wish to avoid; but he must expect reprehension. We should be very happy to lay him quietly on his back, without throwing him into an unseemly posture. When Mr. Locke laid Bishop Stillingflect flat, "without rumpling his lawn," as Mr. Molineux told him, the dispute was a point in metaphysics, concerning personal identity; but in the present contest, the laws, and liberties, and the sacred constitution of England, genuine toleration, the rights of conscience, the lives of the Protestants, truth, historic faith, and God's holy word, are to be maintained, and we must shape the nature of the defence, by that of the attack. If we see the enemy casting up trenches, or erecting batteries, we must make a vigorous sortie, and level his works with the ground; if he cannonade us, we must return his fire; if he proceed by sap, we must counter work him ; if he form a mine, we must go deeper than the enemy, and "blow hìm at the moon;" or if an adventurous champion sball put himself, like Mr. Canning, at the head of the forlorn hope, and endeavour to take our fortress by storm; he must make up his mind to abide by the fortune of war. We confess that we have studied intellectual engineering; but we have not read so far as that chapter, if there be such a chapter, as some would persuade us, which teaches "how to defend a fortress without moving a finger."

After thus accounting for the way in which we have presumed to treat Mr. Canning, who, in the Roman Catholic Question "goes out a common man ;"—we must now beg our readers to advert, once more, to his Speech. In p. 24, he produces (from his favorite classics) what passsed, A. U. C. 433, at the Farcule Caudine. Caius Pontius, as Livy tells us, commanded the Samnites at that fatal place; and the Romans underwent fate as disastrous as that of the English under the command of the Whig General Burgoyne at Saratoga. Pontius was at a loss how to treat his enemies, and he sent a message to Herennius his father, desiring his advice. The old man sent word back, dismiss them inviolate." This counsel did not please his son, who consulted him afresh;--he then advised him to" kill them to a man." Herennius upon this, was brought in person to the army to explain the oracular difficulty of what we marvel Mr. Canning did not call his clashing, conflicting messages (see p. 138). Herennius, on his arrival, told him that was "no third way of proceeding," tertium nullum consilium.-Mr. C. then, but very lamely, endeavours to bring his story to bear on the Roman Catholic Question; and he says, "that we have tried the severe and exterminating counsel in respect to Ireland." This we deny. The Papists have, indeed, exterminated the Protestants in many massacres, and in many rebellions; but the Protestants have never lifted a weapon but in self-defence. The quotation

would have applied better if the Papists had "been put to death to a man ;"-but nothing short of that, can prove that this terrible alternative was ever tried. But after all, we will venture to point out a third way of proceeding; (if we may presume to follow such great men as Herennius P. Herennius F. Livy and Mr. Canning)—which, in fact, is the very mode adopted by the ancient wisdom of our fathers; "hurt not a hair of the Papists' heads, exterminate them not-but put it out of their power to injure the Protestants." Lay them under such restrictions, and restraints, as shall manacle their blood-stained hands, and prevent them from driving out of this world, those whom they hold to be doomed to everlasting destruction in the next. Considering what our ancestors suffered, we cannot wonder at the disabilities under which the Papists groaned. After many years of penance and attrition, (to use one of their own terms), it might reasonably have been expected that contrition might, at last, be produced and thus it became the liberal spirit of a Protestant legislature, and the Christian heart of a Protestant King, to remove a portion of the weight which oppressed them: »

"Nunquam libertas gratior extat

*** Yeti 17 Quam sub rege pio.” ·

But, alas! however indulgent the King and the Parliament have been ;what return have the Papists made to their kindnesses? Shall we be thought to use language too severe, when we answer,—sedition, complottings with the enemies of Great Britain, burning of houses and corn, houghing of cattle, midnight conspiracies, open rebellion, and murder in all its forms? At this present moment, because some slight legal provisions yet restrain the madness of a misguided people; the Papists assume the language of virtuous sufferers, as if their crimes testified by history, and recorded in our courts of justice, were merely ideal; and as if the penal statutes, now repealed, had been originally enacted for no cause. We are given to understand that nothing can save Ireland if the claims of the Romanists be not granted ;-a menace this, which either means, 1. that the Irish Roman Catholics will call to their aid the Corsican Emperor of France, (the edge of whose sword has been rebated by the ice, and his arm paralyzed by the prowess of Russia); or, 2. that they will themselves fly to arms and dissever Ireland from England; or, 3. it means nothing at all -" quarta nulla interpretatio."

