be admitted that he was not a little indebted for his own oration at Armagh :--

'My angry lyre, Magaera string,

In notes Tartarean battle sing
Instead of tears for beauty's woe

Let rancour burn and discord glow

Tho' erst my muse has mourned with Dolly,
My strains now sing her thoughtless folly-
Her pots and kettles, pans and plates,

And pokers breaking brittle pates.

Once upon a time, when all was quiet,

And mute the voice of brawl and riot,
While peace was sitting by the fire,
Then Dolly 'gan with furious ire.'

You should be informed that the indignation of Dolly was produced by a liberty not necessary to be mentioned.

'She threw the poker at my head,

And deemed the blow would strike me dead.

The Poet now, with choler swelled,

Fierce dealt a blow, and Dolly yelled!'

Mr. Robinson proceeds to describe the process by which this modern Thalestris was thrown upon the floor, and when Dolly and the Poet ... but respect to my auditors prevents me from proceeding further.

This Mr. Robinson openly and avowedly without cover, subterfuge, or modification proclaims a wish for civil war, which, he says, may indeed cause a national butchery, but will terminate in the achievement of much substantial Protestant good.

In Ireland we have many sorrows and troubles. But we have no parsons like these; or like the venerable Archdeacon Trench, of Ballinasloe, who was a ruthless apostle of the new religion. He had been, in early life, a military officer. His military standing was that of adjutant, and, without a trial, he, who was to become the venerable Archdeacon of Tuam, sentenced a soldier's wife to be scourged for larceny:

When the regiment was on parade the said Winifred Hynes was by order of the said adjutant brought out, guarded by a file of soldiers and in presence of the regiment, which was formed into a hollow square to witness her punishment, the said Winifred Hynes was tied up hands and feet to the triangles; and the said Winifred Hynes having made vehement struggles to avoid being stripped naked for the purpose of

punishment, the said adjutant cursed and damned the drum-major for not cutting off her clothes, and in a great passion, giving him a blow with a stick, ordered the said drum-major to tear and cut them off; upon which the said drum-major with a knife cut open Winifred's gown, and then tore her other clothing from her shoulders, down to the waist, after which she received 50 lashes on the bare back from two drummers in the usual way of flogging soldiers. 1

The adjutant's name was the Honourable Charles Le Poer Trench, a lord's son; his regimental name was 'Skinhim-alive.' The Honourable Skin-him-alive objected to leniency in scourging, and in his clerical days, in the absence of the common executioner, arranged with the Sub-sheriff of Galway to flog a prisoner. 'I will flog him [in Loughrea] from Cuff's to Customhouse gap, and you will flog him on to Dr. Kelly's house.' The Sub-sheriff (Daniel M'Nevin, of Middle Gardiner Street, Dublin) refused, and the honourable and venerable apostle became so abusive that military had to remove him from the scourging procession. This sweet and noble cleric evicted the Catholic people in hundreds for refusing to send their children to his Souper schools. In the trial, given in the volume quoted, those wretched people filed hundreds of affidavits, testifying to the savage vengeance of the noble and venerable brute. He had begged the parish priest to lend him his church for a few Sundays to refute Romanism. The astonished and refusing priest became the object of his bitterest rage. In the court were those who testified to the amours of the noble cleric. He had twelve mistresses and had thirteen illegitimate children. His female offspring he provided for, by having men ordained and appointed to benefices after they had wed his offspring.

The reports of many men of that ilk shocked the pious Parliament of England. Hundreds of parsons in Ireland led good lives, but the black sheep, the idlers, the greedy, brought shame on the State clergy. Travellers saw and wrote on the great fraud. Politicians studied the tithes, the empty churches, the frauds of schools and vestries, the absentee clergy, the inept, the inert bishops. Men

1 Aggregate Speeches-Speech by R. L. Shiel, p. 398.

throughout the world saw in the alien Church in Ireland a type of the barren fig-tree, fruitless, though cherished. They clamoured for the felling axe. Parsons preached and wrote, sections of the Press upheld the Government creation; Soupers sent thousands of glowing reports, of mighty progress, thousands clamouring for Bibles, crying for light, cursing the priests and their Mass, and their furious priests. In Waterford, the new apostles claimed to have won over multitudes; whole parishes became Protestant, they said; and poverty-stricken Tuam was Lutheran in every fibre. O'Connell urged the priests of Waterford diocese to make a minute search and a very truthful return of the number of non-Catholics in each and every parish. They found :

Seskhinane Parish to contain 3,118 Catholics, 1 Protestant.

