fected to deride the judgment, which naturally revolted at their impolitic and radical denunciations of all orders in the state from the King downwards. Invective soon followed desertion, and the most gifted and consistent patriot Ireland ever possessed, was driven from the land, for whose glory he would have died amid the most cruel, groundless, and ungrateful calumnies. His noble heart felt this treatment deeply, but still the consciousness of integrity consoled it, and in an unpublished letter, one of the last he wrote, he foretels, (oh vain prophecy!) that in the grave his country would do him justiceExtinctus amabitur idem. Alas, poor Curran! how little did he think that even for that grave he should be indebted to England, while the hollow blusterers of his native land were weeping away their " Irish hearts" over the failure of a half-crown subscription for his bust! But happy is he that his resting place was distant-it did not reverberate the apostate shout which cheered the destroyers of Ireland's independence. Attached to this faction, in a great degree, is the Catholic priesthood-not as participating in their political opinions, but as looking up to them for the continuance of a spiritual despotism. The priesthood and this party depend mutually on each other. The priest possesses an unlimited dominion over his flock, which it has been the invariable policy of every projected relief-bill to undermine the "leader" makes such clause the, at least, nominal motive for his dissent; talks of his holy Church and his unbroken hierarchy; and calls upon the clergy to unfurl the "oriflamme, beneath which he invokes the double crown of a patriot and a martyr! The call echoes through the "holy of holies;" the man of God and the man of the people loudly reciprocate the most nauseous adulation--while the first is only struggling for his saintly despotism, and the last for that bad and frail ascendancy which has been raised by the storm, and must sink at its subsiding. It is amusing enough, to one who is in the secret, to read the eulogiums of the Catholic leader upon his ecclesiastical co-partner. They are in the finest strain of Hibernian hyperbole. According to them, he has all the simplicity of a saint, the fortitude of a martyr, the temperance of an anchorite, and the self-devotion of an apostle! Job's patience, Solomon's wisdom, David's inspiration, Paul's eloquence, and Peter's orthodoxy, combine in the titular descendants of Saint Patrick, according to the rant of a Popish radical. If they do, however, most assuredly, in the phrase of a learned professor of chemistry in Dublin, "they mutually devour one another." The truth is, the Irish priesthood of the present day is divided into two classes; those who graduated in the Continental nurseries, and those to whom the policy of later times has given a domestic education at Maynooth. The latter are by no means an improvement. Gloomy, fanatic, and intolerant, they have all the pride, without the learning, of the cloister-the pedantry of the schools contracts their understanding, and the discipline of the Church formalizes their manners. They are, however, certainly zealous in their voca * See the Speech of a Mr. Drumgoole, some years ago delivered to "the Board.*' tion, and their dictatorial solemnity sustains the rank which a kindred vulgarity might otherwise diminish in the minds of their congregation. The old school, of whom, however, but few now remain, were equally zealous, and much less repulsive. A foreign education sweetened their brogue and softened their manners, and gave them an air of the world unimagined even by their successors. It was from this class of the priesthood that the dramatist borrowed the character of Father Luke, and most faithfully has he adhered to his original. Social, but mys terious-convivial, but authoritative-and perfectly impartial where his interests are not concerned, he still rigidly supports his spiritual ascendancy, and to this he makes, by a sort of prescription, every thing temporal pay tribute. The dairy and the barn-door furnish his table; the hen-roost makes his breakfast an ovation; and the produce of the mountain still pays willing duty to his reverence's cellar. But, notwithstanding all this, even in his liveliest "jobations," he never for a moment forgets the secret of his supremacy. Whether over the "brown jug" negociating a marriage, or in his black satin breeches and bright top-boots, waddling forth to hold the village "station," every turn seems to announce to the conceding crowd, "you know I'm your priest, and your conscience is mine,” an intimation never either denied or doubted. His very horse (and he requires a good one) shares his master's sleekness-shining under the potentate of modern Rome, he need not envy even the consular dignities which its ancient liberality destined for his ancestor. It is not to be wondered at that this body, at present actually despotic in their parishes, should loudly declaim against any emancipatory innovation in any way affecting their authority. They do accordingly, and with all their lungs; but they are, of course, too cunning to place it on any ground of individual