This is one among the many reasons why the corporations of Ireland, the last remaining depots of every thing which the enlightened protestant and catholic consider ignorant and contemptible, so perpetually offer up their incense to this sainted monarch.

To him who will estimate the qualities of king William by the infamous acts to which he was obliged to give his consent, the character of this monarch, in the exercise of his royal power in Ireland, must appear odious and detestable. Those of the Irish people who are so clamorous in his praise, found their veneration for king William on those passages of his life which excite the indignation of every honest Irishman. But justice to the memory even of a recorded enemy of Ireland, obliges us to admit that William had to contend with a rancorous malignity, which national jealousy has always excited and kept alive in the bosom of England. In the front of the acts which we have recited, acts which might have satisfied English rapacity, it is pleasant to find a catholic, (and a catholic too who should feel for the suffering of his country, and often reflect on the fame of the venerated family of which he is a member) bearing testimony to the liberality of the monarch in whose reign the war of penal law most bitterly commenced against his liberties and his religion. In a late publication of Mr. Mathew O'Connor, we find the following observations; they may palliate the crimes of king William against Ireland, but they add nothing either to the strength or the firmness of his understanding. They make him a passive and pliable instrument; obedient to the suggestions of the most vicious passions; the executive of any measure of legislation which the jealousy or the avarice of commercial monopoly might please to dictate. Surely such a character is not that of a great king. Mr. O'Connor thus writes:

"In Holland this generous prince, unfettered and uncontrouled, displayed the full blaze of his shining qualities. In England, where his throne was blockaded and his

power contracted; where he was forced to' capitulate, to faction and dismiss his guards; where he was stript of all the substantial powers, and left only the pageantry of royalty, he was forced into measures which threw a shade on the lustre of his character." (This is rather a light description of the acts we have recited, and to which king William gave his consent. Those acts were measures of vital importance to the comfort and happiness of four-fifths of the Irish people. Those measures into which Mr. O'Connor says William was forced, were flagrant and infamous violations of that honor which this immortal sovereign pledged to Ireland.) However Mr. O'Connor proceeds: "Yet on many occasions his firmness and wisdom, and long adversity, burst all restraints, and displayed themselves at the commencement of his reign, in the avowed protection, and towards the close, in underhand countenance and partiality to the catholics. He endeavoured to atone for the acts of severity and injustice to which he was compelled to assent by the clamor of faction and the calls of necessity. 233,106 acres were restored to catholics, adjudged to be comprized within the articles of Limerick and Galway. Those articles had been expounded beneficially in favor of the Irish by the commissioners of claims, and 74,733 were restored to persons pardoned, or whose outlawries were reversed by the special favor and protection of William. This partiality became a subject of the bitterest invective in the English commons, and forms a permanent feature in the report of the commissioners appointed to inquire into the value and disposal of the forfeited estates."

Supposing even this defence to be accurate in point of fact, and Mr. O'Connor has taken it from the partial authority of king William's biographer, it must be admitted, that the monarch who had not the firmness to refuse putting his hand to laws which amounted to an extirpation of the religion, and an extinction of the rights of Ireland, was either a very weak or a very unprincipled

sovereign; nor can we see how the partial protections mentioned by Mr. Harris, his panegyrist and biographer, can atone for the sweeping destruction of a whole nation, to which king William gave his prompt and efficacious assent. Speaking as Irishmen and upon Irish liberty, we cannot admit that this king of "immortal memory," should find an advocate in any pen devoted to the rights of our country. The ignorant Irish corporator toasts the "immortal memory," because his father and grandfather showed him the example; but the enlightened protestant or catholic Irishman who reads the Irish statute-book, turns from the record with indignation, and laments that the great champion of constitutional liberty should be the submissive instrument of Irish slavery.