Dunhill

An outrageous bigot, Parson Daly, who by brazened mendacity and truculent bigotry and relentless Souperism, in the see of Cashel, claimed scores of converts in every parish in my see' was met by the priests' census, taken with accuracy and patience :

And so on, and so on. Daly said the priests were every

one, liars, and he attacked Dan O'Connell, who, in reply, refuted the lying braggart's claims and creed :

Parson Daly [wrote the Liberator], you are not discreet. Parson Daly, you are not wise; you have no tact, no distinct perception of passing events. Anxious as you are to wade through every specious of religious mire to a mitre, you do not perceive that the season of success for adventurers of your description has gone by. The abuse of Catholics, collectively and individually-the foulest calumnies upon the Catholic Church and clergy-no longer insure promotion in your Church. [But Daly became an Archbishop.] You came too late. The traffic by which many have thriven is almost at an end. [Indeed, it was not. It throve for fifty years after O'Connell wrote.] Nay, still better times seem to be approaching, and you and I may both live to see the period when the greatest spiritual rascality shall go without any reward; and when a man may play the malignant hypocrite for years without any increase of his temporal gains.

If that period shall arrive, as arrive I certainly think it will, what then will become of the M'Kittricks, Murtagh O'Sullivans, the O'Phelans, the O'Dalys, and all the rest of the miserable group of that day who may be ready to sell their souls to perdition for a mess of the sugared pottage of the Establishment? Well, a day the renegade will have then no cash bidden for his crime. The calumniator will then have no hope of being recompensed in tithing and oblations for his falsehood. The well-paid lie will become not only out of fashion, but of use, and journeys to London and Edinburgh, to circulate untruths and stimulate uncharitableness, will no more be thought of than journeys to the moon and seven stars.

As for yourself, personally, even in the present times, my opinion is, that unless your brother, your very liberal brother, the member for Galway, does something for you in the way of a ministerial bargain, you will never be a Bishop. . . . Now, as to your affirmative merits, Parson Daly, You are known to be a -; but no, no, I will not imitate your example or adopt your vile phraseology. I will treat you much better than you deserve; and I will describe you thus: Parson Daly, you are well known to be a very imaginative man; your vivid imagination deludes you; it makes you adopt pure inventions for plain truth. I do not, you perceive, accuse you of wilful falsehood, yet it is perfectly notorious that there is no relying on any statement of fact that comes from you. You make more mistakes in mere matter of fact than any other living polemic or layman.1

And yet this liar was a Souper leader, a pet of Government, a popular speaker at meetings of the Biblicals, a budding archbishop.

Critics sprang up and were bitter and incisive :

That dense population in extreme distress inhabited an island where

1 Halliday Pamphlets, No. 1358, published in Dublin by Reilly.

there was an Established Church which was not their church, and a territorial aristocracy, the richest of whom lived in distant capitals. Thus they had a starving population, an absentee aristocracy, an alien Church, and, in addition, the weakest Executive in the world. That is the Irish question.1

I have always compared the Protestant Church in Ireland to the institution of butchers' shops in all the villages of our Indian Empire. We will have a butcher's shop in every village, and you Hindoos shall pay for it. We know that many of you do not eat meat at all, and that the sight of beef-steaks is particularly offensive to you. But still, as a stray European may pass through your village and want a chop or a steak the shop shall be established and you shall pay for it. There is no abuse like it in all Europe, in all Asia, in all Africa, and in all we have heard of Timbuctoo."

Two hundred and eighty-five years has this Church been at work. What could have been done in the way of privileges, authority, endowments which has not been done? . . . Did any other set of Bishops and Priests in the world ever receive half as much for doing twice as much? And what have you to show for this lavish expenditure? What, but the most zealous Roman Catholic population on the face of the earth. Where you were 100 years ago, where you were 200 years ago, there you are still, not victorious over the domain of the old faith, but painfully and with dubious success defending your own frontier.3

Was not this hard on the new reformers, who claimed to have Lutheranized Ireland? But worse follows:

A Church exists to be loved, to be reverenced, to be heard with docility, to reign in the understanding and hearts of men. A Church that is abhorred is useless, or worse than useless; and to quarter a hostile Church on a conquered people, as you would quarter a soldiery, is therefore the most absurd of mistakes.*

In discussing this question, their Lordships were bound to recollect that the Reformation had never taken effect in Ireland. For 300 years and more, by laws of sanguinary operation, they tried to support and advance the Reformation in that country. Oppression, imprisonment, confiscation; arming the son against the father, the father against the son; disinheriting of brothers, fraud, treachery of every kind-all had been tried and tried in vain.

The grey dawn was breaking slowly, slowly through the clouds of bigotry and hate. England was learning the

2 Canon Sydney Smith, Essayist, Works, vol. iii. p. 500.
Macaulay, Hansard, vol. 79, p. 653.

4 Ibid.

5 Lord Hatherton, Hansard, vol. 35, p. 494.