the prelate who authenticated them declared, that in this time and in this place'-time and place memorable chiefly because of the pestilent instruction which disgraced the pulpits of the church of Rome, and the detestable conspiracy of which her members were convicted in this time and place it was worthy of God's providence that the light of his countenance should be shed upon his faithful people,'-the Protestants in Ireland looked upon the deepening mysteries with wonder and apprehension, and were compelled to see the church of Rome in a light in which it never before had been revealed to them. It was under such circumstances the clergy of the church of England addressed themselves to the important controversy, of which the great effects will, at no distant day, be made known; and while I disclaim for them the credit which their exertions would obtain from all who feel a deep interest in religion, had they originated in a sense of duty not thus perilously awakened, I must also, on their part, deprecate the imputation, that they wantonly rushed into controversy, and provoked the opposition which they only met, and over which, I trust in God, they shall yet be found successful."

We feel confident that these speeches will be in the hands of every Protestant in Ireland, and we therefore need not multiply quotations. We are already verging on the space we had assigned to their review; but there are one or two passages of such unrivalled eloquence that we cannot refrain from transferring them to our pages. Speak ing of the coalition with O'Connell

"And was it (he indignantly exclaims) for an associate like this,-to make way for the irresponsible control of this dictator, that the courteous authority of Earl Grey was undetermined by clandestine intrigue, and the ardent support of Mr. Stanley and Sir James Graham forfeited by unprincipled legislation? Was it to conciliate a ruler such as this that the honor of England was tarnished, and the welfare of Ireland disregarded--that the peace of that country was abandoned to the mercy of those to whom repose is extinction, and that a true branch of the Protestant church was to be flung into the fires which Popery had re-kindled? Was the national interest and honor to be placed in jeopardy, that any hireling agitator might, if it so pleased him, convulse the country; that he might, like the

fabled wizards of the north, barter his storms for gold, selling the wind, and in a sense never before exemplified, reaping a profitable whirlwind-that he might make merchandize of the sorrows, of the souls of a much-wronged people; that he might exact wages, earned by practices which distracted habits of industry, and inflamed feelings of disaffection; that he might agitate again a harassed and afflicted land, and,—it must be said,—not without shame to this country, and amid the darkening crimes and miseries of Ireland, gather in again his opprobrious remuneration."

The speech at Bristol concludes with the following appeal to the greatness of the British nation

"Once, and only once, England supplicated foreign protection-when the cry of her children was, that the barbarians pursued them to the sea, and the sea drove them back upon the barbarians. That sea is now her wide and glorious dominion-those barbarous enemies, under her happy sway, have taken their place among the noblest of the human race.

Her sta

tion since has been a station of power, her flag the ensign of sovereignty, and her voice has been command. The generous need not severe or frequent lessons of adversity, and England has ever been prompt to afford that protection which it was once the condition of her weakness to so

licit. She has been the champion of the human race against a mighty despotism.

She has listened from afar for the com

We do not ask

plaint of the slave, and smote the scourge from his oppressor's hand, and vindicated him to the rank of man. Is it only to the Protestants of Ireland her protection is to be denied? We seek no extravagant acts of favor-we implore only that you will not suffer us to be made or to remain outlaws of the constitution--that you will cause law to be obeyed-that you will protect the church which you have incorporated with your own. of you to spare a single defect—but, we entreat you, do not work, in the abused name of reform, the vengeance of a body which hates the church because it exists, which, the more excellent it is, will clamour the more loudly against it, and will never feel its rage abated until the object of its hatred has been rendered inefficient. Do not indulge this fell passion. Do not countenance the preposterous notion that Popery would reform the reformed religion. Encourage those who love your name, with an assurance that you are not

regardless of their origin and their faith; and let the common enemy be warned, that he must not hope for your alliance in his persecutions of men whom you consider as united with you in the bonds and the brotherhood of pure and undefiled religion."

With one more passage we shall conclude our extracts from these speeches. "Let us not lose the benefits of British connexion; let us not be looked upon as outlaws.

