the common defence of their transmarine connexion and their faith, and to hold themselves in readiness for a struggle in support of both. But in the parent island a spirit of liberality, which has been very generally and properly adopted there, has, in the instance of its political daughter, been sufficient to blind it as to her ultimate views, and to cause it to heap favour after favour upon her, at the very time when she meditates casting off its maternal protection-abjuring its religion -and launching out into the world to shift for herself. This, I think, is an unprejudiced statement."

"It is," replied I; "but a Catholic would not allow it to be so."

"But you do not assent to it merely because you are a Protestant?" asked Franklin, with an eager look.

"No, Sir, certainly not." "And you, Sir William, what do you think?"

"I am convinced the statement is a fair one," he replied; " but I had not heard that the inclination to throw off the British yoke was manifest."

"Manifest, Sir! why, even if it were not expressed, as it has been, what mean the distrustful looks-the dark insinuations-the eternal under-growl, as of wild beasts quarrelling with their chains-vincla recusantum? The whole apparent cause at present is the horror, forsooth, which a peaceable peasant feels at having to pay a small sum yearly to a Protestant clergyman instead of to a Protestant landlord! But beyond that the calm, speculative eye of the unprejudiced observer sees in receding but well-defined perspective, the application of that sum to the use of their own church; all very reasonable; the consequent establishment of that church-the repeal of the act of union between the countries; still very reasonable; enquiries back into the title of landlords; still reasonable; and by a natural and most reasonable consequence, an extension of that inquiry to the title of THE GREAT LANDHOLDER of the country himself. In which stage, my dear Sir William, could you say "this does not follow?"

"I really do not pretend to say," said the person addressed.

"But I wish you to be aware at the same time," resumed Franklin, "that it is not as a Protestant that I give these opinions; I never, as you very

well know, allowed religion to sway my political opinions; but, as an observer of both religions and their tendencies in Ireland, I have come to such conclusions. I have endeavoured to point out to you the natural and obvious consequences of Catholic ascendancy, but I have not attempted to enquire whether that ascendancy-abstractedly considered-would be just or not. I have brought Catholic Ireland, by a necessary chain of argument, to a state of independence; and all that remains to be considered is, whether that independent condition would be favourable to it or not?"

I fear," said Jones, "that even in case a monarchical form of government were adopted there, it would not long be stationary in its arrangement."

"Why," I enquired, “might not a mixed monarchy, after the example of its former parent, answer?"

"For this reason amongst others, that there are now in being numerous families having Hibernian blood-royal flowing in their veins, and as title would previously have come under examination, why should not the title paramount hold in its hereditary form? Believe me, Sir, the provinces would in a very few years have each its own king. Nay, every county would place a crown on the head of the representative of its ancient line of royalty.

"And if," said Franklin, "a republic were to be founded! Alas! I fear my own country is beginning to shew the durability of that form of government! and how auspiciously did we commence! We had manifest injuries overcome in the first place. The God of Justice was with us. Then we had ample territories-an independent position-advanced intellect-unwearied activitymoral as well as physical power. But in Ireland

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Nay, my dear Sir," cried I, "there is no occasion to exhibit the picture reversed. I am pained when I look at our state, and cannot devise a remedy for it."

"Listen to mine, then," said Franklin. "Keep Catholicism politically under -and you will raise the Irish, including in the term the very persons thus politically kept down, physically and morally to their just and proper station in the world."

“Can that be Dr. Franklin,” exclaimed I," who puts forward such sentiments?"

"Aye, Sir," he replied with dignity, "the Liberator of America is the Conservator of Ireland, and thus you may perceive how circumstances guide the opinions of liberal statesmen. You may at your leisure consider, with reference to your religion, what line of political conduct should be adopted within your country. In this view I have not considered the subject, nor shall I, for several reasons."

"By the bye," said Jones, "I remember, as we are on this subject, talking about some passages in Junius's letters to the author of them, my friend

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"Have a care, Sir," cried Franklin in alarm; 66 you seem to forget that we have a mortal in our company."

True, my dear Doctor," said Jones, with some appearance of embarrassment. "I was near making a forbid den disclosure--you were on the eve of being made wiser than you expected." he added, turning to me with a smile.