We conceive that we have substantially answered Mr. Canning's Speech in what we have already advanced. We disposed of his three principles, Jong ago; we then refuted his two general considerations; and, as all that follows depends on the solidity of his premises, we feel that we have nullified his conclusions.-We shall, therefore, content ourselves with some observations on one or two of the topics introduced into his Speech,

"Hæreticos persequar et expugnabo" is said, he tells us (p. 27), to be still the doctrine of their [the Romish] Church, and to be incorporated in the solemn oath of their espiscopal ordination." Does Mr. Canning mean to call the truth of this in question? He cannot! Nothing is more certain! We might as well sit down to prove that there is a Form of Prayer with Thanksgiving, to be used yearly upon the fifth day of Novem ber, for the happy Deliverance of King James I. and the three Estates of England, from the most traiterous and bloody intended Massacre by Gun powder," inserted by Act of Parliament in our Prayer-Book. Mr. C. only mentions this Oath in order to introduce that which King William and Queen Mary took on becoming King and Queen of Scotland" to root out heretics." Whatever interpretation may be put upon this expression, let us ask what was its moral effect on the consciences of William and Mary? Did they preach a crusade against the Scottish Papists, or against the Deists and Socinians who abounded so much in their days? How many Heretics did they burn? Did they make the glens of the Highlands resound with the shrieks, and echo to the groans of the Papists? or did they act there, the horrors which once desolated the Pays de Vaud ? Stewart of Purdevan seems to justify the severity of the Scottish law against Papists, placing them on a level with the idolaters of Canaan, who were commanded to be put to death by the law of God ;-what then? Did William and Mary root them out with fire and sword? they did not. The similarity between Jack and my Lord Peter has long since been pointed out; but although Calvin consigned Servetus to the flames, what has this to do with "the Oath taken by King William and Queen Mary on becoming King and Queen of Scotland ?" Whether we are to allow King William to swear metaphorically whilst the Romish Bishops are held to the letter (p. 28) we will not say ;-but thus much we affirm, that William's own conscience revolted at the idea of destroying Heretics; that the consciences of the Roman Catholic Prelates are checked in all their natural fuelings by the doctrine of their Church's Infallibility; and that, to this day, they feel themselves bound by the decrees of General Councils. Of what nature some of those Decrees are, and what practical effect they have had on the Church of Rome, regarding those whom that Church calls Heretics, we appeal to the history of ages. Our readers may easily judge for themselves concerning many of those horrible Decrees, by reading the admirable Précis afforded in the Letters of MELANCTHON, which have appeared, and continue to appear in our miscellany. For some instances of the effects produced by these sanguinary ordinances we refer to the paper on the KILKENNY DINNER, in our last Number; and for a full exemplification of their murderous and desolating tendency, we recommend to the perusal of all Protestants, Baron Ma

