tion, where a natural and national vein of wit and feeling flowed without effort or affectation, were indescribable. But, though formed to be the delight of society, the joys of home and doImestic life were his real element. He was the fondest of husbands, of fathers, of sons, of brothers and of friends. In the privacy of his modest fireside, the liveliest flow of spirits and of feeling was never interrupted by one moment of dullness or of harshness, and it was the happiest of retreats.

His success in the world was astonishing, and owing almost as much to the amiability of his character and social qualities, as to his extraordinary talents. Risen from an obscure birth, and struggling with poverty and difficulties, his classical triumphs and acquirements at the University were of the highest order. On entering afterwards into life, he supported his father and numerous family, by his sole efforts, and rose not only to independence and fame, but was received as a favorite in the first aristocratic circles, even before he engaged in politics. Amongst the illustrious families and characters with whom he was familiarly acquainted, and who certainly yet remember his name with affection, were the Duke of Leinster, Lord Moira, and his noble and princely mother, the Hon. George Knox and Marcus Beresford, Plunkett, Grattan, Curran, Hamilton Rowan, P. Burrowes, Sir Laurence Parsons, Emmett, C. Bushe, Whitley Stokes, &c. and all the heads of the Irish bar and society. I have already observed, that, however opposed to many of them in politics, and when he was become a marking leader, and most obnoxious to the government, he preserved their affection. And when, after Jackson's trial, he lay under a kind of proscription, they gave him noble and generous proofs of it.

His success in politics was no less wonderful. When he wrote his first pamphlet in favor of the Catholics, (the Northern Whig) he was not acquainted with a single individual of that religion, so complete at that period was the distinction marked in society between the several sects. In a few months he was the prime mover of their councils, and accomplished the union between them and the dissenters of the North.

His political principles will of course be blamed or approv ed, according to those of the reader. During his lifetime, some regarded him as a fanatical democrat and furious dema

gogue, whilst others in his own party accused him of haughtiness in his manner, and aristocratical prejudices. The fact is, that, though he preferred in theory a republican form of government, his main object was to procure the independence of his country under a liberal administration, whatever might be its form or name. His tastes and habits were rather aristocratical for the society with which he was sometimes obliged to mingle. I believe that, in reading these memoirs, many people will be surprized at (and some perhaps will blame) the moderation of his views. The persecutions of the government drove him much further than he purposed at first. But, from their fair and impartial perusal, none can possibly rise, without being convinced of his purity and patriotism, whatever they may deem of his wisdom and foresight. No man who ever engaged so deeply and so earnestly in so great a cause, was so little influenced by any motives of personal ambition, or so disinterestedly devoted to what he thought the interest of his country.

In opening these pages it should also be remembered, that the situation and political organization of Ireland at that period, were totally different, both from what they had been before and from what they have fallen to since. She possessed, at that precise moment, a separate government, and a national legislature, nominally independent; my father never considered himself as an Englishman, nor as a subject of Great Britain, but as a native and subject of the kingdom of Ireland, most zealously and passionately devoted to the rights, the liberties, and glory of his country.

At the epoch of the American war (1782) the unguarded state of that Island, the efforts of the patriots in its legislature, and the simultaneous and formidable rising of the volunteers, whilst England was exhausted by that fruitless contest, had wrung from the British Government the reluctant acknowledgment of its independence. This period was brief and glorious. With the first dawn of liberty, she took a new spring and began to flourish by her natural resources; the spirit of her people reviving with her commerce, industry, and manufactures. But this dawn was soon overcast by the corruption of her government, and the bigoted intolerance of the ruling Protestant ascendency; the former carried to the most open profligacy, and the latter to the most besotted blindness. My object is not to

write a history, nor to anticipate what my father has urged with such force and eloquence in the following works and memoirs but, had the Irish legislature, who recovered their independent rights, had the liberality to emancipate their Catholic brethren, and allowed them to participate in the benefits of free and equal citizenship; and had the volunteers admitted them into their ranks, England would never have recovered the power which she had lost. It would be a curious, but at this day a very vain speculation to calculate what those two independent but allied kingdoms might have risen to, cultivating their separate means under one sovereign and with one interest.

