sought instruction on the continent, whither also those who made arms their profession, betook themselves. Mr. England, in his life of Father O'Leary, illustrates the former habit by his account of a very accomplished professor at Maynooth, whe was a native of Ireland, and who had acquired a facility of speaking other modern languages, while it was with much difficulty he could be induced to converse in English. The Abbé Geoghegan, as quoted by Mr. Lewis, (who does not appear to have profited by the quotation,) exemplifies the latter, in his statement, that between the year 1691 and 1745, four hundred and fifty thousand Irishmen had died in the French service.+ The intercourse with foreign countries, evidenced by such results as these, served much to keep alive, in the hearts of Irish Roman Catholics, that national feeling by which they were held in estrangement from England. Nor were contrivances wanting to promote the fatal alienation. For a considerable length of time, France had a recruiting establishment for her armies in this country; and when the British or Irish government ceased to countenance or to connive at it, the practice of recruiting was secretly continued-and agents, known by the name Wild-geese, were constantly employed in exciting a spirit of disaffection towards England, and in procuring and sending off volunteers to the armies of France. When the recruiting system was discountenanced, and its operations were more embarrassed, a precaution, which had, probably, at all times, been taken by some, became more generally adopted. It was that of procuring a species of pedigree, running up a line of six generations, with which adventurous Irishmen set out to seek their fortunes and their friends, in foreign universities or foreign wars. We can remember, well, our first surprise, when, in very early boyhood, we met with, among heaps of uninteresting papers, some of these rough memorials of ancestral pride. The utility of them was soon explained to us; and others, we are persuaded, have felt as we have, when, reflecting on the honourable descent of which these little billets discoursed, and on its attendant advantages, our notions of dignity were rendered far more independent of present circumstances and condition, than they had been before the genealogical cabala changed The English language formed no part of the preparatory studies for entrance into the colleges, where candidates for the priesthood were then received; and it consequently sometimes occurred, that persons were admitted to orders in those establishments, whose knowledge of that language was extremely limited. A striking instance of this was the late venerable and learned Dean of Maynooth College, Doctor Ferris. Few of this gentleman's contemporaries were more intimately conversant with the elegant literature of France and Italy than he was. The classical treasures of Greece and Rome were sources of delightful recreation to him, &c. &c. His merits were recognised even in the capital of the Christian world, and he enjoyed the friendship and regard of the Pope Clement XIV. (Ganganelli ;) yet notwithstanding all these high endowments and distinctions he wrote and spoke the English language with great difficulty and reluctance."-Life of Rev. R. O'Leary, by T. R. England, pp. 14, 15. + Irish Disturbances, p. 458. Among the last and the most conspicuous of these agents was the celebrated Murtough Oge, a cadet in one of the tribes of the O'Sullivans. He was remarkable for his intrepidity, and for extraordinary personal advantages; and relying, perhaps, on the popularity he had acquired among his own people and on his own soil, was less studious of concealment than suited the increasing difficulties of the times. A subject of conversation wherever he appeared, his vocation soon ceased to be a secret; and a magistrate was found bold and loyal enough to send up to the government information of his proceedings. For this fidelity he lost his life; and O'Sullivan, the homicide, eventually paid the penalty of his offence, having been shot by a guard sent out to arrest him. It is said that he had made his escape from the party, had reached the summit of a steep hill, up which he had bounded like a deer, and was in the act of taking a ceremonious leave of his pursuers, when a fatally directed bullet interrupted his salute. Many persons, curious in the structure of the human figure, came from various parts of the country to admire aud to measure his stature and proportions. The notes of their measurement were long remembered and discoursed of, as connoisseurs speak of the forms of the Gladiator and the Apollo. This last of the Wild-geese (of any note or consequence) died in, we believe, the year 1759, or thereabouts. them. The consequences of such a practice are sufficiently obvious. Irishmen were taught to remember incidents connected with the fortunes of their predecessors, on which it would have been well for the peace of the country, that oblivion had fallen; and encouragement was given to the storytellers, by whom they were entertained and often deluded, to represent these incidents in the fashion most gratifying to the pride of birth, but most irritating to the sense of depressed fortunes, and most unfavourably towards England. They were taught, also, to associate themselves in thought with the friends who invited them to seek advancement and honour where it seemed to court them, and to think of England as the country which should properly be held, if not