news arrived which induced an abandonment of the intention. Soon after his return, it was in contemplation to give him the command of the allied armies in Flanders, with the local rank of Field-Marshal; the main object being to supersede the Duke of York, whose incapacity at length became so glaring as to compel his recall by the Ministry. The King was deeply hurt; and on learning this, Lord Cornwallis, like an experienced courtier, vowed that no earthly consideration would have induced him to consent to any arrangement derogatory to his Royal Highness or disagreeable to his Majesty. Some of the letters on this subject are curious, as exhibiting to what extent the public service may suffer from court influence or etiquette.

Early in June, 1798, it was deemed advisable that the supreme civil and military authority in Ireland should be vested in the same person, and Lord Cornwallis was appointed Lord-Lieutenant and Commander-in-Chief. He gives way as usual to regret at his increasing honours :

'The life of a Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland comes up to my idea of perfect misery, but if I can accomplish the great object of consolidating the British Empire, I shall be sufficiently repaid.'

His mistrust and anxiety on this occasion were reasonable enough; for the condition, social and political, of Ireland in the suinmer of 1798 was as deplorable as it could be, short of downright anarchy. To trace her miseries and dissensions to their source would be to go back to the time when the English colonists or conquerors under Strongbow first made good their settlement on her soil, thereby causing it to be parcelled out between two races-the one with the characteristic qualities of the tyrant, the other with the characteristic qualities of the slave. The Englishry,' whether of Saxon or Norman descent, regarded the aboriginal Irish or Celts much in the same light in which the Anglo-Indians have been wont to regard the Hindoos; and their contests, when the oppressed rose against the oppressor, were similarly marked by unrelenting cruelty and vindictiveness. The hatred of race to race was exasperated, if that were possible, by religious differences, and the result was, that, whilst every other nation in Europe was united on some one principle of nationality, the Irish, prior to the Union, hardly ever used their occasional liberty of action for any higher or nobler purpose than to proclaim their internecine quarrels, and consequent degradation as a people, to the world. The genius of Swift, the eloquence of Grattan, might create a semblance of unity for an interval; but the old antipathies speedily overcame the new impulse, and their favourite orator and champion might have said of their patriotism what he

said

said of the short-lived constitution which sprang from it, 'I sate by its cradle, and followed its hearse.'

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At Dublin, in the possession of an historic family, is an historic picture which, if Irishmen of opposite parties could cooperate like Englishmen, would have been engraved by subscription long ago, and be as well known as Frith's Derby Day or Copley's 'Death of Chatham,' which it most resembles in design and manner. The subject is the Right Hon. Henry Grattan Moving the Declaration of Rights. It contains portraits of all the Irish celebrities of the period, male and female, and (by a pardonable anachronism) of some who were not strictly cotemporary; the peers, ladies, and others not members of the House of Commons, being brought in as spectators. Taken as a whole, they form a splendid galaxy. What genius, eloquence, public virtue, courage, chivalry, wit, grace, and loveliness are there! What elements of greatness, and alas, what seeds of corruption, dissension, and decay! The contemplation of it inspires a feeling near akin to that with which the Persian monarch gazed on his countless but perishable host. Before their patriotic purposes can be practically carried out, before the foundations of their liberty can be consolidated, they will be again divided into hostile camps, again assailing each other's characters or flying at each other's throats, again contending whether their boasted independence shall be sold to the British minister or be gratuitously handed over to France. The brave and loyal Charlemont, the Irish Lafayette, whose army of volunteers is morally as well as materially strengthened by Roman Catholics, will record a willing and conscientious vote against their admission to legislative rights; and the haughty Fitzgibbon (Lord Clare), who vehemently applauds and stands prepared to second Grattan, will strain every nerve to destroy the fabric they are now constructing together, and do his best to hang the chief architect as a traitor.

In one of those marvellously-sustained bounds of his rhetorical imagination, which only just escape the fatal transition from the sublime to the ridiculous, Grattan has vividly depicted the grandeur and fleeting character of the scene:

'There was a time when the vault of liberty could hardly contain the flight of your pinion. Some of you went forth like a giant rejoicing in his strength, but now you stand like elves at the door of your own Pandemonium. The armed youth of the country, like a thousand streams,

When Fitzgibbon's promotion was under consideration, Fox objected, and was overruled on the strength of Grattan's approval or acquiescence. Fitzgibbon was made Attorney-General, and from that time forth,' said Grattan, his country and myself were the two peculiar objects of his calumny.'

thundered

thundered from a thousand hills, and filled the plain with the congregated waters, in whose mirror was seen for a moment the watery image of the British Constitution. The waters subside, the torrents cease, the rill ripples within its own bed, and the boys and children of the village paddle in the brook.'

We are hardly guilty of a digression in reverting to this scene; for the grand combination of 1782 gave birth to the Society of the United Irishmen, laid the train for the rebellion which was raging when Lord Cornwallis landed, and afforded the strongest argument for the union which is the Corinthian capital of his administrative fame.

All the speakers of note who took part in the debates on the question of British supremacy advocated a resort to force :

'The attainment of Magna Charta had no precedent; it was a great original transaction, not obtained by votes in Parliament, but by barons in the field. To that great original transaction England owes her liberty, and to the great original transaction at Dungannon Ireland will be indebted for hers. The Irish volunteers had associated to support the laws and the constitution--the usurpations of England have violated both, and Ireland has therefore armed to defend the principles of the British constitution against the violations of the British Government.'

