ment would be put to hazard. Mr. Sheil acquiesced, but saw that he must relinquish all hopes of ever obtaining preferment in his profession. He continued his efforts in parliament in favour of the government, without any hope of remuneration. Soon after the death of William the Fourth, however, the obstacle to his advancement having been removed, he was offered the office of Chief Clerk of the Ordnance, but preferred that of Commissioner of Greenwich Hospital, which became vacant by the death of Mr. Crevey, having been led to think that the office was permanent. After having held it for a year, having been warned that it was practically as well as legally held at pleasure, he resigned an office which, indeed, he ought never to have selected, and, in the year 1839, was named Vice-President of the Board of Trade, and was the first Catholic commoner who was raised to the dignity of a Privy Counsellor in England, since the repeal of the Penal Code. His advancement to this important station created a great clamour, and was made the subject of vehement censure at several public meetings, in which the religion of Mr. Sheil was represented as a practical disqualification; but after a few weeks the matter was forgotten. Mr. Sheil continued Vice-President of the Board of Trade for two years, and a few months before the resignation of the Whig ministers, in 1841, was made Judge Advocate-General, in place of Sir George Grey,

On the dissolution of Parliament, in 1841, Mr. Sheil was returned for the borough of Dungarvan. The large expenditure connected with the repeated contests for the county of Tipperary, which he had undergone, induced him to retire from the costly honour of representing that fine district of Ireland. Mr. Sheil continued to attend parliament as assiduously when out of office, as he had previously done, and took part in most of the important debates which arose upon the measures proposed by Sir Robert Peel. His speech upon the Income Tax was regarded as eminently successful. The impression produced by it was so great, that Lord Stanley having risen to reply to it, Sir Robert Peel pulled him back, and insisted on his right of taking the lead.

When Peel retired from office, bearing with him the contempt of the nation, Sheil was nominated to the Mastership of the Mint. After this appointment he seldom took part in the debates in the House of Commons, as his health was very much shaken by his former close attention, and he was harrassed by repeated attacks of gout.

"In 1851 Mr. Sheil was appointed her Majesty's Plenipoten

tiary at the Court of Tuscany. He died at Florence of a sudden attack of gout, on Sunday, 25th of May, and was interred on Wednesday the 28th in the Church of San Michele. He left no family; his son by his first we clea a few years ago. The managing committee of Glasnevin Cemetery proposed to Shei!' friends to place his remains beside those of O'Connell; the offer was not accepted, as Mrs. Sheil wished that his grave might be where she could in death sleep beside him.”*

• Irish Quarteri keview, vol. 1, p. 407

SELECT SPEECHES

OF THE

RIGHT HONOURABLE

RICHARD LALOR SHEIL.

SPEECH UPON THE MEMOIRS OF THEOBALD WOLFE TONE, MADE AT THE CATHOLIC ASSOCIATION.

THIS book-the life of Theobald Wolfe Tone, who was guilty of a disten pered love of Ireland (he had great talents, and with an adventurous spirit combined an undaunted determination)-contains much matter, in which a Catholic can find instruction, from which a British minister ought to derive a warning, while to a Protestant proprietor it cannot fail to afford a theme, on which, if he shall often reflect, his frequent meditation will not be misapplied. I introduce the subject with some abruptness; but it is as well that any preliminary expatiation should be avoided, and that I should proceed at once to the topics to which it is my intention to direct your notice. I shall advert in the first instance to the observations made by Wolfe Tone upon the policy which he conceived it to be wise, on the part of the Catholics of Ireland, to pursue. He states in a diary kept by him in Paris, that General Clarke, the son of an Irishman, and who was afterwards created Duke de Feltre, expressed to him an opinion, that the system which was called Chouannerie in France, and which is analogous in many respects to the Rockism of this country, might be usefully resorted to in Ireland, and that the people, through such means, might be familiarised with Arms, and prepared for a general co-operation, with an invading force. This suggestion was indignantly repudiated by Wolfe Tone, who justly observes, that agrarian combinations lead to crimes as unavailing for

