I hate a papist from my heart,

Worse than the Devil, or Bonaparte.

AUTHOR.

Why, you are warm: in Mary's* days,

When oft was seen the human blaze;

imagine that they had been the patient and uncomplaining sufferers from the reign of William till George the Third; that they had borne this long and cruel test of loyal resignation; that they had been deprived of property, of arms, of every legal and honourable right.

Parnell's Hist. Apology for the Catholics, p. 180. Ed. 3.

* Yet even the reproach, which is thrown on these days of persecution, will not apply to the Catholics of Ireland.

"A striking proof," says Mr. Parnell, that the Irish Roman Catholics in Queen Mary's reign, were very little infected with religious bigotry, may be drawn from

Or in priest-ridden Stuart's time,

Fruitful in every sort of crime,

their conduct towards the Protestants, when the Protestants were at their mercy.

"Were we to argue from the representations of the indelible character of the Catholic religion, as pourtrayed by its adversaries, we should have expected that the Irish Catholics would have exercised every kind of persecution which the double motives of zeal and retaliation could suggest. The Catholic laity, in all the impunity of triumphant bigotry, hunting the wretched Heretics from their hiding places-the Catholic clergy pouring out the libation of human blood at the shrine of the God of Mercy, and acting before High Heaven those scenes which make the angels weep!

66 But, on the contrary. Though the religious feelings of the Irish Catholics, and their feelings as men, had been treated with very little ceremony during the two pre ceding reigns; they made a wise and moderate use of their ascendancy. They entertained no resentment for the past; they laid no plans for future domination.

There had been reason for your hate,

But now your passion's out of date.

"Even Leland allows that the only instance of popish zeal, was annulling grants which Archbishop Brown had made, to the injury of the See of Dublin; and certainly this step was full as agreeable to the rules of law and equity, as to popish zeal.

"The assertors of the reformation during the preceding reigns were every way unmolested, or as the Protestant historian chooses to term it, were allowed to sink into obscurity and neglect.

"Such was the general spirit of toleration that many English families, friends to the reformation, took refuge in Ireland, and there enjoyed their opinions and worship without molestation.

"The Irish Protestants, vexed that they could not prove a single instance of bigotry against the Catholics, in this their hour of trial, invented a tale, as palpably false as it is childish, of an intended persecution, (but a persecution by the English government, not by the IRISH CATHOLICS) and so much does bigotry pervert all

We fly the lion's ravenous maw,

But what's the skin, when stuff'd with straw?

candour and taste, that even the Earl of Cork, Archbishop Usher, and in latter times, Dr. Leland, were not ashamed to support the silly story of Dean Cole and the Knave of Clubs.

"How ought those perverse and superficial men to blush, who have said that the Irish Roman Catholics must be bigots and rebels, from the very nature of their religion, and who have advanced this falsehood in the very teeth of fact, and contrary to the most distinct evidence of history.

"The Irish Roman Catholics bigots! The Irish Roman Catholics are the only sect that ever resumed power, without exercising vengeance.

"Shew a brighter instance, if you can, in the whole page of history. Was this the conduct of Knox or Calvin, or of the brutal council of Edward VI. who shed tears Has this been the as he signed its bloody warrants?

conduct of the Irish Protestants?

'Tis childhood's timid eye alone

That fears a painted Bloody-bone.

"Had the Irish Roman Catholics, when they gained the ascendancy, debarred you of the rights of property, of the benefits of education, of the enjoyment of social worship, of the security of your domestic peace, of all that makes life grateful, by making it respectable ? O! how would you not have bewailed your unmerited suffer. ings-how would you not have adjured the detestation of God and man on such monstrous oppression!

"How strangely does bigotry cramp the heart and understanding! Who could have thought that so obvious and splendid a proof of the original virtues of the Irish Roman Catholics as this, should have been slurred over, and almost effaced by the wilful blindness of Protestant writers!

"So natural is it that lions should be always repre

sented as vanquished, when men are the painters."

Parnell's Hist. Apology, p. 42.