The Catholic not respect an oath! why not? What upon earth has kept him out of Parliament, or excluded him from all the offices whence he is excluded, but his respect for oaths? There is no law which prohibits a Catholic to sit in Parliament. There could be no such law; because it is impossible to find out what pa.s.ses in the interior of any man's mind. Suppose it were in contemplation to exclude all men from certain offices who contended for the legality of taking t.i.thes: the only mode of discovering that fervid love of decimation which I know you to possess would be to tender you an oath "against that d.a.m.nable doctrine, that it is lawful for a spiritual man to take, abstract, appropriate, subduct, or lead away the tenth calf, sheep, lamb, ox, pigeon, duck", &c., and every other animal that ever existed, which of course the lawyers would take care to enumerate. Now this oath I am sure you would rather die than take; and so the Catholic is excluded from Parliament because he will not swear that he disbelieves the leading doctrines of his religion! The Catholic asks you to abolish some oaths which oppress him; your answer is that he does not respect oaths. Then why subject him to the test of oaths? The oaths keep him out of Parliament; why, then, he respects them. Turn which way you will, either your laws are nugatory, or the Catholic is bound by religious obligations as you are; but no eel in the well-sanded fist of a cook-maid, upon the eve of being skinned, ever twisted and writhed as an orthodox parson does when he is compelled by the gripe of reason to admit anything in favour of a dissenter.

I will not dispute with you whether the Pope be or be not the Scarlet Lady of Babylon. I hope it is not so; because I am afraid it will induce His Majesty's Chancellor of the Exchequer to introduce several severe bills against popery, if that is the case; and though he will have the decency to appoint a previous committee of inquiry as to the fact, the committee will be garbled, and the report inflammatory.

Leaving this to be settled as he pleases to settle it, I wish to inform you, that, previously to the bill last pa.s.sed in favour of the Catholics, at the suggestion of Mr. Pitt, and for his satisfaction, the opinions of six of the most celebrated of the foreign Catholic universities were taken as to the right of the Pope to interfere in the temporal concerns of any country. The answer cannot possibly leave the shadow of a doubt, even in the mind of Baron Maseres; and Dr. Rennel would be compelled to admit it, if three Bishops lay dead at the very moment the question were put to him. To this answer might be added also the solemn declaration and signature of all the Catholics in Great Britain.

I should perfectly agree with you, if the Catholics admitted such a dangerous dispensing power in the hands of the Pope; but they all deny it, and laugh at it, and are ready to abjure it in the most decided manner you can devise. They obey the Pope as the spiritual head of their Church; but are you really so foolish as to be imposed upon by mere names? What matters it the seven-thousandth part of a farthing who is the spiritual head of any Church? Is not Mr. Wilberforce at the head of the Church of Clapham? Is not Dr. Letsom at the head of the Quaker Church? Is not the General a.s.sembly at the head of the Church of Scotland? How is the government disturbed by these many-headed Churches? or in what way is the power of the Crown augmented by this almost nominal dignity?

The King appoints a fast-day once a year, and he makes the bishops: and if the government would take half the pains to keep the Catholics out of the arms of France that it does to widen Temple Bar, or improve Snow Hill, the King would get into his hands the appointments of the t.i.tular Bishops of Ireland. Both Mr. C----'s sisters enjoy pensions more than sufficient to place the two greatest dignitaries of the Irish Catholic Church entirely at the disposal of the Crown. Everybody who knows Ireland knows perfectly well that nothing would be easier, with the expenditure of a little money, than to preserve enough of the ostensible appointment in the hands of the Pope to satisfy the scruples of the Catholics, while the real nomination remained with the Crown.

But, as I have before said, the moment the very name of Ireland is mentioned, the English seem to bid adieu to common feeling, common prudence, and common sense, and to act with the barbarity of tyrants and the fatuity of idiots.

