doubted if the power of song is capable of so marvellous an achievement as that of constructing a house, much less a whole street: I refer all such sceptics to the case of Thebes. I do not mean to say that it is likely that the architectural properties of the inspired throng will be put into requisition for another season or so. In the meantime what can be done in these degenerate times is done. The glory of building a city stands first, and is undoubtedly the property of Amphion; the glory of nourishing a city is entitled to the second place, and that as undoubtedly belongs to the itinerant professors of the London Cries.

W.

THE KING IN IRELAND.

MR. EDITOR,-The reception which the King has experienced in Ireland having created some curious speculations on both sides of the Channel, perhaps you would excuse a few remarks upon the subject, from one not altogether mystified by its exaggerations. Although not an Irishman by birth, still a long residence in that country has given me some insight into the character of its people; and I mention the fact, as well to exculpate me from the charge of presumption, as to assure you of the authenticity of my statements. The subject indeed originates many observations, obvious to none except a local observer, or to one at least well acquainted with the secret springs by which so discordant a population has been set, for the first time, unanimously in motion. That there was much of loyalty in the abstract, and much of sincere affection for the visiter personally, there can be no doubt; but that much of what appeared enthusiasm arose entirely from the workings of interest there is in my mind just as little. Some attention to the contingencies upon the King's reception will make this clear enough to every understanding. Now, Sir, however I, in common with every good subject, may rejoice in the proverbial hospitality with which the King personally has been welcomed, still I must confess the contingencies to which I allude have lowered that people considerably in my estimation. Little disturbed either shall I be if those individual or even national advantages shall not soon be realized, which were so ostentatiously sought after by the sordid compromise of all that was pure, dignified, or patriotic. Before I advert more particularly to the immediate' subject of this notice, some short retrospect is necessary, as well to show why a British king, landing as a friend in Ireland, should have been in the native phrase "heartily welcome," as why that welcome should more particularly wait upon the reigning monarch. You will observe by this, that I take no exception to the popular courtesy as far as regards the sovereign himself, nor indeed in impugning the idolatry lavished upon any one of his attendants, do I mean to infer that the idol was not worthy, however vilely and sordidly, and hypocritically inconsistent might have been some of the worshippers.

Henry the Second was the first royal visiter of Ireland. Perhaps, until the present day, for visiter we should read invader. Invited over by the distress of one prince to punish the adulteries of another,

he made the weakness of the first and the vices of the last the convenient threshold to his own ambition. With, for that day, an imposing power, and an hypocrisy not less imposing, he marched on. ward from Waterford to Cashel, amid affected submission and extorted homage, and at last, in full assembly in the latter city, pleaded the authority of the infallible Adrian for his personal usurpation of the kingdom! The Irish, even then, priest-ridden and pope-led as they were, had still some jealousy of ecclesiastical interference in their temporal concerns, and Adrian's bull met as little respect from the "Royal Roderic" of that day as Quarantotti's rescript did in our own time from the radicals of the Catholic convention. Thus was Henry, with the bull in one hand and the sword in the other, obliged alternately to fight and swindle his way through the country, until at last the Shannon waters and the wastes of Connaught obliged him to make Dublin, for the first time, the winter residence of a British monarch. There, surrounded by fanatics and impostors, whom he bribed to his purposes by the plunder of the people, he spent his Christmas, praying with priests and revelling with savages, and returned to England to mature his frauds upon the hollow allegiance which he left behind him. The throat of Irish patriotism is hoarse lauding the princely grandeur, and lamenting the feudal magnificence upon which Henry intruded; and yet, strange to say, even in the proud metropolis of Milesian legitimacy, the "red branch knights" could afford him no better refuge against the snows of winter than a mud edifice," made of twigs and briars rudely huddled together! After this authenticated fact, we should be little surprised if the Irish legitimates-the genuine "O'Conors Don" of the twelfth century, disputed with Nebuchadnezzar the monopoly of running at grass, at least during the dog-days. The next visit was that of John, of Magna Charta memory. He staid three months in Ireland. During which time it was not stained by any military outrage. He was employed, however, in parcelling out those king's lands which the rapacity of his predecessors had usurped, and the boundaries which he established show, that even then his regal dominion was both limited and uncertain. For many subsequent ages the British monarchs were too much occupied at home to afflict Ireland, otherwise than by deputed persecution; and her fields were alternately scorched and crimsoned, and depopulated, without even the consolation of a royal presence. At length, however, she received the master-pestilence. With the impiety of a bigot and the despotism of a republican, Cromwell came-came to fire the castle with the embers of the church, and quench the altar's flame in the blood of its adorers. In August, 1650, he landed with a considerable military force in Dublin, and in a fortnight after commenced in the town of Drogheda a most frightful series of massacre and conflagration. War went before and famine followed him ;-his whole march might easily be tracked by its wake of extermination. With that blasphemous mixture of fanaticism and murder, which peculiarised the career of that bible-mouthed cut-throat, he persuaded his followers that they should model their treatment of the natives on that adopted towards