"I consider it quite sufficient, Sir," replied I, "to hear such things as are not interdicted, from you and Doctor Franklin. I should even thus become wiser than any study or reflection of my own could ever make me. But, omitting the name, let me entreat of you to continue your interesting remarks."

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They would not be worth listening to," he replied,-" and here,” he continued, pointing to the prospect before us, we are supplied with food for contemplation more congenial and far more elevated than any supplied from the miserable affairs of unhappy and con

tentious man."

We had just arrived at the point of the promontory; and the shadow of the cliff, under which we had been so long walking, now suddenly gave way to such a blaze of light, that I could have imagined noon-day had preternaturally come to visit the conversation of the philosophers. A bare and rugged mass of rock here caught the unclouded moon-beam with a smile of light-there repelled it with the darkest frown. A short way along its face yawned a chasm, in the crannies of which the sea gurgled with a heavy and suffocating sound, that contributed much to the mysterious solemnity of the scene.

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The queen of night was weaving her bright chain o'er the deep," and in one quarter of the horizon the sky glowed red above the city. A small boat reposed upon the water a short distance beyond the cave's mouth, and I fancied in the uncertain light that I caught the figure of a man sitting in it. "What think you, gentlemen," said I, after we had enjoyed the prospect for some minutes, of returning along the upper edge of the cliff, and of thus remaining within the influence of this pleasant light?"

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"I fear, my young friend," said Dr. Franklin, "that we must part here. Along the ocean is our homeward course; you see where our skiff is in attendance to transport us."

"We much thank you," said Sir William Jones, " for your company; you have more than answered Doctor Johnson's description, for he, in the midst of his commendations, insinuated that your temper was not of the evenest description, and I feel that we have exercised both it and your patience tonight."

I protested to him that so far from doing so, they had conferred an honour on me of which I felt myself by no means worthy, and which I should never forget, and expressed my surprise that after the account justly given of me by Dr. Johnson, they should ever have vouchsafed to visit me. They left me with expressions full of kindness, and having skirted a little strip of sandy beach, they made a sign to the boatman, who immediately approached the shore at a jutting rock, and took them in. I stood watching them; for since they had told me that they were leaving me, I felt a strange inability to stir from the spot on which I was. They pushed gently off. I sat down upon a stone, and followed them with my eyes, as they glided away in the line of the moon's light. I continued to gaze until they were nearly out of sight, and then my eyes slowly closed. The rock seemed to sink under me-I startedopened my eyes--and woke in my library-my legs still stretched upon the chair, and my sherry and biscuit untasted beside me.

ADVENA.

LES FACHEUX.

Eraste, no doubt, had good cause for the ejaculation I have taken for my motto; and, if it were not too great a freedom to take with the inimitable Jean Baptiste Poquelin, I would observe, that the calamities to which he subjects his hero in the admirable piece I allude to, are fitter themes for the buskin than the sock: Eraste, how ever (although the poet ransacked all the regions of fiction to make him the most miserable of human beings) had not half the reason to bemoan himself that I have. I am ready to give you any odds you name that I am the best bored man in the empire.

I can actually classify my bores. I have my musical bore, my literary bore, my political bore, my fashionable bore, my epistolary bore, and my miscellaneous, or omnifarious bore, who combines all the distinctive talents or accomplishments of the other species; a suite of these characters is in continual attendance on my person. The figure I make, with my bores in ordinary, bores in waiting, bores of the bed-chamber, &c. &c. is quite princely, except that my retinue does me the very reverse of either service or honour; for on the old principle, and a sound one it is, of "noscitur a sociis," the world continually confounds me with the impertinent blockheads in my train; and probably before long I shall gene

It was well and profoundly remarked, that "every why has a wherefore." Let me illustrate this position by explaining how it happens, that I (who am not, I believe, stained with any crime of more than average enormity, such as might be supposed to make me the peculiar object of divine vengeance) am by so many degrees a better bored man than my neighbours. The fact is, I am what is called an easy man. You talk of the blessing of a good temper— wretched cant! I solemnly protest, of the many “ills that flesh is heir to,” I look upon a good temper as the most insupportable. A choleric man I envy more than a king.

