custom prevails of granting leases on lives, which give the privilege of a vote to the holder of land of the annual value of forty shillings. The Irish forty-shilling freeholder is therefore not the proprietor of the soil, and consequently has neither the education, nor the habits, nor the independence which such a possession implies. His condition indeed is far below that of the English day-labourer: for the landlord, in granting these leases, is not governed by the agricultural necessities of the estate, but by an ambitious desire to increase his own political influence; and he looks to ministerial gratitude for making good those losses which he sustains from a too numerous and inefficient tenantry. To make a freeholder, is, besides, to create a family; and a wife and three or four children are an usual appendage to this species of cattle. The artificial increase in the population of the country, of course, raises the rents; and the freeholder, compelled to give more for the land than it is worth, is bound hand and foot to the landlord by his inability to pay. To the Englishman who desires a sensible image to guide him to a correct notion concerning the Irish forty-shilling freeholder, the itinerant harvestmen, who annually emigrate from the sister island, afford a pretty accurate type. Such, in general, is their exterior; such, the rags in which they are clothed; and such their haggard countenance of mixed ferocity and starvation. Their actual possession is often--nothing: at best, a pig or a cow is the utmost of their havings. With no other available source of maintenance than the potatoe they cultivate, their sole chance of subsistence lies in the permanence of their holding. The sheet-anchor of their hope lies in the forbearance of their landlords, and in the merciful assertion of those pecuniary claims, which it is all but impossible for the tenant to satisfy. The Irish gentleman therefore has, up to the present election, considered his freeholders as much his property, as his sheep: they were driven to the hustings with as little ceremony as the beast is to the market: and to canvass a neighbour's tenantry without his consent, has long been esteemed a duelling transaction. Thus the decision of a county election might be anticipated on arithmetical principles. The number of registered freeholders of each great landed proprietor being known, and their respective leanings being ascertained, the problem was solved: and except in cases of nearly balanced interests, a contest was scarcely to be expected. Such was the ordinary condition of the Irish representation and apparently a more perfect and degrading state of Helotism could not be devised. As an instrument of liberty, such a system seemed obviously worse than useless; while the boasted" amicable intercourse" it engenders between landlord and tenant, which, it is said, holds them in a reciprocity of good offices, (at the expense only of their common country,) was made up, on the one part, of abject servility, perjury, corruption, drunkenness, and idleness; and on the other, in the occasional remission of sums, which never can be paid, and which never should have been demanded; in refraining from pounding the last cow, and counting the last potatoe; with about as much personal urbanity, as a not very ill-tempered savage might afford to his horse or his dog. It was an intimate knowledge of this system, and of its ordinary operation on the liberty and the morals of the people, which made certain of the Catholic leaders so ready to disfranchise the forty-shilling voters; and

not, as has been asserted, a heartless indifference to the poor man's rights, or an undue eagerness for personal advantage. An experience, however, the most unlooked for, has proved the fallacy of these views. The elective franchise is in its essence a power; and it required but a knowledge of the reality of this power to lead to its assertion. The absurd and extravagant combination of a Catholic constituentcy returning an Orange representation could arise only out of the grossest ignorance; that ignorance has been dissipated, and henceforward the elective franchise will be used in Ireland, as it ought always and every where to be employed, in the assertion of liberty. This result, however unlooked for by the Catholic Association, has, with great justice, been attributed by Mr. Shiel to that body. Its labours have awakened in the country a national feeling, have spread a great mass of political information. Discussion has become the order of the day in the remotest cabins, and the pike and the pistol have been laid aside (let us hope for ever) for the newspaper and the pamphlet. The knowledge has been rapidly disseminated, that the destiny of the Catholic freeholders is in their own hands; and that it is idle to imagine that Englishmen will believe their desire for emancipation to be earnest, so long as they supinely return their Orange landlords to parliament. This leaven has fermented potently throughout the entire country; and wherever opportunity has been afforded, an almost unanimous rebellion against the feudal oppressor has developed itself; and the consequence has been a sudden and an awful overthrow of the political power of houses, long the undisputed tyrants of the land, and the monopolists of place, of power, and of pension.