termed, foreign; and thus it came to pass, that they were brought insensibly, but surely, to regard the Saxons as invaders, who had acquired only a military occupation of the country, and to whose laws they owed no other allegiance than necessity or convenience recommended. At the period of which we write, the power of the Roman Catholics of Ireland seemed to be centered in the mercantile and trading part of the body, and in the more dispersed, but not wholly disunited class, consisting of wealthy graziers, who occupied large tracts of land, which absentee or indolent proprietors readily confided to enterprising and industrious tenants.The gentry and aristocracy, as Mr. Wyse instructs us, had withdrawn altogether from public affairs-the time had not arrived in which the strength of the peasantry was fully understood -the classes in which wealth had been accumulated, and enterprise was not dead, took up an advanced place in the movement of the body, and without any visible assistance or encouragement from their lay superiors or spiritual directors, became the managers of Roman Catholic affairs. Mr. Wyse has sketched for us the characters of the three individuals who directed the incipient efforts of his party, and has made us acquainted with their respective capabilities and studies to promote the common object. Mr. O'Connor devoted himself to the task of exhibiting, in an attractive light, the antiquities of his native country.Doctor Curry applied his powers of research and representation to the office of removing from the Roman Catholics the guilt of the great rebellions; and while these two gentlemen thus studied to win favourable opinions from their Protestant countrymen, Mr. Wyse, (the author's progenitor) whose youth "had been spent abroad, and whose sons were employed in the service of foreign powers;" whose "thabits were not literary but active, little content with obliterating Protestant prejudice, thought a more important task remained the compressing into shape and system the scattered energies of his Catholic countrymen." * History of Association, p. 43. History of the Cat. Ass., vol. 1, p. 62. The plan according to which Mr. Wyse proposed to form a representative association, so far as his descendant has thought fit to indulge us with an account of it, may be found among the mottos which we have prefixed to this chapter. He sought to include the nobility, gentry, and clergy among these associated representatives, but it appears that "the merchants of Dublin were its first, and, for a time, its sole members;" as they were, while the Triumvers were preparing the plan of a society, their sole assistants and advisers. "There was no people to appeal to-the body of the nation still slumbered; but they had that knot of high-spirited commercial men, from whom all the lights of freedom and instruction in a state generally emanate."§ We need not remind the reader that Mr. Wyse is somewhat in error here. The people, as we have recently shown, were not altogether sunk in slumber. The whiteboys were awake; but it is, we believe, the truth, that the principal agents in the management of Roman Catholic affairs were, as Mr. Wyse informs us, persons engaged in commerce. Let it be recorded, then, among the coincidences which serve to render the movements of the Irish Roman Catholics intelligible, that, at the same time, 1. A contrivance for "political agitation" was in preparation in the metropolis. 2. An organization for agrarian disorder and crime was in process of being completed in the provinces. Let it also be recorded, that the time when these arrangements for agitation and outrage were in progress, was the time when France threatened Ireland' with a twofold invasion ; and that the call of his excellency the lord lieutenant, upon parliament and people, to provide for the defence of the country, was responded to not only by the ready loyalty of the faithful and brave, but also by efforts (whether well or ill-timed depends on their design) calculated to encourage an invading army, and to obstruct and embarrass the preparations for defeating it, by efforts 1.* Calculated to occasion financial difficulty; and, if designed to have such an effect, savouring of a commercial policy, a run upon the banks. 2. To cause dissension here, and to encourage the enemy-an outery and a tumult against the scheme of a union with Great Britain, 3. To provide auxiliaries for the invading army-the whiteboy organization. We do not forget that, at the same. time, addresses were presented from the Irish Roman Catholics to the viceregal throne, redolent of loyalty, and so vehement in invectives against France, as, according to the judgment of the historian,† to disgrace the subscribers to them. We neither forget this circumstance, nor wish it to be overlooked by the reader. The addresses were presented at a time when, Mr. Wyse informs us, the leaders of the Roman Catholic body were secretly organizing their strength, for purposes of "political agitation;" and when the masses of the people were becoming bound by treasonable engagements. We leave it with, the reader, whether they shall have upon him the effect they apparently produced upon the government of 1760-that of preventing or removing suspicion; or, if they shall seem part of the same system by which lawlessness and disaffection were promoted; like the friendly ensigns which a corsair may hoist, while his men stand to their guns, ready, at the favourable moment, to receive the signal for fight, and to pour a fatal broadside upon the too confiding enemy.It is our part, merely, to recapitulate 1. That a body of men clandestinely enlisted for continental service in the year 1758, was prevented by the Irish government from leaving this country. 