its people, and assume to the remainder the monopoly of the Godhead. Recollect that you are forfeiting your great prerogative of taking the lead in liberating the human mind: in the arts that grace mankind other nations excelled you; they sang better, they danced better; but in stating courageous truths, in breaking political or metaphysical chains, here were your robust accomplishments. We have heard of divers anomalies in your policy-they are numerous; your treaties, your subsidies, and your prayers; but you yourself are the great anomaly. The Continent lay flat before your late rival; the Spaniard had retired; the Austrian had retired; the Prussian had retired; the iron quality of Russia had dissolved; the domination of France had come to the water edge, when, behold! from a misty speck in the west, the avenging genius of these countries issues forth, clutching ten thousand thunders, breaks the spell of France, stops, in his own person, the flying fortunes of the world, sweeps the sea, rights the globe, and then retires in a flame of glory; and, when the human race is in amaze and admiration at his courage and originality, he turns school divine, fights a battle about extreme unction, and swears against the companions of his fortune and his victories. Our prince is, on the part of his father, the supreme head of the church; we are his national council, and as such, have a right to advise him. I avail myself of this privilege, and say to him, "My prince, my master, you must take the lead in the deliverance of your people. The graciousness of your manners indicate that you were born for acts of benevolence. Your predecessor, the Plantagenet, prevailed on the Continent, so have you; but then he gave the charter and the laws of the Edwards: your other predecessor, the Tudor, she rescued Holland, so have you; but then she passed wise and useful statutes innumerable. You have carried Europe on your back; but then the home measure, the securing and ascertaining and extending the liberties of your people-that, that still remains. The whole body of the Roman Catholics petition for freedom. The destinies of a fifth of your empire are before you. Comethe glory of the House of Hanover is waiting for you; be the emancipatator of the Roman Catholics, as you have been the deliverer of Europe, and look in the face, the Tudor and the Plantagenet."

APPENDIX.

CHARACTER OF MR. PITT.*

THE secretary stood alone. Modern degeneracy had not reached him. Original and unaccommodating, the features of his character had the hardihood of antiquity; his august mind overawed majesty; and one of his sovereigns† thought royalty so impaired in his presence, that he conspired to remove him, in order to be relieved from his superiority. No state chicanery, no narrow systems of vicious politics, no idle contest for ministerial victories sunk him to the vulgar level of the great; but, overbearing, persuasive, and impracticable, his object was England, his ambition was fame; without dividing, he destroyed party; without corrupting, he made a venal age unanimous; France sunk beneath him; with one hand he smote the house of Bourbon, and wielded in the other the democracy of England. The sight of his mind was infinite, and his schemes were to affect, not England, not the present age only, but Europe and posterity. Wonderful were the means by which these schemes were accomplished, always seasonable, always adequate, the suggestions of an understanding animated by ardour, and enlightened by prophecy.

The ordinary feelings which make life amiable and indolent,-those sensations which soften, and allure, and vulgarize, were unknown to him; no domestic difficulties, no domestic weakness reached him; but, aloof from the sordid occurrences of life, and unsullied by its intercourse, he came occasionally into our system to counsel and decide. A character so exalted, so strenuous, so various, so authoritative, astonished a corrupt age, and the Treasury trembled at the name of Pitt through all her classes of venality. Corruption imagined, indeed, † Not George II.

* Lord Chatham.

that she had found defects in this statesman, and talked much of the inconsistency of his glory, and much of the ruin of his victories—but the history of his country, and the calamities of the enemy, answered and refuted her.

Nor were his political abilities his only talents; his eloquence was an era in the senate, peculiar and spontaneous, familiarly expressing gigantic sentiments and instinctive wisdom,-not like the torrent of Demosthenes, or the splendid conflagration of Tully; it resembled, sometimes the thunder, and sometimes the music of the spheres. Like Murray, he did not conduct the understanding through the painful subtilty of argumentation; nor was he, like Townshend,† for ever on the rack of exertion, but rather lightened upon the subject, and reached the point by the flashings of his mind, which, like those of his eye, were felt, but could not be followed.