O te Bolane, cerebri
Felicem!

is with me an hourly exclamation; and in the teeth of John Locke, Maria Edgeworth, and every other writer, masculine and feminine, on the subject of domestic discipline, I shall omit no pains to cultivate every pugnacious propensity and stormy passion in my children. Their combative organs shall be developed to the size of promontories. I know, by sad experience, the consequence of depression in that region.

Your bore knows an easy man by instinct. A good temper is the natural prey of the species. They flock about it as wasps about a sugar-bowl, vultures round a gibbet, or Whigs in place round the abuses they rail at in opposition. As to me, I am a banquet for them, such as the racy talents of

Burgess never prepared, such as Heliogabalus would have thought cheaply purchased with half his empire. Town or country makes no difference. Win ter or summer, it is the same thing. At home or abroad, no remission. The true bore is no respecter of times, places, or seasons by sea or by land to escape him is impossible. He is omnipresent. He exists in every point of space and every moment of time. Go down into the deep and you meet him in the cabin of the steam packet. Go up into the air in a balloon and you are sure to meet him descending in a parachute. Go with Parry to the polar wastes, and though you miss the north-west passage, you will find, in all human probability, looking out for you from the top of an ice-berg, the Bore -the identical Bore-to escape from whose mortal clutches you have jeopardied your life amongst the white bears and Esquimaux. Aye! and he is not only omnipresent but immortal. When did death ever carry off a bore? A dead bore is as rare a phenomenon as a dead donkey or a dead attorney. No, Sir, your true bore possesses the elixir vitæ. The typhus will rage and carry off all the worthy inoffensive people in a district I have known it-yet it shall not come nigh him. No; though the whole faculty be called in, the recovery of a bore is as certain as the succession of day to night. It was the same with the cholera. The bore was the only member of the community who was safe: every body else laid in a store of cajeput and French brandy; he kept his money in his purse, and walked abroad, even through noisome alleys, in perfect security. I watched with the most intense anxiety to observe the effects of that pestilence upon the bores of my acquaintance. Not a death; not the slightest blue tinge on one of their hateful physiognomies. I have no doubt the two plagues had a mutual understanding, or were influenced by an esprit de corps. It would have been as unhandsome in the cho lera to kill a bore, as in one highwayman to blow out the brains of another. Allow me to introduce first to your notice the gentleman who holds the post of musical bore in my establishment-a sad miscreant-a fellow who would have softened the heart of Pharaoh better than all the vermin in the insect kingdom. Do I say too much?

Not three weeks since, he made an appointment with his music-master, Signor Tantaracini, to give him a lesson on the bassoon-think for an instant of the bassoon!--three times a week at my lodgings, without asking my permission, and with the thorough knowledge of the fact, that I abominate music of all kinds, vocal and instrumental, as devoutly as a Jew does swines' flesh. While the weather remained tolerably fine, the thing was supportable, for I could take my hat the moment the Signor arrived, and saunter through the streets, or ramble into the country; but latterly it was raw, wet, and cold, and then the lessons on the bassoon were, as old Dogberry says, "most tolerable and not to be endured." I had no alternative but to stay within doors and submit to be practised and dinned almost to death. The infernal bassoon! The trump of discord was nothing to it. Yet I have reason to think that worse tortures are being prepared for me. It was but yesterday that I heard a hint dropped' about the establishment of a catchclub at my quarters. The members reside, it appears, in remote corners of the town, and are in want of some central place to hold their meetings. My lodgings are just the thing to suit them; and as to any objection on my part to the arrangement, that is what, I will venture to say, not one of the songsters will ever trouble his head about. I must succumb or migrate; and the latter is out of the question, for I have taken my lodgings by the year, and have no pretence whatever for a quarrel with my landlady. Doctor Adam Clarke, one day, took a troublesome young ensign up by the waistband of his pantaloons and flung him out of a three-pair-of-stairs window. That was the proper way to deal with a bore; and there is only one thing prevents me from adopting the Doctor's way of proceeding towards Signor Tantaracini's pupil. I am unhappily what the Doctor was not-an easy man.

