particular description of the subjects of any state from the enjoyment of advantages possessed by the community, is in itself a positive evil." Adverting to an observation which had fallen on a recent occasion from one of His Majesty's ministers (Lord Mulgrave), who had said, that although the Catholics had declared they would be satisfied with the concessions of 1793, they again came, like the beggar in Gil Blas, asking alms, with a pistol pointed to their lordships' breasts, Lord Donoughmore indignantly asked, "Are my Catholic countrymen then to be charaterized as beggars by His Majesty's mild, conciliating, and temperate ministers? If they are beggars, who made them so? They have, unhappily, had the full benefits of your instruction and fraternity for the last six hundred years. You complain of your own acts. It was your own barbarizing code which forcibly arrested from the Catholic the constitution of his country, his inheritance, and birthright which made him, as it were, an alien in his native land. It was the all-devouring spirit of your commercial monopoly which stripped my countrymen of their manufactures, their commerce, and their industry. It was your insatiate lust of power that degraded the parliament and the nation by the arrogant assumption of binding by your laws another legislature as independent as your own. But when, and under what circumstances, did the Catholic, and the Protestant, and the parliament, reclaim and recover their invaded right? In times of British weakness and apprehension. When did these invasions of their rights fall upon my countrymen with the greatest weight? In the most triumphant moments of British strength, pride, and prosperity. Under such impressions as these, I feel it to be my bounden duty, earnestly to recommend to your lordships' prompt and favourable consideration, the manifold grievances of your Catholic fellow-subjects, whilst the grant may still preserve somewhat of the dignity and the grace of unforced concession." The disappointment of the expectations which the Catholics founded on the presumed favourable opinion towards them of his present Majesty, then recently invested with the

Regency, Lord Donoughmore thus elegantly described: "To no event have my Catholic countrymen ever looked with so much confident and anxious hope as to that auspicious moment, when, in the fulness of time, the present heir-apparent to the crown, should assume the government of these his realms. In him, they thought they saw the messenger of peace, with healing on his wing, the promised guardian of the people's rights of the fomented discord of his father's Irish subjects the indignant spectator, of their interests the avowed and zealous assertor, to Catholic privilege an assured and plighted friend. When the exercise of the executive functions was suspended, for the first time, by the same awful visitation, Ireland successfully maintained the cause of the Prince, not equally triumphant in this more favoured nation; committing to him, the legitimate heir to all the royal authorities, the administration of his own inheritance, until returning health should restore his sceptre to the suffering King. The heart of the illustrious person overflowed with affectionate and just feelings; and my confiding countrymen fondly trusted that they had bound their future monarch to them by a double tie. How sanguine were their hopes! How strong and firmlyrooted the foundations on which they seemed to rest! But they are gone - blasted at the moment of full maturity; and instead of that rich and abundant harvest of national union and prosperity which we were prepared to gather, as the first fruits of the promised conciliation of the illustrious person, the sharpened edge of a slumbering statute which had never been awakened before for the annoyance of the people, called for the first time into mischievous activity, and turned against the Catholics, assembled for the lawful purpose of remonstrating for the redress of grievances; and those desperate men who dared thus to intercept, in their constitutional and legitimate progress to the parliament and to the throne, the petitions of an oppressed community of four millions of their fellow-subjects, confirmed in the full possession of all their former power, in the full exercise of all their former intolerance, as the ministers of his own peculiar choice, by the first

act of the unlimited Regent !"-"The ministers have drawn, as it were, a magic circle round the throne, into which none are permitted to enter on whom the confidence of the illustrious person has been accustomed to repose. Within its range, the artificers of mischief have not ceased to work with too successful industry. What phantoms have they not conjured up, to warp the judgment, excite the feelings, and appal the firmness of the royal mind! But though the evil genius should assume a mitred, nay, more than noble form, the sainted aspect which political bigotry delights to wear, or the lineaments of that softer sex which first beguiled man to his destruction-though, to the allurements of Calypso's court were joined the magic and the charms of that matured enchantress should the spirit of darkness take the human shape, and issuing forth from the inmost recesses of the gaming-house and the brothel, presume to place itself near the royal ear-what though the potent spell should not have worked in vain, and that the boasted recantation of all encumbering prepossessions and inconvenient prejudices had already marked the triumph of its course- though from the royal side they should have torn the chosen friend of his youth, and faithful counsellor of his maturer years, the boast of his own gallant profession, the pride, the hope, the refuge of my distracted country, and a high and conspicuous ornament of your's though they should have banished from the royal councils talents, integrity, honour, and high-mindedness like his, and should have selected for the illustrious person an associate and an adviser from 'Change-alley and from the though they should thus have filled up to its full measure the disgusting catalogue of their enormities, —we must still cling to the foundering vessel, and call to our aid those characteristic British energies, by which the ancestors of those whom I have now the honour to address, have so often and so nobly saved the sinking state."