the Canaanites in the time of Joshua! The devil quoted Scripture to his purpose; and indeed such a purpose was easily inculcated on such a fraternity. The ruthless system scarcely left in three-fourths of Ireland, a solitary native to record and curse the inhumanity of his usurpation. All who professed the religion of their ancestors were driven into the wilds of Connaught, and a proclamation was issued, stating, that if after a certain day, any Irish Catholic, man, woman or child, should be found in any other part of the kingdom, they might be legally put to death, without either charge or trial! This proclamation, involving, as it did, confiscation and banishment, was denominated by the usurper an act of grace, because it was his reluctant substitute for a previous plan of universal extermination. At the end of nearly four centuries Cromwell's progress is still discernible by the ruins it created. Yet strange to say, his successor and locum tenens, Ludlow, found but little advantage from the extirpations of his master-though he left almost a solitude, still it was not peace. Of Cromwell's progress there were also some living land-marks, which one would have supposed the gratitude of Charles the Second would have obliterated. But gratitude was not the characteristic virtue of the Stuarts. The confiscation-grant survived the donor-it flourished in all its vigour after the Restoration, and Cromwell's brigands have now risen into noble families, bloated by the forfeitures of not only disregarded but spoliated loyalty. Notwithstanding this, when fortune once more declared for the Stuarts, James the Second was received by the Irish as the prince of a people upon whom adversity only created an additional claim. This was the first British king who did not approach them in all the pride and insolence of conquest. He came as a fugitive, and a fugitive he left them, having clearly established that it was his natural character. A bigot in religion, and a tyrant in power, he proved himself a calumniator in safety. After having betrayed the faithful, and abandoned the brave, he fled to France, and slandered at Versailles those whom he had deserted at the Boyne; too dastardly to share their death, he excused his cowardice by assassinating their memories. Even in Ireland's "highest noon" of indignation, however, there is something humorous, as there is sometimes a mixture of bitterness in her jocularity, her revenge on the tourist Twiss will not easily be forgotten; and she has given James a Milesian cognomen very likely to rival that of Jefferies in the nostrils of posterity. In her orator's words there certainly is not "a sweetness in the odour of his memory." His conqueror, William, remained behind in Ireland, to blight a hero's laurels and a statesman's wisdom with the crimes of vengeance. She felt again, that though friendship would not restore, hostility could ruin, and William added largely to the confiscations which Charles's ingratitude had suffered to remain. With him departed the last royal visiter of Ireland up to the present day. Happy for the country if with him could have departed also the humiliation of defeat and the insolence of triumph. They have lived at least up to the memorable twelfth of August-dies creta notandus, if upon it

their epitaph has been written; but I fear her fields are still too furrowed to afford space smooth enough for the inscription.

