the "rapidity with which he has brought the details before the public" (Preface); that the most laboured writer of our time should have left, according to his own avowal, probable imperfections unsupplied, and probable inaccuracies uncorrected, through the speed with which he has thought it necessary to administer his poetical antidote? Does all this, or does it not, betray a bitter conviction of the profound impression produced on the mind of England by the atrocious revelations of Exeter Hall? This book, then, is an indication cheering to Irish Protestantism. The party forgot their proverbial cunning when they commissioned their seribe to write it.

But we have said more; we have called it a high tribute to the gentleman who has had the enviable fortune of being the chief object of its virulence. Such satire, in such circumstances, is the impudence of weakness; it is conscious defeat ridiculously disguising itself in the robes of triumph. When Philip played the fool at Charonea, the imperial buffoon had at least the excuse of victory; but the modern rival of his venial indecencies is the busy babbler of his own disgrace; it is the writhing and wincing of his torture that he distorts into the piteous semblance of a grin, while he attempts, like "moody madness," to "laugh wild amid severest woe." But as the prophet of old,-malicious critics would compare him to the prophet's companion, he involuntarily blesses those whom he

comes to curse.

We shall see more distinctly how transcendently honourable is this libel to Mr. O'Sullivan, when we remember the boasted ability of the Accuser, compute the amount of the Charges, and reflect on the palpable Motive of

them.

First, as to the Satirist. It is no common champion who has been selected for the task; it is the most accomplished lampooner of the day, one whose tendencies to vituperation seem so inexplicably essential to his nature, that by some strange obliquity his very praise resolves itself into a refinement of defamation, till it has been at length universally admitted, that a grave in a cross-road is a monument in Westminster Abbey, compared with the posthumous misfortune of a friendly biography

from Mr. Moore. This Archilochus of encomium, this eulogist whose suicidal praise neutralizes itself, this essential Acid, this living and moving Gall of bitterness which even its own volition cannot sweeten-imagine what this instrument of vengeance must be, in premeditated vituperation; and yet, such is the personage whose bad energies have been set to work to construct the rack for Mr. O'Sullivan's fame and feelings. The result is indeed the miserable abortion of a revenge that, scorpion-like, stings itself; but the illsuccess of the performance does not lessen the rancour of the plan. Nor does it lessen the proof which the whole affair presents of the lofty estimation in which the faction are forced to hold their illustrious foe, when they matched him with an opponent deemed so skilfully sarcastic. But bitter is their fate-they are compelled, themselves, to respect while they assail him, and they increase the world's respect for him by their abuse.

Again, what are the charges in this laboured indictment? Here we have all which ingenuity quickened by resentment could contrive; if he be innocent of these, he must be immaculate. We open the book; we yawn through some very unmeaning pages which we modestly conjecture are meant to be witty, (from the number of Italicized words, to assist the reader's conceptions, in each line) but of which the point or purpose is sadly indistinct; until, after cautiously groping for meaning in the starless twilight of three entire "letters," we come upon the first formal annihilation of our poor unresisting friend. As the cause of religion, and of Mr. O'Sullivan, are unfortunately found inseparably associated, it was absolutely necessary to commence this awful process of destruction by some well-directed sarcasm, the object of which is to ridicule a professedly religious journal solely for having expressed an anxious desire to be found on the side of the Lord." Support us-we expire with laughter! How delightfully ludicrous! There is something so irresistibly funny in that absurd anxiety to do the will of God. Cheered by this innocent pleasantry at the vestibule, we enter the mansion. And how can our poor advocate (for whom even we

begin to tremble as we read) any longer stand erect, when he has been by our unpitying satirist invited to come o'er," in order to get dinners from "the saints," that being now so clearly the concealed object of his journey of some hundred miles; (the gormandizing knave!) and when the religious tracts are invited, by a rather original ascription of musical powers, "to blow trumpets" as " he comes to tell tales of woe." But the worst is to come. He is--oh, horrible!—he is-suicide is his only resource-he is-we ought perhaps to write he was, for after such a visitation he cannot still be breathing -he is actually nick-named O'Mulli gan! Alas, our heart bleeds as we picture to ourselves the form, once somewhat stalwart, of our sensitive friend, pining in the fatal rapidity of a decline exceeding the whole powers of medicine and Marsh to restrain, as he gazes on the mystic, the indelible syllables. Had it pleased heaven to try him with affliction; had it rained all kinds of sores and shames on his bare head," he might have borne it, butO'Mulligan! Humanity shudders at

46

the contemplation of sufferings beside which the dungeons of the inquisition are a paradise.

