you flowing locks, as if Irish loyalty, like Samson's strength, lay in the hair:) You hair close, wear your may may sing what songs, and dance to what tunes you please, but I tell you, you are no true croppy: you reason; but a republican," said she with animation, "feels for his bleeding country-for the exile in a foreign land-for the prisoner in a dungeon-for the victim on the scaffold-for the wretched wanderer without habitation or name, whose house has been burned, and property destroyed, by the vile agents of lawless and brutal power! And because I am a woman, I am not to think of this: I am not to feel for their sorrows, because I cannot relieve their distresses;-I am not to pursue with curses their low-minded, and soon, I hope, to be low-laid oppressors, because I am a woman--because I am weak-because I am a girl, as you were pleased to call me; but if I am weak, God is strong, and will soon, I trust, exterminate such monsters from the face of the earth! I would not," added she, after a pause, and in a more moderate tone, "strike a dagger into one of their hearts, but I would bless and pray for the man who did it, and would take his chance of Heaven far sooner than the cold-blooded preacher, who talks of virtue, but encourages vice, and tramples on and outrages innocence by affording impunity to guilt." No reply was made to this violent speech: to have answered it with ridicule would have been cruel, and reason would have been unavailing to lay those terrific images her fancy had conjured up; and which caused her, like Hamlet, to speak daggers, though, like him, she said she would use none. Spite of his prudence, the cold-blooded preacher, indeed, was struck with respect and admiration for the feelings that dictated those sentiments, that sparkled in the eye, and illuminated the countenance of the fair enthusiast; and when he took hold of her hand, which still trembled with the vehemence with which she had spoken, and surveyed the tear which trickled down her glowing cheek, he found his feelings, in favour of the exile, the prisoner, and the wanderer, stronger than they had ever been before. Like Festus in the Apostles, he could have exclaimed, “Almost thou persuadest me to be a republican." The At a period subsequent to this, I knew her myself. She was then married, and I never was in company with a more amiable woman. The enthusiasm of the hour had passed away, and given place to the sober business of human life. Occupied with domestic employment and domestic happiness, she thought little of those evils she once considered great, which are incidental to all insurrections, and which interference, however well meant, hardly ever fails to exasperate. fault she fell into is one very common to persons of great sensibility; whose feelings are strong and judgments weak; who have good hearts but weak heads. In the strong sympathy they feel for distress, all minor considerations are swallowed up; they never reflect how much of it is folly, and brought on by itself; how much of it is guilt, and deserving of punishment : become sanguinary, even by the excess of their humanity; become oppressors, from their abhorrence of oppression; they inflict misery from the hatred they bear it; their love of virtue makes them unjust, their horror of cruelty makes them cruel, and sullen hatred and demoniac malice are not productive of greater ills in society than their noble and generous, but romantic and ill-regulated emotions. The English character itself is a strong and unfortunate illustration of this: without going back to any distant period, we have only to refer to the causes which led to the war in which we have been engaged, with slight interruption, for upwards of seventeen years. What Mr. Pitt's motives for entering into it were, I shall not attempt to determine; but of this I am certain, the humanity of the people of England, which made them tremblingly alive to the excesses perpetrated in France, could alone have engaged them so warmly in it; nor do I know whether most to admire or execrate the characteristic cunning of that wonderful man, which enabled him, with such fatal adroitness, to convert the honest prejudices of the English nation in favour of good order and humanity into the deadly weapon of destruction of all they most revered. The French people were guilty of great excesses, which excited the abhorrence of the English. It is to their credit that they did excite it; yet happy would it have been for the peace of man, had they been "Duller than the fat weed That rots itself in ease on Lethe's wharf, For to our interference, I fear, is to be ascribed many of the miseries of the war, as well as the dreadful character it displays. This might have been foreseen by any person who witnessed the shock our declaration of it in the year 1793 gave to public as well as individual feeling in France. That Austrian and Prussian despots should endeavour to crush the infant republic, was not to be wondered at. The French relied on the superiority of their strength, and as they had little : fear, they could not long feel much resentment, whatever (from motives of policy) they might affect to feel. But the interference of England, her gigantic power, her immense resources, put in imminent jeopardy the frail bark of freedom, assailed as it was by dangers of other kinds: nor was it more overwhelming than unexpected. England, the seat of freedom, of humane feeling, of just reasoning: England, whom they venerated, whose opinions they adopted, whose example they thought they followed, whose prejudices they cherished that she should regard those efforts (for which she expected praise) with horror; that she should repay her veneration with insult and unkindness, were injuries too great, too aggravated, ever to be forgiven. Love was converted into hatred-the milk of English kindness was curdled in their breasts; and the unsteady Frenchman became the steady and irreconcilable enemy of England. He met no kindness in the day of his sorrow, no allowance for the excesses of his madness, no mercy in the hour of his weakness; and we may be well assured, he will show none in the hour of his strength. I have said, perhaps, too much on this subject; yet my feelings are so strong, I cannot forbear saying a few words more. The French revolution was a great but a fleeting evil; it was a transient cloud that would soon have passed away; our interference fixed it, and drew down that fatal storm which has desolated Europe, and inundated her plains with blood. French atheism overturned the altars of religion, banished and murdered her priests; English religion squandered millions, and preached up a crusade of blood. French ambition overran countries, overturned governments; English humanity encouraged nations to unavailing resistance, and sent her own troops to hopeless combat, or to moulder in infected climes and unwholesome marshes, from the effects of slow, though not less certain disease. French action and English reaction, French barbarity and English humanity have inflicted as much misery on mankind these last seventeen years, as, perhaps, ever befel them in the same space of time, not even excepting the civil wars between Cæsar and Pompey, or the proscriptions of Augustus and Mark Antony. CHAPTER XVII. Visit at a farm-house-Sentiments of an Orangeman-Bedchamber-Ludicrous night-adventure. Omagh. and it I HAD now spent several days in Cwas time to think of quitting it. I have said so much of the people, that I have not left myself room to say any thing of the place; no great misfortune neither, as I know nothing remarkable in it, except the extreme neatness of the shambles: the meat sold there, I am told, is excellent, but of this I can only speak by hearsay; I abominate the sight of raw meat as much I do that of a butcher; it reminds a man too forcibly of what a cannibal he is. I took leave of my venerable friend with a melancholy presentiment that we should never meet again in this life, nor was I disappointed; the very day I left her she was suddenly taken ill, and died after a few hours' illness. I do not know that at any age death should be considered an evil; perhaps |