England, (whose heart will, I am sure, at last prevail over any erroneous scruples suggested by my Lord Elidon's casuistry, when he was keeper of the royal conscience) that the true way to tranquillize Ireland is to treat her with kindness, and to win her affections and her gratitude. For my own part, violent and intemperate as I am deemed, there is nothing which I more sincerely and devoutly wish than to see my country at peace, to behold a reconciliation between all parties in this country, and England and Ireland inseparably bound by mutual interests, and a community of rights and privileges, together. I have always been convinced, and I never shall, I am sure, relinquish that strong persuasion, that the real happiness of Ireland can never be achieved except by an identity with England, and a complete consolidation with her empire, which never can be effected while differences of religion are made the standard of political distinction. I consider the diffusion of English habits, principles, and opinions as the greatest blessing that can befal my country. Let one act of justice be done to Ireland-let seven millions of her people be put on an equality with the rest of her inhabitants-let injurious and exasperating distinctions be abolished, and there is not a man amongst us who will not participate in the sentiment of ardent and enthusiastic loyalty, which, even in anticipation of a better system, is already growing up. The hope of witnessing the great measure of conciliation peacefully and satisfactorily carried through every branch of the legislature, has, if I may speak so much for myself, already removed every sentiment of political asperity from my mind; and, so far from indulging in any wish that the repose of England should be disturbed, that her greatness should be diminished, or her grandeur should be impaired, I trust that she will long continue to be the asylum and refuge of the genuine principles of liberty, and that the power which watches over the virtue and happiness of mankind, will, for the sake of both, render her empire equally glorious and everlasting.

VOTE OF THANKS TO MR. CONWAY.

SPEECH IN SECONDING A VOZE OF THANKS TO MR. CONWAY.

I SECOND the resolution of thanks to Mr. Conway. That gentleman, by the unremitting exercise of his distinguished abilities in the national service, has acquired a title to public gratitude, and large as the encomium is which Mr. O'Connell has pronounced upon him, it does not exceed his deserts. Mr. Conway is a Protestant; but although he does not kneel at the same altars, nor use the same formula of orison as ourselves, he derives, from the community of country, a participation in our sufferings, and gives expression to his sense of the heavy wrongs under which we labour, in language, perhaps, bolder and more strenuous than we should ourselves employ. The reason is this the Roman

Catholic body is not wholly free from some of those bad moral results which political degradation is calculated to produce. We have been accustomed to consider ourselves an inferior class, and, until very recently, our tone and bearing were characterised by feelings which bespoke an humiliation bordering on servility. Our Protestant auxidiaries, who have not contracted the same habits, use language far more peremptory and indignant than we are wont to employ, and I need do no more than refer to the writings of Mr. Conway, in order to illustrate the justice of this remark. The merits of that gentleman are eminent indeed, and have acquired for him a high reputation, not only in Ireland, but in the sister country. He has won the applause of those whose panegyric is most valuable, as they are themselves the just objects of encomium; I may venture to state, that I myself, individually, know that Mr. Moore, who is, perhaps, the first writer of his time, looks upon Mr. Conway as a man of extraordinary abilities, and as a most useful servant of his country. The merits of Mr. Conway are obvious. His style is at once bold, vigorous, and clear; his expression is always pure, and not unfrequently highly imaginative and original. He is remarkable for the force and simplicity of his reasoning, as well as for power of diction and resources of phrase; and if the spirit of sarcasm occasionally breaks out in his compositions, and gall flows from his pen, it is against the enemies of his country that his invective, which never exceeds the fair limits of political discussion, is directed. But the chief merit of Mr. Conway-and it is a rare one in Ireland-consists in the minuteness with which he investigates elucidatory facts, and arranges the evidence by which his assertions are established. Mr. Macdonnell has well observed, that we indulge too much in abstract expatiations on our sufferings, and do not dwell sufficiently upon the specific instances of oppression, which would afford proof of the reasonableness of our complaints. Mr. Conway has not fallen into this mistake. His compositions are distinguished by the accuracy with which he goes through the details of oppression, and follows the spirit of tyranny through all its forms. Mr. Conway, in his letters to Lord Lansdowne, has displayed this, his peculiar talent, in an eminent degree. In those letters he has embraced the whole system of misgovernment which has produced the evils of this country. Although he has touched every subject with great felicity, there are two topics which he has lately treated with peculiar power and effect. He has denounced the Subletting Act, and co-operated with Mr. O'Connell in exhibiting the ruinous consequences of that most unmerciful measure. If there had been means of subsistence provided for the myriads of wretches who are to be the victims of this act of parliament, we should not complain of its effect. But every man of ordinary humanity must shudder at the idea of turning the mass of the population out of their miserable hovels, when there is no place of refuge afforded them, and they are left to perish upon the public road. If there were ships in every port ready to carry off the people to New Holland, we should, perhaps, acquiesce in this measure. But no such vent for the houseless and famishing peasantry is provided. The result, therefore,

