tient, long-suffering, and insulted people. Yes, both people and priesthood are insulted by this disgusting oath." But why, in common sense, cannot a Papist say his prayers and preach his sermons, or proselyte his neighbours, without keeping up a correspondence with Rome. Or, is it not palpable that this correspondence may be made a cloak for any traitorous intercourse with any foreign enemy favoured by Rome? "Our Clergy will scout, with prompt and charitable contempt, this fresh attempt to trample under foot our inextinguishable religion. They never will submit. Let the dungeon and scaffold be prepared! They will never submit to falsehood, prevarication, or perjury!" Mr. O'Connell's Opinions of Mr. Plunkett. "I did not think he had acuteness enough to form so complete a snare for the Catholic religion. "I still cannot give Mr. Plunkett credit for the extreme fitness of his 'infernal machine,' as the French would call it; I think he must have been aided by some personage still more ingenious than himself, and of deep malignity!". A note should have been added, to tell us, whether this super-eminently ingenious and malignant personage was courteously meant to imply "Mr. Canning," or that regular subterranean author of infernal machines, to whom the Pope imputes our Bible. "Come forward, Mr. Plunkett, you who presume with your double recital "It was scarcely decent in you, the apparent advocate of the Catholics, to inflict ridicule, and even ribaldry, on our doctrine of the real presence This out-heroding of Herod belongs to Mr. Plunkett! Let him have the sole and exclusive honour of it, especially as he has invented it in the capacity of our advocate!" "Mr. Plunkett's Bill is an impudent Veto; I will not call it less; it is an audacious attempt to place all the Catholic Clergy of Ireland under the worst species of ministerial controul, and also to leave them at the mercy of every malignant Orange informer!" "The minuteness of his dislike to the Catholic Church, has induced him to go beyond every former attempt, and he will soon be discontented, if he cannot extend severity and punishment to the most humble orders of our clergy." "Mr. Plunkett may make martyrs of them, but he never will succeed in making them either perjurers or traitors to their God!" (Letters to the Catholics of Ireland.-Passim.) Yet Mr. O'Connell, with those words glowing from his pen and his lips, turns round, with a fond conversion, more expeditious than a lover's quarrel, or a miracle of Prince Hohenlohe, and flings himself into Mr. Plunkett's arms; abandons his anger and his allegiance together, and " ere those shoes were old," in which he followed his poor Church's body, rushes into ardent alliance with its notorious slayer. Mr. Plunkett, has received his advances with no repulsive frown; and we now have the curious exhibition of two learned personages, one of whom would, with Mr. Plunkett's good-will, have been at this time looking through the bars of an Irish dungeon, and the other, with Mr. O'Connell's, would have been devoted to the tender mercies of a Popish Church; involved in an amity as tender, as is possible between a silk gown and a stuff one. Mr. Plunkett, clever as he is, will certainly have the worst of it in this embrassade *. What then must be the answer of all men, who are not determined to be deceived, when the Popish advocates come forward to offer Securities, "We cannot believe that you are in earnest—we find you pledged by name to the refusal of all pledges for our safetyWe find you calling down vengeance on your friends, who before ventured to offer securities in the House.--Your Clergy have declared, in the most violent and passionate language, that they will suffer no interference, even of the most trivial kind, no common and lawful prevention of obvious public mischief, such as is allowed by every other denomination of faith in the empire, and such as is demonstratively essential to prevent foreign treason, and domestic conspiracy within the borders of the realm.-In their speeches and pamphlets they denounce this simple and general obligation, as a device "Thus, when a collier and a barber meet, The collier black, the barber smugly neat ; of Satan; from their altars they invoke the angry spirit of their flocks against it, and ostentatiously demand to be led to the prison and the scaffold, rather than submit, to "vetoism of any description." But all restrictive, provident authority of the legislature must be some description of vetoism.- "But your two present Securities are still more impolitic and obnoxious than all those that have been hitherto torn out of your hands and ground in the dust under the heel of priest and populace. First, the pensioning of your Clergy, which they must look upon as a trap for their simplicity, a mere state contrivance to separate them from the people. Thus, you rouse the passions of the one class. Next, the disfranchisement of the forty-shilling freeholders. Thus, you rouse the passions of the other. "You bind your Clergy and your people in an interest to which the past, strong as it was, was but straw and stubble; you weld their confederacy by real insult and real injury *." * Sir Francis Burdett has now withdrawn those offers, obviously in consequence of the outcry already raised against them. They, however, have been made; which shews that those who made them either desired to hoodwink the English Parliament, or knew nothing of the Irish Papists. Let them choose their alternative. |