necessary to exhibit what a cantankerous and unscrupulous critic Mr. Senior was. То say that O'Connell failed in Parliament is an assertion simply preposterous. His great contemporaries and antagonists would be the first to repel such an outrage on history. It would have been all but an impossibility for O'Connell to have failed, where human speech was the weapon, and human affairs the stake, in any assembly of articulatespeaking men. One towards whom he once used words that certainly were ungentle, but who was too generous to remember them on such an occasion-one peculiarly qualified to estimate Parliamentary greatness-Mr. Disraeli has recorded in words memorable and very touching the last appearance of O'Connell in the House. The passage is from the "Life of Lord George Bentinck":

He sat in an unusual place-in that generally occupied by the leader of the opposition-and spoke from the red box, convenient to him from the number of documents to which he had to refer. His appearance was of great debility, and the tones of his voice were very still. His words, indeed, only reached those who were immediately around him, and the ministers sitting on the other side of the green table, and listening with that interest and respectful attention which became the occasion. It was a strange and touching spectacle to those who remembered the form of colossal energy, and the clear and thrilling tones that had once startled, disturbed, and controlled senates. Mr. O'Connell was on his legs for nearly two hours, assisted occasionally in the management of his documents by some devoted aide-de-camp. To the House generally it was a performance in dumb show, a feeble old man muttering before a table; but respect for the great Parliamentary personage kept all as orderly as if the fortunes of a party hung upon his rhetoric; and though not an accent reached the gallery, means were taken that next morning the country should not lose the last and not the least interesting of the speeches of one who had so long occupied and agitated the mind of nations.

Posterity will probably prefer on such a point the evidence of Mr. Disraeli to the evidence of Mr. Senior. As to O'Connell's supposed still more stinging failure in society, the real reason why he began the Repeal agitation, what is to be said? Was it in general deportment, or the turning of bons-mots, or only at short whist, or in dancing that he failed? O'Connell probably thought, with Sir George Lewis, that the world would be a very endurable place were it not for its pleasuresmeaning specifically the pleasures of society. We must wait for "Mrs. Grundy's Memoirs," "The Autobiography of a Lady Patroness of Almack's," "The Diary of a Duchess in the reign of William IV.," and other forthcoming works of fashion, to test this point. British society to Mr. Senior

meant probably, in the first place, the society with which Mr. Senior mixed, and in which, let us suppose, he succeeded. We admit it is as difficult to conceive O'Connell succeeding in that set as it is to conceive an Irish wolf-dog performing the tricks of a parlour poodle. Do men of his stamp care to what is called "succeed" in what is called "society"? Was Mr. Cobden a success in society? Is Mr. Bright? It is impossible to write their honoured names in this connection without recognising how much they both owed to the example and the political method of O'Connell. His great system of moral force agitation has indeed been far more fruitful in legislative benefits and political training to the English people than to the Irish. But in some respects O'Connell had superior advantages. He was a man of old, and, in the true sense of the word, noble family; and his appearance singularly befitted his genius and his rank. His power of personal fascination and adaptation was extraordinary; his manners distinguished (faulty, if at all, towards complaisance); his humour exuberant and genial. If such qualities do not succeed in society, so much the worse for the society in which they fail. The real difficulty is to conceive O'Connell caring for such success, unless in so far as it came in his way, and could not fairly be avoided. Mr. Senior's other statements are flagrant fictions, which it is hardly worth while to contradict. What he calls "the rent" existed long before O'Connell entered Parliament. O'Connell supported Lord Melbourne's administration rather than Sir Robert Peel's, for precisely the same reasons that Irish Catholics now support Mr. Gladstone rather than Mr. Disraeli. He was a Repealer from the moment the Union was carried. He spoke in that sense, if once, a hundred times before the Clare election; and he introduced the question to Parliament, in one of the most remarkable of his speeches, ten years before he commenced the great agitation, of which Mr. Senior was actually writing.

It would be a weary task to expose the ignorant and scandalous calumnies against the Catholic Church and the Irish priesthood with which almost every page of Mr. Senior's Journal abounds. It would be difficult to believe that he believed many of the things that he puts upon paper, were it not that the book has obtained, and still continues to obtain, a reception from well-informed critics, never qualified by a syllable of doubt or censure. On all matters connected with religion, even the most interesting historical and literary questions, Mr. Senior appears to have been profoundly ignorant. This is a passage from a conversation with Archbishop Whately:

"What is Thomas à Kempis's book, 'De Imitatione Christi ?" I asked. "It is a misnomer," he answered. "It is a very pious, very dull book, a dialogue between Christ and the Soul, and contains only a few passages really on the imitation of Christ."

Here Dr. Whately's inability to comprehend the beauty and depth of a Christian classic is hardly so strange as Mr. Senior's blank ignorance of a book itself so famous, and the cause of one of the most curious of literary controversies. In the same conversation Mr. Senior says

Every Roman Catholic is a polytheist. When a Roman Catholic, praying to the Virgin, says, Monstra te esse matrem, he puts her, in fact, above God.

Any Roman Catholic who has had much acquaintance with Protestants must have remarked, that in proportion to a Protestant's difficulty of stating in a clear and definite form what he himself believes, is his confidence that he knows what a Catholic believes better than the Catholic himself can possibly know. But it may be simply said of this particular passage that the difficulty is to get a Roman Catholic's intellect to comprehend how his saying to our Blessed Lady, "Show that you are a Mother," puts her, in fact, above God Almighty.

