ONE of the greatest services that can be rendered either to England or to Ireland, is an honest, unbiassed account of the moral and religious condition of Connaught, Leinster, and Munster, the three great Papal provinces, in the first instance; and of Ulster, the Protestant province, in the other. There are so many conflicting accounts, so many partisan tourists, so many political pens and eyes jaundiced by expectations of promotion before they are directed to the spots they visit, that impartiality is as rare as it is felt to be desirable.

We think that on our table one of the most honest, the most useful, and the most amusing. The author set out with no purpose to subserve, no favourite theory to support, no party to keep in power. He walked the bogs of Connaught with his pencil in hand, jotting down all he heard, saw, or met with, and leaving the reader to draw the just and legitimate inferences. For the comfort of the protégés of the Melbourne cabinet, he prefixes to those chapters where he was forced to pronounce an opinion on the comparative effects of truth and error, a caution, to the effect that those who got and hold their place in consequence and in remuneration of concessions to the Italian hierarch bad better skip it.

In many respects, Ireland is unique and sui generis. She has excellences and defects, many and intense. Her excellences are natural; her sins and immoralities are the productions of that once exotic miasma, which England primarily introduced. We believe that the Irish character is naturally possessed of those warm and social affections, those generous and high-toned feelings, which are the stamina of real and lasting national prosperity. There are a contentment in their privations, and a gratitude for any alleviation of them by the hand of the stranger, such as are rarely seen in the more favoured provinces of England. They have good intellectual as well as moral qualities. Irishmen have risen to the very loftiest rank in the pulpit, in the senate, and at the bar. The records of the army,

of science, and the more brilliant tablets of poetic excellence, all bear simultaneous and imperishable testimony to the energies and worth of their character. What, then, has depraved and deteriorated at least five millions of the Irish population? Is it whisky or potatoes? Is it Whiggery or Toryism? Is it Absenteeism, or Middlemen, or Ribbonism, or Whiteboyism? It is none of these alone, or primarily. The teeming fountain of all those savage deeds which now stain the moral aspect of that country, of those storms and tempests that rend its social fabric, and of all that squalid wretchedness and pinching poverty which are as certain inmates of an Irish cabin as poteen, potatoes, and a pig; of that fear of loss, and that precarious safety, that repels capitalists from Connaught, and proprietors and landed gentry from Munster and Leinster- of those horrid iniquities that deface the national calendars, and identify Ireland with barbarous communities,-is, in two words, POPERY and its PRIESTHOOD.

This system exists and festers in Ireland, in perhaps its most concentrated and embittered forms; and its faithful administrators-John M'Hale and his surpliced menagerie-are, without exception, the coarsest, most antisocial, and virulent enemies of Protestantism, of civilisation, and of social well-being, in the four quarters of the globe! These two have preyed on the vitals of the country, and reduced it to its present miserable moral and political chaos. It was their aim and their united effort to place that country precisely where we now find it; for as long as its people were peaceful, and friendly to their connexion with England, so long the wished-for ascendancy of the Romish hierarchy was put off, and the certainties of rapid and wide-spread conversions to the national church multiplied. But by reducing Ireland to a state of physical, political, and moral disorganisation, they enjoy to themselves the high delight of beholding its provinces so hot that Protestants must escape for their lives; and the whole population so agitated and inflamed, that there

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England surrendering the savages to the taming force of the iron crosier of the mitred Dominic of Tuam. The priests glory in the chaos. They know what produces it; and they know how to perpetuate and agitate it, till England, in sheer despair, consigns the island to their hands. A firm and fearless government might have done great things in that country; but, in the wise and inscrutable purposes of Heaven, this boon has not been given her, and she endures the consequences. Conciliation is absurd and mischievous. We may as well think to conciliate cats to mice, serpents to society, and Satan to mankind, as to conciliate real Romanism to morality, or truth, or chastity. Concession is just as hopeless. It will never satisfy. The grave cannot be satiated with dead, nor the papacy with power, till the knell that announces the destruction of both.

It is the merest ignorance that attributes the exasperations of the Irish priests to the presence of tithes, or ecclesiastical imposts of any description. This can be proved by fact. There is an island on the coast of Ireland known by the name of Achill. It is naturally barren and unproductive. When the Rev. Messrs. Nangle and Baylie, two devoted missionary clergymen of the Irish Church, first set foot on the island, they found cabins worse than wigwams, a people extremely barbarous, and Fathers Hughes and Dwyer loving the darkness more than the light, for very obvious reasons. After days of hard toil, and nights of anxious watchfulness, they contrived to raise the embryo of a village, in which were located, with themselves, readers, schoolmasters, and a physician. By and by, upwards of thirty acres were reclaimed, the school-houses came to be well attended by children, and many Romanists were eventually brought within the influences of Christianity. A transformation moral, and thereby and therefore physical, speedily ensued. The hitherto wretched peasantry saw and appreciated the advantages, and gave no slight tokens of preferring Protestant light to Papal darkness. Did the priests hail the transition? Far from it. They got soi-disant Archbishop M'Hale to visit the island in his archiepiscopal tinsel, and strutting like a turkey-cock, to appear among the islanders, and fulminate the