interest-quite the contrary. They resort to the first ages of the Church, invoke their holy saints and fathers, supplicate, in preference, the penal re-enactments, refer to their "unbroken hierarchy," their mountain-vigils, their bog-masses, their unknown fasts, and invoke the pains of martyrdom, "Luke's iron crown, and Damien's bed of steel," rather than so heathenish and impious an emancipation. The poor peasant, alarmed at dangers which he does not understand, and proud of the submission which is the purchase of heaven, echoes his pastor with an accordant howl, which is instantly reverberated by the radical leader in the name of the true church and the majesty of the people! This faction, the reader must see, however contemptible in their individual capacities, are yet most formidable in the aggregate. Agitation is the element in which they thrive, and they are perpetually on the watch for grievances;-like sea-birds in a storm, they see them in the wind, and try to outshriek its roaring. However, with the selfishness of the priesthood, and the ignorance of the people for their instruments, they can never be at a loss to excite the country, so long as civil discontent and religious bigotry will ferment together, To this party the King paid no particular attention, though by every ostentation of loyalty, and in every key of vociferous servility, they incessantly implored it. The King has the reputation of much natural sagacity, and doubtless appreciated these new-born professions at their proper value; but the slight has sunk barbed into the nature that never forgives, where it will fester and rankle until time shall give its poison an opportunity of being infectious. It gives one, however, but a poor opinion of humanity to see the very same persons who, without having done her any service, persecuted the Queen for her official favours, bellowing, before her corpse was cold, in the train of her antagonists. Such were the parties who alternately misgoverned and disturbed Ireland at the moment of his Majesty's arrival; and it requires but little skill to foresee that their suspension of hostilities, or rather their sudden and miraculous unanimity, is not to be calculated on for any great duration. The interests of some, and the personal affection of others, for the King, produced the demonstration; but it is at best only the "mala sarta amicitia." If a stranger to Ireland requires any proof of this, he will find it in the hollow and heartless acclamations which have hailed the arrival of some of the King's attendants. If there ever was a measure which before temporarily united the opposing factions, it was the measure of the UNION. They poured upon it their unanimous execration, denounced it as a calamity which laid their independence in the dust, and through each succeeding year have held it up as the bane of their prosperity, and the annihilation of their Rame. And yet, in twenty years after it passed-even in that very city which it had chiefly prostrated, whose mansions it had untenanted, whose merchants it had impoverished, whose streets it had depopulated, and whose splendour, as the seat of legislation, it had eclipsed for ever-even there, the reviled author of that measure was so hailed by the plaudits of radical consistency, that if he did not altogether supersede the Sovereign, he may, at least, now with truth exclaim— "Divisum imperium cum Jove-habui !—" It is scarcely possible to conceive this adulation to be sincere, and its offering is an omen of no auspicious import. When a people become either, so desperate, or so shameless, as to fling off the principles of which they have been violent in the profession, and transform all at once the object of their denunciations into the god of their idolatry; however it may expose themselves, it most assuredly cannot impose upon the world. It manifestly reduces them to this dilemma, either that their clamour has been ill founded, or that their devotion is insincere; and in either case, their claim upon respect or credulity is the same. Such violent conversions in politics are seldom pure, and quite as seldom permanent. It is scarcely possible to believe, that the men who are bending the pliant knee upon the pier at Dunleary, are the same men who, in 1812, made Clarendon Street Chapel ring with the "witchery resolutions." Yet their personal identity is certain but the object of their caprices is transformed: power has touched it with an Ithuriel spear, and deformity has become divine. However, Sir, even confiding in, which I do not, the superlative raptures which have arisen from the royal visit, it appears to me impossible that all their prospective visions can be realized. Ireland may have been flattered by the King's attention, but the King cannot have been informed by such a journey. It is not amid the parade of a triumphal entry, or at corporation shows and college dinners, that the wants and interests of such a country are to be learned. Dublin, all beauty without, and all poverty within--like the statue in Lucian, with its polished surface of Parian splendour and its interior filled with rags and wretchedness, is but a deceitful specimen of the state of