So declaimed Grattan, and he was followed in the same strain by Fitzgibbon, whose whole after life was employed in crushing those who carried the dangerous principle of resistance to what they deemed its legitimate conclusions:

'As Ireland is committed, no man, I trust, will shrink from her support, but go through, hand and heart, in the establishment of our liberties. As I was cautious in committing, so I am now firm in asserting, the rights of my country: my declaration, therefore, is, that as the nation has determined to obtain the restoration of her liberty, it behoves every man in Ireland to stand firm.'

Did it, then, less behove every man in Ireland to stand firm when her restored liberty was ravished from her, because this emphatic assertor of her rights had become Lord Chancellor and the equally uncompromising assertor of British supremacy? Well may Lord Macaulay call Ireland the most unfortunate of nations. At the most brilliant epoch of her history, from 1780 to 1800, when her senate, her bar, and her social circle were at their zenith-when she counted Burke, Sheridan, Grattan, Flood, Curran, Bushe, Plunket, Castlereagh, Fitzgibbon, and Thomas Moore amongst her living sons-when she

'Saw History write, with a pencil of light,

That illumined whole pages, her Wellington's name'—

she had literally no alternative but to be governed by her so

called

called sister through the medium of an intolerant and corrupt minority, to be the battleground of factions till she was devastated and depopulated, or to submit to what she then believed the disgraceful extinction of her individuality.

Prior to the Union, the normal mode of governing Ireland was this a few powerful persons, to whom the state of the peerage and the representation gave a preponderance in both Houses, undertook to execute the wishes of the English ministry for the time being, and were complimented with the whole of the local power and patronage as their reward. These were called 'managers.' Every judgeship, bishopric, commissionership, or appointment, was bestowed as they directed; and to confirm or increase their influence, sinecures were shamelessly multiplied, and places of trust conferred with a ludicrous disregard of fitness or propriety. A scene in one of Lady Morgan's novels, where the Irish Cabal, having nothing else vacant, agree to give one of their female adherents a cornetcy of dragoons en attendant, is founded upon fact.*

A large measure of parliamentary reform would have broken up their monopoly, but no one who is acquainted with the composition and views of the democratic party can doubt that revolution and separation would have ensued; whilst the admission of the Catholics would only have made confusion worse confounded, and completed the resemblance to a Polish Diet. We think, therefore, that the Government did right in resisting any organic change in the Irish legislature; and the socalled patriots who, headed by Grattan, seceded in 1797 on the rejection of their motion for reform, have much to answer for. Secessions have never succeeded in their professed aim; and the seceders have commonly returned to their places of their own accord, without any call from their ungrateful country, very much surprised to find themselves neither missed nor wanted, and not greatly delighted at finding the front opposition bench occupied by a new and formidable rival, as it was by Tierney during the Whig Hegira in the same year. Grattan and his friends virtually announced, by their peculiar mode of abdication, that the reign of law and reason was at an end, and that the only remaining hope lay in a resort to arms,

6

* See 'The O'Briens and the O'Flahertys,' vol. ii. p. 9. He (the Provost of T. C. D., Hutchinson) is said, when he was at the head of the University, actually to have had one of his daughters gazetted for a majority of horse, which commission she held for several days, until an opportunity offered for her selling out to advantage.'-Curran and his Contemporaries. By Charles Phillips, Esq. Third edition, p. 45. It was of this Provost that Lord Townsend, when Lord-Lieutenant, said, 'If I gave Hutchinson England and Ireland for an estate, he would solicit the Isle of Man for a potato garden.'

The

The people accordingly took up arms, and the most determined and desperate of the conspirators opened a communication with the French Directory, which promptly responded to the call. But their counsels were betrayed, their movements anticipated, their combinations broken, and their leaders incapable. Their commander-in-chief, Beauchamp Bagenal Harvey, a barrister of fortune, was physically as well as mentally disqualified for such a post. He is described as 'diminutive, weak, and meagre; his voice tremulous; his dress squalid; his mind as feeble as his body, and as undecided as his stumbling movements.' During the sanguinary affair of Ross, which lasted ten hours, he and his aide-de-camp Gray, an attorney, remained inactive spectators on a hill. The battle of Vinegar Hill fortunately completed the discomfiture of the rebels prior to the arrival of the French; or, considering what the small reinforcement sent by them effected a little later, there is no knowing what the consequences of an earlier landing might have been.

Lord Cornwallis reached Dublin on the 20th of June, 1798, and on July 1st writes: "I think our civil war will, for the present, be nearly at an end, but we shall have no progress towards permanent peace.' In a subsequent letter (July 24), after stating that there was no law either in town or country but martial law, and that numberless murders are hourly committed by our people,' he adds:

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'The conversation of the principal persons of the country all tend to encourage this system of blood, and the conversation even at my table, where you will suppose I do all I can to prevent it, always turns on hanging, shooting, burning, &c., &c., and if a priest has been put to death the greatest joy is expressed by the whole company. So much for Ireland and my wretched situation!'

Whilst the embers were yet smouldering, intelligence was received (August 22) that General Humbert had landed in Killala Bay. His force, which did not exceed 1100 men, was much exaggerated by rumour; and Lord Cornwallis, distrusting many of his Irish levies, and knowing that a defeat might lead to a general rising, did not move till he had concentrated his forces, and taken measures for hemming the French in on all sides. In the mean time they advanced boldly, and gallantly attacked a detachment imprudently posted by General Hutchinson. The loyalist troops were so completely and disgracefully routed that the affair has popularly gone by the name of the Races of Castlebar. According to the best authenticated account, the Galway Volunteers, with the Kilkenny and Longford Militia, ran away. Lord Ormonde exerted himself to stop his men: he first begged and beseeched: he then upbraided and swore

at