Yet he was not always correct or polished; on the contrary, he was sometimes ungrammatical, negligent, and unenforcing, for he concealed his art, and was superior to the knack of oratory. Upon many occasions he abated the vigour of his eloquence; but even then, like the spinning of a cannon ball, he was still alive with fatal, unapproachable activity.

Upon the whole, there was in this man something that could create, subvert, or reform; an understanding, a spirit, and an eloquence to summon mankind to society, or to break the bonds of slavery asunder, and rule the wildness of free minds with unbounded authority; something that could establish or overwhelm empire, and strike a blow in the world that should resound through its history.

* Lord Mansfield.

† Mr. Charles Townshend. See his character in Burke's speech on American taxation.

443

ANSWER TO A PAMPHLET OF LORD CLARE.

To the Printer.

I HAVE seen a pamphlet, purporting to be written on the Union, and published in the name of the Earl of Clare. The speech of the noble earl, delivered in the House of Lords, I have nothing to say to; but a publication is not a speech, and though it be the work of a member of Parliament, has no privilege. Whether his lordship be the author, I have no authority, save the assumption of the publication, to affirm; but the pamphlet contains against several, with whom I have acted, charges, the most direct, and against myself, for the last twenty years, charges the least qualified, and insinuations the most deep. What is yet worse, it tends to lower the character of the country, and to tarnish the brightest passages of her history, as well as the memories of the persons concerned in those transactions. Matter so various and comprehensive, could not be regularly discussed in any debate that has come, or is likely to come, before the House of Commons. In the interval of business, I therefore resort to the only method of defence, the press.

H. GRATTAN.

Mr. Grattan will take no notice of any answer, except one coming from the author of the pamphlet.

Dublin, April, 1800.

Of the work which it is proposed to answer, nearly one-third is the common place of Irish history. Much of abridgment, much of misrepresentation, no new discovery, no new remark; the termini, or landmarks of historic knowledge, remain precisely as they were, in their old sober station. What was long known before by many men, by many women, and by many children, the compendium of the studies of your childhood, this pamphlet reports to you, for the amusement of your age,

without any other novelty, save that of misrepresentation. The idea is to make your history a calumny against your ancestors, in order to disfranchise your posterity; the execution is without the temper of a commentator, or the knowledge of an historian.

We will begin with this performance, at the Irish Parliament of James I. The author is now within 187 years of his subject. Ireland, says he, had no parliamentary constitution till that time. Here his pages only deserve attention, in order to vindicate the lineage of our liberties against slander. This statement is a traduction of the inheritance of the realm, a calumny against her antiquities, and a falsification of her title. Lord Coke, the judges of England, the records of Ireland, the modus tenendi parliamentum, the statute-book, the extent of acts of Parliament before the reign of James throughout the realm, and the act of annexation among others, answer him. From all those you find, that Ireland had a parliament from the beginning, and that the legislature was not of the Pale, but of the nation."

The boldness of this assertion is rendered the more remarkable by the distinguished feebleness of its reasoning. The pamphlet attempts to prove that to be true in argument which is false in fact; and its argument is, that James I. generalized Irish representation by forty private boroughs, that is, that he rendered representation general, by making it particular. It teaches you to think, that it was James instead of Elizabeth who created the seventeen counties, and that he did not create the forty boroughs, by him erected to counteract that county representation, in order to pack a parliament. It conceives, that the legislature was not general, because the representation was not so. It should have said, that the legislature being general, the representation ought to be so. It discovers two ideas of a new and extraordinary nature on this subject, that parliament is confined by the bounds of representation, and that national representation is extended by the creation of private boroughs. And for this paradoxical idea of parliament, and this paradoxical idea of representation, it offers you nothing like extent of erudition, or force of imagination; it is dull The art of modern war, says the pamphlet, is to traduce the house of Stuart; the art of modern court loyalty, it might have added, is to praise the principle of the Stewart, and to plant it in the house of Hanover.

error.

The pamphlet now comes to its own times, and it is to be remarked,

See the speech of Mr. Hutchinson (late Secretary of State,) on the subject of parliamentary reform, in the parliamentary debates of 1793. It is a complete answer to the pamphlet on this part of the subject.