prevent a junction between the French and Irish Jacobin armies. And what is the state of our navy? I some time since intimated my apprehensions of the consequences which might arise from the weak and undignified manner in which Government gave way to a just claim of the seamen, improperly, illegally, and dangerously asserted. It is said to-day, that a fresh mutiny has broken out, in which blood has been shed, I believe, on both sides. With a mutinous navy and a rebellion in Ireland, (which I think will certainly be if the war continues, and Ministers remain obstinate as to Ireland,) it would require very different abilities for the conduct of war from those which have been manifested by the present Government, to make me expect any. benefit from suffering war under them rather than treat in a congress. The armistice of four months (in which it is said we may be included if we please), may give time for our credit to recover itself, as it is now in fact very nearly recovered; and for suppressing the first possible movements in the North of Ireland. The congress, in which I presume the Emperor of Russia, as our ally, may take part, may produce some impression unfavourable to the French, both in the mind of Paul the First as well as of Frederic William, who, I have reason to think, now that he has weakened the House of Austria by his neutrality, begins to be uneasy at his new neighbours and friends. Neither am I wholly without hopes from some late publications of the official style in the Morning Chronicle, and what I have privately heard and observed, that Fox may take the opportunity of putting himself on something more like constitutional grounds against French ambition.

The true cure of our internal evils, I conceive, would be the attachment, the warm and zealous attachment, of the Irish Catholics, and a vigorous and united attack with our whole force on those parts of the French coast, where we might yet best expect to reanimate the Royal cause. But this is too great for the present Ministers, who are little. I shall take some occasion to express these sentiments; but I shall less commit myself with such a Government and for such a Government. Lord F. will be in town this week, I shall talk to him seriously about it.'

At the misrule of that unhappy country, and not only at the blind impolicy of continuing the laws to promote religious animosity and civil war, but at the systematic oppression and malversation so long permitted to deface the practice of the Government, Mr Burke's indignation is frank, unqualified, and vehement, at all times and in every posture of affairs. We should hesitate to use the expressions in which he often vents the feelings excited in his mind, by that art and policy which has driven the Catholic body, contrary to its nature, into Ja'cobinism, in order to form a pretext to multiply the jobs, and to increase the power of that foolish and profligate junto to which Ireland is delivered over as a farm.' (p. 78.)

What you say about the Pope is very striking, but he and his Troy will be burned to ashes, and I assure all good Protestants that

whatever they may think of it, the thread of their life is close twisted into that of their great enemy. It is perfectly ridiculous, in the midst of our melancholy situation, to see us forswearing this same Pope lustily in every part of these dominions, and making absolute war upon him in Ireland at the hazard of everything that is dear to us, whilst the enemy from whom we have most to fear, is doing the same thing with more effect and less hazard to themselves. For we are cutting our own throats in order to be revenged of this said old Pope. It is very singular, that the power which menaces the world should produce in us no other marks of terror than by a display of meanness, and that this poor old bugbear, who frightens nobody else, and who is affrighted by everybody and everything, is to us the great object of terror, of precaution, and of vigorous attack.-You remember the fable of the Hare and the Frogs. On this point, I verily begin to believe that Mr Pitt is stark mad; but that he is in the cold fit of this phrenetick fever. I agree with you, and it was long the opinion of our dear departed friend, that Mr Pitt, keeping an underhand and direct influence in Ireland to screen himself from all responsibility, does resolve on the actual dissolution of the empire; and having settled for himself, as he thinks, a faction there, puts everything into the hands of that faction, and leaves the Monarchy and the superintendency of Great Britain to shift for themselves as they may.'

This is the exaggeration proceeding from bitterness of spirit, and great personal dislike of Mr Pitt, whom he always charged with having betrayed the cause of civil order and national independence by his mismanagement of the war. But the following letter contains a sound view of the Irish Question. Mr Burke's is the name, and his the authority, which our Ultras the most affect to venerate; let them then consult their oracle upon the Catholic Claims. They may find possibly some of the sybil's fury; but if they will not allow the inspiration, at least they must admit the response to be anything rather than ambiguous.