Whatever your opinion may be of the follies of the Roman Catholic religion, remember they are the follies of four millions of human beings, increasing rapidly in numbers, wealth, and intelligence, who, if firmly united with this country, would set at defiance the power of France, and if once wrested from their alliance with England, would in three years render its existence as an independent nation absolutely impossible. You speak of danger to the Establishment: I request to know when the Establishment was ever so much in danger as when Hoche was in Bantry Bay, and whether all the books of Bossuet, or the arts of the Jesuits, were half so terrible? Mr. Perceval and his parsons forget all this, in their horror lest twelve or fourteen old women may be converted to holy water and Catholic nonsense. They never see that, while they are saving these venerable ladies from perdition, Ireland may be lost, England broken down, and the Protestant Church, with all its deans, prebendaries, Percevals, and Rennels, be swept into the vortex of oblivion.

Do not, I beseech you, ever mention to me again the name of Dr.

Duigenan. I have been in every corner of Ireland, and have studied its present strength and condition with no common labour. Be a.s.sured Ireland does not contain at this moment less than 5,000,000 people.

There were returned in the year 1791 to the hearth tax 701,000 houses, and there is no kind of question that there were about 50,000 houses omitted in that return. Taking, however, only the number returned for the tax, and allowing the average of six to a house (a very small average for a potato-fed people), this brings the population to 4,200,000 people in the year 1791: and it can be shown from the clearest evidence (and Mr. Newenham in his book shows it), that Ireland for the last 50 years has increased in its population at the rate of 50,000 or 60,000 per annum; which leaves the present population of Ireland at about 5,000,000, after every possible deduction for _existing circ.u.mstances, just and necessary wars, monstrous and unnatural rebellions_, and all other sources of human destruction. Of this population, two out of ten are Protestants; and the half of the Protestant population are dissenters, and as inimical to the Church as the Catholics themselves. In this state of things thumbscrews and whipping--admirable engines of policy as they must be considered to be--will not ultimately avail. The Catholics will hang over you; they will watch for the moment, and compel you hereafter to give them ten times as much, against your will, as they would now be contented with, if it were voluntarily surrendered. Remember what happened in the American war, when Ireland compelled you to give her everything she asked, and to renounce, in the most explicit manner, your claim of sovereignty over her. G.o.d Almighty grant the folly of these present men may not bring on such another crisis of public affairs!

What are your dangers which threaten the Establishment? Reduce this declamation to a point, and let us understand what you mean. The most ample allowance does not calculate that there would be more than twenty members who were Roman Catholics in one house, and ten in the other, if the Catholic emanc.i.p.ation were carried into effect. Do you mean that these thirty members would bring in a bill to take away the t.i.thes from the Protestant, and to pay them to the Catholic clergy? Do you mean that a Catholic general would march his army into the House of Commons, and purge it of Mr. Perceval and Dr. Duigenan? or, that the theological writers would become all of a sudden more acute or more learned, if the present civil incapacities were removed? Do you fear for your t.i.thes, or your doctrines, or your person, or the English Const.i.tution? Every fear, taken separately, is so glaringly absurd, that no man has the folly or the boldness to state it. Everyone conceals his ignorance, or his baseness, in a stupid general panic, which, when called on, he is utterly incapable of explaining. Whatever you think of the Catholics, there they are--you cannot get rid of them; your alternative is to give them a lawful place for stating their grievances, or an unlawful one: if you do not admit them to the House of Commons, they will hold their parliament in Potatoe Place, Dublin, and be ten times as violent and inflammatory as they would be in Westminster. Nothing would give me such an idea of security as to see twenty or thirty Catholic gentlemen in Parliament, looked upon by all the Catholics as the fair and proper organ of their party. I should have thought it the height of good fortune that such a wish existed on their part, and the very essence of madness and ignorance to reject it.

Can you murder the Catholics? Can you neglect them? They are too numerous for both these expedients. What remains to be done is obvious to every human being--but to that man who, instead of being a Methodist preacher, is, for the curse of us and our children, and for the ruin of Troy and the misery of good old Priam and his sons, become a legislator and a politician.

