strides amongst us. Even the most cautious capitalists are beginning to venture upon investments in landed property in Ireland, and could we but succeed in eradicating from the less informed minds of the English manufacturers their deeply rooted prejudice against the Irish, as a wild and savage race, amongst whom the lives of English Protestants can be but ill secured even by the strictest laws, the perfect assimilation of this country to England would be rapid indeed, and it would soon come to be looked on as a different and very admirable district of one and the same country. This is a consummation, in my mind, devoutly to be wished, and which I shall rejoice indeed if my efforts can be at all instrumental in accelerating. I am not vain and foolish enough to imagine, that we are already so well as to stand in no need of being made better, but I am most anxious to prove to my countrymen, on both the one and the other side of St George's Channel, that we are at least apt and docile scholars, who can reward our teachers with an ample return of pleasure and of profit to them as well as to ourselves. That our inferiority is al ready greatly less than has been commonly supposed, and that if there be, as undeniably there are, very many things which we have yet to learn from England, we are willing to profit by the example of our elder and wiser sister, and yet by no means deficient in great and good qualities of our own.

"Those who have the candour and good sense to examine with their own eyes into our real condition, rather than place implicit faith in vague expres sions of horror and disgust against our people, uttered with shrugging of the shoulder and uplifting of the palm, by weak and ill-informed persons, and some times by those who find their account in misrepresenting us, will find that we are a hardy and intelligent nation, destitute neither of the common necessaries of life, nor of the strong desire to add to our comforts and our luxuries which commonly pervades mankind. If men possessed of capital, and common sense to expend it judiciously, will settle amongst as, instead of a horde of starving and naked savages, ready to plunder and to murder them, they will meet with a population not without whole clothes, and fed in a manner which they themselves prefer (and perhaps with good reason too) to that of the English peasant-a population, who are willing and able to co-operate vigorously and well with any man who will treat them fairly in the

exchange of money or goods for rich land and hard labour."

We began with an intention of giving a regular straight-forward abridgment of this pamphlet, but find that we have adopted another, perhaps better way, of giving its chief contents, by following the order of our own thoughts, and turning over its leaves again for selection. Thus, our readers will thank us for treating them with an excellent extract, in continua tion of the views given above, relative to the character of the Irish peasantry:

"The character of the Irish peasantry cannot easily be appreciated or under stood by strangers. It is full of religious feeling even to overflowing, yet sadly de ficient in religious principle. It sounds paradoxical, and yet it is true in fact, and may be philosophically accounted for in theory, to say that the Roman Catholie religion is apt to produce this defect in the minds of its unenlightened members, though perhaps one of its most palpably unscriptural errors is the supposed meri toriousness of human works. Possibly, however, it would be more just as well as more charitable to ascribe much of the good, and somewhat less of the evil, of the Irish character to the influence of their religious faith, than we high Protestants are usually disposed to do. Certain it is, that however our people may live without God in the world, they do not live without his name ever and anon in their mouths, and that, not irreverently or lightly, but with all the appearance of unaffected piety and earnestness, which would seem to betoken that they have God in all their thoughts.

"If two boatmen pass each other on the Shannon, or on a canal, or two carmen on a road, whether they know each other or not, you are sure to hear in mellow musical Irish, God save you,' from the comer, and God speed you,' from the goer. If an Irishman approach the door of a cabin, whether it belong to an acquaintance or stranger, and whatever be his business, his first salutation invariably is, God save all here,' and the reply is as invariably similar. If he meets with persons working, whatever be their occupation, he never dreams of passing them without saying, God bless your work.' When first he sees a neighbour's child, or his horse, or his cow, or anything that is his neighbour's, he is sure to say,

That's a fine child, God mark it to grace,'' that's a fine cow, God bless it. The instances are endless, but they sometimes sound ludicrously. If you ask

a rheumatic old man how he is to-day, he will say, Thank your honour, I'm all full of cramps and pains in my bones, glory be to God;' or if he be drenched in rain to his great harm and discomfort, he will say, Troth, it's a mighty wet day entirely, the Lord be praised.' Happen what may, their brief and pithy comment is, It was the will of God,' or if they wish for any change of existing circumstances they never fail to add if it was God's will.' All this may arise as much from habit as from piety, it is true, but still the very existence of such a habit proves a kind of character and a state of mind very much more susceptible of culture and improvement than the utter recklessness of impure thought and of unclean living, that is so lamentably prevalent in some of the mining and manufacturing districts of England, nay, even than the insensibility and blindness to everything spiritual or mental that are frequently to be met with in the lowest class of English agricultural labourers. In a word, though the religion of the lower classes in England, when they have any religion at all, is infinitely more excel lent than that which prevails among them here, yet a profound veneration for religion, a steadfast belief in the essentials of Christian faith, and a regular attendance on divine worship, debased though it be by the superstitious observances of their church, are incomparably more certain to be met with among the inferior classes with us than with you; and, besides this, they are far more generally submissive and respectful to their superiors, more disposed to honour and obey a gentleman because he is a gentleman, more resigned when favours are denied, more grateful for favours given, more uniformly obliging, flexible, and anxious to please, than are the peasantry of England. There is, however, greater giddiness and unevenness of character amongst them than amongst the English. It is a common saying with themselves, that they are honest with good looking after. They do not scruple to tell lies to screen themselves when they commit a fault, and when detected, to pass off the lie with a jest. When they labour for others, they are apt to idle or get into mischief, if they be not well watched; they are prone to gossip and dawdle over their task; whether from an innate indolence or a love of sociality, I will not pretend to determine; certain it is, they

