HEAD. You are in an unreasonably bad temper.

HEART. I am in a bad temper, and somewhat dangerous, but not unreasonable. Have I not good cause to be in a bad temper? Here are we, the loyal protestant gentry of Ireland, by whose attachment to the law, and the church, and the crown, this Island has for two hundred and fifty years (ever since its actual conquest,) been preserved to the British Empire. We, by whom three dangerous rebellions have already been put down in this realm, and who would be ready to put down an other in the same cause, were it to burst out to-morrow. Here are we, I say, who are the controllers of popery; the safeguards of British connection; the guarantees of the empire's integrity; the most respectable body of men for our members, in all Europe, whether we be considered with regard to wealth, industry, intellect, position, or absolute power; here are we, I say again, who in a word, are the arbiters of Britain's fate, deceived, insulted, spoiled, and set at defiance.

HEAD.-Softly; softly. The whigs still love our church, though they have been her involuntary spoliators. They cannot be such fools, as not to value our friendship, though they have much against their design, estranged our affections. See, now of late, when they perceived to what a miserable state we are reduced, through their mismanagement, have they not sacrificed their pride of principle, and exposed themselves to the charges of hypocrisy, and tyranny, for our sake?

HEART. They have sacrificed no principle who never had any. They have done nothing for our sake, who never had an aim beyond the gratification of their own political conceits. Is it for our sake, that we are exposed to as much of the indignity of their bill, as the vilest clamours of the Arena? Is it for our sake, that we dare no more meet than a mob? Is it for our sake, that we are denied even the use of

their bill's authority, for the collection of our rightful property?

HEAD.-Surely it is something in our favour, to be able to lie down without the fear of having our houses burned, or our throats cut before morning. It is something for a man to be able to walk from his own door to his place of worship, without risk of being shot at from behind his father's tombstone It is something for a man to get his rents, too; and the privilege of setting one's lands to tenants of one's own choosing, is also something. The bill was unconstitutional, and galling: but it has had the effect desired. It has tranquillized the country.

HEART.-Tranquillity; do you call it? The tranquillity of fear for an unjust power, is more than open violence. It is either manhood prostrated, or deeper malice concealed. Yet you will never cease taunting me with our tranquillity. Go, taunt the plundered traveller, with the quiet comforts of his gag!

HEAD.-There you go! bouncing, and puffing in the face of reason. The only act ever done by the whigs, that can be called a boon to the Irish Protestant, you rebel against as hotly as if it had been catholic emancipation, or an Irish church bill. True; I can see very plainly the illegality of that act, and can be well aware, that while it continues in force, we are de jure deprived of magna charta; but I rest the most secure confidence; themost fearless assurance in my knowledge, that the application of that bill, can never de facto place us beyond the pale of the constitution. It is a rod that we care not to see laid on the shoulders of the turbulent, and lawless. Our backs are at Lord Brougham's defiance.

HEART. Though the necessity, and the benefits of that bill, were demonstrated to me a hundred times in the day, I could not think of it's framers, without abhorrence and disgust. They, who for twenty years did nothing but irritate the sore, which proper treat

ment had cicatrized within a single mouth; it well becomes them now, to call out for the knife, and the searing iron! They, whose whole talk has been of liberty, and the blessings of the constitution; of the rights of man; the unalienable rights of man, and the hatefulness of arbitrary power-it well becomes them to be the first to propound an edict like a Russian ukase! Hypocrites and tyrants! may they live to reap-Oh! God forbid that the seed which they have sown, should ever come to maturity; but if it do, then may they be the first to reap a harvest of abundant punishment! May they be the first to see their spurs of privilege chopped off by the cleaver of a hangman mob! May they be the first to see the ruffian soldier stable his horses in their cabinets!-Infamy eternal cling to their memories, who, when one salutary summer shower of the law, would have quenched for ever, the smouldering causes of sedition, did, for their own base purpose, rake them together, and fan them into flames, and who, when that conflagration had burned the bar riers, and overleaped the rampart, and was bursting at last into the very sanctuary of the capitol, did, for the suppression of that, their own incendiarism, pull down our transept of the iple temple, where Irish honour still lies prostrate and suffocating among the blackened ruins.

HEAD. Rather say that Irish honour shines brighter for the sacrifice she has made to Irish safety. For they who truly checked the flame, were not the whigs, but the Irish protestants, without whose assent, their bill had never passed into law. That their honor is either blackened or tarnished, I deny. Nay, that these bold and virtuous men, by controlling the very feelings which you have now expressed, (and which they universally have felt rebelling within them, against their better reason,) and by thus submitting their private índig nation to their sense of the public good, have gained themselves a civic glory, far more honorable than the most romantic pride of partial patriotism could bestow-that they have won such an honour, I say, is clear to the eyes of every man in the Empire, who can value the goods of peace, and the protection of the laws.