But, farther still, as if by the similarity of the title to remind him, each domestic hour, of his woes, the wretched victim, already wasted by sorrow, cannot call for hot water or his slippers, but—oh refinement of torture! -he involuntarily addresses his valet by the fearful nomenclature of O'Branigan!-Larry O'Branigan-one of those blundering Irish servants of whom even the shilling gallery is now well nigh weary, and a fair proportion of whose bulls we venture to guess Mr. Power could have told the public much more amusingly than Mr. Moore has done, long before the arrival of the Fudges on the English coastLarry, we say, plays an important part in the epistolary drama. We must give a specimen of his eloquence du billet, and perhaps the description of his departure from his home, which we meet in turning over the first page of his correspondence, will offer a fair specimen of the exceeding point of his style through the whole.

If our readers survive the drollery of this, let them turn over the next leaf. Larry becomes a chairman, at

what he cleverly styles" an up-anddown-place they call Bath!" So

Is it not killingly pleasant? Really, if Mr. Moore will write so laughably, we must provide ourselves with ribs of

steel, or the Sardonic death will be our fate.

But we are forgetting our more

"Saints," and the

66

direct subject, in these pleasing labyrinths of poesie. Let us recover from the convulsions of our laughter, and be serious. We repeat then,-putting aside the obsolete twaddle which Mr. Moore expectorates against the Parsons," and the Law Church," all of which we have been studying in that dignified journal, Paddy Kelly's Budget, for some months past-we repeat in stern seriousness, what has Mr. Thomas Moore, or Mr. Thomas Brown, or Mr. Thomas Little, vel quovis alio nomine gaudet, to allege against the Rev. Mortimer O'Sullivan? Did we not remember how often this multinomial author has writhed beneath the quiet chastisement of the Irish clergyman, the supposition might at first seem preposterous;between such men we might imagine that there could be no common ground, and that Mr. O'Sullivan might better say to his rival than Rousseau did to his," Quelle langue commune pouvons nous parler, comment pouvons nous nous entendre, et qu'y a-t-il entre vous et moi?" However this may be, in vain have we searched for the semblance of a distinct fact, from the blasphemy of Miss Biddy's diary to the blunders of Mr. Larry's missives; in vain have we sought for double meanings in every line, imagining that an insinuated accusation might lie perdu in a pun since none could be detected on the face of the record. As to the general attributions of hypocrisy which befoul every page of this whole performance, and degrade its author at least as much as anything else he has ever yet done, Mr. Moore knows right well that any one may attribute disgraceful motives, who is unfair enough to make a foul charge, which, from its nature can never be distinctly and directly tested. We will show him just now that we too can analyse motives, though they shall not be motives of the character which he so unsparingly lavishes on his political and literary chastiser,-for we will not imitate his degradation-but motives which, in truth, are natural enough to every victim of disappointed ambition. What, we ask, is the expressed ground of this writer's charge against the defender of the Irish

Church? It is this, versified from the scurrilous prose of the radical press, that Mr. O'Sullivan in early youth was a professing member of the Church of Rome, in which communion he had been brought up, and that (Mr. Moore, supplying such motives as we presume he best understands) he left that communion (as many other pure and holy men have done) to embrace the tenets of the Church of Ireland. Mr. O'Sullivan has since, as a matter of course, become eminent in that church, as he would have become eminent in any profession to which he devoted so unremit tingly the faculties of so powerful an intellect. But let us descend for a moment to the nasty depths of Mr. Moore's own argument, and ask, what is the extent, and what the nature, of the eminence? Mr. O'Sullivan is not one of those opulent dignitaries whose revenues our poet's oriental imagination has so often and so magnificently exaggerated. He is the rector of an Irish parish, and he is contented; but Mr. Moore knows as well, and feels far more bitterly than we do, that his real distinctions are of a kind which would equally have been his, to whatever persuasion or profession he had belonged, the unpurchaseable distinctions of the intel lect,-while had he belonged to any other, the worldly distinctions of rank and affluence would probably have been his, to a much greater extent. What then becomes of the accusation? Where is the rich bribe which tempted this unpaid apostate? And where, oh where, can the discomfited defamer hide his shame?

But with what unsullied nobility does real dignity of character rise above the insults of this low buffoonery! When we see on the one hand Mr. Moore, exhausting to its last poor effort his already effete imagination; childishly jingling his words into silly pun or sillier rhyme, since he finds it hopeless to marshal them in argument; appealing for his facts to his own raving romance, the memoirs of Captain Rock; for his jokes to the language of Holy Writ; and madly quoting examples which the most profligate would at least wish to imitate, as the fitting subject for a ridicule

whose outworn stupidity is its only antidote:* and when we contemplate on the other, a man whose mind has been devoted to the noblest purposes of man, the chosen advocate of the persecuted against the persecutors, he who truly spoke, as his assailant truly says, of the "martyrdoms" of the Irish church, and spoke of them with a gifted fervour which has placed him second to no orator of his day: we know not where to look for a parallel to illustrate the immeasurable distance between them. Compare them! We might as well compare the glowing splendours of Etna or Cotopaxi with the mud volcanoes of Trinidad-the one flashing the unborrowed ardours of a genuine fire, the others sputtering their filthy deluge over every thing within reach of their defilement !