Romish sanctity, says Archbishop Whately, is essentially and ostentatiously ascetic. It differs from that of a Hindoo fakeer only in degree.

The life of St. Francis de Sales, or St. Vincent de Paul, differs from that of a Hindoo fakeer only in degree!

Whole pages of the book are studded with equally grotesque absurdities; but, after all, these are its venial offences. Some of the charges against the character of the Irish priesthood are of a different order, and give us deep cause to lament the posthumous publication of the book, which renders it impossible to bring their authors to public account. The most shocking of these statements are attributed to Archbishop Whately, and such a one as follows is a sad revelation at once of his gross credulity and his reckless malignity. It concerns the conduct of the Irish priests during the famine :

Their incomes were spent during the famine, as they were spent before it, and as they are now spent, on themselves, or hoarded until they could be employed in large subscriptions to chapels or convents. And this was not the worst. In some cases they refused to those who could not or who would not pay for them, the sacraments of their Church. In ordinary times this may be excusable. A clergy unendowed and unsalaried must be supported by

voluntary contributions, or by dues. In so poor a country as Ireland, voluntary contributions cannot be relied on. The priest might often starve if he did not exact his dues, and as he has no legal rights, his only mode of exacting them is to make their payment the condition on which his ministrations are performed. But during the famine payment was often obviously impossible. When under such circumstances the sacraments, which the priest affirmed to be necessary passports to heaven were refused, the people could not avoid inferring either that the priest let men sink into eternal torment to avoid a little trouble to himself, or that absolution or extreme unction could not be essential to salvation.

It is almost impossible to a Catholic to conceive any priest under any circumstances, except deliberate impenitence, refusing absolution to a dying man-but above all, we may venture to say, an Irish priest. The tender wisdom of the Church restores to the fallen and degraded priest the full plenitude of his jurisdiction for that supreme moment, and binds him to its exercise. The authority of the Church, on the other hand, would promptly smite the priest who was known to be guilty of such a shocking scandal as is here alleged, with at the least suspension from the cure of souls. Dr. Whately tells Mr. Senior that the practice was so common that it produced a certain effect on the mind of "the people." Every Irish Catholic, especially every Irish Catholic who remembers the period of the famine, will, we are sure, agree with us in repelling such a statement as a malignant outrage against the known truth. We are not concerned to claim all the virtues under the sun for the Irish priesthood; but if there be one which, like the eminent purity of their morals, has been always traditional, characteristic, and, as it were, instinctive to them, it is their devotion to the dying. A "sick call" is a summons to the Irish priest with which there is no parley. Distance, weather, night, contagion, his own ailments or fatigue are pleas of no avail-he seems to share for the time the agony of the dying, and can know no rest until his tender ministry has smoothed the passage of the parting soul. To think of his dues at such a moment would be against his very nature. Ordinary Protestants are not aware that there are no dues attaching to the administration of absolution or extreme unction, that dues are rather connected with the public and festive ceremonies of the Church, like baptism and marriage. But Dr. Whately is no more to be excused for the ignorance of such a series of statements as he made to Mr. Senior concerning the practice of the Catholic Church in Ireland-a practice which, if he believed in his function there to the extent that he professed, he was bound to understand

accurately before he spoke so confidently-than Cardinal Cullen would be justified in telling an Italian traveller, about to produce a book on Ireland, that the Irish Protestants annually immolated a Papist infant on the first of July to the shade of William III.

We may pass the passages relating to the conversion of Ireland to Protestantism, which was supposed in Dr. Whately's circle to be imminent when Mr. Senior visited Ireland in 1852. Even before the census of 1861 disposed of that fond and costly illusion, Dr. Whately had learned to doubt what he was in the habit of hearing on the subject. "For some time," Mr. Senior writes in his diary of 1852, "a considerable conversion to Protestantism has been going on in Ireland. The converts are to be numbered by thousands, not by hundreds." When Dr. Whately revised this passage, he inserted in italics the significant words "it is said" in the last sentence, after the word "numbered." That he believed that the national system of education would ultimately prove fatal to the Catholic faith in Ireland-that he was determined to use his considerable influence in its direction to this end, the reader of his memoirs may be already aware. Speaking to Mr. Senior on the subject, he more than once expressed himself in this way:

Though the priest may still perhaps denounce the Bible collectively, as a book dangerous to the laity, he cannot safely object to the Scripture extracts which are read to children with the sanction of the prelates of his own Church. But these extracts contain so much that is inconsistent with the whole spirit of Romanism that it is difficult to suppose that a person well acquainted with them can be a thorough-going Roman Catholic.

This ludicrous delusion appears to have pervaded the Archbishop's circle. A Mr. C., a Dublin lawyer, says, in much the same strain :

Archbishop Murray was a sincere believer in the peculiarities of his faith. Thinking them true, he thought they would be diffused and strengthened by the diffusion of knowledge. If he had not thought so, he would not have given the sanction of the Board to Archbishop Whately's "Christian Evidences," a book decidedly anti-Roman Catholic, since it founds belief on reason, not on mere authority. His successors are less confident. They have forced the withdrawal of the "Christian Evidences," and I have no doubt that they will get rid as far as they can of the common religious instruction.

It is useless, of course, to comment on the astounding assertion, uttered quite as a notorious commonplace, that the priest is in the habit of denouncing the Bible collectively as a book dangerous