"But is it not a question, whether we have not already lost these benefits? In petitions from my country imploring you to guard the bonds of connexion, I have repeatedly seen it assigned as a reason for the prayer, that Ireland must otherwise become the battle-field whereupon contending nations would decide their conflicts. This was the worst evil which was dreaded from separation; and I do not hesitate to affirm that a far more fearful evil is found compatible with what is called a union. Look to the reports which recount, imperfectly and partially, some of the atrocities by which Ireland is now afflicted. Look to the representation ascribed to the late Chief Secretary for Ireland, declaring that the parts of the country where the Church of Rome prevails, should be traced in blood-red colours upon the map-and that, on an average, he received accounts of three murders every two days. Look to the reports from a late privy council in Dublin, at which the Lord Lieutenant of Tipperary (a county to which the Irish government long denied the benefit of the coercion act) gave in returns of crime, and showed in that one county, in the space of only two years and five months, five hundred and sixty murders had been perpetrated; and then say whether any state of things can be imagined more dreadful than that which prevails at this moment. War!-A battle-field! member well when the brave and highspirited gentry of the south of Ireland, would have hailed, with acclamation, war, open, terrible war-in their own fields, if it were a change from a gloomy, fiendish spirit of assassination, the blackest curse before which ever nation withered.

I re

War! If it have its terrors, it has also grand compensations. It calls out noble bursts of human energy,-lights of tenderness relieve it, and it is glorious in the loftiest qualities by which our unchanged nature can be adorned. The fields which it has signalized are separated

to a peculiar honor-pilgrims visit them— and their names are spells to awaken those deep and proud emotions which are among the high mysteries of our being. But where murder steals out with coward stride and fell purpose-where he withdraws to his lair, and no indignation smites him-I am weak and wrongwhere murder becomes the great animating and debasing principle-where it frowns the puny affectation of courts of justice into contempt-where its baleful presence is attested by more victims than angry war demands or numbers-where the fall of every victim is a most fearful crime, and brings a curse and a cry of blood upon many criminals there is a state of things having less to compensate its evil than comes in the train of battle. And this is the state of the southern provinces of Ireland. War would be

better.

with the Emperor of France to his Who would not rather go forth battles, than abide amid the revolting butcheries of Robespierre or Marat? And who that reflected would not rather see Ireland the battle-field of civilized made for murderers. war than the shambles which it has been

We appeal to you, shall it continue

thus ?"

Here we must cease our notice of these speeches. We have made no attempt to do justice to their merits as oratorical compositions. We may safely leave their eloquence to make its own way with our readers. It cannot fail to command their judgments and arrest their admiration. But it will not do have stated, we have been chary in so the less because, for the reasons we bestowing that tribute of applause which were we indifferent to the pleadings we could not withhold from the advocate. We have a far higher opinion of the merits of these addresses than to suppose, for an instant, that they can suffer by the omission. The eloquence that would need the eulogy of the critic to procure admiration for its beauties, may fairly be said to possess no real beauties, and to deserve no genuine admiration.

Without, however, departing from our intention of not offering any critical comment upon the characteristics of Mr. O'Sullivan's eloquence, we may, perhaps, venture upon one or two observations that will involve, at most, a very slight departure from our rule.

Those who have been accustomed to regard Irish eloquence as the eloquence of exaggeration, both in passion and in fancy, will find perhaps in these printed speeches but little indications of our supposed national peculiarities. We cannot now stop to enter on an examination how far the character so generally and unscrupulously assigned to Irish eloquence is the just one. Those who would disparage our national genius assert, that the Irish orators mistake passion for reasoning perhaps it would be nearer the truth to say that they combine them. Enthusiasm is by no means an impediment to the process of correct deduction. It is when the mind is excited that even the reasoning powers are most acute, and in the midst of strong feeling the judgment will be the more ready to perceive the connexion between the trains of thought. Those who censure Irish eloquence for its passionateness forget this truth-and the phlegmatic coldness which seems recommended as its antithesis can only be praised, or even tolerated upon an hypothesis, which all experience disproves, and all philosophy rejects that excitement must necessarily disturb the operation of the intellect, and that man, when he begins to reason, must cease to feel.