ment commands were laid upon the miserable peasantry to have no intercourse with the heretics-to curse them, hoot them, and "cut the sign of the cross when they came near them to stone them to cast them into bog-holes--to sell them no food, and to take from their doctor no physic. Now we ask, why and wherefore this virulent and desperate aggression ? Was it on account of tithes? Mr. Nangle neither asked nor received a thousandth part of a penny from any of them. Was it on account of churchrates? The name of this impost is not known in the place. What then? Unquestionably, the bitter and inherent hatred which the papacy essentially cherishes to truth, under all circumstances, in all ages, and in every latitude. We have, in the case of Mr. Nangle and his settlement at Achill, most decisive evidence, on a microscopic scale, of the true cause of the discord of Ireland. That settlement has served a great moral end. The bitter root in Ireland is not Irish, but Italian; it is exotic, not indigenous. The demolition of the remaining bishoprics of the Irish Church, and the extinction of all its temporalities tomorrow, would not be the harbinger of an Irish millennium, but, on the contrary, the signal for an Irish havoc ; not the quietus to the priesthood, but a stimulant to the expulsion of all light and truth from the country. Well does Cesar Otway observe :—

"Here the Romish priests are assuming in Dublin, and all over England and Scotland, such a bland, and soothing, and liberal aspect; and they come and even ask our Protestant bishops to give them money to build their chapels; yes, and Conservative lords and squires are found giving sums-and these large ones -to build chapels. A Protestant landed proprietor has given a large territory to the monks of La Trappe. Moreover, if a man refuses to aid them in building schools, chapels, and convents, he is pointed at as a bigot. Well, look at the proceedings of these most expecting, and exacting, and bland priests in the West. Here comes a Protestant clergyman, altogether unconnected with church property of any sort, not drawing one the blood-stained tithes,' penny from but depending on the Voluntary system as much, and infinitely more, than the priests themselves; and he takes from a Protestant landed prontistor a nione of

ren;

and there he opens schools, into which he don't drive, he merely invites, childhe sets about an improved system of culture, encourages industry, discourages drunkenness and disorderly conduct; as far as possible, requires that all within his influence should abstain from violence, injustice, or breaches of the peace; and, lo! because he has the impertinence to molest the priests' owlish, silent, solitary reign, he and his people are to be cursed, hooted, stoned, pitchforked, and thrown into bog-holes ; and a man calling himself a priest of Jesus is found, and that openly, saying that he has encouraged his followers to do these things."

The worthy writer of this extract does well to prefix to the chapter that contains it a salutary caution, in this style :

"Those whose desire is to establish the sway of the Roman Catholic hierarchy in Ireland may skip this chapter, unless disposed to read what they won't like."

We hold it a first principle, in all legislative enactments for Ireland, that Popery be depressed, and Protestantism, if not fostered as it should, be at least protected. Let the British government do its duty to God, and to the solemn obligations under which the powers that be necessarily lie, and brighter days will shine on Ireland. Restore the ten defunct bishopricserect ten more-endow with the money you are now squandering on commissions 1800 additional clergy; and in five years Ireland, from being a drag and disgrace, will be a bright gem in Victoria's diadem. But "to a blind horse a nod is as good as a wink." There is no hope of such "justice to Ireland," as long as Melbourne's lord rules the roast in Downing Street. This we repeat:-Ireland will approximate to a clean Pandemonium, precisely in proportion as Popery is patronised, paid, or palliated.

We have been so absorbed in regret at the wretched state of Ireland, that we have forgotten we intended to follow Cesar Otway in his humorous, useful, and interesting tour in Connaught.

Of the four Irish provinces, Connaught is perhaps best fitted to teach us what is the real state of the papal 77 07

and sorrow, the sunshine and cloud of human life, are so intermingled, that every moral analysis of Ireland fails to satisfy. In no country are buoyant animal spirits and wretchedness of situation so striking and so intermingled. Even in that country, despair and utter hopelessness do not exist. Remove a million of Englishmen to Ireland, and place them in the same circumstances as the inhabitants of Connaught are in at the present hour, and the majority would be sleeping in their graves, as suicides, in six months. They could not stand it. They want the animal spirits and light-hearted merriment of Irishmen. This fact alone shews that the Irish are naturally a fine race; and that nothing but the abominable superstition under which they groan, prevents that country from surpassing England in all kinds of prosperity.

Mr. Otway leaves Dublin and its dirty purlieus, and commences his local antiquarian and historic recollections before he has reached the end of Barrack Street, and works his way westward to the darkest province of the "Land of Job," as he humorously designates the land of his sires. The mere geographical reflections we let alone. We have scarcely time to recount the straths, castles, abbeys, duns, round towers, and marauding rapparees, which pass vividly before us, as if we were sliding along the midst of the panorama at the moderate locomotive pace of forty miles an hour. A spring at Leixlip, however, engages our fancy, as it did that of the reverend author. It is purely Irish in its pretensions:

"Not a fish or frog will live in its waters; nay, more, let any one who has drank over night from fifteen to twenty tumblers of punch, and whose head is so hot that it makes the water fizz into which it is plunged let him, I say, but take a quart or two of the water of this spring on the following morning, and he will lose all his whisky-fever, and walk home as cool as a cucumber."

Such, we presume, is the reverend divine's experience—

"Quæque ipse miserrima vidi, Et quorum pars magna fui."