seres's recent edition of Sir John Temple's "Irish Rebellion, or an History of the Attempts of the Irish Papists to extirpate the Protestants in the Kingdom of Ireland, together with the barbarous Cruelties and bloody Massacres which ensued thereupon ;" and if any man, judging theoretically, and, like Mr. Canning, measuring other men's principles by the humane and benevolent feelings of his own heart, shall imagine that Popery is different in our days from what it was in 1641;-let him read the "select Passages," annexed to Temple's work, taken from "Sir Richard Musgrave's History of the Rebellion in Ireland in the Year 1798; from which it appears that the religious Opinions of the Roman Catholic Inhabitants of that Island, at this Day, continue to be as dangerous and hostile to the Protestant Religion, and to the Safety of their Protestant fellow Subjects as they were in the Year 1641."-Facts put an end to surmises and suppositions. When we see the tendency of Popery to stimulate mankind to persecution, evidenced by the documents contained in the papers and books to which we refer, Mr. Canning's eloquence loses all its power; we regret the delusion under which he labours, and the spell which shackles his mind; but we ourselves escape the fascination so fatal to this victim of error. We are not to be called away from con. templating the atrocities of Papists, by the ingenuity of Mr. Canning, employed in reprobating a Scotch oath administered to King William and his royal consort. We do not "draw conclusions against the Papists from the crimes and cruelties of those who held the same faith two hundred years ago;" (see Mr. C.'s Speech, p. 34)-but from what they did in our own days, and under our own eyes;-the passing gale has hardly yet dis persed the fœtor exhaling from the hot blood of Protestants shed on Wexford Bridge; the ruins of the barn at Scullabogue, wherein the Protestanta were sacrificed to the Moloch of Popery, have hardly ceased to reek. Mr. Canning speaks of "two hundred years"—when that time shall have elapsed, and the Papists shall have learnt in the interval the bland principles of toleration, to which they are strangers (saving that they themselves are benefited by them as they exist in the bosoms of Protestants ;) our posterity may listen to the Canning of those days, whose tropes, figures, flights and fancies will not be flattened and crushed by the overwhelming weight of recent and irresistible facts.

↑ We have long intended reviewing this most interesting work; the Preface to which merits the deep attention of every subject of the United Kingdom, at this crisis.-We cannot bring forward every thing at once. We request our friends to think of this. Öne advises us to notice such a work; another such a one. We thank them cordially for all their hints; but we must not attempt impossibilities. Our limits are contracted➡ sunt certi denique fines."

We marvel much at the space which the pamphlet intituled "An awful Warning, or the Massacre of St. Bartholomew," and the prints with which it is illustrated, and the dedication of that narrative to the memory of Mr. Perceval; occupies in the Speech of Mr. Canning. The feelings of all men were much affected by the lamented death of that great and good man, at the time when the pamphlet was printed; and candour will make some allowance for a little excess of zeal. Mr. C. reprobates the conduct of the publisher of that passage of history, in terms severe enough for that of the perpetrators of the Parisian Massacre. Of the publication in question we knew nothing, till we saw it in print; but we could have helped the editor, whoever he was, to a narrative (if something of a pa rallel was wanted), rather more in point than the assassination of Admiral Coligny, who was but one out of many thousands ;-we mean the trial of Robert Green, Henry Berry, and Lawrence Hill for the murder of SIR EDMUNDBURY GODFREY on the 12th day of October 1677. This worthy Knight was a Protestant magistrate, and, in the discharge of his duty, he had taken some examinations relative to a Popish Plot; and there can be no doubt, but he was murdered by the contrivance of certain Papists, priests, and others. We will not say that Mr. Perceval was murdered at the instigation of the Papists-but most certainly he was a far more formi dable opponent to them, than Sir Edmundbury Godfrey After all, we must say that some things attended Mr. Perceval's death that were of a very singular nature. His murderer made a strange parade about his Prayer Book; yet he does not seem to have been so much accustomed to the use of one, (and it must be recollected that he bought it when he might have borrowed a Prayer Book), as to attend divine service without first finding out the places in it, and doubling down the leaves. There were, most certainly, two men who run out of the lobby of the House of Commons, at the moment when the fatal pistol was fired, that have never been identified or accounted for.-If the trial of Sir E. Godfrey had been reprinted, and dedicated to the memory of Mr. Perceval, Mr. Canning would have had a fairer excuse for indulging in the indignant philippie which he uttered on the 22d of June last.

Before these pages shall be published, we trust that the wisdom of the legislature will have determined the question for the present. We trust that for this year at least, the Protestant constitution of this realm may be permitted to continue: unimpaired by the industrious machinations of its enemies. We are assured, on good authority, that the Protestant cause has gained, by the general, election, a.considerable accession of strength, and we hope that the voice of the country will be duly attended to;→→which voice speaks, loudly and firmly, in direct contradiction to the sentiments of Mr. Canning.