You know that the far greater and the most oppressive part of those laws has been repealed. The only remaining grievance which the Catholics suffer from the law, consists in certain incapacities relative to franchises. The ill will of the governing powers is their great grievance, who do not suffer them to have the benefit of those capacities to which they are restored, nominally, by the law. The franchises which they desire are to remove the stigma from them which is not branded on any description whatever of dissenters in Ireland, who take no test and are subject to no incapacity; though they [are]. of the old long-established religion of the country, and who cannot be accused of perverseness or any factious purpose in their opinions,, since they remain only where they have always been, and are, the far greater majority of the inhabitants. They give as good proofs of their loyalty and affection to Government, at least as any other people. Tests have been contrived for them, to purge them from any

suspicious political principles, supposed to have some connexion with their religion. These tests they take; whereas the persons, called Protestants, which protestantism, as things stand, is no description of a religion at all, or of any principle, religious, moral, or political, but is a mere negation, take no tests at all. So that here is a persecution, as far as it goes, of the only people in Ireland, who make any positive profession of the Christian faith; for even the clergy of the established church do not sign the thirty-nine articles. The heavy load that lies upon them is, that they are treated like enemies, and as long as they are under any incapacities, their persecutors are furnished with a legal pretence of scourging them upon all occasions, and they never fail to make use of it. If this stigma were taken off, and that, like their other fellow citizens, they were to be judged by their conduct, it would go a great way in giving quiet to the country. The fear that, if they had capacities to sit in Parliament, they might become the majority, and persecute in their turn, is a most impudent and flagitious pretence, which those, who make use of it, know to be false. They could not at this day get three members out of the three hundred, and never can have the least probability from circumstances of becoming the tenth part of the representatives, even though the boroughs made in the time of James I. for the destruction of the then natural interests of the country should be reformed upon any plan which has as yet been proposed, because the natural interests have been varied and the property changed since the time of King James the First. At present the chief oppression consists in the abuse which is made by the powers of executive government, which may more effectually harass an ob noxious people, than even adverse laws themselves. I do not know whether you are apprised of all the proceedings in the county of Armagh, particularly of the massacres that have been perpetrated on the Catholic inhabitants of that county, with no punishment and hardly any discountenance of Government. All this, however, is a matter of very nice handling in a British Parliament, on account of the jealous independence of that county. Neither the Court nor the Opposition party I am afraid would relish it, especially, as they pretend, or may pretend, that the subject is to become a matter of their own inquiry. I have written my mind fully upon this subject to Lord Fitzwilliam, but I have had yet no answer, nor, indeed, hardly could. The Jacobin Opposition take this up to promote sedition in Ireland; and the Jacobin Ministry will make use of it to countenance tyranny in the same place.'

But one of the most important letters on this subject is written the month before his death, and relates the substance of a conference he had held with a much venerated friend upon Irish affairs. We can only afford room for a single passage, as the whole occupies five pages.

sees this Parliamentary Reform thus pushed in concert by the Opposition in both kingdoms exactly in the same light which you and I do, and yet without regard to the dreadful consequences which

he foresees from this measure, and without regard to the total, at least temporary, alienation of those people (the Irish Opposition, Messrs Grattan, Ponsonby, &c.) from his confidence, his connexion, and his principles. I plainly perceive that if he was consulted, he would advise to throw everything into their own hands. If I am asked what I would myself advise in such a case, I should certainly advise the same, but with this temperament and express previous condition, that they renewed their confidence in ****, whom I hold to be the only person to settle Ireland; and that they give him some assurance as a man, á gentleman, and a friend, that they will be practicable about their schemes of changing the constitution of the House of Commons; and that they will desist from the scheme of an absentee tax, which in its principle goes more to the disconnexion of the two kingdoms than anything which is proposed by the United Irishmen. As to Mr Grattan's other project, of laying new taxes upon English commodities, and the principle upon which he proposes it,-namely, that England is a foreign and a hostile kingdom, and adverse in interest, (it) is, I think, a measure he would hardly persevere in. I think the difficulty of the case is extreme, when you consider the military government established on the one hand, and the wild democratic representation proposed as its cure (on) the other.'