The Irish parliament were taught, in the instance of Mr. Molyneux's book in defence of their legislative independence, how to demean themselves on the great question of the woollen trade of Ireland. Poor creatures !* the wretched victims of their own barbarous and besotted policy, they were obliged to kiss the rod, and bow in silence to the mandate of the English parliament. The lords justices called upon the Irish legislature to put down

* Mr. Curran (the present master of the rolls) has given to posterity a fine picture of the situation of the parliamentary monopolists of Ireland, during the existence of their penal laws. It is one of those master touches that so often fell from the pencil of our eloquent Irishman, which succeeding orators have a hundred times repeated, and which none have improved. The reader of this passage is able to take in all the melancholy circumstances which followed in the train of the penal laws. The figure presented by the orator, comprehends all the horrors of unjust laws, and he turns with pity and disgust from the consideration of a system which could generate such a monster.

"Let me ask you," said Mr. Curran to the Irish parliament of 1796, "how have those laws affected the protestant subject and protestant constitution? In that interval, were they free? Did they possess that liberty which they denied to their brethren? No : where there are inhabitants, but no people, a free government cannot be kept steady or fixed in its seat. You had indeed a government, but it was planted in civil dissention and watered in civil blood; and whilst the virtuous luxuriance of its branches aspired to heaven, its infernal roots shot downwards to their congenial regions, and were intertwined in hell. Your ancestors thought themselves the oppressors of their fellow subjects-but they were only their jailors; and the justice of Providence would have been frustrated, if their own slavery had not been the punishment of their vice and their folly.”

the woollen manufacture. They most respectfully answered in the affirmative; or, as Dean Swift observed, they resolved that they would rather live on salt herrings than the best beef; and therefore faithfully promised to encourage the linen manufacture of Ireland.

On the tenth of October, 1698, the Irish commons resolvedt hat the woollen trade of Ireland should be regulated. The reader will attend to the mild phrase of regulation, and then recollect the plan of regulation this honest parliament adopted. They imposed a duty of four shillings on every twenty shillings value of broad cloth exported from the 25th of March, 1699, and two shillings on every twenty shillings value of all serges, bays, kersies, or any other sort of new drapery made of wool, or even mixed with wool, friezes only excepted. Here was the regulation, or rather, here was the "act of suicide" which was insultingly denominated regulation, and which most effectually succeeded in its object, namely, the destruction of the woollen manufactories and manufactures of Ireland. But even this did not satisfy England. The English parliament passed an act prohibiting the export directly or indirectly from Ireland after the 24th of June, 1699, except to England or Wales.

Those infamous proceedings against our devoted country were accompanied by an act which prohibited to papists the profession of the law. The biographer of king William says, that "no transaction, during the reign of this monarch, so pressed upon his spirits, or so humbled his pride, as the resumption of the grants of the forfeited estates in Ireland by the English parliament." Of this we can have little doubt; and it is to be remarked, we find no such opinion from king William's biographer, when that monarch was setting his seal to the atrocious violations of law and justice, which we have already enumerated. The reason is obvious; king William was distressed that he could not parcel out Irish property to his Dutch and German adventurers, as he thought

proper, and the pride of the monarch was wounded in the contest with the rapacity, of his parliament. Ireland was too precious a field for the complete satiety of the English plunderer; and therefore Mr. O'Connor may here say, that William was forced to give up all his old loving and affectionate Dutch auxiliaries. It is said, that the violence done to the king's feelings by this act of the British parliament, made an impression on his mind and spirits from which he never rallied to the hour of his death. Much has been said of the spirit of toleration which governed the conduct and characterized the disposition of king William. We shall put the legislative acts of his reign against the conjectures or the assertions of his panegyrists. We shall open the Irish statute book, where every Irishman may read the character of this monarch of "immortal memory" written in the blood of our country. We should therefore consider his Irish admirers as the enemies of Ireland, and estimate their abhorrence of every liberal and enlightened principle in proportion to the degree of enthusiasm with which they revive the memory of king William, when considered as monarch of Ireland. As the indefatigable opponent of foreign despotism, we will join in general admiration of William's memory, but as the sovereign of our country, whose rights, civil and religious, he basely trampled on, after giving his solemn pledge to support and protect them, we must, in common with nineteen-twentieths of our country, lament that he ever existed.