words of the Declaration of Right, "No doing judgement, proceed ing, or any wise to the contrary shall be brought into precedent or example." Do not then tolerate a power-the power of the British Parliament over this land-which has no foundation in utility, or ne cessity, or empire, or the laws of England, or the laws of Ireland, or the laws of Nature, or the laws of God,--do not suffer it to have a duration in your mind.

Do not tolerate that power which blasted you for a century; that power which shattered your loom, banished your manufactures, dishonoured your peerage, and stopped the growth of your people; do not, I say, be bribed by an export of woollen or an import of sugar, and permit that power which has thus withered the land, to remain in your country, and have existence in your pusillanimity.

Do not suffer the arrogance of England to imagine a surviving hope in the fears of Ireland; do not send the people to their own resolves for liberty, passing by the tribunals of justice and the high court of parliament; neither imagine that, by any formation of apology, you can palliate such a commission to your hearts, still less to your children, who will sting you with their curses in your grave for having interposed between them and their Maker, robbing them of an immense occasion, and losing an opportunity which you did not create, and can never restore.

• Hereafter, when these things shall be history, your age of thraldom and poverty, your sudden resurrection, commercial redress, and miraculous armament, shall the historian stop at liberty, and observe, -that here the principal men among us fell into mimic trances of gratitude, they were awed by a weak ministry, and bribed by an empty treasury, and when liberty was within their grasp, and the' temple opening her folding-doors, and the arms of the people clanged, and the zeal of the nation urged and encouraged them on, that they fell down, and were prostituted at the threshold?

I might, as a constituent, come to your bar, and demand my liberty. I do call upon you, by the laws of the land and their violation, by the instruction of eighteen counties, by the arms, inspiration, and providence of the present moment, tell us the rule by which we shall go-assert the law of Ireland,-declare the liberty of the land.

I will not be answered by a public lie in the shape of an amendment; neither, speaking for the subject's freedom, am I to hear of faction. I wish for nothing but to breathe, in this our Island, in common with my fellow-subjects, the air of liberty. I have no ambition, unless it be the ambition to break your chain, and contemplate your glory. I never will be satisfied so long as the meanest cottager in Ireland has a link of the British chain clanking to his rags: he may be naked, he shall not be in iron. And I do see the time is at hand, the spirit is gone forth, the declarationis planted and though great men should apostatize, yet the cause will live; and though the public speaker should die, yet the immortal fire shall outlast the organ which conveyed it; and the breath of liberty, like the word of the holy man, will not die with the prophet, but survive him.

I shall move you, That the King's most excellent Majesty, and

the Lords and Commons of Ireland, are the only power competent to make laws to bind Ireland.'

It was an Herculean labour that the great Irishpatriots of that day had undertaken. They proceeded in their enterprise with temper, but with firmness. While Mr. Grattan was attacking the supremacy of the British parliament, Mr. Flood and Mr. Yelverton (afterwards Lord Avonmore) selected the law of Poynings; Mr. Gervase Bushe the Perpetual Mutiny Bill; Mr. Gardiner and Sir Hercules Langrishe, the Penal Code. It was at Charlemont-house that the plans of this arduous campaign were laid.

In the mean time, a singular revolution was at hand, and various causes contributed to urge it on. The losses of Great Britain in America, and the irresolution and weakness of Lord North's administration, were greatly instrumental to this object. But it is to the volunteers, that Ireland owes the revolution of 1782. They had augmented to nearly 80,000 men. At the celebrated meeting held at Dungannon, they passed the following momentous resolutions:

That a claim of any body of men other than the King, Lords, and Commons of Ireland, to make laws to bind this kingdom, is unconstitutional and a grievance.

That the powers exercised by the Privy Council of both kingdoms under colour of the law of Poynings, are unconstitutional and illegal...

That a mutiny bill not limited in point of duration from session to session, is unconstitutional and a grievance.'

