gone a pruning, while its roots remained untouched. Mr. Doherty is not the first Solicitor-general of great abilities who has been despatched by Government for the purpose of awing the peasantry into their duty. The present Chief Justice of the King's Bench, upon filling Mr. Doherty's office, was sent upon the same painful errand, and after having been equally successful in procuring the conviction of malefactors, and brandished the naked sword of justice, with as puissant an arm, new atrocities have almost immediately afterwards broken forth, and furnished new occasions for the exercise of his commanding eloquence. It is reasonable to presume that the recent executions at Clonmel will not be attended with any more permanently useful consequences, and symptoms are already beginning to reappear, which, independently of the admonitions of experience, may well induce an apprehension that before much time shall go by, the law officers of the crown will have to go through the same terrible routine of prosecution. It is said, indeed, by many sanguine speculators on the public peace, that now, indeed, something effectual has been done, and that the gaol and the gibbet there has given a lesson that will not be speedily forgotten. How often has the same thing been said when the scaffold was strewed with the same heaps of the dead! How often have the prophets of tranquillity been falsified by the event. If the crimes which, ever since the year 1760, have been uninterruptedly committed, and have followed in such a rapid and tumultuous succession, had been only of occasional occurrence, it would be reasonable to conclude that the terrors of the law could repress them. But it is manifest that the system of atrocity does not depend upon causes merely ephemeral, and cannot, therefore, be under the operation of temporary checks. We have not merely witnessed sudden inundations which, after a rapid desolation, have suddenly subsided; we behold a stream as deep as it is dark, which indicates, by its continuous current, that it is derived from an unfailing fountain, and which, however augmented by the contribution of other springs of bitterness, must be indebted for its main supply to some abundant and distant source. Where then is the well-head to be found? Where are we to seek for the origin of evils, which are of such a character that they carry with them the clearest evidence that their causes must be as enduring as themselves? It may at first view, and to any man who is not well acquainted with the moral feelings and habits of the great body of the population of Ireland, seem a paradoxical proposition that the laws which affect the Roman Catholics furnish a clue by which, however complicated the mazes may be which constitute the labyrinth of calamity, it will not be difficult to trace our way. It may be asked, with a great appearance of plausibility, (and indeed it is often inquired,) what possible effect the exclusion of a few Roman Catholic gentlemen from Parliament, and of still fewer Roman Catholic barristers from the bench, can produce in deteriorating the moral habits of the people? This, however, is not the true view of the matter. The exclusion of Roman Catholics from office is one of the results of the penal code, but it is a sophism to suggest that it is the sum total of the law itself, and that the whole of it might be resolved into that single proposition. The just mode of presenting the question would be this: "What effect does the penal code produce by separating the higher and the lower orders from each other?" Before I suggest any reasons of my own, it may be judicious to refer to the same writer, from whom I have extracted a description of the state of the peasantry, with which its present condition singularly corresponds. The authority of Arthur Young is of great value, because his opinions were not in the least degree influenced by those passions which are almost inseparable from every native of Ireland. He was an Englishman-had no share in the factious animosities by which this country is divided-he had a cool, deliberate, and scientific mind-was a sober thinker, and a deep scrutiniser into the frame and constitution of society, and was entirely free from all tendency to extravagance in speculation, either political or religious. Arthur Young's book consists of two parts. In the first he gives a minute account of what he saw in Ireland, and in the second, under a series of chapters, one of which is appropriately entitled "Oppression," he states what he