Ireland, particularly when she is blazing in the transient rays of an imported Court, and peopled with the train of foreign Ambassadors. To know Ireland, the monarch should have gone unattended through its provinces. deserted villages"-its roofless manu--he should have seen its " factories-its shipless harbours-its ragged, dispirited, discouraged peasantry, surrendering to the agent of some absentee landlord the worthless pittance which the tithe-proctor had spared, and taking refuge from thought in eternal intoxication;-he should have seen the adverse bigots, waging their impious battle over the polluted altars of a common faith-he should have gone into the crowded prisons and into the continual barracks, and cursed the instruments, and wept he should have asked whether the sta over the victims of coercion tions under him, from the highest to the lowest, were distributed according to merit, or interest, or corruption--he should have inquired why it was, that all the names of which the country can be proud-.the Burkes, the Goldsmiths, the Moores, with a long train of etceteras in arts, and arms, and politics, have been obliged to migrate into distant lands, leaving the honours and emoluments of their own to those who have less spirit and more subserviency. He should have done this to know even something of Ireland—and, when all this knowledge was acquired, amply sufficient would then remain behind to satisfy curiosity during the next promised triennial visitation. If the royal affection for Ireland is as sincere as it appears to be, and indeed there can be no reason to doubt it, these inquiries once acted on would produce to the country results the most beneficial, and to the King himself reflections the most delightful. EUDOXUS. TO THE TURQUOISE. IN sunny hours, long flown! how oft my eyes VOL. II. NO. X. 2 F L : THE CAPE OF GOOD HOPE.* IN this book-making age, when every traveller's tour is ingeniously expanded into a goodly quarto, of which the mite belonging really to the author himself is completely hid in the mass of compilation and transcription in which it is enveloped, we hail with pleasure the appearance of a modest unpretending little volume, like that which is the subject of the present article. The author of Notes on the Cape has been content to give us the wheat without the usual make-weight of chaff; and we wish all travellers would follow his example. He tells us what he saw, what he heard, and what he thought, and all this in a very lively and entertaining manner; so that while we are collecting a considerable stock of information respecting the country which he visited, we are amused with the spirit and vivacity of his sketches, and delighted with the originality of thought and the poetical feeling which often distinguish his descriptions. The charm of a book of travels is, when it records the first impressions made upon a man of feeling and intelligence, who has the power of describing what he sees, and expressing what he feels, in a lively and unaffected style; and much of this charm will be found in the work before us. We have been too much entertained with it to object very seriously to an occasional pruriency of phrase which a revisal might easily correct, or to the too general prevalence of a tone of sarcastic bantering, which still more requires to be softened and subdued. If, however, the author is sometimes flippant, he is never dull; and the faults of flippancy generally carry their own excuse along with them. The volume commences with the author's arrival at the Cape : "On the morning of the 1st of January, 1820, we arrived at this new Land of Promise; a date too memorable to be easily forgotten, as being the first day of a new year dawning upon me in a new quarter of the globe. After a long and protracted voyage, where the eye has been accustomed to range at large over the blue expanse of waters, without one object to diversify and break the sameness of the view, the first appearance of the land is really dazzling. Its outline, shape, and colour, are more vivid and distinct, more intensely present to us than at any other moment of our lives; and we gaze at it with an ardour that those only can conceive, who have experienced this long and unnatural separation. The sea, after all, is not our element; we are intruders upon the secrets of the mighty deep, and we feel that our arrival at the shores of mother earth, though in a foreign and unknown clime, is, as it were, a return to home. At day-break the land of the Cape of Good Hope was a speck upon the horizon, that, slowly rising from its bed of waters, gracefully unfolded its dusky form, and stood at length displayed in wild and naked majesty. The Table Mountain, with its fleecy canopy of clouds, is the most remarkable feature in the scene; but it would be vain to attempt a picture of the whole of this lofty promontory, which stretches its rugged arms into the sea, and, frowning like a mighty giant upon the sons of other climates, that pour in upon his Cyclopæan dominions, seems an appropriate introduction to the wilds of Southern Africa." *Notes on the Cape of Good Hope, made during an excursion in that colony in the year 1820. |