2. That agents, known by the soubriquet, Wild-geese, were employed, clandestinely, in enlisting and conveying recruits to the armies of France. 3. That at a time when an invasion was threatened, the Roman Catholic merchants and traders were organizing themselves secretly into a political society; and the rural population (of the poorer classes, at least) into a confederacy, not only lawless but treasonable; and 4. That while we might, without any great extravagance of conjecture, suspect the agency of such combinations in those efforts which threatened the stability of the national credit, and were, to some extent, effectual in divesting the law of power, we are bound to remember, when setting a value on the " addresses," that they emanated from persons who were profuse in expressions of loyalty and zeal, but who do not appear to have communicated to the government any information by which conspiracy might be defeated. "Addresses poured in from all sides; but so debased by the most servile adulation of the reigning powers, and by ungrateful vituperation of the French, to whom, from the treaty of Limerick up to that hour, they were indebted for every benefit ;the exile for his home the scholar for his education-their ancient and decayed aristocracy for commissions in the army for their younger sons that their poor descendants blush in reading the disgraceful record, and turn aside in disgust from the melancholy evidence of the corrupting and enduring influences of a long-continued state of slavery." + Insurrectionary Coincidences in our November Number. Insurrectionary Coincidences, November Number. S We may find it necessary to recur to this topic again. It is, certainly, a remarkable, and, we think, a significant coincidence, that while a mercantile body directed the affairs of the Roman Catholics, and was secretly framing their first political association, French money, imported under most suspicious circumstances, supplied Whiteboys with the materials of war; and the financial operations of the Irish government, by which it was to be prepared against a threatened invasion, were embarrassed by the very measure which disaffected merchants were most likely to originate. FARDOROUGHA, the miseR: OR, THE CONVICTS OF LISNAMONA.—PART VI. BY WILLIAM CARLETON, Author of "Traits and Stories of the Irish Peasantry." To those whose minds and bodies are of active habits, there can be scarcely any thing more trying than a position in which the latter is deprived of its usual occupation, and the former forced to engage itself only on the contempla tion of that which. is painful. In such a situation, the mental and physical powers are rendered incapable of mutu ally sustaining each other; for we all know that mere corporal employment lessens affliction, or enables us in a shorter time to forget it, whilst the acuteness of bodily suffering on the other hand, is blunted by those pursuits which fill the mind with agreeable impressions. During the few days, therefore, that intervened between the last interview which Connor held with Nogher M'Cormick, and the day of his final departure he felt himself rather relieved than depressed by the number of friends who came to visit him for the last time. He was left less to solitude and himself than he otherwise would have been, and, of course, the days of his imprisonment were neither so dreary nor oppressive as the uninterrupted contemplation of his gloomy destiny would have rendered them. Full of the irrepressible ardour of youth, he longed for that change which he knew must bring him onward in the path of life; and in this how little did he resemble the generality of other convicts, who feel as if time were bringing about the day of their departure with painful and more than ordinary celerity. At length the interviews between him and all those whom he wished to see were concluded, with the exception of three, viz.-John O'Brien, and his own parents, whilst only two clear days intervened until the period of his departure. It was on the third morning previous to that unhappy event, that the brother of his Una-the most active and indefatigable of all those who had interested themselves for him-was announced as requesting an interview. Connor, although prepared for this, experienced on the occasion, as every high-minded person would do, a strong feeling of degradation and shame as the predominant sensation. That, indeed, was but natural, for it is undoubtedly true that we feel disgrace lie more heavily upon us in the eyes of those whom we esteem, than we do under any other circumstances. This impression, however, though as we have said the strongest, was far from being the only one he felt. A heart like his could not be insensible to the obligations under which the generous and in-, defatigable exertions of young O'Brien had placed him. But independently. of this, he was Una's brother, and the appearance of one so dear to her, gave to all his love for her a character of melancholy tenderness, more deep and full than he had probably ever experienced before. Her brother would have been received with extraordinary warmth on his own account, but in addition to that, Connor knew that he now came on behalf of Una herself. It was, therefore, under a tumult of mingled