his colleagues. This treaty was signed by General Gorzkowsky on the part of the Imperial Government, and by the podestà, Count Correr, on that of the Venetians. The list of exiles comprised the members of the Provisional Government, some few members of the National Assembly most noted for the vehemence of their opinions, two editors of newspapers, and four ecclesiastics, two regular and two secular, who had preached rebellion and spoliation.

Perfect discipline was observed by the troops in taking possession of the town; no insolent gesture escaped either officer or soldier; they proceeded to their destined quarters in tranquillity, and with their presence Venice was restored to a state of liberty and plenty to which it had long been a stranger. The entrance of Marshal Radetzky was performed amidst the silence of a bewildered population, who felt at their deliverance a joy that fear compelled them to conceal.

The civil and military authority was lodged in the hands of General Gorzkowsky, a governor as gentle and humane in the exercise of his civil power, as he was resolute and uncompromising in his military command. Never was so long, so obstinate, and so wanton a resistance punished with so little severity: no executions, no legal prosecutions, no imprisonments. A tax was levied on the town for the clothing and victualling of the army, with a provision for the family of the slaughtered Marinovich, and a few fines imposed, but soon commuted, or altogether remitted. We wish we could add that this spirit of conciliation was met with gratitude and obedience: the truth, however, is far otherwise; forbearance is attributed to timidity or to apathy, and the discomfited democrats inspire more fear than the victorious Austrians. The nobles, crushed, plundered, and despised as they were by the demagogues, affect to deplore a victory which leaves them in the tranquil enjoyment of the comforts and luxuries they cherish. The industrious classes, however, though they dare not express their satisfaction, cannot altogether conceal it; freedom of speech, which the revolution destroyed, is beginning to be recovered, and whispered_congratulations are sometimes heard that forced loans are no longer exacted, and that teaspoons and saucepans are not now in requisition for the reward of patriotism. The town has been cleared of foreign agitators and domestic incendiaries, and trade and commerce begin to show some signs of revival. Loose characters depart by degrees -to seek for occupation and sympathy in other countries. Many have taken refuge in Piedmont, where they hope to pursue the same game they have been playing at Venice-many are in France -some have found their way to this country. We have observed

divers letters,'' addresses,'' appeals' in our newspapers, by which the public has been called upon to assist the exiles of Poland, Hungary, and Italy by subscriptions and testimonials of approbation.' We have always considered the poorer classes in England the most patient and forbearing, as well as the most orderly and laborious in the world; and never, we think, has their patience been more severely tried than by such calls in favour of foreigners at a moment when they themselves stand in so much need of assistance. With regard to the Italian patriots, we beg only to suggest that, however poor they may have been when the rebellion began, the circumstances that have reduced them to exile have vastly improved their worldly fortunes, and placed them far above the sort of assistance that is contemplated. For the Hungarian exiles, or those adventurers who shall please to present themselves under that colour, a higher distinction seems to have been prepared-a species of triumph indeed is demanded for the hero of that insurrection, and in the name of freedom and virtue we are called on to provide a lodging and entertainment for Kossuth at the public expense.' We trust the public' is too wise to comply, without having taken some small pains to inform itself as to the merits of the cause and claims of the hero. It is unsafe to attribute to a man every other virtue simply because he is a rebel.

In the Italian case, it cannot, we think, have escaped our readers' observation, how few of the leaders of the revolt have taken an active part in its defence in the field. M. Mignet, in his Academical Eloge' of Count Rossi, says, Toute l'Italie s'élançait sous les étendards du noble Charles Albert.' This is said in December, 1849, by a French historian of some mark. Well-of all the zealous partisans who planned the outbreak, directed its movements, and gathered its fruits, have English students noticed the name of one in the lists of killed and wounded? While urging 'all who were worthy to bear the Italian name' to hurry to the fight, and while denouncing the unsuccessful commanders to popular indignation as cowards or traitors, did one of these gentlemen afford the example he preached, or make an effort to repair the treachery he proclaimed? Which of the high-born Milanese saw the standard of the noble Charles Albert' unfurled in action? What one of the Famiglie Illustri' has had to deplore the loss of a son or a brother? Or were the wealthy and intelligent of the middle classes more zealous? Were they not all as careful of their purses as of their persons? And did any of the cities of Venetian Lombardy afford a brighter example? The defeat, the mourning, and the ruin fell on the Piedmontese alone; and both the princes who soiled their reputation by uniting with such unworthy allies were first deserted and then branded with treachery.

ART. VII.-1. The Battle of Magheramayo-a full and impartial Report of the Evidence given on the Inquiry into the Conflict at Dolly's Brae before W. Berwick, Esq., Q.C. Newry. 1849. 2. Report of the Special Committee of the Grand Orange Lodge of Ireland, appointed November, 1849. Dublin.

THE

HE collision of the Orangemen and Ribbonmen near Castlewellan, in the county of Down, on the 12th of last July -much to be regretted for its immediate results-has become additionally and more extensively important from the consequences which the indiscretion, to give it the gentlest term, of the Irish government has entailed on the original misfortune, and from the serious questions of both constitutional law and policy which have been by this, and several other affairs of a like tendency, forced upon public attention.