stews

On the 1st of July, 1812, Lord Donoughmore supported the Marquis of Wellesley's motion, that the house would, early in the next session, take into its most serious consider

ation, the state of the laws affecting His Majesty's Roman Catholic subjects in Great Britain and Ireland. On the 19th of March, 1813, he presented petitions from the general body of the Catholics, the Catholics of the county and city of Cork, and the counties of Roscommon and Tipperary; but in consequence of the introduction into the House of Commons, of a bill for the relief of the Catholics, which he trusted would reach the House of Lords, he felt it unnecessary to appoint any day for calling the attention of their lordships to the petitions.

The expectations of the noble earl and of the Catholic body having, however, once more been disappointed, Lord Donoughmore, on the 8th of June, 1814, again presented the general petition of the Catholics of Ireland, praying the removal of all existing disabilities; also similar petitions from the Catholics of the city and county of Cork, the town of Carrick-on-Suir, the county of Tipperary, and the county of Roscommon; and stated, as the grounds on which he declined bringing the subject under discussion in that session, the opinion of his own parliamentary friends and the friends of the Catholic cause, " that the late proceedings of the Catholic board (the only accredited organ for the expression of the sentiments and feelings of the Irish Catholic community,) had tended to retard rather than to advance, their own interests, and the success of their question." The noble earl added, that although he did not himself think that that cause was sufficient to induce a postponement of the discussion of the Catholic claims, yet that the manner in which the Roman Catholics of Ireland generally had received the rescript of the sub-prefect of the propaganda, the depository of the papal power, fully satisfied him of the propriety of the postpone

ment.

When, on the 11th of November, 1814, Earl Fitzwilliam called the attention of the House of Lords to the continuance of the militia in an embodied state, notwithstanding the restoration of peace, Lord Donoughmore made some strong remarks on the vacillation which ministers had exhibited on

that subject, especially in Ireland. The noble lord also took a part in the discussion originated by Earl Darnley, on the 15th of November, upon the conduct of the naval administration; as, likewise, in the conversation of the 21st of November, on the negociations between Great Britain and America, at Ghent. On the 24th of November, Lord Donoughmore made three motions. The first, which was for "an address to the Prince Regent, for a copy of the representations which had been made to His Royal Highness on the want of protection to trade, by the merchants and ship-owners of Liverpool, Glasgow, Port Glasgow, Greenock, and London," was agreed to. The second, which was for "the weekly accounts of the state of the naval force under Sir Alexander Cochrane, on the American station," was negatived. The third, which was for certain communications to the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, "announcing the complete, or any restoration of tranquillity, in the only barony of Ireland (that of Middlethird in the county of Tipperary,) to which it had been thought necessary to apply the provisions of the bill in the last sessions, intituled, " An Act for the Preservation of the Peace," in introducing which motion, the noble lord expatiated on the severe and injurious nature of the bill in question, was also negatived. When, on the 1st of December, 1814, the Earl of Liverpool moved the adjournment of the House to the 9th of February, Lord Donoughmore opposed the motion, in the existing critical conjuncture of public affairs; observing, "that the noble earl seemed to think no business worth his attention but taxation; and that the moment the supplies were granted, the candles were put out, the House was abandoned to darkness, and looked more like an inquisition than a House of Parliament."

On the 19th May, 1815, Lord Donoughmore again presented the general petition of the Roman Catholics of Ireland; and on the 8th of June following moved the immediate reference of the Catholic claims to a committee of the whole House. This motion the noble earl prefaced by an able although not a long speech; dividing his subject into four