They spare no labour, grudge no cost, there is no sacrifice they do not make to get at me. One individualI call him my Valetudinarian bore-will travel post, three successive days and nights for no discoverable purpose on earth save to inform me of the state of his " alimentary canal," or acquaint me with the superabundant energy of

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his muscular system," or give me a history as long as Sir Charles Grandison, and about as interesting, of the progress of a certain pain or ache, which originated under his midriff, and gradually proceeded to the great toe of his right foot, from whence it took a spring, precisely at five minutes past three in the morning, into the corresponding digit of the left, and then ascended again, until it got back, he assures me upon his honour, to the precise spot under the midriff, from which it first started. Would it had travelled to better purpose and given him his quietus. But to give you a further idea of this worthy, (who, by the bye, is as fat as Mr. Bo Gn and as robust as Hercules,) he is literally an ambulatory medicine-chest, or walking druggist's shop. He is never an instant unprovided with James's powders, effervescent magnesia, salts of all kinds, concentrated essence of Jamaica ginger, soluble Cayenne, and twenty other things, which, not having a pharmacopeia at hand, I cannot now enumerate. He never takes an excursion, were it only to Bray or Kingstown, without a box of Abernethy's pills in his waistcoat pocket, and many a time I have carried Buchan's Domestic Medicine, and Paris on Diet for him, through the streets of London, (where I have frequently had the mishap to meet my "malade imaginaire,") and thought myself well off that he did not saddle me likewise with his " Accum on culinary poisons," and the works of Mr. St. John Long. Then there is a certain apparatus, much in use in France, but over whose virtues, even its name, delicacy obliges me to draw the curtain, without which he never stirs the length of his nose. All anonymous and coupled with ignominy as this machine is, I have panted after him for a full hour in the dog-days, carrying it under my arm as obsequiously as a footman does the reticule of his mistress. He has also a portable pair of scales to regulate his daily allowance of food; and this he produces were he only about to masticate a Naples biscuit; notes down the exact weight in a book he keeps for the purpose, and calls his " Alimentary Register;" and assures me gravely that to his delicate constitution--the varlet might sit for a picture of Samson Agonistes-an error, even of a decimal of a grain, might be

fatal. This is, you may suppose, better than any farce to the damsels in the confectioner's shops. I am ashamed, though fainting with hunger, to ask for a bun in any quarter of the city. They take me-I know it by their looks-for a professional care-taker of gentlemen out of their right minds.

My literary bore is one of the most efficient officers on my staff. He is worse than a rack or wheel, Phalaris would have made him his prime minister. How shall I give an adequate idea of this living instrument of torture? I call him literary, merely because he styles himself so, for of all the endowments of a writer I never could discover that he was gifted with more than three-to wit, pen, ink, and paper. With these, however, he has achieved prodigies; and if not the most luminous, he is perhaps the most voluminous author extant. To be sure he never appears in print-the publishers and editors take care of that; but it is so much the worse for me. If a dult book is a nuisance, imagine the horrors of dull manuscripts; and then conceive the felicity of my situation who am compelled to read every line that this blockhead is pleased to write. I must peruse all his repudiated pamphlets; I must wade through all his rejected articles; not a paragraph or letter of his inditing is kicked out of a newspaper office with contumely, but I must pore over at his discretion. His papers make a tour of all the periodicals in the kingdom; but you, Editors, have an easy life of it; you see at a glance that a contribution of half a ton weight will not do, and you forthwith cashier it with one of those cant observations you rejoice in, such as “Profundus is too deep for our pages," or "Lacon must excuse us; we never insert articles that we can scarcely lift." This done, you throw yourselves back in your easy chairs, and pair your nails, or perhaps slumber; but it is then that my tribulations commence-what you reject I must read; nor will either indisposition or business excuse me. It is easy to say, why not pretend to read, and send the nonsense back pencilled here and there in the margin. I have tried it without any success. I must read or I must listen. The law of the Medes and Persians was not more fixed. Nor will a cursory perusal serve; for I am actually examined, and if found defi