It cannot be denied, and it ought not to be conccaled, that the Catholic priests have actively availed themselves of that influence which their spiritual authority and their conciliatory and affectionate bearing towards their flocks have given them, to ripen this perception of a fact into a vivifying sentiment, and to confirm the sentiment by a sense of duty. This interference having proved so fatal to the enemies of the Catholics, has not unnaturally excited much clamour. Doubtless all interference of priests, as priests, in political discussions, is alike to be deprecated, let the religion they teach be what it may : but till church work shall be done by machinery, till sermons shall be preached by power-looms, and visitations be performed by steamengines, such interference will ever exist. It is of the nature of man to use, and to abuse, the powers with which he finds himself invested; and it is neither the surplice nor the stole which will impose humility and forbearance. It must also in candour be admitted, that in this respect the parsons have not been a jot behindhand with the priests; and it may be safely doubted whether the latter, with all their patriotism and zeal, have carried their electioneering practices as far as the subornation of perjury. As men, the clergy of both churches have a deep interest in the state of the representation; and as long as they have property to be plundered, or persons to be enslaved, we cannot conceive a plea for restraining them from participating in elections. If the authority of the Catholic priest be greater than that of the Protestant parson, it is a necessary consequence of that ascendency, which a community of injury and of suffering must ever afford. If there be

any undue influence, any formidable authority at the disposal of the priest, grant the question of emancipation, and it will disappear for ever. Restore the Catholics to their civil liberties, and, like all other sects, they will look on their clergy but according to their deserts; and they will be equally prone to regard them as claimants on their purse, and as restraints on the freedom of their actions. Those persons, moreover, are much mistaken who consider the priests as the mainsprings of the recent movement. True it is, that publicly from the altar they have declared to the people the friends of their rights, and denounced the enemies of their emancipation. True it is, they have exhorted the freeholder in the street; and in the polling-booth, where they could not raise their voice, they have imposed on him by the terror of their eye; but in this the priests were but the subaltern and subordinate agents, puppets in the hands of circumstance, a link in the chain of causation. In Waterford, where the triumph over the landlord was the most complete, and where the effervescence of popular feeling was the most violent, many causes conspired to produce the result. The Catholics in that county are rich and enlightened; the liberal Protestants wealthy and influential. A young, a rich, an eloquent, and a noble candidate, called the party to battle. Frequent meetings of the Catholic body had given a loud and an angry expression to the sense of injury, and roused a patriotic and a religious spirit among the people. That the priests partook of this spirit, that they abused, in the excitement of the moment, their spiritual influence to electioneering purposes (if, indeed, such was the case), has nothing in it extraordinary or alarming, nothing which ought to disturb the tranquillity of the most timid. The movement was a national movement; and the clergy are citizens: and surely if ever a case can occur in which clerical interference in politics is justifiable, it is when religion is made the cause of oppression, the pretext and the shibboleth of an implacable and endless persecution. This conquest of national over selfish feeling, has not been made without a struggle, which, while it diminishes in no respect from the result, adds materially to the interest of the contest. The freeholders were not insensible of the vengeance which awaited their assertion of right. No effort has been spared by the landlords to maintain their long undisputed usurpations; no exertion has been wanting to raise the peasant to a sense of his duty to the public and to his religion. The internal struggle of the half-starved tenant, pressed on the one hand by his desire for emancipation, and on the other, harassed by the threats of agents, the prospect of ruin, and the tears of a supplicating wife and children, was painful and protracted; and not even the pencil of Hogarth could render such a struggle ridiculous, by all the circumstance which his accumulative ingenuity could throw into his groupings, when the cause at issue is a nation's emancipation, and the right of every man to worship God, each according to the dictates of his own conscience. Vast, however, as were the interests at stake, the issue was not long doubtful. The rich and populous county of Waterford was carried by storm; and the power of the Beresfords, whose will in Ireland was long its law, was prostrated before the energies of the people, as the idol Dagon fell before the ark of the living God. In the whole county, their candidate did not poll half the number of their own

personal frecholders. In Westmeath, the result was not less striking. In Armagh, the strong hold of the high church and the power of Orangeism, the party were unable to shake Brownlow in his seat; though every nerve was strained, to punish his abandonment of its factious ways. In Louth, one Orange candidate was driven from the hustings, and the other, Leslie Foster, the most powerful of the landed proprietors, saved his election by a majority of five, through the courtesy and forbearance of the Catholics. In Monaghan, the result was equally decided: and if in Dublin, the triumph of the emancipators was less marked, if the election of White and Talbot was for a minute in doubt, the circumstance is explained, by a misplaced security, and the total inapprehension of a contest.