Lord North's government was now dissolved, the Fox party appointed to succeed it, and the Duke of Portland sent over to Ireland. Upon an address being moved as usual to the Lord Lieutenant, Mr. Grattan moved by way of amendment, a Declaration of Right to his Majesty, which was carried unanimously.

The exordium of his speech on that occasion, is solemn and striking. It is not, indeed, secure from a minor criticism as to the antithetical abruptness of its sentences; but who can stop to take petty exceptions to a rapid and impetuous piece of eloquence, pronounced on one of the most interesting subjects that affect the dignity or the happiness of man?

'I am now to address a free people: ages have passed away, and this is the first moment in which you could be distinguished by that appellation.

"I have spoken on the subject of your liberty so often, that I have nothing to add, and have only to admire by what heaven-directed steps

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you have proceeded until the whole faculty of the nation is braced up to the act of her own deliverance.

'I found Ireland on her knees. I watched over her with an eternal solicitude. I have traced her progress from injuries to arms, and from arms to liberty. Spirit of Swift! Spirit of Molyneux! Your genius has prevailed! Ireland is now a nation. In that new character I hail her, and bowing to her august presence, I say, Esto perpetua!

She is no longer a wretched colony, returning thanks to her governor for his rapine, and to her king for his oppression; nor is she now a squabbling, fretful sectary, perplexing her little wits, and firing her furious statutes with bigotry, sophistry, disabilities, and death, to transmit to posterity insignificance and war.

Look to the rest of Europe, and contemplate yourself, and be satisfied. Holland lives on the memory of past achievements; Sweden bas lost her liberty; England has sullied her great name by an attempt to enslave her colonies. You are the only people,—you, of the nations in Europe, are now the only people who excite admiration; and in your present conduct, you not only exceed the present generation, but you equal the past. I am not afraid to turn back, and look antiquity in the face. The revolution, that great event, whether you call it ancient or modern I know not, was tarnished with bigotry. The great deliverer, (for such I must ever call the Prince of Nassau,) was blemishedwith oppression: he assented to, he was forced to assent to acts which deprived the Catholics of religious, and all the Irish of civil and commercial rights, though the Irish were the only subjects in these islands, who had fought in his defence. You, with difficulties innumerable, with dangers not a few, have done what your ancestors wished, but could not accomplish ; you have moulded the jarring elements of your country into a nation, and have rivalled those great and ancient commonwealths whom you were taught to admire, and among whom you are now to be recorded. In this proceeding, you had not the advantages which were common to other great countries, no monuments, no trophies, none of those outward and visible signs of greatness, such as connect the ambition of the age which is coming on with that which is going off, and form the descent and concatenation of glory. No, you have not had any great act recorded in all your misfortunes, nor one public tomb, to assemble the crowd and speak to the living the language of integrity and freedom.

Your historians did not supply the want of monuments; on the contrary, these narrators of your misfortunes, who should have felt for your wrongs, and have punished your oppressors with oppression's natural Scourge, the moral indignation of history, compromised with public villany, and trembled. They described your violence, they suppressed your provocations, and wrote in the chain that entrammelled their country. I am come to break that chain, and I congratulate my country, who, without any advantages, going out as it were with nothing but a stone and a sling, and what oppression could not take away, the favour of heaven, accomplished her own redemption, and left you nothing to add, and every thing to admire.'

We wish that no record existed of the memorable dispute

between Mr. Grattan and Mr. Flood in the Irish Parliament on the question of simple repeal. We have always considered that question to be a mere controversy of words, Whether the claim of England to a legislative supremacy over Ireland, was extinguished by an act of repeal or by a course of treaty, (which, in point of fact, was the case,) was a matter unworthy of the stormy and tempestuous debates which it excited. Such language as that in which Mr. Grattan conveyed his acrimonious attack, ought not to have been tolerated in a legislative assembly.