HEART. What do you mean by protection of the laws, when the very

extension of the so called protection, is itself the utter annihilation of that law? HEAD.-"Salus populi, suprema lex." HEART." Fiat justitia, ruat cœ lum !"

HEAD. And if the sky did fall, let me ask who would be the "larks ?" But away with the idleness of childish metaphor. If revolution had, in Ireland, a successful issue, what would become of our estates, our liberties of conscience; our personal liberties; our lives? Oh, we would respect the rights of property, says the Popish plotter, and we would never deprive another of his religious liberty, after struggling so long, and so devotedly for our own-all we would ask would be your co-operation in carrying into effect the decrees of our parliament, or to speak more clearly, we would only insist on your subjection and obedience (the necessary consequences, mark you, of minority in numbers, when universal suffrage and ballot voting, shall have cast all the power of the nation, be it republic or what you will, into the hands of our own people.) Then as to your church; if the whigs leave her anything, we would of course apply that to national purposes; and you surely could not object to a like appropriation of lands confiscated by their owners levying war against their country.' But if I ask, what is meant by national purposes? Why' replies our jesuit, the march of mind must be directed by an authority, competent to so high an office; and what authority, save that of the Church, has moral power qualifying it for the intellectual command of a whole people? The Church, my friend, must be reestablished. The spirit of heresy must be eradicated-You Protestants, my excellent fellow, must either conform or quit. This may seem hard, yet it is no more than the lex talionis. Times, Sir, are altered; you have had your day. 'Tis our turn now.

HEART.-This talk of the nation, the republic, the levying of war, the forfeiture of estates, and seizure of church lands, alarms me. You do not seem to consider a repeal of the union, but to speculate on a violent separation.

HEAD. It is a separation on which I speculate. A repeal of the union, as the phrase is generally understood, I take to be a sham, a pretence, the mere shadow of a stalking horse; a thing

that has existence only in theory, like a whig's doctrine of the three estates. HEART. And can you for a moment bear the contemplation of such an event as the first, without dread and abhorrence?

HEAD.-Horror and shrinking are for you. I can contemplate, unmoved, any state of affairs that may await us. If changes go on as they have for some time proceeded, I can, without either fear or wonder, contemplate the enactment of laws for the British Empire, by the lowest demagogues, (by delegated tinkers, if you please,) and I can consider the enforcement of these laws entrusted to the pikes of sansculottes. If then I can look on such a state of things unmoved, I need not shrink from the consideration of that which seems, at all events, not more improbable; for, if Catholic emancipation produce repeal, so surely will repeal produce ultimate separation; and so sure as we have a separation, so surely will there be war levied, estates confiscated, and the Popish church established.

HEART. In such a crisis we would be in a sad case-between the devil and the deep sea.

HEAD. Our duty and line of conduct would be plain, supposing England still to be the Old England that she has not yet ceased to be. Yet why do I say so? for while England is as now, Repeal can not take place.

HEART. I boasted but now of our strength, and yet I see how our strength would be weakness, in the event of that which you hint must accompany Repeal.

HEAD. I do not hesitate to avow it. Repeal can never take place until the Protestants of Ireland are disgusted by, and alienated from, the English Go

vernment.

HEART. In such a crisis, which God in his mercies avert, I do feel that our present available power would be almost useless; for, at present we stand midway upon the balance, and by leaning to either side can make the opposite scale kick the beam; but in circumstances such as another Revolution might produce, our position would be altered in proportion to the change of those we deal with, and in truth, I fear, unless we qualify ourselves for some new mode of action, we

should hardly be able to touch the beam at all.

HEAD. It is much to be lamented that the Protestant gentry of Ireland have not sooner begun their apprenticeship to the craft and mystery of self-defence. Yet even on that account we must admire them the more; for it has been their frank and manly confidence in the honor of the British Government that has hitherto prevented them from seeking or using the arms in which others, less scrupulous and more selfish, have been disciplining themselves for the last ten years. But it is time now to lay aside all romantic punctilios, all weak forbearances; to gather together, and, seeing that concession has begot concession, like the draughts of a drunkard, to make known our determination that we will concede no more; that, if further abandonment of our rights be wrung from us by violence, we also will take up the game that has been played to such advantage by the rest.

HEART.-We are not yet enough initiated in the arts of agitation to play it with the same success.