We need not pause to point out the utter fallacy of a doctrine which, perhaps, when plainly stated, there is no person bold enough to maintain. It was the passionateness of his reasoning that made Demosthenes the first orator the world has ever seen. It is not only that the argument that is tamely stated loses half or more than half its force; but the man whose mind is not excited on his subject will never himself discover half the reasonings that support him.

The reader of the speeches before us will, perhaps, observe that calmness of reasoning and of statement appears eminently their characteristic. He will not complain of any deficiency of energy; but he will, perhaps, that this energy is too much subdued into the character of repose; and so far from noticing the fault generally charged upon Irish oratory by its critics-that it abounds too much with the elevated and impassioned-he will sometimes feel, that the sobriety

of narrative, or the chasteness of reasoning, is almost too long unrelieved by any burst of passion or of fancy.

This might, perhaps, be attributed to the circumstances of the mission which occasioned their delivery, which would have made any approach to violence, at all times injurious, peculiarly unbecoming. But vehemence and violence are very different things; and we have alluded to this, not for the purpose of pointing out a fault, but of reminding the reader of these addresses that those who heard them spoken could never complain of the absence of the former; and those passages which, in their written form may seem to have too much of quiet, were animated into energy and elevated into grandeur by a delivery which, giving to every word its force, kindled every sentiment into a feeling, and converted, if we may use the expression, every argument into passion.

We

It is almost superfluous for us to express our sense of the obligations which the Protestants of Ireland owe to the author of this volume; and yet we cannot bring ourselves to close this paper without an acknowledgment that seems almost a formal one. believe those services are fully appreciated; and yet, perhaps, they are better attested by the malice of our enemies than the gratitude of our friends. There are few individuals upon whom that malice has been so abundantly-none upon whom it has been so harmlessly poured. Calumny and ridicule have been employed against him equally in vain. The talents of the buffoon rhymer, and the foul-mouthed slanderer have been exerted in prose, and we had almost said poetry, (we correct ourselves) lampoon to damage his reputation; but even Moore and O'Connell, masters of their respective arts, were here at fault. The one could find no more laughable subject of ridicule than that the reverend gentleman desired to serve his God-the other no more bitter subject of scurrilous invective than that he had altered the etymology of his name.

Poor Moore! We never can think of the melancholy exhibition he made of his fading powers in his Fudges in England, without a humiliating reflection upon the frailty and perishable nature even of that genius which men

fondly call immortal. There needed no better illustration of the truth than to place his last volume beside Lalla Rookh. Without the illustration we could hardly believe that any course of degradation could debase the genius of the one, to the rabid venom of the other. We believe that the lampooner has been already roughly dealt with in our pages; and yet we think we can say that sorrow more than anger was the actuating motive of his reviewer. We never can think of the subject without recalling the lines of Byron :

The wild dog howls o'er the fountain's brim
With baffled thirst and famine grim-

For the stream has shrunk from its marble bed Where the weeds and the desolate dust are spread.

'Twas sweet of yore to see it play
And chase the sultriness of day,

As springing high the silver dew
In whirls fantastically flew;
But never more-

It is with sorrow that we make the melancholy application. The ebullitions of fancy have ceased for ever; and in the dismal notes of his last un

fortunate dirge, we can but hear the howlings of sectarian bigotry watching like "the wild dog" beside the decayed and desolate reservoir, where the fountain of genius shall never play again.

But here we may take our leave both of Mr. O'Sullivan and his calumniators. To the Protestants of Ireland, in whose cause they were spoken, we earnestly recommend these beautiful and powerful vindications of their cause. And of that cause we call on them never to despair. They needed not this publication to assure them that it is the cause of truth, of justice, of Christianity; and they need no eloquence but that of the inspired volume to assure them that that cause must ultimately triumph. Let there then be no faintheartedness among us— - however dark our prospects may seem—and there have been times when they were darker. Let us remember still that the cause of truth is committed to our keeping, and in the confidence produced by that elevating remembrance we will neither shrink from the contest nor despair of its result.