A distinction, I perceive, is taken by one of the most feeble n.o.blemen in Great Britain, between persecution and the deprivation of political power; whereas, there is no more distinction between these two things than there is between him who makes the distinction and a b.o.o.by. If I strip off the relic-covered jacket of a Catholic, and give him twenty stripes ... I persecute; if I say, Everybody in the town where you live shall be a candidate for lucrative and honourable offices, but you, who are a Catholic ... I do not persecute! What barbarous nonsense is this!

as if degradation was not as great an evil as bodily pain or as severe poverty: as if I could not be as great a tyrant by saying, You shall not enjoy--as by saying, You shall suffer. The English, I believe, are as truly religious as any nation in Europe; I know no greater blessing; but it carries with it this evil in its train, that any villain who will bawl out, "_The Church is in danger!_" may get a place and a good pension; and that any administration who will do the same thing may bring a set of men into power who, at a moment of stationary and pa.s.sive piety, would be hooted by the very boys in the streets. But it is not all religion; it is, in great part, the narrow and exclusive spirit which delights to keep the common blessings of sun and air and freedom from other human beings. "Your religion has always been degraded; you are in the dust, and I will take care you never rise again. I should enjoy less the possession of an earthly good by every additional person to whom it was extended." You may not be aware of it yourself, most reverend Abraham, but you deny their freedom to the Catholics upon the same principle that Sarah, your wife, refuses to give the receipt for a ham or a gooseberry dumpling: she values her receipts, not because they secure to her a certain flavour, but because they remind her that her neighbours want it:--a feeling laughable in a priestess, shameful in a priest; venial when it withholds the blessings of a ham, tyrannical and execrable when it narrows the boon of religious freedom.

You spend a great deal of ink about the character of the present prime minister. Grant you all that you write--I say, I fear he will ruin Ireland, and pursue a line of policy destructive to the true interest of his country: and then you tell me, he is faithful to Mrs. Perceval, and kind to the Master Percevals! These are, undoubtedly, the first qualifications to be looked to in a time of the most serious public danger; but somehow or another (if public and private virtues must always be incompatible), I should prefer that he destroyed the domestic happiness of Wood or c.o.c.kell, owed for the veal of the preceding year, whipped his boys, and saved his country.

The late administration did not do right; they did not build their measures upon the solid basis of facts. They should have caused several Catholics to have been dissected after death by surgeons of either religion; and the report to have been published with accompanying plates. If the viscera, and other organs of life, had been found to be the same as in Protestant bodies; if the provisions of nerves, arteries, cerebrum, and cerebellum, had been the same as we are provided with, or as the dissenters are now known to possess; then, indeed, they might have met Mr. Perceval upon a proud eminence, and convinced the country at large of the strong probability that the Catholics are really human creatures, endowed with the feelings of men, and ent.i.tled to all their rights. But instead of this wise and prudent measure, Lord Howick, with his usual precipitation, brings forward a bill in their favour, without offering the slightest proof to the country that they were anything more than horses and oxen. The person who shows the lama at the corner of Piccadilly has the precaution to write up--_Allowed by Sir Joseph Banks to be a real quadruped_, so his Lordship might have said--_Allowed by the bench of Bishops to be real human creatures_.... I could write you twenty letters upon this subject; but I am tired, and so I suppose are you. Our friendship is now of forty years' standing; you know me to be a truly religious man; but I shudder to see religion treated like a c.o.c.kade, or a pint of beer, and made the instrument of a party. I love the king, but I love the people as well as the king; and if I am sorry to see his old age molested, I am much more sorry to see four millions of Catholics baffled in their just expectations. If I love Lord Grenville and Lord Howick, it is because they love their country; if I abhor ... it is because I know there is but one man among them who is not laughing at the enormous folly and credulity of the country, and that he is an ignorant and mischievous bigot. As for the light and frivolous jester, of whom it is your misfortune to think so highly, learn, my dear Abraham, that this political Killigrew, just before the breaking up of the last administration, was in actual treaty with them for a place; and if they had survived twenty-four hours longer, he would have been now declaiming against the cry of No Popery! instead of inflaming it.