We have marked his dislike of Mr Pitt; it was grounded both on what he terms an incurable suspicion of his sincerity,' which he ascribes to others, insinuating that he partook of it; and on a contempt for his views of government.

The declaration, though it has not astonished me, has not given me great defection of spirits. There is a sort of staggering and irresolution in the cowardice of others, but there is a sort of unconquerable firmness, a kind of boldness, in the pusillanimity of Mr Pitt. His madness is of the moping kind, but it is not the less phrenzy for being fixed in lowness and dejection. He is actually taking every means to divest this country of any alliance, or possibility of alliance; and he is determined that no spirit shall arise within this country, not knowing what course that spirit might take.'

And what is the ground of so much vituperation? Simply Mr Pitt's attempting to avoid the miseries and the dangers of war, by negotiating for peace. We shall not be charged with too great admiration of that minister's policy in conducting the war; but this might have been forgiven by Mr Burke, had he only done nothing to escape from its dreadful calamities. He sees the minister's proceedings, however, always in the same light, whether at home or abroad. The mutiny in the Flect draws forth the following remark, in the last letter he wrote before his death:- As to the state of this kingdom, it does not appear to me to be a great deal better than that of Ireland. } Perhaps in some points of view it is worse. To see the Thames itself boldly blocked up by a rebellious British Flect,

is such a thing as in the worst of our dreams we could scarcely have imagined. The lenitive clectuary of Mr Pitt's bill is perfectly of the old woman's dispensatory. The only thing which he spoke of, and which has any degree of common sense,' &c.-Nor had his friend and correspondent failed to imbibe the same sentiments. He thus expresses himself in one letter to Lord Fitzwilliam, stating his principles on all the great questions of the day, previous to coming into Parliament under the patronage of that truly venerable and patriot statesman.

With the power of Mr Pitt, I never wish to have any connexion. So far from it, my Lord, that I some little time since voluntarily resolved (and signified my resolution) to forego my claims to the first rank in my profession, should a vacancy happen. My motives, not material here, were in part private, in part public. I should endeavour to maintain him in power, merely from a conviction, that in consequence of the ground taken by Opposition, and the distemper of the times, the cause of Government in the abstract, and our excellent Constitution in particular, cannot be supported but by supporting the actual Minister. Happy, I believe, would it have been for Europe, if the breaking out of the French Revolution had found Mr Fox in the situation of Mr Pitt!'

Of Mr Fox, Mr Burke's language also is always respectful; nor is it deficient in kindness, unless when he has been irritated by a personal attack.

The speeches in the House of Lords in Ireland were in the same strain; and in the House of Commons, the Ministers put forward a wretched brawler, one Duigenan of your profession, to attack Mr Fox, though they knew, that as a British Member of Parliament, he was by them invulnerable; but their great object was, to get him to rail at the whole body of Catholics and Dissenters in Ireland, in the most foul and unmeasured language. This brought on, as they might well have expected from Mr Grattan, one of the most animated philippics which he ever yet delivered, against their Government and Parliament.

It was a speech the best calculated that could be conceived further to inflame the irritation which the Castle-brawler's long harangue must. necessarily have produced. As to Mr Fox, he had all the honour of the day, because the invective against him was stupid, and from a man of no authority or weight whatsoever; and the panegyric which was opposed to it was full of eloquence, and from a great name. The Attorney-General, in wishing the motion withdrawn, as I understand, did by no means discountenance the principle upon which it was made, nor disown the attack, which was made in a manner upon the whole people of Ireland. The Solicitor-General went the full length of sup-, porting it. Instead of endeavouring to widen the narrow bottom upon which they stand, they make it their policy to render it every day

more narrow.'