‹ Thus defective in every relationship, whether to constitution, commerce, or toleration, I will suppose this gentleman to have added much private improbity to public crimes-that his probity was like his patriotism, and his honour on a level with his oath. He loves to deliver panegyrics on himself. I will interrupt him, and say, Sir, you are much mistaken if you think that your talents have been as great as your life has been reprehensible.. You began your parliamentary career with an acrimony and personality which could have been justified only by a supposition of virtue. After a rank and clamorous opposition, you became on a sudden, silent; you were silent seven years; you were silent on the greatest questions; and you were silent for money! In 1773, when a negotiation was pending to sell your talents and your turbulence, you absconded from your duty in parliament, you forsook your law of Poynings, and all the old themes of your former declamation. You were not then to be found in the House. You were seen, like a guilty spirit, haunting the lobby, watching the moment in which the question should be put, that you might vanish; or you were perceived coasting the upper benches of this House, like a bird of prey with an evil aspect and a sepulchral note meditating to pounce on its quarry. These ways (they were not the ways of honour) you practised pending a negotiation which was to end either in your sale or your sedition.

'Such has been your conduct; and at such conduct every order of your fellow citizens have a right to exclaim! The merchant may say to you-the constitutionalist may say to you-and I, I now say, and say to your beard, Sir,-you are not an honest man.'

The result of this invective may be imagined. The Speaker issued his warrant, and the parties were bound over.

Mr. Grattan's exertions in behalf of the Irish Catholics exceed all praise. Never was perseverance in effectuating a great object of public policy, more steadily, and we may add, more beautifully exhibited. The great law of Christian charity was the inexorable rule of his political life. It reflects, however, shame upon an age abounding with the lights of literature and philosophy, that down to1782, the Catholics were deprived of the rights of property and education. The bill by which they were

enabled to acquire lands by purchase, grant, descent, devise, or otherwise, by which they were restored to the free exercise of their religion, by which their houses and private property were secured from confiscation, and their disabilities as to education removed,-was carried without a division in that year.

It awakens a train of reflections serving to show how impregnable are human prejudices to the reasoning faculties, and how strong a hold they take even on minds the most highly gifted, but illustrates at the same time the sure and irresistible, though tardy and impeded progress of better opinions,—to recur to the period when the Catholic question was first introduced into the Irish House. Upon that occasion, Mr. Grattan and Mr. Denis Browne, who supported it, could scarcely obtain a hearing. The petition of the Catholic body was even ignominiously rejected; and it is said that a Sir Henry Harstonge actually carried it down to the bar and kicked it out of the house. But these difficulties were as resting-places only to the victorious progress of Mr. Grattan's exertions. It was his uniform opinion, that the fate of Ireland as an independent nation, hung on that decision, and that the constitution could not be upheld, unless all classes and ranks were interested in its conservation. Nor were the labours of Mr. Grattan consecrated only by the justice of his cause. He succeeded in his philanthropic struggle for the rights of religion and humanity. Concessions to the Catholics went pari passú with the free trade and independence of the country; and never was political prophecy so literally verified as his celebrated exclamation, so frequently remembered since it was uttered, The day you reject the Catholic question, that day you vote the Union.'

In the Imperial Parliament, he repeatedly introduced that question, and on one occasion, nearly succeeded in carrying it. He spoke also of other questions of moment,—the Orders in Council, the Walcheren Expedition, Irish Tithes, the Irish Convention-act, and the war with Buonaparte in 1815. Mr. Grattan at these times was heard with the most respectful attention. His venerable age, his long life consecrated to the advantage and happiness of his country, and the eminence he had so early acquired and so long retained, secured to him from the urbanity of the first assembly in the world, a silent and patient audience. But the peculiar character of Mr. Grattan's eloquence suffered much in being transplanted from its native soil. It had been nurtured by local associations which no longer existed. Its habitual warmth, its tone of high moral indignation and virtuous contempt, which struck so forcibly on the chords of national sympathy, when he hurled his invectives against those venal and corrupt parasites of the Castle, by whom Ire