better take something to drink,' said Moriarty, for, by my soul, that same bread and boiled grass is dry as well as meagre.' He laughed, and left the room as he spoke; and here the affair would, in all probability, have ended, but that, as he entered the passage, he saw the buckets which a water-carrier had just deposited there.-Some evil spirit put it into his head to play a wicked trick: he would not-perhaps he did not try to-resist it; but, seizing one of the buckets, he stepped back to the table at which the Guards (black-guards he always called them when he told this story) were sitting, and deliberately emptied its contents into the spinach-dish, at the same time plentifully sprinkling the convives.-There, gentlemen,' he said; now you can at least have your spinach dans son jus. This was rather too much to be endured by the bonnets rouge, even from an Irish student, and Morin swore that he would rather lose the custom of the college for ever than suffer such an indignity to be offered to his corps. The gallant soldiers were instantly in motion: they seized their swords, and all attacked poor Moriarty at once, who, with the water-bucket in his hand, parried their blows manfully, and cried out Kerry! Kerry!' as loudly as if he had been at the fair of Mul linstown. The result proved that his shout was not less effectual than if it had been raised there; for, by the time he had knocked down a butcher, who ventured within the range of his bucket, we, who had heard his cry, rushed to his assistance. (I shall never forget Silverthorne's cramming his pockets first with the Marons.) In a moment the officers were dashed on the floor-their weapons were broken -their clothes torn, and the lads' were in full exercise, dancing

Cum

mulum' upon the prostrate democrats, when a body of gens d'armes from the neighbouring caserne of the Luxembourg rushed into the room, and, after a desperate struggle, captured the whole of our party, carried us off to the corps de garde, and thrust us into a dungeon.

With the morning came reflection: it also brought the benevolent Abbé Kearney to the prison of his wild young countrymen, to whom, being known, he obtained access; and, after

lecturing thein mildly, advised a submission, and an apology; for,' added he, 'I have no money with which to purchase the silence of those beggars: the last crown I had in the world I gave to assist poor Mary Collins in waking her husband, Tom Collins, an invalid of the Regiment of Dillon, who died yesterday in the Rue Pot d' Enfer.'

The tear glistened in the eye of the Abbé.-Thank you, thank you, sir,' said Moriarty ;-even if you had money you could use it in a better service than ours.'

But, sir, I have a better plan in my head, and I will put it into immediate execution.-Abbé Kearney, will you, with your usual goodness, procure for me pen, ink, and a sheet of paper?' I will.' And will you

forward a letter which I shall write?' -I will carry it myself,' said the good Kearney.

The Duke of Dorset was at that period our (I mean the English) ambassador in Paris: Sir Charles (now Earl) Whitworth was his secretary; and to him did the rogue Moriarty write, attributing the outrage to its obvious cause, and begging the interference of the ambassador, and so forth.

Sir Charles readily undertook to procure the release of the students, representing to the authorities that it was St. Patrick's day. 'Hold,' said the Minister; are they Irish?'

Yes.' Ils sont toujours bons garçons! said he, laughing, and signed an immediate order for our discharge.-Such was the manner in which I spent one of my early St. Patrick's days in Paris. I have a large budget of stories besides to tell you, relating to our countrymen who from time to time have served in the French army, and who have always kept up the national character in a manner that makes any man who has formed one of them reasonably proud. For the present you have enough: it is nearly dinner-time, and I am engaged to meet a knot of old Irishmen, who, like myself, never forget to celebrate this day as it deserves. Among the toasts you may be sure of being remembered; and to the cause you advocate, I need not tell you, the first bumper will be consecrated.-Erin go bragh! Adieu.

WHAT! write a serious article on the Corporation of Dublin? Impossible! The subject would disturb the gravity of Heraclitus himself; and, were the weeping philosopher to undertake the task, you would soon see him, like an April day, smiling through his tears. For my part, I can never think of the Corporation, or of any of its members, without being obliged to hold both my sides, since the day I first saw my Lady Riddle (every one knew Sir James) passing over Ballybough Bridge on a hired jaunting-car, with the celebrated Bryan Maguire sitting on the opposite side, to keep her plump little ladyship in balance. Ever since the very mention of city knights and ladies throws me into fits, all seriousness is banished from my face, and my risible muscles, in spite of all my endeavours to the contrary, distort my countenance into something approaching a horse-laugh. It may indicate a want of good manners-betray the vulgarity of my breeding: but still I must laugh out I cannot possibly help it; and, whether a fault or a folly, I enjoy my laugh.

