The preceding topics were discussed by us under the head of the "Causes which produce the Outrages which occasionally exist in Ireland;" and as a subsidiary and collateral argument, we showed that those outrages were scarcely ever in the smallest degree excited by any feeling of a religious or political nature, and that the sole object of them was to prevent the persons committing them from being themselves overwhelmed by the ruin which continually impended over them from the hands of the landlords. The evidence which we have already brought forward upon this point was as complete as it has been upon every other part of the case. Yet although, to use the words of Mr. Lewis*, "the absence of all religious hostility in the outrages committed by the Whiteboys is established by the most unvarying and unimpeachable testimony;" still, as the people of this country are continually imposed upon by the grossest falsehoods upon the subject, and as the establishment of the truth upon a basis altogether unassailable has a tendency to enlarge the goodwill which we most vehemently desire to conciliate in the bosoms of the English people towards the unfortunate population of Ireland, and as, moreover, the topic is itself of the greatest importance, we shall be excused for subjoining the following additional testimony upon the point. It is unnecessary to say any thing of the witnesses. Their names alone are a sufficient introduction; and their evidence will prove, beyond controversy, the truth of the position laid down by Mr. George Lewis, "that Whiteboyism is utterly unconnected with religion, and that it may exist under any religión, or under no religion at all.” † Mr. Griffith having stated that the gentry in a part of the county of Cork were obliged to barricade their doors at night in the disturbances of 1822, says that the "Catholics were obliged to do so just as much as the Protestants." Mr. Baron Foster says, that "the consideration of religion does not enter at all into the relation between landlord and tenant."§ The same learned judge elsewhere says, that "religious animosities are and have always been less common in the disturbed districts than in other parts of Ireland."|| Robert Cassidy, Esq., justice of peace, says, "that the disturbances had decidedly nothing of a religious character mixed up with them."¶ Mr. Francis Blackburn, late Attorney-General, says, "that * P. 170. House of Commons, 1824, p. 232. || Lewis, p. 125. Lewis, p. 335. resistance made to landlords who wanted to dispossess their tenants was not AT ALL influenced by the religion of the landlord."* Mr. Justice Day, a judge of the Queen's Bench for twenty-one years, states "that the recent disturbances in Ireland have not had any thing to do with religion." The real causes he states to be poverty, want of employment, the absence of the landlords, and the unconscionable rents exacted from the peasantry." The Rev. Mortimer O'Sullivan says, in his evidence before the House of Commons in 1825, "that the disturbances commenced in the struggles of poverty, and that of course it was principally a war against property.” ‡ Mr. Justin McCarthy, J. P., a magistrate residing in the county of Cork, says, "that almost all the attacks were made UPON ROMAN CATHOLICS." § M. Singleton, Esq., chief magistrate of police, says |, "there is no discrimination with respect to persons attacked about land. In the county of Galway the majority of attacks must have been made UPON THE ROMAN CATHOLICS." Major Warburton says,** "The greater part of the property in the county of Galway is in the hands of Roman Catholic gentlemen; and I have understood that the disturbances in Galway were very much put down by the exertions of the Roman Catholic gentlemen, as much as of the Protestants." The witness might probably have added with perfect propriety, that the disturbances were caused as much by the conduct of the Catholic as of the Protestant landlords. That such was the case at a remoter period is a fact which rests upon the highest authority. Mr. Wyse, in his eloquent and philosophical History of the Catholic Association, says, that "Mr. O'Connor, the historian, frequently complains in terms of just bitterness of the more than Protestant severity of the Catholic landholders; and that the thunders of the episcopacy, and the exhortations of the lower clergy, during the insurrection of Munster, fell idly upon the affections and fears of the infuriated peasantry ++," who doubtless were of opinion that starvation, expatriation, and execution were not rendered at all more palatable for being administered by the hands of a member of the same religion as the victims themselves. Major Willcocks, chief magistrate of police, says ‡‡, "The great mass of the population of the parts that I am intimately acquainted with is Catholic, and of course the outrages are committed by a greater proportion of that persuasion than of the others; but I never heard of any religious distinction among the peasantry." §§ Major Powell, inspector of police for the province of Leinster, says, "that in his experience the outrages were directed EXCLUSIVELY AGAINST THE CATHOLICS, as there were scarcely any Protestants, except of the higher classes, in the part of the country to which he referred.” 66 Religion," says Judge Day, "is totally out of the case; and the outrages are inflicted with the most perfect impartiality upon Catholics and Protestants." The learned judge observes, that in the south of Ireland (of which he was himself a native, and where all his connections principally resided) the Protestants amongst the humbler classes are scarcely one in a hundred."