any political purpose as they are morally odious, and produce a harbatous and irregular disturbance, which the government regard without alarm, and which affords an opportunity for the enactment of coercive laws, whenever it suits their purpose to resort to them. Tone alludes to another important topic, the disunion of the Catholics amongst themselves, and the secession of the Catholic gentry from the people. He laments these unfortunate incidents, and inveighs against the unhappy spirit of pusillanimous compliance, which characterized the Catholic leaders in the bargain which they were induced to strike with the government in 1793. He states himself to be fully convinced that if, in the midst of the embarrassments of the ministry, with war without, and disaffection within, the men who negotiated on the part of the Catholics of Ireland had adopted the peremptory tone which the condition of the country would have enabled them to assume, the minister would have been compelled to yield, and a measure of complete and unqualified enfranchisement would have been extorted from him. This remark is well founded; I am sure that our interests as well as our honour will be always most effectually consulted by a bold, uncompromising course; that the men at the head of the people must rely upon the people, and nothing but the people, for the accomplishment of every national purpose, and that whenever they shall be weak enough to listen to the false blandishments of power, they will discover that a sacrifice of principle is sure to be followed by a relinquishment of their real interests, and that of their own unwise cunning, as well as of the craft of their antagonists, they will infallibly prove the victims. Sc much for that portion of this book, which relates more immediately to the course which it befitted the leaders of the Irish Catholics in 1793, in the opinion of Theobald Wolfe Tone, to have adopted. I turn to a topic of deeper interest-to a portion of the narrative contained in these memoirs, calculated to awaken in the mind of an English statesmar reflections of a very serious kind, and in which I ventured to say, that practical admonition was to be found. In 1795, Theobald Wolfe Tone was compelled to retire from Ireland to the United States, where he lad at first an intention of settling; there in the bosom of his family, with a wife whom he adored, and children who shared in his idolatry for their incomparable mother, he might have led a long and prosperous life, if he knew how to form a just estimate of felicity, and could have appreciated the opportunities of happiness with which he waз encompassed. But ambition, or perverted patriotism, was among many passions paramount to every other: he was pursued by the recollections of Ireland: the memory of his country became a malady of his heart: and in the idealism of exile the scenes of oppression which he had witnessed, and at which his blood had boiled, rose with all the distinctness of unimpaired reality before him. The phantasms with which men coudemned to leave their country are disastrously haunted, are, to men like Tone, prompters of great enterprise. There gradually grew up in his mind a design as adventurous as any of which the romance of history has left us an example. He formed the determination to strike a blow at England, where he knew that she was most vulnerable, and to

invite the French republic to become his auxiliary in an enterprise which should put the British empire to hazard. Full of a purpose, which at first view appeared to be as extravagant as it was criminal, he set sail from America, and arrived at Havre on the first of February, 1796 Having reached Paris, he found himself in a state which men less ardent, and with less fixedness of intent would have looked upon as desperate: he failed for a considerable time in obtaining access to any man in authority, and the little money in his possession was almost expended. He was without friends, without resources of any kind, and could scarcely express himself in the language of the country. It is, indeed, difficult to conjecture a state more utterly hopeless than that to which he was reduced. Yet, in the desolation of a great metropolis, he was upheld by that unalterable purpose, from which the aliment of his soul was derived. At last he obtained an interview with the minister of war His chief credentials, the documents on which he grounded his claim to the confidence of Charles Lecroix, were two votes of thanks, which he had received as their secretary from the Catholics of Ireland. Although Lecroix had never heard of him before, he was struck by his project, and sent him to General Clarke, whose family was connected with Ireland; but Clarke entertained such strange notions about the country from which his father had emigrated, that he inquired from him, whether Lord Clare was likely to co-operate with the French, and whether the Duke of York would accept the sovereignty of Ireland, in the event of its conquest by the French republic. Tone perceived that little could be effected with Clarke, and determined to go directly to the President of the Directory, who was no other than the celebrated Carnot, to whose genius the marvellous successes of France were in a great measure to be ascribed. An interview was obtained, in which the victorious mathematician listened to the enthusiastic Irishman, with a not very unnatural distrust in the feasibility of his project. He slowly acceded to it, and it was proposed by the French Government to send two thousand men to Ireland. This suggestion Tone treated as an absurdity. His reasoning was so cogent, that he prevailed upon the Directory to resolve upon an expedition of eight thousand men, with fifty thousand stand of arms; but Hoche, who enjoyed the highest military reputation, having been named to the chief command of the invading army, insisted on its being increased from eight to fifteen thousand men, with a large park of artillery, and arms sufficient to supply the insurgent population. The French Directory acceded to this requisition, and that large force, conveyed by seventeen ships of the line, sailed from Brest. While every good citizen must concur in the unqualified con demnation of the man, at whose instance the French Government embarked in an undertaking which, if it had been successful, would have entailed irretrievable calamity upon his country, yet when we look back at the circumstances in which Wolfe Tone was placed, and consider the difficulties with which he had to struggle, that his achievement was a most extraordinary one, must be acknowledged. How must his heart have beaten when he beheld that great armament, with its vast sails dilated in some sort by his own aspiring spirit, steering its course to the