must be, that they will die in thousands upon thousands in the highway and in the streets. Even now the slaughterous consequences of this act are felt. The scythe of legislative massacre is mowing the people down, and the only consolation is, that there is a Judge in heaven before whom the framers of this measure will have to answer for this consecration of murder in the sanctuaries of legislation. The other topic to which I refer, in speaking of the services done by Mr. Conway, is the Established Church. We have too long observed a prudential silence in relation to that enormous mass of abuses-that huge accumulation of evil-that--what shall I call it? that nuisance in politics, and monstrosity in religion-the anti-Christian and anti-apostolic opulence of the Established Church. God forbid that I should attempt to msinuate that public worship, no matter in what form, should not be maintained in a manner befitting the nobleness of its object. The Church of Scotland affords a model. Its pastors are raised above indigence by the State-they are independent in circumstance, and conspicuous for their learning and their piety. The five hundred thousand Protestants of Ireland should have a respectable establishment predoLinant in law and in dignity; but it is insulting to reason, and it is a burlesque upon the Christian religion, that the ministers of that religion, in any shape, should roll in all the splendour of their gorgeous sinecurism, in the name of Him, who was born in a manger, and died upon a cross-what an object a bishop of the Establishment presents upon his death-bed! He grasps with his trembling hands, shaken with the tre mor of agony, a renewal fine of ten thousand pounds, and then he goes to pass his account before the God of poverty in heaven. The death of a bishop! I wonder how the late bishop of Winchester looked, when his mitred spectre stood before the face of the living God-before whom, we are told by himself, that it is dreadful to appear. He died worth two hundred thousand pounds!! Bible-readers, Pope, Gordon, and the rest of you, is there warrant in the Scriptures for this? But I deviate from my subject. Mr. Conway has deserved well, by exhibiting this system in its proper light. So has Mr. Staunton, who has lately proved to demonstration, in his letters to Mr. Lamb, that the church is worth more than two millions a year! I trust that Mr. Hume will turn Mr. Staunton's admirable exposition to good account. I am sure he will. He has thanked him for the information which he has supplied, and stated that, by a perseverance in the course which Mr. Staunton has adopted, success must ultimately be achieved. To him and to Mr. Conway, for their candid co-operation in this great undertaking, we are greatly indebted. We owe large obligations to the liberal press. Almost every journal of respectability and influence in the empire are on our side. The adverse faction, indeed, in this country have newspapers which are in extensive circulation amongst them, and which are the appropriate channels by which the passions of the party find vent. There could not be a more befitting medium of evacuation for the bad and malignant feelings of the body of which those journals are the organ. It is not my habit to complain of the press. I think that every individual who, of his own accord, rushes into publicity, is a