have a special aversion to working alone, and you will see three trooping off with facks in hand to perform a job which one man would set about at once in England; nor will these three accomplish more in the day than any two of themselves would do, if you could employ them separately and apart, so that they should lose no time in talking. In passing through the country here, you frequently see numerous groups of men; women, and children, working in the fields, while in England you would almost suppose the ground were cultivated by magic, or in the night, so rarely do you see people at work. They certainly, with us, do not, in general, labour so hard as the English; it is to be remembered, however, that this is chiefly when they are badly paid and insufficiently fed. They do not even hesitate to urge this reason for their insufficiency, nor is it unreasonable they should. I have been assured by practical men,-Mr Nimmo, the engineer, for example,-that a given piece of manual labour cannot be executed more cheaply in Ireland than in England or Scotland, where wages are treble their amount with us. My own experience would not go the length of justifying this assertion, but in any case it does not disprove the capability and willingness of the Irish labourer to exert himself with as much industry and effect as others, when placed under the like circumstances, because it is notorious that Ireland supplies every part of the king's dominions with the hardest-working labourers they have. In their dealings one with another, our people are hard and over-reaching; they are so little accustomed to the possession of money, that they greatly overrate its value, and on the other hand, they have such a superabundance of unoccupied time, that they can scarcely be made to understand that time is at all valuable. Two men will travel four or five miles and wrangle half a day before a magistrate, for some trumpery affair that does not matter sixpence to either; and what is most strange, they will appear at drawn daggers, whilst addressing the justice, and will use the worst and most abusive language towards each other, but the moment he dismisses the case, (which he very often does by telling them they are a pair of great fools, and to go home and mind their business, and not pester themselves or him with non

driv,' as she told us, out of house and home, abused and abhorred by all, and none to say a good word of her, or for her, an' she was left to starve of could and hunger, wid neither man nor mortal to offer her a crass for her berrin, or pity her after she was gone.' She had come to see if an application would be made to the Castle to get her a small pension, or some means of saving her from dy ing of hunger, and she assured us,' she wouldn't trouble them for it long, as in troth it id be bether for her it was the Lord's will to take her away.' There was something fearful in the scowl of this miserable-looking old creature, as she recounted with harrowing minuteness the indignities she had received, and the sorrows she had suffered, and as she stooped in shivering wretchedness, supplicating for what herself called the blood-money for her boy,' the recollection that she was the mother of a murdered man, who probably himself had been a murderer, produced a feeling of horror that made me recoil from her with that instinctive sort of shudder which one feels on reading the brief inscription murder,' on the cell of a condemned felon in Newgate. Measures were taken to have the wretched woman's relief properly cared for."

Our author is of opinion that improvements, the most extensive and important, have been made within the last twenty years in the state of the Irish population. The spread of elementary education has been very great, and all the minor decencies of life are much better observed by the people. The dress and appearance of the peasantry, for example, is much more creditable than it used to be. Twenty years ago, when they came before Grand Juries, to give evidence concerning roads, or in criminal cases, they appeared in loose attire," melancholy hat," hose ungartered, collar unbuttoned, shoe untied, and everything about the outward man, denoting a careless desolation; but now they are to be found in good shoes and stockings, thickset breeches, a spruce waistcoat, and a strong grey coat. He goes the length of saying, that if the Legislature would be kind enough to give them a little breathing time, and not trouble their heads about the people of Ireland exclusively, and as distinguished from the rest of the empire, Ireland might do very well, and perhaps at no very distant period be as Protestant a kingdom as England herself; for a spirit of inquiry has

gone abroad among the people, which must ultimately terminate in the rejection of error, and in the embracing of truth.

Of the Catholic Association he speaks with as much disgust as Mr Canning can possibly experience on any subject

and laughs at Mr Brownlowe for his late solemn warning, not to treat its power and efforts with slight and scorn. He calls it a foul blotch on

the Catholic body-like the red raw flesh we read of in the Levitical law, it is a plague of leprosy broken out of the bile; but like other noisome is sues, it serves the office of a conduit to carry off the foul humours from all parts of the system. He justly sneers at the late Attorney-General's unsuccessful attempts to check Mr O'Connel's intemperance by prosecutionand at the threatened proceedings against that most contemptible creature Shiel. The folly of such men, he truly says, sufficiently defeats their wickedness. Ridicule is the best weapon against nonsense, and imbecility may safely be abandoned to contempt. The number of those amongst the influential Roman Catholics who approve of any of the measures of the Associa tion is not great; and even of those who give to it their names and subscriptions, there are many who would feel ashamed to sit in the assembly, and join in its proceedings. It is mournful, says he, that so respectable a man as Mr Brownlow can be so far misled as to give an ephemeral importance to a desperate band of brawling demagogues, by condescending to notice their existence:

"Is it possible the honourable gentleman has yet to learn that to talk of millions and of means of intimidation, is the sure way to disgust the English people altogether? England well knows she has a giant's strength, and so do the members of the Association. Let them beware how

they provoke her to use it like a giant. whatever-imagine for a moment that Does Mr Brownlow-can any gentleman any man in Ireland, possessed of even rebellion, would embark in a scheme in means and brains enough to organize a which his every step should be steeped in crime and blood, and every vista closed idle dream of misnamed independence? by beggary or the gallows, and all for an I have, indeed, been assured, that the esoteric doctrines of these persons comprise the abrogation of the Union, the confiscation of church property, and the