conceives to be the causes of the lamentable condition of the people. Having prefixed this title of " oppression" to the 29th page of the second part of his book, he says, "The landlord of an Irish estate inhabited by Roman Catholics, is a sort of despot, who yields obedience in whatever concerns the poor to no law, but his own will. To discover what the liberty of a people is, we must live amongst them, and not look for it in the statutes of the realm: the language of written law may be that of liberty, but the situation of the poor may speak no language but that of slavery. There is too much of this contradiction in Ireland; a long series of oppression, aided by many very ill-judged laws, has brought landlords into a habit of exerting a very lofty superiority, and their vassals into that of a most unlimited submission: speaking a language that is despised, professing a religion that is abhorred, and being disarmed, the poor find themselves, in many cases, slaves, even in the bosom of written liberty!... The abominable distinction of religion, united with the oppressive conduct of the little country gentlemen, or rather vermin of the kingdom, who were never out of it, altogether bear still very heavy on the poor people, and subject them to situations more mortifying than we ever behold in England." In the next page after these preliminary observations, this able writer (who said in vain fifty years ago, what since that time so many eminent men have been in vain repeating,) points out more immediately the causes of the crimes committed by the peasantry, which he distinctly refers to the distinctions of religion. "The proper distinction in all the discontents of the people is into Protestant and Catholic. The Whiteboys being labouring Catholics, met with all those oppressions I have described, and would probably have continued in full submission, had not very severe treatment blown up the flame of resistance. The atrocious acts they were guilty of made them the objects of general indignation: acts were passed for their punishment, which seemed calculated for the meridian of Barbary: it is manifest that the gentlemen of Ireland never thought of a radical cure, from overlooking the real cause of the disease, which, in fact, lay in themselves, and not in the wretches they doomed to the gallows. Let them change their own conduct entirely, and the poor will not long riot. Treat them like men, who ought to be free as yourselves: put an end to that system of religious persecution, which for seventy years has divided the Kingdom against itself. In these two things lies the cure of insurrectionperform them completely, and you will have an affectionate poor, instead of oppressed and discontented vassals; a better treatment of the poor in Ireland is a very material point to the welfare of the whole British empire. Events may happen which may convince us fatally of this truth. If not, oppression would have broken all the spirit and resentment of men. By what policy the Government of England can, for so many years, have permitted such an absurd system to be matured in Ireland, is beyond the power of plain sense to discover." Arthur Young may be wrong in his inference, (I do not think that he is,) but, be he right or wrong, I have succeeded in establishing that he, whose evidence was most dispassionate and impartial, referred the agrarian barbarities of the lower orders to the oppression of the Roman Catholics. But the passage which I have cited is not the strongest. The seventh section of his work is entitled " Religion." After saying that "the domineering aristocracy of five hundred thousand Protestants, feel the sweets of having two millions of slaves," (the Roman Catholic body was then not one third of what the penal code has since made it,) he observes, "the disturbances of the Whiteboys, which lasted ten years, (what would he now say of their duration?) in spite of every exertion of legal power, were, in many circumstances, very remarkable, and in none more so than in the surprising intelligence among the Insurgents, wherever found. It was universal, and almost instantaneous. The numerous bodies of them, at whatever distance from each other, seemed animated by one zeal, and not a single instance was known, in that long course of time, of a single individual betraying the cause. The severest threats and the most splendid promises of reward had no other effect than to draw closer the bonds which cemented a multitude to all appearance so desultory. It was then

evident that the iron hand of oppression had been far enough from securing the obedience, or crushing the spirit of the people; and all reflecting men, who consider the value of religious liberty, will wish it may never have that effect,-will trust in the wisdom of Almighty God, for teaching man to respect even those prejudices of his brethren, that are imbibed as sacred rights, even from earliest infancy; that, by dear-bought experience of the futility and ruin of the attempt, the persecuting spirit may cease, and toleration establish that harmony and security which, five score years' experience has told us, is not to be purchased at the expense of humanity."

