her name, her fields waving with the fruits of agriculture, her ports alive with the contributions of commerce, and her temples vocal with unrestricted piety. Such is the ambition of the true patriot; such are the views for which we are calumniated! Oh, divine ambition! Oh, delightful calumny! Happy he who shall see thee accomplished! Happy he who through every peril toils for thy attainment! Proceed, friend of Ireland and partaker of her wrongs, proceed undaunted to this glorious consummation. Fortune will not gild, power will not ennoble thee; but thou shalt be rich in the love and titled by the blessings of thy country; thy path shall be illumined by the public eye, thy labours lightened by the public. gratitude; and oh, remember-amid the impediments with which corruption will oppose, and the dejection with which disappointments may depress you-remember you are acquiring a name to be cherished by the future generations of earth, long after it has been enrolled amongst the inheritors of heaven:

SPEECH

DELIVERED AT

AN AGGREGATE MEETING

OF

THE ROMAN CATHOLICS

OF

CORK.

IT is with no small degree of self-congratulation that I at length find myself in a province which every glance of the eye, and every throb of the heart, tells me is truly Irish; and that congratu lation is not a little enhanced by finding that you receive me not as quite a stranger. Indeed, if to respect the Christian without regard to his creed, if to love the country but the more for its calamities, if to hate oppression though it be robed in power, if to venerate integrity though it pine under persecution, gives a man any claim to your recognition; then, indeed, I am not a stranger amongst you. There is a bond of union between brethren, however distant; there is a sympathy between the virtuous, however separated; there is

a heaven-born instinct by which the associates of the heart become at once acquainted, and kindred natures as it were by magic see in the face of a stranger, the features of a friend. Thus it is, that, though we never met, you hail in me the sweet association, and I feel myself amongst you even as if I were in the home of my nativity. But this my knowledge of you was not left to chance; nor was it left to the records of your charity, the memorials of your patriotism, your municipal magnificence, or your commercial splendour; it came to me hallowed by the accents of that tongue on which Ireland has so often hung with ecstasy, heightened by the eloquence and endeared by the sincerity of, I hope, our mutual friend. Let me congratulate him on having become in some degree naturalized in a province, where the spirit of the elder day seems to have lingered; and let me congratulate you on the acquisition of a man who is at once the zealous advocate of your cause, and a practical instance of the injustice of your oppressions. Surely, surely if merit had fair play, if splendid talents, if indefatigable industry, if great research, if unsullied principle, if a heart full of the finest affections, if a mind matured in every manly accomplishment, in short, if every noble, public quality, mellowed and reflected in the pure mirror of domestic virtue, could entitle a subject to distinction in a state, Mr. O'Connel should be distinguished; but, it is his crime to be a Catholic, and his curse to be an Irishman. Simpleton! he prefers his conscience to a place, and the love of

his country to a participation in her plunder! Indeed, he will never rise. If he joined the bigots of my sect, he might be a sergeant; if he joined the infidels of your sect, he might enjoy a pension, and there is no knowing whether some Orangecorporator, on an Orange-anniversary, might not modestly yield him the precedence of giving "the glorious and immortal memory." Oh, yes, he might be privileged to get drunk in gratitude to the man who colonized ignorance in his native land, and left to his creed the legacy of legalized persecution. Nor would he stand alone, no matter what might be the measure of his disgrace, or the degree of his dereliction. You well know there are many of your own community who would leave him at the distance-post. In contemplating their recreancy, I should be almost tempted to smile at the exhibition of their pretensions, if there was not a kind of moral melancholy intermingled, that changed satire into pity, and ridicule into contempt. For my part, I behold them in the apathy of their servitude, as I would some miserable maniac in the contentment of his captivity. Poor creature! when all that raised him from the brute is levelled, and his glorious intellect is mouldering in ruins, you may see him with his song of triumph, and his crown of straw, a fancied freeman mid the clanking of his chains, and an imaginary monarch beneath the inflictions of his keeper! Merciful God! is it not almost an argument for the sceptic and the disbeliever, when we see the human shape almost without an aspiration of the human soul,

separated by no boundary from the beasts that perish, beholding with indifference the captivity of their country, the persecution of their creed, and the helpless, hopeless destiny of their children? But they have nor creed, nor consciences, nor country; their god is gold, their gospel is a contract, their church a counting-house, their characters a commodity; they never pray but for the opportunities of corruption, and hold their consciences, as they do their government-debentures, at a price proportioned to the misfortunes of their country. But let us turn from those mendicants of disgrace: though Ireland is doomed to the stain of their birth, her mind need not be sullied by their contemplation. I turn from them with pleasure to the contemplation of your cause, which, as far as argument can effect it, stands on a sublime and splendid elevation. Every obstacle has vanished into air; every favourable circumstance has hardened into adamant. The POPE, whom childhood was taught to lisp as the enemy of religion, and age shuddered at as a prescriptive calamity, has by his example put the princes of Christendom to shame. This day of miracles, in which the human heart has been strung to its extremest point of energy; this day, to which posterity will look for instances of every crime and every virtue, holds not in its page of wonders a more sublime phenomenon than that calumniated pontiff. Placed at the very pinnacle of human elevation, surrounded by the pomp of the Vatican and the splendours of the court, pouring the mandates of CHRIST from