With this practical comment on the baseness of human nature, I bid you adieu!

JAMES SMITH.

(1775-1839.)

LVI. THE POET OF FASHION.

From the famous _Rejected Addresses_.

His book is successful, he's steeped in renown, His lyric effusions have tickled the town; Dukes, dowagers, dandies, are eager to trace The fountain of verse in the verse-maker's face: While, proud as Apollo, with peers _tete-a-tete_, From Monday till Sat.u.r.day dining off plate, His heart full of hope, and his head full of gain, The Poet of Fashion dines out in Park Lane.

Now lean-jointured widows who seldom draw corks, Whose tea-spoons do duty for knives and for forks, Send forth, vellum-covered, a six-o'clock card, And get up a dinner to peep at the bard; Veal, sweetbread, boiled chickens, and tongue crown the cloth, And soup _a la reine_, little better than broth.

While, past his meridian, but still with some heat, The Poet of Fashion dines out in Sloane Street,

Enrolled in the tribe who subsist by their wits, Remember'd by starts, and forgotten by fits, Now artists and actors, the bardling engage, To squib in the journals, and write for the stage.

Now soup _a la reine_ bends the knee to ox-cheek, And chickens and tongue bow to bubble-and-squeak.

While, still in translation employ'd by "the Row"

The Poet of Fashion dines out in Soho.

Pushed down from Parna.s.sus to Phlegethon's brink, Toss'd, torn, and trunk-lining, but still with some ink, Now squat city misses their alb.u.ms expand, And woo the worn rhymer for "something off-hand"; No longer with stinted effrontery fraught, Bucklersbury now seeks what St. James's once sought, And (O, what a cla.s.sical haunt for a bard!) The Poet of Fashion dines out in Barge-yard.

WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR.

(1775-1864.)

LVII. BOSSUET AND THE d.u.c.h.eSS OF FONTANGES.

This is taken from Landor's _Imaginary Conversations_, and is one of the best examples of his light, airy, satiric vein.

_Bossuet_. Mademoiselle, it is the King's desire that I compliment you on the elevation you have attained.

_Fontanges_, O monseigneur, I know very well what you mean. His Majesty is kind and polite to everybody. The last thing he said to me was, "Angelique! do not forget to compliment Monseigneur the Bishop on the dignity I have conferred upon him, of almoner to the Dauphiness. I desired the appointment for him only that he might be of rank sufficient to confess you, now you are d.u.c.h.ess. Let him be your confessor, my little girl."

_Bossuet_. I dare not presume to ask you, mademoiselle, what was your gracious reply to the condescension of our royal master.

_Fontanges_. Oh, yes! you may. I told him I was almost sure I should be ashamed of confessing such naughty things to a person of high rank, who writes like an angel.

_Bossuet_. The observation was inspired, mademoiselle, by your goodness and modesty.

_Fontanges_. You are so agreeable a man, monseigneur, I will confess to you, directly, if you like.

_Bossuet_. Have you brought yourself to a proper frame of mind, young lady?

_Fontanges_. What is that?

_Bossuet_. Do you hate sin?

_Fontanges_. Very much.

_Bossuet_. Are you resolved to leave it off?

_Fontanges_. I have left it off entirely since the King began to love me. I have never said a spiteful word of anybody since.

_Bossuet_. In your opinion, mademoiselle, are there no other sins than malice?

_Fontanges_. I never stole anything; I never committed adultery; I never coveted my neighbour's wife; I never killed any person, though several have told me they should die for me.

_Bossuet_. Vain, idle talk! Did you listen to it?

_Fontanges_. Indeed I did, with both ears; it seemed so funny.

_Bossuet_. You have something to answer for, then?

_Fontanges_. No, indeed, I have not, monseigneur. I have asked many times after them, and found they were all alive, which mortified me.