But Mr. Moore has a definite charge to adduce. He is of opinion-such is his solicitous tenderness for the welfare of the Irish church-that Mr. O'Sullivan and his companion should remain in their own parish and oversee their own little flocks, instead of exposing the privacies of popery in the metropolis of Britain. As if any salutary ecclesiastical discipline would seek to restrain the expansive utility of such men, or as if such men in such times were not intended by nature to be the guides of a country as well as the guides of a parish. But, above all, is it not intolerable-but no, we will gather patience from contempt-is it not passing all gravity to hear the unceasing aspirant after aristocratic distinctions, the pet

poet of London salons, conveniently loving his dear country a la distance, and ready to do every thing for Ireland but live in it-to hear this patrician Paddy enforcing such stout anti-absen

"

teeism, without fear of awkward suggestions before his eyes, while his own disinclination to dwell in the country offers the simplest of all proofs of the insufferable den of discontent which his faction have made of it.

A word, in the third place, as to the obvious motives of this publication. We say obvious, because they are demonstrable by unanswerable argument. Mr. Moore was not, on this occasion, merely the Scribbling Machine of the Romish party, wound up to go for so many pages; he had a motive or two beyond the automaton. If the true principium et fons of the " Fudges" were not a personal enmity against Mr. O'Sullivan, occasioned, of course, by an uneasy remembrance of reiterated exposures from that powerful pen, how happens it, we beg leave to ask, that the original detector of Dens, the ori ginal planner of the Exeter Hall meetings, and the advocate who stated the case formally in each, passes without attack-is so unfortunate as not to be abused-through the volume ? We apprehend this argument most inconveniently conclusive. To whet his ire, we can imagine the agonized satirist as he wrote, hurling a frowning glance occasionally at the "Detection of Rock," and the "Guide to an Irish Gentleman." Bitterly did he feel how each had routed his tawdry forces. The former proved him what we fear the forthcoming volumes of his Irish history will but confirm : as yet, in that work he has only, as Spenser says of himself,

Vouched antiquities which nobody can know.‡

"points of belief," nor has it any fault, but the beautiful one of being too gentle and generous for ordinary controversy, and too refined for the class of readers who patronize the coarse and vapid volumes which it refuted.

As we have consumed a good deal of paper-much more than we should ever have given to Mr. Moore, if the distinguished object of his virulence had not eminently deserved these notices at the hands of the Magazine of Irish Protestantisin our readers can scarcely expect that we should give them much either of abstract or extract of this puerile pasquinade beyond what they may collect from the paragraphs we have already written. The plan of the thing is really contemptible beyond the heaviest descent of the most ponderous imagination. When a writer composes an avowed fiction, we do not indeed demand the perfect symmetry of truth; but we demand a shadow of possibility-we demand that invention shall, at least, preserve an inferior and relative consistency. But will Credulity herself trust us when we apprise that amiable weakness, that in the "Fudges in England," Mr. O'Sullivan, a married man, is introduced as heiress-hunting in England; and that the whole point of this inexplicable enigma of stupidity is contained in the dénouement of his eventual disappointment in that probable pursuit ! The lady to whom this bigamist is wedded at the close, is represented as a sort of antiquated religious idiot, and is, of course, most impartially meant to impersonate female Protestant piety in general. We confess that, to us, Mr. Moore's own career seems not unlike that of Miss Biddy Fudge. The author of Little's Poems, "making his soul" in the "Travels of an Irish Gentleman," would be to us quite as ridiculous as the dress-loving zealot whom he invents as a heroine for his own

tale; were there not, in every thing relative to religion, and more especially in the contemplation of erring, and self-deceiving, and unrepentant Age, an object which excites feelings too solemn for sarcasm, and, did we not force ourselves to it as a duty, too sad for severity. And it is in this spirit we would close our remarks. If we have been stern to Mr. Moore, he will remember how he has treated his antagonist. We have imputed no motives

we would be understood as imputing no motives,-directly and intentionally dishonorable, though many, indeed, which from their weakness, vanity, and frivolity lead-it may be unconsciously

to actions which we cannot and will not characterize as other than disgraceful. Mr. Moore has ascribed the grossest intentional hypocrisy, with unsparing reiteration, to the high-minded object of his paltry vengeance. But we leave him to his own reflections. He may suffer these to be temporarily overpowered in the clamours of a despicable applause; but we have a terrible assurance that they will make themselves be heard. It is the fearful doom of malice, that, in attempting to deprive others of character, it deprives itself of peace; and-for, miserably fallen as he is, we cannot even yet regard Thomas Moore without interest-would to heaven that our pages could lead him to remember, ere it be too late, that, severe as may have been our transitory review, there is a severer still-that terrible REVIEW of which the remorse of an awakened conscience is the dread author, and from whose decision there is no appeal but to a Court in which that very Conscience is but warranted and vindicated as the Delegate of supreme justice on earth,-at once Accuser, Judge, and Avenger of self-convicted guilt.

VOL. VI.