¶¶. ⚫ Lewis, p. 126. † Ib. p. 126. Ib. p. 127. [We recommend this statement to the particular attention of those who have been in the habit of hearing the speeches of the Rev. gentleman upon the same subject at Exeter Hall and elsewhere.] § House of Lords, 1824, p. 207. House of Commons, 1832. No. 4118-19. Lewis, 131. ** House of Commons, 1824, p. 136. tt Vol. i. p. 89. #House of Lords, 1824, p. 56. §§ Lewis, 128. |||| Evid. House of Lords, 1924. Lewis, 131. ¶¶ Although this statement was made before the taking of the general census, yet the learned judge made a very close approximation to the actual proportions. The dioceses of Ossory, Cashel, and Emly include the most disturbed part of Ireland; viz. the county of Kilkenny, the southern part of Tipperary, and the south-eastern part of the county of Limerick. In the first of these (according to the report of the Commissioners of Public Instruction) the Roman Catholics are above 94 per cent., in the second above 96 per cent., and in the third above 98 per cent. of the population. Lewis, 125. To the same effect is the testimony of Major Warburton; Mr. Serjeant Loyd, who was a judge under the Insurrection Act; Colonel Rochfort; Captain Despard, magistrate; Mr. Barrington; and other witnesses, whose testimony is to be found in Mr. Lewis's book, from page 132 to 138. It is rather singular, however, that some of the witnesses, in slight opposition to the general tenor of the evidence, depose to the existence of some degree of "partiality" upon this subject. The partiality, however, operates in a direction which will probably surprise the English reader. Thus Mr. Cahill (sessional crown prosecutor for Tipperary) says, "that there is not the slightest degree of a religious character about the outrages, except that the Protestants in Tipperary are spared a good deal more than the Catholics." "" # Mr. John Bray says, "They visit the houses of the Protestants to take arms; but the Catholics are more exposed to personal outrage. Supposing a Protestant farmer (where such exist) and a Roman Catholic to violate the laws of Captain Rock, the Catholic is more likely to be punished than the Protestant." + It may surprise some English readers to hear that even the Roman Catholic priests themselves have been frequently the objects of agrarian outrage; but the following evidence will leave no doubt of the fact. Major Willcocks states, "that the Catholic peasantry, believing the fees demanded by their own priests to be too large, inflicted the horrible torture of carding upon all who complied with the exactions of the clergy." ‡ Lord Chief Justice Burke, in his charge to the grand jury at the special commission in Maryborough in 1832, classes the dues of the priest with the tithes of the parson as objects of the hostility of the insurgents. Dr. Kelly, the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Tuam, states, that the demands of the Catholic clergy were one of the grounds of complaint made by the insurgents of 1820 in Galway and Mayo. The same prelate, in a letter which was inserted in The Times of the 19th of August, in the year 1840, describes, in the following words, the condition of the peasantry as they appeared at his visitation about the period of the disturbances :- "I never, in the course of my long experience, witnessed more nakedness and poverty. Numbers of able-bodied youths and married men came to receive the consolations of religion barefooted and barelegged, and in many —many instances the people of a village who attended the first day lent the TOP COAT, ALMOST THE ONLY GARMENT THEY WORE, to their neighbours, that they might come to us on the day following. It is impossible to expect that any inculcation of religion, or of the rules of morality, will teach the poor people to submit quietly to such privations as they now endure. The oath of the Thrashers contained an undertaking that the party swearing should not pay more than certain limited fees to his own priest." || Dr. Murray, Roman Catholic Archbishop of Dublin, says, that the insurrection in the south and west had been frequently directed against_the demands of the priests, as well as against the payment of tithe. The Rev. Mr. O'Connor states¶, that the Whitefeet had more hostility to the Catholics than to the Protestants, and had frequently threatened their own priests for denouncing their outrages. The threats had been on the increase. If these statements should meet the eyes of any of the honest portion of the Exeter Hall assemblages, they will be able to estimate very accurately the veracity of the orators who figured upon those occasions, who attributed all the evils of Ireland to the diffusion of Popery, -who perpetually declared * House of Commons, 1832. No. 7441-44. † Ib. No. 3501-2. Ib. 1824, p. 118. Lewis, p. 164. VOL. VI. Evid. House of Commons, 1825, p. 259, 260. that the outrages which are committed in that country are almost exclusively committed upon the instigation of the priests, and that the real and sole object of those violations of law and tranquillity is the extermination of the Protestant portion of the population. Indeed it is quite notorious, in Ireland at least, that the objects of some of the most remarkable outrages that have been ever committed in that country were all Catholics. Such were Mr. O'Keefe of Mountain Lodge, and Mr. O'Keefe of Thurles; the latter of whom was a Precursor, and the representative of that society in the district where he lived. Mr. Theodore O'Ryan, a justice of the peace, who was shot at some time ago in the county of Limerick, was a Roman Catholic. The celebrated murder of the Franks family is accounted for by the Earl of Kingston in the following manner. He says, that the young man had, by his testimony, procured the conviction and transportation of a person whom the whole county believed afterwards to be innocent; that he, Mr. Franks, had also been extremely oppressive to his tenants and undertenants, exacting the rent from them, and as heavy a rent as he could, as soon as it was due, but never by any chance paying his own. There was a conspiracy against him, and he was murdered.