But the absolute increase of strength to the Catholic party, in the new Parliament, is the least part of the victory thus gained. The majority of the county members was before favourable to emancipation: but for the future, it may be anticipated, that no candidate will present himself, without being ready to pledge himself to emancipation. Even Leslie Foster, the calculating Leslie Foster, who proves ascendency by A+B-X, will discover before the death of the present Parliament, reasons for advocating the Catholic claims. But what is of infinitely more importance, the Irish constituentcy, from having been the most corrupt and servile, has suddenly shown itself the most independent and unmanageable body of the entire empire. A single tenant may be displaced; but a whole tenantry cannot be removed from their holdings. This secret has transpired, and the oligarchy of landlords is no more. To recover their influence, the proprietors of the soil must "Stoop to conquer." To rule their tenantry, they must rule for the advantage of all. They must abandon their fanatical prejudices, or they must surrender their places; they must give up their supremacy over the consciences of the Catholics, or they will not be left with political influence to make a single tide-waiter. In the mean time, the example is dangerous, the disease catching, and it is impossible that the ministry can behold such a condition of things with indifference. To disfranchise the rebels cannot now be attempted; "once warned forearmed;" and to disturb them in this moment of their popularity, is folly to conceive, and impossible to effect. Their claims, therefore, must be heard, the ministerial majorities in the House of Commons are at issue; and will ye, nil ye, Messrs. Peel, Eldon, &c. must submit. Thus then it is, that the Catholic Association, maugre all opposition, has effected its purpose. It has said, "Let there be light," and there is not a cabin in Ireland, from which the darkness of political ignorance has not been dispelled.

HINDOO COMIC STORIES.

M. de Sacy has traced the migration of the Fables of Vichnou Sarma (Pilpay) from India, through the various nations of Europe: and we suspect that most of the stories which have delighted our childhood, whether under the name of Arabian, Persian, or Turkish Tales, are derived from Indian Sources. Whatever may be urged against their invention of chess and decimal scale, nobody we suppose will dispute the right of the Hindoos to be regarded as the first inventors of apologue, or the possessors of the oldest and most numerous collections of domestic stories in existence. The well-known Tutti-Namah" (Tales of the Parrot) have a Sanscrit original, and many of the tales in the Bahar Danush, the Persian Tales, and the additional volume of the Arabian Nights, translated by Dr. Scott, have been shown by a learned and ingenious writer in the Calcutta "Quarterly Magazine," to be mere rifacimenti of some Hindoo stories of which he has given translations. In the tales to which we have alluded, we perpetually discover the sources to which European, as well as Oriental conteurs have been indebted; and find not only the springs that nourished the luxuriant harvest of invention which sprung up in Europe on the revival of letters, but the apparent origin of many of the classical fictions. The Indian elephant filled with armed men, is the prototype of the Trojan horse. The huge birds of the Sanscrit tales, the Roc of the Arabians, is evidently the Phoenix of the Greeks, as well as the Griffin of chivalry. Not only are the Fabliaux traceable to Indian stories, but even Bondello and Boccaccio have borrowed from them some of their most diverting incidents. Not only are Queen Margaret of Navarre's Pentameron, the Gesta Romanorum, and the Disciplina Clericalis, largely indebted to the Sanscrit tales for some of their most amusing inventions, but even those stories which we reckon eminently English-Whittington and his Cat, for example are derived from the same sources. The romantic tale of Edgar and Elfrida, which Hume has elevated into a historical fact, has been proved by Dr. Lingard to be a fiction of Gulielmus Malmsburiensis, and to have been taken by him from an old ballad, of which all the incidents exist in a Sanscrit story. It is sometimes curious to trace the changes which a fiction has undergone in its transmission through many ages and nations. In an old Sanscrit tale, the hero and heroine are each presented with a red letter which is to fade when either becomes inconstant. The red lotus in the old romance of " Perceforest," and in Wieland's "Oberon," is a rose-in Amadis of Gaul, a garland-in "Des Contes à rire," another flower-and in Spenser the girdle of Florimel. In some old romances, (Tristan, Perceval, and La Mort d'Arthur) the test is a cup of red wine-as in Ariosto, and in La Fontaine who has copied him. But we have already, we think, bestowed enough of learning and tediousness on our readers, who are of course desirous that we should now, as Hamlet says, (or should have said)" leave our damnable prefaces, and begin" with our Hindoo Comic Stories.

The truth is, that the first sentence of our article, touching the migrations of the Fables of Pilpay, (from the Abbé Dubois's translation, of which we have borrowed whatever is amusing in the present paper) suggested to us the preceding reflections on the migration of their fictions in general, which we now beg leave to conclude, and proceed to business.

Among the Hindoo comic stories at the end of the volume of which we have spoken, the adventures of the Gourout Paramarta are eminently ludicrous. Paramarta is a sort of Indian Abraham Adams, without the sense or the learning which that inimitable creation of Fielding's wit always possesses, and sometimes chooses to display. His disciples, however, are at once profoundly stupid and malignant, and the disagreeable accidents which their superior perpetually encounters in consequence of their malice and their

* Le Pantcha Tantra, &c. Traduit par M. l'Abbé Dubois. Eve. Paris, 1826. + Indian pricst.