surprise be experienced that the issue of so unequal a competition should be what it is; law divested of its necessary and salutary terrors; lawlessness assuming to itself, and as its own, those attributes of threatening and severity, by which, under wise and good government, it should be overawed and subdued.

We know that much is said upon the influence of example: the multitudes who assemble to witness an execution, will be seriously impressed by the spectacle, and perhaps affrighted from evil courses. There are states of society in which such observations may be rational, and the hopes they encourage may not be chimerical. The state of society in Ireland is not such. The example held forth in an execution is the example of constancy. This, the dying criminal is urged by all motives which can effect him, to exhibit. By this, the multitudes who come to honour his heroic departure from life, were admonished to be impressed and instructed. He had given his life to an oppressive law, but his secrets died with him. He had died the death of the brave. What an erroneous estimate must they have made of the effects of public punishment, who could arrange the spectacle of an execution, that it might serve as a salutary example, in a society where the law of opinion was of such a character as this? In a country where the friends of a condemned criminal have been known to rejoice that the body of the convict was given to them for interment, more than over the mercy which mitigated the sentence of the law, so as to change death into transportation, where the extreme penalty is so void of disgrace, that one of the most formidable of Irish factions or parties could take the name by which they were to be called from the manner of their leader's ignominious death. It should not have been overlooked, that there were influences and agencies at work, which neither the terror nor the disgrace of a public execution, could overcome; and which, on the contrary, could find in such an event, matter and occasion for turning grief into anger; for encreasing the exasperation and disesteem in which the multitudes were trained to regard the law; and for promoting and spreading, more widely, the spirit of estrange

ment and disaffection. This, as events have mournfully proved, is not idle speculation. Capital punishment, as it has been visited for insurrectionary* offences in Ireland, has been attended with no good result. Its severity has been altogether uncompensated. It has caused more murders than it has punished. It has provided a rich martyrology for the enemies of order and law; and supplied the seditious with stirring topics of defamation and excitement. It may have, perhaps, somewhat retarded the progress of insurrection, but it was not productive of that salutary fear which would prevent the numbers of insurgents from encreasing, and would aid in the defeat of their projects, and the divining their plans. For more, we believe, than a century, with very rare exceptions, exceptions confirmatory of our reasoning, the secrets of treason have been kept, so long as it would be injurious to disclose them. Stronger proof need not be adduced that our system of capital punishment is defective. We are, however, to remember, that we are not legislators, but historians. We must therefore, return from the digression, in which it was our object to show, that in its contest with the Whiteboy system for power over the fears of the people; a contest in which both parties almost equally disregarded the peoples' wrongs and wants, the state(imitating, at cautious distance, the example of severity set by its lawless competitor, but neglecting to observe such of the accompanying conditions as rendered Whiteboy cruelty adequate to its object,) was, as it was reasonable to anticipate, defeated by its craftier and more unscrupulous antagonist, and condemned to see insurrection settling itself into a system, which was perpetually receiving new accessions of popular support, and becoming day after day more powerful to abridge the empire ofthe laws, and to obstruct and embarrass the freedom of their operation.

Reflecting men, generally speaking, throughout Ireland, had begun, notwithstanding endeavours to lead them into an opposite opinion, to believe that the Whiteboy system was a confederacy for political and religious purposes; and to feel alarm at its growing strength and boldness. Favoured as the Whiteboys were by the

security, professed, or felt, by Lord Halifax; and by the diversion contrived or created for them by the disorders of the Hearts-of-Oak in Ulster, they had time to recover from the severities by which their first attempts had been repressed, to become reorganised and recruited, and to appear again in the year 1764, with demonstrations, perhaps, more formidable than those which had previously alarmed the government. In that year, various malefactors were tried and convicted, for enlisting men to join their party; one man was condemned for the crime of enlisting for the service of France; and other indications, equally unambiguous, gave ground for serious apprehension. In the following year, the strength of the Whiteboys was sensibly increased; their enterprises also were more daring and ambitious. They not alone attempted to assassinate military persons, (two were shot dead, in the streets of Nenagh, in, we believe, open day;) but they were bold enough to attack parties of soldiers, and, in some instances, with advantage. We have heard of a guard-room surprised in a populous town, (Clonmel,) and the guard deprived of their arms. We have heard of stratagems indicating discipline and military skill by which escorts of prisoners and arms were overreached and defeated. In short, the progress of the Whiteboys was so rapid as necessarily to cause alarm to the loyal, and to the demand from those who bore authority in the insurrectionary movement, unless they were ready to take the field, some check by which it could be advantageously retarded.