This wakening of the spirit of liberty, roused, however, from their long slumber of slavery, the oppressed and degraded Catholics; who, by a strange anomaly, forming the original population of the country and the mass of the people, were, at that period, and are still in some respects, aliens in their native land. Their first steps were weak and timid, but their progress was inconceivably rapid; those of the present day in reading these memoirs, and other works of the same time, will scarcely believe that their fathers could ever have been degraded to such a state; and with what trembling, doubts, and hesitation, they first opened their eyes to the dawn of freedom, and directed their first tottering steps in its career. My father was the first Protestant who engaged in their cause to its whole length, and experienced the greatest difficulty, in the beginning, to rouse them. if not to a sense of their wrongs, at least to the spirit of expressing them.*

But these efforts, by which the whole Island began shortly to heave to her foundations, alarmed the jealousy of that party who monopolized all the power and property of the country. To secure the support of England, they sacrificed its prosperity, honor, and independence, and the British ministry, with patient discretion, awaited the result; they gave all their means and aid to strengthen the Irish administration, and allowed it to render itself as odious as possible, and to destroy, by its

*It is a remarkable fact that most of the leaders of the United Irishmen who perished in the civil war were Protestants. Tone, Emmett, Russel, Lord Edward Fitzgerald, &c. Of the twenty prisoners in Fort George, four only were Catholics.

cruelty and insolence, in the hearts of the people, all affection for their national government. No other arms but those of corruption, were used by England against the independence of Ireland, for its own administration took on itself all the odium of its tyranny, and all the task of reducing the people to slavery. The distant King and Parliament of England were, on the contrary, often solicited as mediators by the oppressed and miserable Irish. It was this government and this party, against which the animosity and attacks of my father were directed; it was the Irish government which he sought to overturn by uniting the divided factions of the people. His resentment against England was a secondary and incidental passion; it arose from her support of those abuses. He long endeavored, by legal and constitutional means, and even by soliciting the British monarch and government, to effect that reform; nor was it till all his hopes proved fruitless from that quarter, that he determined on attempting, by any means, the separation of the two countries.

As for the Irish administration, England reaped the fruits of her policy. It became so corrupt and so infamous that it could no longer stand, and finally its members bartered the existence of their country as a nation, for a paltry personal compensation to themselves. It was the cheapest bargain England ever drove. Was it the wisest? Instead of using her influence to reorganize that wretched government, to give it strength and popularity, by emancipating the people and attaching them to their institutions, she chose to absorb Ireland in her own sphere, and efface it from the list of nations. But that execrable administration, in disappearing from existence, left, as a pernicious legacy behind it, all its abuses, confirmed, rooted in the soil, and now supported by the direct and open authority of the British monarch, laws, parliament, and constitution. The union and incorporation of the two countries was but nominal, and the mass of the Irish population participated neither in the benefits nor privileges of the British institutions.

This was a wretched and narrow policy. Instead of encou raging, by every means in its power, the industry and the mental and physical resources of Ireland, and thus adding to the general mass of wealth and information of the whole empire, a petty jealousy of her competition with the trade and

manufactures of England has always engaged the government of the latter country, to keep down and crush, in every possible way, the natural spring and spirit of the Irish.

Whether England has gained much by the union, time will show. The ministry has gained a clear reinforcement of 100 votes in Parliament, for no Irishman will ever consider himself as an Englishman; and whilst his own country is miserable and enslaved, what earthly motive but his own interest can influence him in questions which regard merely the liberties or interests of England? The people show no symptoms of attachment or loyalty to their new masters; and for what should they be loyal? For six hundred years of slavery, misrule, and persecution! Ireland must be guarded at the same expense, and with the same care as formerly, and is rather a heavy clog on the powers and means of Great Britain, than a support and an addition to them. Nor is it absolutely impossible that, if some ambitious and unprincipled monarch hereafter mounts the throne, he may find in the Irish Catholics, of whom the mass will be brutalized by misgovernment, and rendered ignorant and ferocious, very proper instruments for his designs. They have no reason to admire, nor to be attached to the British constitution, and would follow the call of Satan himself, were he to cheer them on to revenge-and who could blame them?

But I must not lose myself in dissertations which do not concern my subject. For in my father's time no one dreamt of that union; and his most violent adversaries, the most furious upholders of the Protestant ascendency, would have been most indignant at such a suggestion. Had it been prematurely proposed, they would, perhaps, have joined with their adversaries rather than have listened to it. The only conclusion which I wish to draw from these premises, is, that England, by dissolving that Irish government, has fully confirmed the charges adduced against it, and my father's opinion of it; and till the abuses which it supported, and which have survived its fall, are corrected, till that monopoly is removed, by which all the rights and powers of citizenship and sovereignty are usurped by a favored minority, whilst the remainder of the population groans in slavery, Ireland, either under a separate and national administration, or as a province of Great Britain, will ever remain in an unnatural state of anarchy and misery, unable to culti