Man is a risible animal, and I am fond of the privilege of my species. Grimaldi makes me laugh, Liston makes me laugh, the gravity of lawyers makes me laugh, and the cant of hypocrites makes me laugh; but, above all, the Common Council of Dublin makes me laugh. In William Street I am a perfect Democritus; and their honours' have not asseinbled once during the last ten years without my hastening to the laughing banquet. Talk not of Rabelais, of Sterne, of Brown, of Burton; these fellows are too sensible, too satirical, too talented by far; but, for an extract to make a man laugh outright, quote me a speech made in the Common Council of Dublin by a tallow chandler or a butcher, by Sutter or Fitzsimmons. In any one of these you will find the most accurate proportions of flummery and nonsense, bathos and fudge, intolerance and fanaticism; while the whole is blended VOL. I.-No. 2.

with such a happy mixture of obscurity, that, trust me, it forms a risible olio far beyond any thing Doctor Kitchener (epicuri de grege porcum) could fabricate.

For some time I purposed making a collection of these specimens of city oratory; but, after I had filled six large folios, I found they could not please me, laughable as they undoubt, edly were; for some of the reports were inaccurate, some imperfect'; and, unless I could print the orator's face with his speech, three quarters of the humour was lost. Still I am quite. sure a publication of the sort could not be a bad speculation. It certainly would please the world; but I, who have sat for hours listening to one greasy fellow after another-oh! no, it could not please me, neither do I want it, for the fidelity of my memory is quite sufficient, particularly as I renew my acquaintance with their honours,' and the lower house,' whenever they meet to discuss city politics. Reader, if ever you are assailed by those enemies of good hu mour, blue devils,' repair to William Street, take your seat in the gallery, and you are one man picked out of ten thousand if you do not, in less than ten minutes, burst into a laugh that would expel a seven-years' quinsy. There is no place in this world like William Street for broad farce, made more irresistibly funny by the assumed gravity of the different actors. A butcher from Cole's Lane or Castle Market talks of humanity, a tallow-chandler of cleanliness, a coal-merchant of the high price of fuel, and a tavern-keeper of temperance. A leather-breeches maker declaims, in furious terms, against the statutes which ruined our cloth trade; and a brewer condemns the high price of wine. All is discord and out of character, when up bounds a fishmonger or a silk-weaver to propose a vote of censure on the junior sheriff for the scantiness of his last official dinner. This is a subject on which they are all agreed; the black-beans predominate, the executor of the law is hissed, the soup is brought in, and

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This is but a faint outline of what takes place in William Street. To appreciate the comic gravity-the affected consequence and would-be oratory-to hear the king's English murdered, grammar outraged, and reason perverted, you must personally witness a sitting of the Common Council. Neither pen nor pencil could do them justice, for none but themselves can be their parallel.

How easily could I enter into a long and learned discussion on the impolicy of corporation nonopoly-trace their foundation to the feudal timesand pronounce them a curse on free trade and liberality-show how, in Ireland, they have kept alive religious prejudices, and impeded the progress of national improvement-exhibit them as the hot-bed of Orangeism, the refuge of intolerance, and the last hold of bigotry! All this I could do without much labour, but where would be the advantage? These knaves are neither to be convinced nor deterred. To disturb their self-complacency, and make them passing honest, you must laugh at them. There is nothing so potent as a laugh. Hold them up to deserved ridicule, and depend upon it absolute shame will work a reformation in a very short time.

The Edinburgh Review' represents the people of Ireland as foolishly attached to existing abuses; it might add, unreasonably incensed at harmless institutions. Perhaps Sawney is right in arguing for an abolition of the Lord Lieutenancy; certainly I think the people wrong in wishing for the destruction of the Corporation of Dublin. For myself, I could not afford to part with their

subjects to me, and I owe them much for hours of delightful laughter. How dull would Dublin seem without the Lord Mayor's show! how stupid our morning papers if deprived of the speeches delivered by the members of the Common Council! At present our society is quite aristocratic. My Lady Brady, my Lady Whitford, and a dozen other civic ladies, do honour to shopkeeping; while a Miss Nugent-wonder as you may-has become a member of the Guild of Merchants. The English Parliament,' says De Lolme, can do any thing but make a man a woman or a woman a man.' The Dublin Corporation, it seems, is possessed of greater power, for it has made the daughter of a citizen a freeman.

