half the landed property of the country, and their Tithes alone are said to have amounted to one fourth of the rents of the whole kingdom. Yet, now, so little scruple has there been in getting rid of this obnoxious burden, that they no longer exist in Scotland, as a contribution of the produce of the land; but, assuming the form of a fixed rent, leave the farmer his whole crop to manage as he likes, and the minister his whole time to devote to works of peace and usefulness-no fear of severance to interrupt the labours of the one, nor any decimal calculations to disturb the devotions of the other.

I have thus hastily but, to myself, satisfactorily exposed, the futility of those claims as well divine as civil, which my Reverend Antagonists set up to an inviolable property in Tithes. I shall, in a future Chapter, lay open some of the machinery of the Tithing system-particularly as brought into operation in Ireland, and as connected with the interests and prosperity of my own family there.

Like a physician, who writes a treatise upon the disease by which he lives, without any fear of losing practice by his exposure of its diagnostics, I shall freely point out all the ravages of this Ecclesiastical malady, without much dread of

being superseded in my manner of treating it, or of being doomed to idleness by any radical removal of the complaint. The perusal of Mr. Haslam's work on Insanity, has never, that I know of, prevented any gentleman, so disposed, from going mad; and I shall not be surprised to hear of Mr. Wetherell, rising from the perusal of this very Chapter of mine, to state gravely in the House of Commons, that "Tithes are a sacred vinculum between the Clergyman and his parishioners, and possess a certain noli me tangere quality about them, which makes it necessary to leave them in statu quo, and go on paying them in sæcula sæculorum."*

A faint imitation of this gentleman's learned style of speaking. May I venture to recommend for his perusal the Diatribe of Bishop Montague on Tithes, where he will find specimens of this tesselated style, almost equalling his own? For instance :-"Scilicet, you are gallinæ filius albæ in your own opinion. But hæc erat illa Helena, good master Selden, not as you mistake the matter."

CHAPTER V.

1763-1778.

Political State of Ireland during the early part of the Captain's Life. - Dr. Lucas. - Undertakers. - Administration of Lord Townsend, Lord Harcourt, etc.— Corruption. The "Catholic Enemy."-Jews.- Con

verts.

FOR about fifty years after the Revolution, there was in the Politics of Ireland no Irish Party. Our Parliament was but a sort of Chapel of Ease to that in Westminster. Irish pensions, Irish peerages, and even Irish patriotism were all exclusively in the hands of Englishmen, or the sons of Englishmen-and, though now and then their deliberations affected to be patriotic and national, the country itself had as little to do with the matter, as a corpse has with the inquest the coroner holds

over it.

Even the patriotism of Swift, as I have already remarked, might have come under his own interdict, as an imported article ; and, useful and honourable as his genius has been to Ireland, that happy illustration of the machinery of most human motives, une roue de cuivre fait tourner une ai

،،

guille d'or," may, without much injustice, be applied to those of Swift-as English discontent was, after all, the "roue de cuivre" that put the "aiguille d'or" of his patriotism in motion.

It was not till about the period of Lord Harrington's administration (1747-9), that the English in Ireland began to be, as Burke says, "domiciliated," and to feel that they had a country-and it is in the writings of that indefatigable Tribune, Dr. Lucas, that the first dawnings of a national and Irish feeling are to be found. No longer circumscribing the Spirit of Patriotism within the wizard circle of the "Protestant Interest," he was the first member of the Parliament of Ireland, that dared to extend his sympathies beyond the little colony around him, to the great mass of the Irish nation ;-and there is one of his Addresses, in which, putting aside, boldly and entirely, the eternal scape-goat of Popery, he arraigns the whole conduct of England towards Ireland, and declares that "the Mexicans were never used worse by the barbarous Spaniards, than the poor Irish had been for centuries by the English."

till

The duration of our Parliaments had been, this time, for the whole life of the king-so that the Parliament, which the death of George II. dissolved, had been in existence thirty-two years!

-and it was by the exertions of Dr. Lucas, that they were at length, in the year 1767, limited to the period of eight years. But still their dependency on the will of England was so absolute, and all power of originating Bills,-even Money-Bills -was so completely taken away from them, that their deliberations and decisions, except for purposes of corruption, were mere acting and child's play.

In this shackled state our Parliament remained till 1782,—and, among the farces on a grand scale which have been played off before the world, the Debates of such a House of Commons, in the leading-strings of the English Attorney-General, could not have been the most unamusing to an indifferent spectator. The solemn proposal by some patriot member, of a Bill previously submitted to the censure of the Privy Council-the appeals to liberty and the Constitution on both sides-the animation of the opposition benches-the agitation of the galleries-and, all this time, a perfect consciousness every where, that the Attorney-General of England could, with a dash of his pen, reverse, alter, or entirely do away the matured result of all the eloquence and all the abilities of this whole assembly ! *

* See Young's Tour,