HEAD. I am aware that we are, individually, too much gentlemen to cope, in the excitement of a rabble's sympathy, with such persons as the brawlers of the Corn-Exchange. And I am, besides, conscious that the subjects with which we must have to deal, will always present to our adversaries an aspect much more easily reconcileable to the views of the mob, than that in which we must contemplate them. Tell a man that, by the changes you desire, he will have his whiskey at half-acrown the gallon, his tea at one and six-pence by the pound, his claret, if he be a wine-drinker, at eight-pence abottle, and his loaf, if he have a family of many mouths, at double size and less than half price, and you will experience little difficulty in persuading him to lend you his assistance in carrying these changes into effect. But, if by close reasoning and a complicated chain of nice conclusions, you endeavour to demonstrate to the same man, that by gaining these benefits, he must inevitably lose others of much more vital importance, such as the comforts of an orderly state of society, constant employment, sure markets, high wages -or if you attempt to show him the

likelihood of such events compromising his personal or moral liberty, or sinking his country in the scale of nations-if you attempt this, I say, you will find that his perceptions, which were keen and perspicuous in the apprehension of positive good, are dull and incredulous where contingent evils are sought to be exhibited.

HEART.-Another disadvantage we labour under in the opinion, which we have never with sufficient vigour contradicted, that our opponents have, in their Irish blood, a stronger claim to credit for disinterested nationality than we who are, generally speaking, comparatively "strangers."

HEAD. This is a mistake which must not be allowed to mislead us longer. Supposing (which I do not for a moment admit) that we are universally strangers by blood, as the Normans were in England, yet have the newest comers amongst us, as good a claim, now, to the name of Irishmen, as had these Norman invaders to that of Englishmen in the time of the Edwards. Between the battle of Hastings and the days of Cressy and Poictiers, they had scarcely a longer time or better opportunity of making themselves a national nobility than we have had from the Battle of the Boyne to the present day. Yet what a difference!

HEART. And why?

HEAD. Because, forsooth, we live in an age too far advanced in intellect to suffer our imitation of these founders of British greatness. But why waste time in lamenting the loss of that which is irrevocable? Protestant ascendancy, which promised to make us another England, is, by the fraud and violence of traitors rendered ineffectual for good or evil, and come after it what may, whether a Popish Establishment, a tolerating French philosophical morality, or Deism at large, Ireland never can be that which Protestant ascendancy might have made her. Yet stripped as we are of power and privilege, neither Whig tyranny nor Popish malice can deprive us of our birthright, which is the love of Ireland.

HEART. I know not whence my blood may have been drawn, but it circulates with a swifter liveliness at the name of this country, and I feel and know that I am the heart of an Irishman.

HEAD. And ten to one the chances that your blood has been drawn from a source as purely Irish as that of O'Connor or O'Brien. The Scot, returning to the land that sent him forth, need not be ashamed to recognise his cousins of the South,-but away, again, with the idleness of country, kindreds, and invasions. The Celt may have been expelled by the Nemedian, the Nemedian by the Firbolg, the Firbolg by the Tuatha de Danaan, the Tuatha de Danaan by the Scot, the Scot by the Anglo-Noman-but what of that? They were all Irishmen in turn, and wB are Irishmen now. Would that this were our only difference: but, alas! what are those curious distinctions of the genealogist, to the contending principles of Popery and Protestantism, that have made a thousand men murderers in one night!

HEART.-Aye, I could burst at the thought of that.

HEAD.-A difference, too, which time, in many respects, has made only more inveterate.

HEART. And worse than all, an evil, resignation to which is crime.

HEAD. That the conversion of the Irish Romanists will yet be effected by a reformation as sudden as that in England, I am still fondly willing to expect. Meanwhile, the mere neighbourhood of Protestantism is gradually liberalizing them. They are already disclaiming juggleries of which, fifty years ago, they would have boasted. The common sense of the times, too, is an active auxiliary among their better sort.

HEART.-Common sense alone does not know where to stop: I would not have Ireland like France.

HEAD. I make a wide distinction between common sense and the march of mind: Yet doubtless, we may have reasonable fears of an ultra-reformation here, some day, if Protestantism be not pushed with greater vigour in time.

HEART.-On the heads of those who have crippled the Irish Church, be the shame and punishment, if she do not overtake the spoiler, and that quickly.

HEAD. Of that, unless by a providential revolution of opinion, I now see no reasonable prospect. We will drive Popery by degrees from lie to lie, each one contested with the obstinacy of despair; but between the outworks of trick and legerdemain, and