We need not inform our readers that, though sincerely attached to the Protestant constitution, we are not Orangemen-that we have always regarded the Roman Catholic religion with the respect due to so large a portion of Christianity, and have often been disposed to larger measures of indulgence and liberality towards the Irish Roman Catholics than many of our friends may have approved. Those incidental opinions, however, are beside our present purpose, except so far as they enable us to say that, with such feelings-far, though not equally, distant from the extreme of either party, and predisposed, as our readers know, to a favourable construction of Lord Clarendon's personal conduct-we believe ourselves to be as impartial judges in this case as it is possible that men attached to the broad and general principles of the British constitution can be. We do not indeed pretend to impartiality between rebellion and loyalty, but between a Roman Catholic and a Protestant equally attached to the British monarchy we should, we own, be inclined (for obvious reasons) to attribute the greater merit to the former. Our judgment, however, on the present occasion, whether impartial or not, has been at least conscientiously formed, and the result, we regret to say, is wholly against the ministers and the party they have espoused. Having for some years past looked at the state and course of government in Ireland with great uneasiness, we now see with still more alarm the growing subserviency of the Irish administration to the anti-Protestant and anti-British spirit of the Popish agitators. We have even been occasionally forced to ask ourselves whether her Majesty's Ministers had not some occult design of establishing Roman Catholic ascendancy in Ireland-which would be in fact the overthrow of

the

the great principles of 1688—the dismemberment of the empireand the abrogation of that special and vital constitutional condition, by virtue of which, and of which only, her Majesty holds her crown.

This conflict between the first principles of the great Whig settlement of 1688, and the conduct of those who now call themselves Whigs, deserves a few words of explanation.

We need not recall to our reader's recollection the circumstances which produced, about sixty years since, that most egregious solecism and apostacy-the alliance of the Whigs with the Irish Papists. This alliance was, as we have shown in a former Article, during the many years of Whig opposition, a mere political expedient-the stalking-horse of their faction; but since what Lord John Russell styles the Revolution of 1832,' it has become an official necessity-it is 'like the air they breathe, without it they die.' And not less strange is this alliance between Whiggery and Popery than that the mainstay and chief support of her Majesty's Government should be in the various classes which may be generically described as dissent and disloyalty. Deduct from the ministerial muster-rolls in the Houses, or in the country, all those who avow various shades of hostility to the Church or the Monarchy, and what will remain? It is notorious that the precarious and painfully patched up majorities which enable them to occupy, without filling, their offices, are composed-not of their friends, but-of the enemies of Conservatism; and the necessity of accommodating their measures, or half-measures, or no measures, so as not to displease any section of the discordant group, is the secret of their unsteady and unsatisfactory attempts at legislation and government.

But their main reliance is on the Irish Roman Catholics, who have, as we have said, become the unnatural allies of the modern Whigs, and are, in fact, the 'weak masters' of a weaker Ministry. Now, the Popish party in Ireland, under whatever name, shape, or pretence, sometimes insidious and sometimes audacious, it may disguise its purposes, is really, essentially, and, indeed, with a vast majority, avowedly hostile-not merely to the Union, but to British connexion, and of course to British allegiance and to the integrity of the British empire. On the other hand are arrayed the different denominations of Irish Protestants—as Irish as any Milesian, by birth, by property, by local attachments, by a strong national feeling and no inconsiderable share of national character; but British by descent, British in manners, politics, and religion; possessing three-fourths of the property, and, perhaps, even a greater proportion of the industry, intelligence, and general civilization of the country. This is the

body

body planted in Ireland by England three centuries since, and which for three centuries has preserved Ireland to England; which has been, in fact, the great tie, the only effective amalgam, of the British Isles and Empire; and it is this body that the Ministers of her Majesty (a Protestant Queen, and Queen because she is a Protestant) seem to take, and even to make, opportunities of discountenancing, discouraging, and even wantonly insulting.

One of these was the affair of Dolly's Brae, which has been so much misrepresented in Ireland-by the Irish Government especially-and so much misunderstood in England, that we think it our duty to trace both the true spirit and real facts of that

transaction.

6

In any case of a rencounter between two men or two bodies, who should mutually accuse each other of being the assailants, the previous temper, character, and disposition of the parties would be, though not conclusive, very influential evidence; and, unfortunately, the disposition of the Celtic Irish to pick quarrels and to get up fights is too notorious to be for a moment questioned. Sir Walter Scott records as surprising, even to the historian of border feuds, the wantonness with which Pat is up with the pike and the shillelah on any or no occasion;' and in the good old quiet times of Ireland, no market, fair, race, or even funeral, ever terminated without an amateur battle, in which some were always wounded and homicides not infrequent. These faction-fights,' as they were technically called, were not of political, but of local and personal factions. Both the parties were Roman Catholics; nor was it ever suspected that these feuds arose out of any of those questions of either politics or religion, in which it is now the fashion to find a solution and an excuse of all Irish violence. But having thus cursorily premised the predisposition of the native Irish to battle and even to blood, we at once admit that their conflicts with the Orangemen are (bating the general predisposition to pick quarrels) of a different and deeper origin.

To form a fair judgment of the Orange Institution, it is necessary to take a retrospective glance at its origin. It is not, as commonly supposed, a modern and partisan invention. It is coeval with the principle of the Revolution of 1688-and has been ever since in more or less active co-operation with it. That Revolution-which we suppose even the modern Whigs will not venture to deny to have been the triumph of civil and religious liberty was brought about solely by the Church and aristocracy of England. The Papists, first and last and without exception, adhered cordially and zealously to James; and the majorityat least at the outset of Dissenters of all denominations took the same line and were ready to accept the insidious and Jesu