This is strong language, and was used by a man who had no connecting sympathy of interest, of religion, or of nationality with Ireland. So unequivocal an 'opinion, expressed by a person of such authority, and whose credit is not affected by any imaginable circumstance, must be admitted to have great weight, even if there was a difficulty in perceiving the grounds on which that opinion rested. But there is little or none. The law divides the Protestant proprietor from the Catholic tiller of the soil, and generates a feeling of tyrannical domination in the one, and of hatred and distrust in the other. The Irish peasant is not divided from his landlord by the ordinary demarcations of society. Another barrier is erected, and, as if the poor and the rich were not already sufficiently separated, religion is raised as an additional boundary between them. The operation of the feelings, which are the consequence of this division, is stronger in the county of Tipperary than elsewhere. It is a peculiarly Cromwellian district, or, in other words, the holy warriors of the Protector chose it as their land of peculiar promise, and selected it as a favourite object of confiscation. The lower orders have good memories. There is scarce a peasant who, as he passes the road, will not point to the splendid mansions of the aristocracy, embowered in groves, or rising upon fertile elevations, and tell you the name of the pious Corporal, or the inspired Serjeant, from whom the present proprietors derive à title which, even at this day, appears to be of a modern origin. These reminis cences are of a most injurious tendency. But, after all, it is the system of religious separation which nurtures the passions of the peasantry with these pernicious recollections. They are not permitted to forget that Protestantism is stamped upon every institution in the country, and their own sunderance from the privileged class is perpetually brought to their minds. Judges, sheriffs, magistrates, Crown counsel, law officers, -all are Protestant. The very sight of a court of justice reminds them of the degradations attached to their religion, by presenting them with the ocular proof of the advantages and honours which belong to the legal creed. It is not, therefore, wonderful that they should feel themselves a branded caste; that they should have a consciousness that they belong to a debased and inferior community; and having no confidence in the upper classes, and no reliance in the sectarian administration of the law, that they should establish a code of barbarous legislation among themselves, and have recourse to what Lord Bacon calls "the wild justice" of revenge. A change of system would not perhaps produce immediate effects upon the character of the people; but I believe that its results would be much more speedy than is generally imagined. At all events, the experiment of conciliation is worth the trial. Every other expedient has been resorted to, and has wholly failed. It remains that the legislature, after exhausting all other means of tranquillising Ireland, should, upon a mere chance of success, adopt the remedy which has at least the sanction of illustrious names for its recommendation. The union of the two great classes of the people in Ireland, in other words,. the emancipation of the Roman Catholics, is in this view not only recommended by motives of policy, but of humanity; for who that has witnessed the scenes which I have (perhaps at too much length) detailed in these pages, can fail to feel that, if the demoralization of the people arises from bad government, the men who from feelings of partisanship persevere in that system of misrule, will have to render a terrible account?

VINDICTE MAGOGIANE; 'OR, A MODEST DEFENCE OF

GOG AND MAGOG.

" Thou shalt answer for this, thou slanderer. "DRYDEN.

A MORE wanton and unprovoked attack upon two more orderly and inoffensive individuals, than the libel upon Gog and Magog in the last number of the "New Monthly Magazine," was, I verily believe, never committed to paper. If the writer of it had not been as ignorant of general and natural history as he has proved himself to be of individual character, he must have been aware that, by a benignant provision of Nature, the superior power of all the larger animals, disproportioned as it is to their increased bulk, is moreover neutralised by their peaceable and harmless disposition, those which are physically the most formidable, being morally the most amiable and philanthropic. Such an arrangement was obviously necessary for the protection of all inferior creatures, and it will accordingly be found in universal operation. The immeasurable Kraken, for whose existence we have episcopal authority, is not recorded to have ever committed one single aggression, his diving down with Munchausen, when the Baron had taken the unwarrantable liberty of lighting a fire upon his back, being simply an act of self-defence, and one which the meekest Christian might excusably perpetrate if he could thus get rid of all his backbiters. The immense serpent that once stopped the march of a whole Roman army, although to him doubtless, as well as to the Dragon of Wantley, "Houses and churches were only geese and turkeys," did not gobble up a single centurion, notwithstanding the averment of Pliny that they awoke the Python out of a sweet sleep by bringing a battering-ram to bear upon his back-bone, a process which might have excused some little degree of pettishness. Mammoths and that other still more gigantic animal, whose skeleton extending to one hundred and seventy feet in length, has lately been discovered in America, I firmly believe to have been most meek and innocuous creatures, Atlantean lambs, colossal deer, gigantic innocents, whose peaceable character is sufficiently established by the fact that they have become extinct; for had their nature been carnivorous and fierce, it is much more likely that they should have swallowed up the last of some of the defenceless races, than that they themselves should have ceased to exist. They have evidently fallen a sacrifice to their amiability, and need no better monument than their bones, which, like those of the Spartans at Thermopylæ, seem to say to the traveller-"Go! and tell to all the world that we lie here in obedience to the laws of benevolence and love."