* The following extract will throw some additional light upon this case. "I have frequently," says Mr. Wakefield+, "seen the cattle of the occupying tenant driven to pound by the head landlord, and sold by auction for rent which the tenant had actually paid to the middleman, who had failed to pay it to the head landlord. The numerous instances of distress occasioned by this severity, which every one who has resided for any time in Ireland must have witnessed, are truly deplorable; and I believe them to be one of the chief causes of those frequent risings of the people, under various denominations, which at different times have disturbed the tranquillity of the country, and been attended with atrocities shocking to humanity and disgraceful to the empire." Mr. Marum was brother to the Catholic Bishop of Ossory. The circumstances connected with his murder will be found in the evidence taken before the House of Commons in 1832. "An ejectment had been brought by a noble lord against a middleman, and a habere issued, possession taken, and the land relet, not to the tenants in possession, but to Mr. Marum, who was another middleman- the usual method of proceeding being to relet to the occupying tenants for the six months during which what is called the equity of redemption existed. Mr. Marum deluded the tenants with a hope that he took the land for their benefit; but when the six months expired he turned those tenants out, and sold their household goods for the six months' rent. He was afterward shot, in the open day, in the middle of a dense population." It is stated in the same place, that he had always been a great land-jobber, taking land from whence other persons had been expelled. His being a Roman Catholic, and the brother of a Catholic bishop, availed him little in such circumstances as a protection against the fury of the populace. Indeed, in reference to the future consequences of the present state of Ireland, we venture to say to the English people in the language addressed by Lord Chesterfield ‡, when lord-lieutenant of Ireland, to Mr. Prior, "Be as much upon your guard against poverty as against popery. Take my word for it, that you are in more danger from the former than the latter." Indeed, this freedom from religious, and even political admixture, has been a quality of all the outrages committed since the year 1760; excepting, of course, the rebellions of 1798 and 1803; the heads and projectors of which were, however, not Catholics at all. The great Lord Charlemont, in speaking of the disturbances of 1761, makes use * House of Lords, 1825, p. 453. † Vol. i. p. 244. Mis. Works, vol. ii. p. 542. of language which in general expresses very accurately the nature of all the disturbances which have happened since that time. "As the insurgents were all of the Catholic religion, an almost universal idea was_entertained among the more zealous Protestants, and encouraged by interested men, that French gold and French intrigue were at the bottom of this insurrection: the real causes were, indeed, not difficult to be ascertained. Exorbitant rents; low wages; want of employment in a country destitute of manufactures, where desolation and famine were the effects of fertility; where the rich gifts of a bountiful mother were destructive to her children, and served only to tantalize them; where oxen supplied the place of men, and by leaving little room for cultivation, while they enriched their pampered owners, starved the miserable remnant of thinly scattered inhabitants: farms of enormous extent, let by their rapacious and indolent proprietors to monopolising land-jobbers, by whom small portions of them were again let and relet to intermediate oppressors, and by them subdivided for five times their value among the wretched starvers upon potatoes and water: taxes yearly increasing, and tithes which the Catholic, without any possible benefit, unwillingly pays in addition to his priest-money – misery, oppression, and famine! These were undoubtedly the FIRST and ORIGINAL CAUSES, obvious to the slightest inspection, though resolutely denied, and every public investigation into them IMPUDENTLY FRUSTRATED by those whose sordid interest opposed their removal."* After the masses of evidence which we have already adduced as to the real causes of Irish disturbances, we should consider that we only insulted the common sense of the reader by gravely constructing a formal argument in answer to the theory of Lord Powerscourt that assaults are a mere appendage to agitation, that outrages originate in oratory, and that riot is. the result of rhetoric alone. It would be just as rational, and rather more amusing, to say that the weathercock is the cause of the wind; or to allege, in the language of an Hibernian act of parliament, that the idleness of the labourers was the consequence of the extent to which they trafficked in the purchase of horses! + A SCENE FROM CALDERON. By far the most beautiful and poetical specimen of the Spanish theatre is the religious drama El Magico Prodigioso. This prodigious magician, who is no other than the Devil, forms the hero of the play as much as the nominal hero St. Cyprian of Antioch, whom it is intended to honour. This drama is the one upon which Goëthe founded his Faust. It is curious how exactly similar are the incidents. The originals of Faust, which certain of our contemporaries have vainly sought, might be comprised in this one poem, which is not much inferior in poetical merit and picturesque details to the German masterpiece any more than in grace and beauty. It opens with a very impressive colloquy between Cyprian and his arch foe upon a mountain near Antioch, of which we regret our limits will not allow us insertion. An analysis of the plot of the piece-of the theological disputes of the Saint and Dæmon, the strange catastrophe of the martyrdom of the hero and heroine, and their subsequent glorification-would prevent us from fulfilling our intention of presenting a specimen of the poem in the forms of the original; which we now attempt, choosing as the best scene that of Cyprian and Justina's temptation. An open Gallery,—in the Background a mountainous Landscape. Enter the DEMON and CYPRIAN. Dam. Since I cross'd thy threshold here In thy countenance appear. * Hardy's Life of Charlemont, vol. i. 171. 8vo. ed. † 3 & 4 Phil. & M. ch. 5, |