A daring attack upon a party of Lord Drogheda's regiment of cavalry, causing a sanguinary skirmish, in which many lives were lost, and great numbers were wounded, brought matters to a speedy issue. Lord Drogheda's regiment was composed, to a very considerable extent, of individuals in a rank of life to be esteemed gentlemen. Many of the privates retained servants

to discharge what they accounted the menial offices of their station, while they themselves sustained the character of bold and hardy soldiers. An engagement, in open day, in which some of these men lost their lives, was an event of no little importance, and was likely to disabuse minds which had adopted the theory of agrarianism, a theory which then, as now, it was the passion of the interested and the deceived to propagate. The skirmish was thus "an untoward event." Its ill effects should, if possible, be corrected. Romanism, at least, must be discharged from all suspicion of contriving it. This was attempted. A pastoral letter went forth from a Roman Catholic bishop, denouncing the Whiteboys and their crimes and excesses, especially the latest and most alarming. We shall commence a new paragraph, and give the reader time to breathe, before we mention that bishop's name.

But we must not put our reputation for cautiousness in peril, by running too fast. Instead of offering our inferences as certain truths, it is our wish always too propose them at their proper value, and enable the reader to ascertain it, by submitting to him the premises from which our conclusions have been derived. We shall not, in the present instance, forsake our good old custom.

The public Register, or Freeman's Journal of December 8, 1764, contains the following address, which we give without abridgement, both for the importance we attach to it, and because it may serve well as a specimen of addresses, similar in character and effect, towhich we shall adver thereafter, without reciting them.

To the Rev. Roman Catholic pastors, and other clergymen of the Diocese of Ossory.

"The enormous outrages committed by the unruly people called Whiteboys, are too well known to you all; even to such an excess as that some of his majesty's light horse lost their lives.† This I mention because there are many Roman

IT is to be presumed that the recent delightful prison autobiography of Silvio Pellico, may have awakened in some degree the interest even of the English public, on the subject of his celebrated national tragedy of Francisca da Rimini-that cherished offspring of his early genius, the bright memory of which flashed at times across his dungeon fresh gleams of kindred inspiration, and the unimpaired hold of which on the admiration of his countrymen, (testified by its chance representation on the very day he again set foot in Italy, after ten years of incarceration and exile), unlocked a fount of tears which even these had sometimes failed

to draw forth.

This interest was, we must confess, somewhat checked and sobered in our selves, by fear lest in this juvenile production of a southern muse, there should lack aught to disturb or alloy the sweet and approving sentiment, (amounting well nigh to personal affection,) with which every reader of "Le mie Prigioni," must regard the gentle, unoffending, heaven-schooled victim of despotic power. Had this even been the case-had crude conceptions, or false sentiment, or objectionable morality, tarnished the almost boyish composition -not only might palliation have been found in the youth of the author, but ample expiation in that long course of estrangement from every thing like human sympathies, by which the

undue excitement of them would in that case have been not inappropriately, though severely atoned for.

But the very supposition is a fresh injury to the mild martyr of Italian patriotism; nor is there in the poem of the young, gay, thoughtless votary of his country's muse, a line (save one, perhaps, which his deepened sense of religion would now prompt him to expunge), which the matured and chastened man of solitude and sorrow would wish to see erased.

Nothing, perhaps, but the reckless hardihood of youth and genius would have einboldened Pellico to choose for the subject of a maiden drama the most pathetic and familiar episode of the father of Italian poetry. Nor could aught save the united strength and delicacy of a firmly constituted

mind, have enabled him (and without depriving it of the deep and mysterious pathos traditionally infused into it by the very guilt of its victims) to convert, by the mere transposition of its few and simple incidents, shuddering reluctant pity for crime, into pure though painful sympathy for innocence and misfortune. We gaze on the vision of the suffering lovers in the Inferno of Dante, with a thrill of horror; while we acquiesce in the merciful catastrophe by which Pellico dismisses them, "more sinned against than sinning," to a holier, happier sphere.

of the national subject embalmed by If there was daring in the adoption conscious power appears in the bold Dante in imperishable lines, no less of limitation of the whole interest and dialogue of a five act play to four prin flagging spirit and energy of the diacipal characters only; and in the unlogue itself, which is clothed in a language of real life and passion, remote

alike from the studied laconism of

Alfieri, and the turgid declamation of

Metastasio.

Of the possible effect of the play when acted, on Italians especially, it would be little less bold to hazard a conjecture; but such is the feeling inspired by its bare perusal, that our love (already unhesitatingly avowed) for the author hardly prevents us from siding with the patriotic writer who, on Pellico's affecting ignorance (on his return to his country) of his own tragic reputation as the author of Francisca da Rimini, was only restrained by his haggard, prison-worn appearance, from knocking the recreant son of Italy

down.

The play opens with the arrival of the venerable Guido, Lord of Ravenna, at Rimini; moved thereto by tidings of the deep and unabated grief with which his daughter Francisca (recently united to its sovereign) persists in bewailing a slain brother, and sadly repaying with alienation and tears the affection of her youthful and amiable husband.

And here let us pay another tribute to the genius of the author. Some versions of the tragic tale

"With which all Europe rung from side to side.”