If we turn from these uncertain or extinct animals to those which still inhabit our globe, shall we not invariably find those of the hugest bulk and power the most gentle, meek, and inoffensive. The great fish that swallowed up Jonah surrendered him again without hurting a hair of his head, or even charging any thing for his three days' lodging. Far from interfering with our fishing-grounds, or the courses of our steam-boats, to which he might prove himself a most formidable antagonist, the mighty but modest whale betakes himself to the very extremities of his own element, deep in the Polar seas, but, alas! not beyond the reach of that universal enemy-man. The human, or rather the inhuman biped, traverses those icy fields, plunges his harJuly.-VOL. XXIII. NO. XCI.

D

poon in the back of his unsuspecting victim, and instead of pouring oil upon his wounds, like a good Samaritan, endeavours to extract oil out of them. Is not such cruelty enough to make the stoutest whale blubber? Little thinks the gentle reader when he is sitting beside his spermaceti candles, or the clear bright flame of his lamp, enjoying the supreme luxury of reading the present article in the New Monthly, that he is indebted for it to the stupendous whale, the native burgher of the floods, whose last breath is, as it were, exhaling from the glass of the lamp or the flaring wick. The gentle reader literally makes light of his death, adverting not to the conclusive throes and heavings of the cetaceous breast when the sufferer, stuck all over with harpoons, like the front wall of Northumberland House, plunges and rushes through the roaring abysses of the deep, churning the waters into foam, and dying them with blood, until they resemble a devil's punchbowl of raspberry-cream, in the midst of which he at length dies himself. Strange that we should thus get light from the darkest depths, fishing up, as it were, an arctic moon to irradiate the midnight streets of London; nor less strange that our beauties should be rendered shapely by the most unwieldy of fishes, and that the symmetrical bust which captivates the lover's eye should be only built up upon a bracket of whalebone. Can we wonder that Love declines being himself a staymaker, when he discovers the secrets of the trade! If Cupid were honest, his bow should be wrought of whalebone and his dart should be a harpoon.

And the elephant, the largest of all terrestrial animals, is he not as bland and mild as the huge-ribbed monarch of the waters? Timid and graminivorous, he desires only the uninhabited wilderness for his domain, where he may live, like a four-legged hermit, upon pulse and herbage; but man, the universal robber, stops the elephantine traveller upon his own highway, transplants his ivories, and robs him of his trunk. If the case were reversed, what a hubbub would be made of such an outrage in the police reports; how the walls would be plastered with bills headed "Robbery and Murder!" in large letters, and what rewards would be offered for the apprehension of the truculent perpetrator! Never was this intelligent and noble animal known to commence aggression upon man; and even in his death he heaps blessings and comforts upon his murderer. The most colossal of quadrupeds. "the half-resoninag parent of combs," supplies us with traps for catching the little nameless wanderers of the capillary forest; with tetotums for amusing our children; with harpsichord-keys for our young ladies, who, when they are "warbling immortal verse and Tuscan air," little perpend what obligations they owe to the tusk of the elephant ;with balls for billiard-players, who knock about the teeth of the forestmonarch with no more ceremony than my lady's scull is sometimes "knocked about the mazard with a sexton's spade;"—and, finally, with dice, those fearful instruments of misery and ruin, in which shape it may be thought that the elephant has taken an ample, though unintentional revenge upon mankind.

But why dissert we upon colossal beasts and fishes, when it would be more germane to our subject to confine ourselves to those human giants, of whom Gog and Magog may be presumed to be the types or images? The rebel giants, as they are termed in the ancient mytholo