MEMOIRS OF CAPTAIN ROCK. BOOK THE SECOND. CHAPTER I. Birth of Captain Rock.—Some Account of his Father.— Penal Laws.-Enactments with respect to Property.Beggary of the Rock Family.-Levellers.-White-boys. -Christening of the Captain.-Brought up to the Tithe Line.-Remarkable Prophecy. I was born in - in the province of Munster, about the beginning of the year 1763. My father, though the head and representative of our ancient family, had been for a great part of his life as quiet and suffering a Papist as the Protestant Ascendancy could, in its most fastidious moments, require. Even the Scotch rebellion of 1745 appealed in vain to his hereditary sympathies; nor could all the pains taken by the government on that and other occasions, to persuade him and his family that they were notorious rebels, produce any overt-act that at all resembled such a propensity. One of the counsellors of the crown, in the year 1743, when there was an alarm of a French invasion, went so far as to suggest, that as the Papists one hundred years before had begun a massacre on the Protestants, the Protestants ought now to return the compliment, by falling in the same unceremonious manner upon the Papists. But even this hint was lost upon my imperturbable father. Not only he, but four-fifths of his countrymen seemed sunk into such a close resemblance of beasts of burthen, as might have gone far to satisfy that doubter mentioned by Bolingbroke, who said "he never could believe that slavery was of divine institution, till he beheld subjects born with bunches on their backs like camels, and kings with combs upon their heads like cocks." Whether the Papists of that period had bunches on their backs, is not ascertained-but that they were treated as if they had, is agreed on all sides. An event, however, happened a few years before I came into the world, which at length roused all the family spirit in my father, and drove him to take that station in the affairs of Ireland, which the House of Rock seems destined, at all times, to assume. As property and education are the best securities again discontent and violence, the Government, |