jast object of comment, and, as he has made his election in betaking himself in politics, he must be prepared to submit to the strong reprehension of his antagonists, which he thus voluntarily incurs. But there are, after all, some limits to the exercise of that prerogative of vituperation, and at all events the expedient recently adopted with respect to Mr. Maguire, cannot admit of a palliation. What can be more unjustifi able, than after a public trial has taken place, to circulate hand-bill enclosed in the folds of newspapers, against a gentleman, whose only crime was, that he stood forward as the champion of his religion, which he defended with the ability of a most accomplished disputant, and the mildness which should distinguish a Christian priest. Against that individual a conspiracy of the foulest kind was formed. It was defeated. But the faction have not given over their pursuit of him. They did not dare to print in their authorised journals, (which are some three or four,) any statement to his disparagement but they enclose in the folds of newspapers, libel conveying the most deadly insinuations against his character. Is this fair?-Is this consistent with the legitimate latitude of free discussion? Can the Protestants of Ireland approve of this? Is not this as ignoble as it is criminal? After having failed in their efforts to slay his character, in an open and undisguised attack, they shoot, from their dark and perfidious place of ambush, a poisoned shaft against him. Is not this the veriest treachery of malevolence? Is not this waylaying of reputation; and may it not be said of the turbulent and remorseless faction who do these things, that they would have been assassins if they had not been authors, and that they would have stabbed, if they had not written? Why should the Orangemen of Ireland put such means as these into operation, and have recourse to such unworthy stratagems against a poor, an humble, and unoffending priest? Do they want to force us into retaliation? Have we no parsons to set off against them? Do they forget? Have they so deeply drank of oblivion? Have they swallowed such large draughts of Lethe? Can they fail to remember the stigma that is branded upon the mitred forehead of their own hierarchy? Protestants of Ireland, cease, in mercy to your priesthood, to provoke us. We are your equals in invective, and we have a vantage ground in the materials of vituperation. You know

-But I will not breathe so detestable a sound. Human nature shrinks from its utterance. It would taint and pollute the moral atmosphere. Be then the name of the episcopal villain like his crime— inier Christians non nominandum."

PLATO AND DR. MAGEE.

SPEECH ON PLATO AND DR. MAGEE.

THERE is a pagan gorgeousness in the Church Establishment of Ireland, which is incompatible with the genius of Christianity, and repugnart to the first elements of our belief. Let ne suppose, that some philo. sopher of antiquity, Plato, for example, were called up from the dead.

The fancy may often be employed as a guide to truth, and a powerful argument be presented in an imaginative shape. The lamp, with which reason lights its way, may be moulded in a strange and antic form. Let me then suppose (and let no severe logician quarrel with the extraagance of the hypothesis), that the spirit of Plato were submitted to some necromantic process of resuscitation, and that after he had revisited "glimpses of the moon," the task of effecting his posthumous conversion to Christianity were committed to the pious divine, whose meek and apostolic forehead has been recently invested with the Archiepiscopal mitre of the metropolis. Let me be permitted to imagine, that the ex-fellow of the University of Dublin were to revert to those early occupations from which his sacred prosperity is derived; that he were intrusted with the religious education of the re-animated philosopher, and that having again become tutor, he should have Plato for his pupil. I pass by the preliminaries of introduction between these distinguished personages, and say nothing of the astonishment of Plato, at the episcopal jauntiness of air and the volatile agility of demeanour which characterise the learned Doctor. Let me imagine the wonder of Plato to have subsided at the novelty of this our modern world, it which the Doctor performs so important a part, and that after having been contented upon the other subjects of his admiration, he exclaimed, "Where are the gods of the old time? What has become of Jupiter: Does the thunder no longer roll at his behest? What has befallen the martial maid to whom Athens had devoted her peculiar adoration, and built that lofty shrine, whose chasteness of form was well associated in its name with the virgin majesty of Minerva? Where is the sublime worship of the god of poetry and light? Has he been flung, like his own adventurous boy, from the chariot of the sun?" To this interrogatory the Doctor replies, "These graceful but unholy products of the idolatrous imagination of your country have returned into the nothingness from which they rose. These splendid vapours of the fancy have vanished like the illuminated mists of the mountain in which the gods of Greece held their imaginary abode. These dreams of a fabulous creed have passed away, and that of which you, or your master Socrates, in one of your noblest dialogues have given a prophetic intimation, has been realized, in a pure and celestial system of worship and of faith. There came from heaven a Being whose precepts carry an internal evidence of their divinity, and who, to use your own words of remote prediction, hath taught us to pray.' His coming was not announced in thunder, nor was his mission illustrated with flashes of lightning. His arrival on the earth was told in the solitude of the night, and in a peaceful and lonely song to shepherds abiding in the mountains. le descended as an emissary of that Godhead of which he was at once a messenger and an emanation, in the lowliest form with which miser. able humanity could be invested. His whole life was as simple as his birth was obscure. The poor, the sorrowful, and the unfortunate were his companions. His only pomp consisted in the grandeur of his revelations, and even their sublimity was tempered by the meekness of bis moral inculcations; mercy dwelt for ever on his lips, and diffused its