sensations, that he received him in his gloomy apartment-gloomy in despite of all that a humane gaoler could do to lessen the rigours of his confinement. "I cannot welcome you to sich a place as this is," said Connor, grasping and wringing his hand, as the other entered, although I may well say that I would be glad to see you any where, as I am, indeed, to see you even here. I know what I owe you, an' what you have done for me." "Thank God," replied the other, returning his grasp with equal pressure, "thank God, that, at all events, the worst of what we expected will not-” He paused, for on looking at O'Donovan, he observed upon his open brow a singular depth of melancholy, mingled less with an expression of shame, than with the calm but indignant sorrow of one who could feel no resentment against him with whom he spoke. O'Brien saw at a glance, that Connor, in consequence of something in his manner joined to his inconsiderate congratulations, imagined that he believed him guilty. He lost not a moment, therefore, in correcting this mistake. "It would have been dreadful," he proceeded, "to see innocent blood shed, through the perjury of a villain— for, of course, you cannot suppose for a moment that any one of our family believe you to be guilty." "I was near doin' you injustice, then," replied the other; " but I ought to know that if you did think me so, you wouldn't now be here, nor act as you did. Not but that I thought it possible, on another account you No," he added, after a pause, "that would be doin' the brother of Una injustice." "You are right," returned O'Brien. "No circumstance of any kind"-and he laid a peculiar emphasis on the words" no circumstance of any kind, could bring me to visit a man capable of such a mean and cowardly act; for as to the loss we sustained, I wouldn't think of it. You, Connor O'Donovan, are not the man to commit any act, either the one or the other. If I did not feel this, you would not see me before you." He extended his hand to him while he spoke, and the brow of Connor brightened as he met his grasp. submit to it. How did you leave her? I heard she was getting betther.” "She is better," said John-" past danger, but still very delicate and feeble. Indeed she is so much worn down, that you would scarcely know her. The brightness of her dark eye is dead her complexion gone. Sorrow, as she says herself, is in her and upon her. Never, indeed, was a young creature's love so pure and true." O'Donovan made no reply for some time; but the other observed that he turned away his face from him, as if to At length his conceal his emotion. bosom heaved vehemently three or four times, and his breath came and went with a quick and quivering motion, that betrayed the powerful struggle which he felt. "I know it is but natural for you to feel deeply," continued her brother; "but as you have borne every thing heretofore with so much firmness, you must not break down now." "But you know it is a deadly thrial to be for ever separated from sich a girl. Sufferin' so much, you say so oh, "I believe you," he replied; "and worn! Her dark eye dim withnow I hope we may spake out like it is-it is a deadly thrial a heartmen that undherstand one another. In breaking thrial! John O'Brien," he case you hadn't come, I intended to proceeded, with uncommon earnestlave a message for with you you are her only brother, an' mother. ness, my I believe you know all Una's sacrets ?" she is your only sister. Oh, will you, "I do," replied O'Brien, "just as for the sake of God, and for my sake, well as her confessor." if I may take the liberty of sayin' sobut, above all things, will you, for her own sake, when I am gone, comfort and support her, an' raise her heart, if possible, out of this heavy throuble?" than Yes, I believe that," said Connor. "The sun in heaven is not purer she is. The only fault she ever could be charged with, was her love for me; and heavily, oh! far too heavily, has she suffered for it." "I for one never blamed her on that account," said her brother. I knew that her good sense would have at any time, prevented her from forming an attachment to an unworthy object; and upon the strength of her own judgment, I approved of that which she avowed for you. Indeed I perceived it myself before she told me; but upon attempting to gain her secret, the can. did creature at once made me her confidant." "It is like her," said Connor; "she is all truth. Well would it be for her, if she had never seen me. Not even the parting from my father and mother sinks my heart with so much sorrow, as the thought that her love for me has made her so unhappy. It's a strange case, John O'Brien, an' a trying one; but since it is the will of God, we must Her brother gazed on him with a melancholy smile, in which might be read both admiration and sympathy. "Do you think it possible that I would, or could omit to cherish and sustain poor Una, under such trying circumstances? Every thing sidered, however, your words are only natural-only natural." 66 con "Don't let her think too much about it," continued O'Donovan. Bring her out as much as you can let her not be much by herself. But this is folly in me," he added; "you know yourself better than I can instruct you how to act." "God knows," replied the brother, struck and softened by the mournful anxiety for her welfare, which Connor expressed, "God knows, that all you say, and all I can think of besides, shall be done for our dear girl-so make your mind easy." "I thank you," replied the other; |