Such were the specimens which Ireland had, before the present reign of royal visitations; and it is little to be wondered at if she received the novelty of a monarch's friendship with something of even more than enthusiasm. There was much, however, of personal affection in the welcome, and, as far as regarded the King, it was altogether free from any taint of inconsistency. George the Fourth was always a favourite with the Irish. Whether it resulted from his long exclusion from power which attracted the sympathies of a people who thought they unjustly participated in that exclusion, or from those early whims and gaieties which were not either entirely without their sympathies, or from that mixture of hope and hatred with which an oppressed people turn from the possessor to the heir; whether it was from any of those feelings, or from an union of them all, certain it is the present monarch has long received rather a devotion of the heart, than an allegiance from the lips of Ireland. She evinced this often, but more especially on a most momentous occasion-I allude to the period of the late King's first unfortunate mental aberration. At that time it will be recollected with what violence the Whig and Tory parties disputed on the subject of the Regency. The genius of Mr. Pitt ruled the ascendant in this country; but Mr. Grattan, at the head of the popular party in Ireland, counterbalanced his triumph, and called upon the Prince, by address, to assume the reins of government. The King happily recovered just as it was presented, but the Prince, by his answer, pledged his eternal gratitude to the Irish people. From that moment, it is said, Mr. Pitt, exasperated and perhaps alarmed at this clashing of the legislatures, determined on their amalgamation. If this be true, surely the country which lost her parliament through an affection for his Majesty, has a peculiar claim on him, for at least the compensation of an occasional visit. He seems to have so felt it; and, to do him justice, he has acknowledged it, while the mark of the crown was still fresh upon his forehead. Indeed of this personal sentiment he had given an early proof by the selection of his more intimate companions. Burke and Sheridan were the lights of his youth; Lord Moira the companion of his manhood; Londonderry and Wellington are the elect of his cabinet, and to those offices in which perhaps confidence is most necessary and most unequivocally expressed, Sir Benjamin Bloomfield has succeeded to General Macmahon. This favouritism, it may be supposed, was felt through their respective families in the sister kingdom. As a proof of this, I need only mention that the high office of Master of the Rolls is filled, and to say the truth. very satisfactorily, by a brother of the latter gentleman. That Ireland felt and returned these demonstrations requires no further proof than her conduct upon a late melancholy occasion. When England and many parts of Scotland testified their partisanship by the eternal addresses which almost wore the threshold of Brandenburgh-house, Ireland remained not only passive but indifferent.

One solitary address from a few radicals at Belfast rather insulted than consoled the Queen by the suspicious peculiarity of its homage.

Such was the relative situation of Ireland and the King at the time he determined upon his personal excursion. It was a determination hazardous in the extreme, and required much delicacy in its execution. Never, perhaps, did man enter into an atmosphere of more discordant elements; he not only trod on embers but walked amid lightnings-like the explorer of a volcano it was impossible to say at what moment the mere pressure of his foot might have raised a flame around him. Happily his appearance reconciled, at least temporarily, the contending factions. Whether that coalition is to be more than temporary, whether the golden age of unanimity and concord is likely to continue and produce those results which Irish ardour pictures to itself in prospect, perhaps a review of those factions, as they exist, will be more likely to decide than any visionary speculation. For myself I have no hesitation in saying, I more than doubt either the permanency or the sincerity of that coalition, and I doubt it still more from contemplating the indiscriminate blandishments which it so suddenly squandered, not only upon the King but upon every one of the dramatis persone who stooped to solicit it. If it was indeed sincere, I have only to say that Ireland is the very cradle of forgiveness, or that public virtue is nothing but a shadow. The least numerous, but perhaps the most opulent and powerful, is the ORANGE PARTY-a relic of the pale, rebaptized at the revolution. This is composed of friendly brother, and occasionally of Masonic societies, with a thick sprinkling of Tory peers, absentee agents, village drunkards, and corporation expectants. At the head of this decidedly is Abraham, now Sir Abraham Bradley King, who added to the profit of being crown-stationer, the dignity of having been twice Lord Mayor of Dublin. The warwhoop, or rather the password of this party, is "No Popery." They consider the Pope as the incarnation of all evil, and his adherents as so many attendant dæmons, who are ever warmed by the original principle, no matter how distant may be the orbit in which they circle round it. This is innate bigotry in some, mere pretence in others, affected for the purposes of interest; in all, however, it is the essence of their creed-the bond of their union-the sine qua non of their loyal fraternity. They may transfer to their porch the motto which adorned the gate of one of their chosen cities, the genius which fabricated its rhyme, consorting well with the Christianity which propagated its principle

"Jew, Turk, or Atheist,

may enter here, But not a Papist.'

At the Revolution this body, though not created, was regenerated. It had, in some degree, existed since the pale. It was an association extra the indigenous Irish, formed at first for the purposes of defence, and cemented afterwards by forfeiture and confiscations. During the period to which I have referred it took its new and religious, or rather bigoted, character; still opposed to the native population it