perfection the anti-social code, which had been comparatively mild under the reign of William. The barbarising non-education laws were rendered more precise; the Gavel Act of Queen Anne was sharpened into more execrable efficiency; every legal evasion suggested by the commiseration and humanity of the Protestant was attempted to be cut off; and to give it a still more sweeping extension, it was rendered by a clause of peculiar malignity, retroactive. But the ingenuity of the persecutor was principally exercised in attempting the extermination of the Catholic priesthood. Partly by fraud, partly by violence, first by registering, and then by forcing on the registered the oaths of abjuration, and meeting their refusal with an accumulation of pains and penalties unknown in the code of any civilised nation, they nearly succeeded in extirpating all species of religious as well as literary instruction from the island. The pro

The Irish were taught in Munster the Greek and Latin languages, mathematics, history, geography, and other sciences. The existing law was not sufficient to eradicate civilization. It was enacted, that every Popish schoolmaster, tutor, or usher, should be subject to the same penalties as the Catholic clergy, and 107. was offered for their conviction. In such laws, and not in the want of well-bound Bibles, we shall find the secret of Irish barbarism.

fession of informers was declared "an honourable service" by a resolution of the House of Commons; blood-money for the capture of priests was unsparingly lavished; the whole country was debauched and demoralised by the very bodies to whom chiefly was entrusted the guardianship of public morality. It was in vain that Sir Stephen Rice, in support of the petition of Lord Kingsland, again attempted to interpose his powerful eloquence between his Catholic countrymen and these atrocious enactments. But the last consummation was now perfected. The land was reduced to a waste, yet fear and discord still reigned; solitude was every where, but peace was not yet established. Emigrations became numerous and frequent; all who could fly, fled. They left behind a government in prey to every vice, and a country the victim of every wrong. The facility of acquiring property by the violation of the natural duties of social life, was too powerful a temptation: dishonesty, treachery, and extravagance prevailed. The rewards of conformity cast at large the seeds of mutual distrust in the hearts of child

and of parent. Hypocrisy and dissimulation. were applauded and recompensed by the laws themselves. A nursery for young tyrants was formed in the very bosom of the legislature;

habitual oppression and habitual subserviency degraded and debased the upper classes. The lower, without rights, without land, with scarcely a home, with nothing which truly gives country to man, basely crept over their native soil defrauded of its blessings, "the patient victims of its wrongs, the insensible spectators of its ruin," and left behind them, between the cradle and the grave, no other trace of their existence, than the memorial of calamities under which they bent, and of crimes which were assiduously taught them by their governors.t

The reign of George I. could add little to these inflictions. Human cruelty seemed exhausted. The peculiar circumstances which threw him into the hands of the Whigs, ren

Land-land-land-was the beginning, the middle, the end of all this. Fear against fear (says an Italian politician) is the promoter and continuer of all revolutions.

+ What Lord Chesterfield said later, was equally applicable to this period. "All the causes that ever destroyed any country, conspire in this point to ruin Ireland. Premature luxury outstrips your riches, which in other countries. it only accompanies; a total disregard to the public interest both in the governed and governors-a profligate and shameless avowal of private interest-a universal corruption both of morals and manners. All this is more than necessary to subvert any constitution in the world.". Miscellaneous Works, v. iii. p. 361.

dered still more permanent and unrelenting the twofold policy of his predecessor. Hatred to Popery-hatred to Ireland-the first confounded with slavery, the second with every thing hostile to the supremacy of England, were the guiding maxims of his cabinet and parliament. The one worked for the other; and the English monarch, forgetting he was also king of Ireland, played kingdom against kingdom, and party against party, reigning over factions, and rejoicing over victories, each of which, by a wise and just monarch, ought to have been lamented as a national defeat.

All the former tyrannies were now found consolidated into one. The records of this reign present the same indefatigable persecution of the Catholic clergy, the same injuries and insults heaped without measure on the ancient aristocracy of the country, the same anxiety to furnish new additions to the exterminating code, the same legalised violations of the rights of the subject, the same usurpations of Irish rights, which so disgracefully characterise the administration and parliaments of the preceding. But under George the First, what was originally experiment became system; and the machinery, wherever it was found defective, by the perverse vigilance of the legis

lature, was gradually improved into the most atrocious perfection. The Protestant had achieved the work for which he was employed; and it was now time that "the broken tool should in its due season be cast away. The Irish Protestant constitution in church and state was fully established: the Protestant had reaped and toiled; but the harvest was not for the Irishman, but the Englishman. The poisoned chalice was returned to his own lips. He had succeeded in barbarising, in demoralising, in impoverishing, the Catholic; but when he came to inspect the works of his own hands, he found that he must continue to dwell in the midst of the ruins and desolation, and have the barbarism, and vice, and poverty, which he had so madly created, for ever raging around him. He had succeeded in excluding the Catholic from all power, and for a moment held triumphant and exclusive possession of the conquest; but he was merely a locum tenens for a more powerful conqueror,-a jackall for the lion,an Irish steward for an English master; and the time soon came round, when he was obliged to render up reluctantly, but immediately, even this oppressive trust. The exclusive system was turned against him: he had made the executive entirely Protestant; the Whigs of George I. made