Is not all this laughable? and should the people of Dublin refuse to pay for being amused?—Certainly not. A thousand a year for strawberries to feed the aldermen is not too much for the privilege of ridiculing them. It promotes hilarity, expels bile, and conduces to health. Pay on, good citizens of Dublin, that I may enjoy my laugh.

Before I discuss the particular merits of this loyal and venerable Corporation, allow me, gentle reader, to introduce to your notice, in the next number of The Dublin and London,' some of the individual members who compose this worthy civic body. You are not to expect any alphabetical arrangement or chronological order: I must have my own way in this, as in other things; and all I can promise you is to be a faithful delineator. Dublin.

Z. z.

without proofs; and that he read nothing but Mr. Wakefield's very inaccurate work is quite apparent from the strange assertions contained in the above short extract. How a freeholder with a house and one or two acres of land is without any property whatsoever, I leave reviewers to prove; but I must tell this stupid fellow that an Irish potatoe-garden is of very undetermined dimensions, not unfrequently containing ten, twenty, and thirty Irish acres. You, my dear Editor, have already demonstrated that the cant about superabundant population and small farms is mere nonsense; and, had this northern sage examined the list of voters at the different contested elections, he would have found, in place of universal suffrage, that not one-tenth, nor even one-twentieth, of the people are freeholders; nay, that two-thirds of those who absolutely are freehold ers do not register their leases, and that this is a subject of universal complaint among the Whigs of Ireland. In Sligo, in 1818, one-twentieth of the freeholders were not registered: so much for the pauper warren which Ireland has become.

As this writer has dealt so largely in generals, I must request of him to let me know, by post, the name of any one landlord who subdivides his whole estate, and lets it in small patches. Until I hear from him, I must be lieve that he has stated what is not true. I know Ireland somewhat better than any Scotchman in Edinburgh; and I never yet saw any thing like an inconvenient subdivision of farms, for the purpose of creating freeholders. If the reviewer visits Mr. White's estate near Dublin, he will see fortyshilling freeholders perhaps more numerous than on any other estate in Ireland; and I defy him to point me out, in Great Britain, cottagers more independent or comfortable. Not, however, to waste your time, I shall only tell Sawney, that, if the estate of Earl Fitzwilliam was divided in the manner he states, it alone would give more freeholders than are to be found at present in the whole island.

Those who suppose these forty

shilling freeholders to be obsequious instruments of their landlord's ambition know nothing of them; for they have never failed to evince a spirit of independence, and love of popular rights, not found in more wealthy voters. The truth is, Englishmen judge the Irish peasantry by their own; and forget that the system of letting farms, in both countries, is quite different; for, while the English farmer and labourer are tenants at will, always in dread of their landlord's caprice, the Irish farmer and cottier have comparatively long leases; and, if freeholders, they can act independently of their landlord; for, în spite of him, they can retain their holding during their own or some other person's life. The one, therefore, is almost uncontrolled, while the other is absolutely fettered.

With admirable consistency this Scotch economist, and advocate of free trade, recommends certain restrictions to be imposed on landlord and tenant, It should be enacted," says the reviewer, that every principal tenant, who presumed either to sublet or subdivide the whole or any portion of his farm, without a clause authorizing him to do so being inserted in his lease, or without the consent of his landlord, previously asked for and given in writing, should, by doing so, forfeit his lease.'

I would wager a dozen of old port against a quart of potheen that Jeffrey himself is the author of this dull article. Every thing in it indicates the contracted hand and narrow intellect of the lawyer. Only think of a man's lease being null and void, unless he previously asked for the privilege before he obtained it! What would you think of an Act of Parliament to prevent the tradesmen of London from letting any part of their houses to lodgers ?-and yet, where is the difference between a house and a farm? Both are taken for the advantages they are likely to yield, and the tenant must be the best judge of the means by which he shall procure these advantages. Leave landlords and tenants, whether in town or country, to themselves; and depend upon it