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bill should not extend to admitting Catholics into Parliament. Their admission, warmly advocated by Canning and other leading men, was carried by 223 to 211, but a subsequent clause was carried which expressly excluded Roman Catholic ecclesiastics from Parliament. As so amended, the bill passed, in defiance of the opposition of Mr. Peel and the government, by a majority of 19; and thus, for the first time, the House of Commons conceded to Catholics nearly all they demanded, subject only to the objectionable veto.

The bill was read the first time in the House of Lords without a division; but Lord Liverpool, the premier, and Lord Eldon as usual intimated their decided repugnance to the whole measure. Immediately afterwards immense numbers of petitions were presented against the bill; these were followed by others in its favour. The second reading was debated in the Lords for two long nights. Lord Liverpool enunciated the view of the government. He said there were not three lines in the bill to which he could assent. His opinion was, that the Parliament and the Privy Council should be kept as they were. He thought it was a more manly course in him to declare that at once than to encourage hopes and expectations which might never be realized. The possession of civil and religious liberty, he most readily allowed, was an inherent right in every man in the State, but the claim to merely political privileges and to political power rested upon a very different ground. He believed that this measure, so far as the general body of the people of Ireland were concerned, would have no effect whatever. If any benefit could be conferred on the Roman Catholics of that country, he conceived their lordships ought immediately to grant it, so long as it was not inconsistent with the general welfare of the country; but it should be remembered that they also owed a duty to the Protestants of Ireland, whose liberties, lives, properties, and faith they were bound to protect. The lords who took a prominent part in favour of the bill were Lansdowne, Melville, Ashburton, and Somers. The Duke of York took a prominent part in opposing the second reading, which was lost by a majority of thirty-nine.

Thus, to all appearance, the way to reconciliation was stopped by

the House of Lords, backed up by the whole force of the government in both Houses. There still remained the King, who as yet was not openly committed either way. As news travelled slowly in those days, his early avowals of predilections in favour of liberality towards Ireland and the Catholics were still comparatively fresh amongst the bulk of the people, who, not being brought up to the art of reading for themselves, had to receive everything from afar by the slow and not oversure process of hearsay. It appears, from this cause, a popular notion prevailed that the King, by soine kind of imaginary hocus-pocus, would be the means of bringing about changes to the good of everybody, wrought out in true kingly fashion.

Acting upon this ascertained state of popular feeling, the ministry, by way of blotting out inconvenient memories concerning the convenient intervention of the House of Lords, devised a royal visit to Ireland. The King, being quite willing, for a change, to make acquaintance with some of his very loyal subjects, readily concurred in the project, and, after what he publicly called travelling far and making a long voyage, he landed at Howth. Before his departure from London, he had just received intelligence of the death of his unhappy and infamously treated wife, Queen Caroline; but the news was not permitted to affect his royal progress. It is recorded by some, who were not ashamed to be his courtiers, that he, in the indulgence of grief at the loss of his Queen, desired to land in private, but there is not an incident to justify such a conclusion, and it is beyond all question that he could have landed in private, or not at all, if he had desired either course. On the contrary, while the unhappy Queen's corpse was in preparation for burial, he landed amid the plaudits of an excited populace, and proceeded through a storm of enthusiastic cheering to the viceregal lodge. There, at a select dinner party the same evening, he opened his royal heart to the honoured guests, and, throwing aside the cloak of sorrow for the dead Queen he had previously (as some say) decently worn, he said, without qualification, "This is one of the happiest days of my life. I have long wished to visit you-my heart has always been Irish-from the day it first beat it loved Ireland

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This day has shown me that I am beloved by my Irish subjects. Rank, station, honours are nothing; but to feel that I live in the hearts of my Irish subjects is to me the most exalted happiness."

It appears that the King's happiness was further exalted by a few days of congenial retirement, which was, however, much interrupted; for while the body of the Queen was on its way to its last resting-place, the lodge was besieged with a multitude of persons who strove to become accepted courtiers in order that they might the better succeed as applicants for State favours; so that, from the highest to the lowest, the whole visit was a period of preposterous illusions, energetically encouraged by O'Connell, strange as it may seem. The Catholics were to be emancipated; the rich were to get into all kinds of offices of honour and emolument; the shopkeepers were to become inordinately prosperous; manufactures were to revive upon the reputation of the cambric which the royal visitor had effusively applied to his eyes; tenants, by some inexplicable process, were to have their rents lowered, and the workpeople their wages raised. To the Hibernian imagination it seemed impossible that such a gracious visit could fail to cause something very important to take place, and many a hopeful Hibernian indulged his own particular and private imagination as to what that something would be with reference to himself.

During the King's happy retirement, all Dublin was in a ferment of preparation for a grand entry and public reception of the King. Lord Londonderry, who had previously been the subject of specially bitter vituperation, made himself conspicuous in the preparations; and, all resentment being forgotten for the occasion, he basked in the temporary fervour of the besotted multitude. The gracious speech of the King, previously quoted, was strenuously circulated and made known far and wide, and its plausible phrases worked enthusiasm up to a white heat, in the midst of which the King, free from sentimental mindfulness of the funeral pageant of the Queen, scarcely ended, made the royal entry into Dublin, on Friday, the 17th of August, 1821, in a state procession got up with all the magnificence that could be put into it at so short a notice, hailed by the perpetual cheering of the tens of thou

sands who crowded to witness the scene. During the day the King held a drawing-room; and at a public banquet, O'Connell, who had previously made much of the honour of personally presenting a large bunch of shamrocks to the King, testified his enthusiastic loyalty, and joined in a toast prescribed by his bitterest foes, the Orangemen of the period.

As a preliminary to the visit, it had gone forth that all differences and animosities should be laid aside, and it was given out that it would be inappropriate to intrude grievances upon the King, who needed no such representations. So everything was taken for granted; the King was committed to nothing; all that he did in that way was to instruct Lord Sidmouth to write a letter recommending the people to be united, after which he sailed from Kingstown with tears of emotion in his eyes leaving the citizens of Dublin nothing but the bill of expenses.

CHAPTER XX.

AFTER THE FEAST-THE WHITEBOYS-INCREAING

OUTRAGES.

HE delirium of the feast of enthusiasm that had saluted the King

THE

was not long in subsiding. Very soon all men looked at each other in amazement, having leisure to contemplate the folly they had been guilty of. Official assurances were sought that the hopes that had so unreasonably accompanied the royal visit would be fulfilled; but everybody in the least entitled to speak either refused to do so or disavowed any expectation of the reforms so wildly anticipated. The leaders of the Catholics for a time retired into sullen silence. In the following January there was a reconstruction of the ministry by means of a coalition. The Grenvilles, who had hitherto taken systematic part with the Whig opposition, joined the Tory government, of which Mr. Peel then became the intensely Tory Home Secretary. At the same time Lord Wellesley was made Lord Lieutenant. His reputation as an advocate of concessions to the Catholics was calculated to renew their hopes, and other official changes were made in the Irish executive that seemed to promise better things. The effect was to put off any vigorous demonstrations for the present, though such hopeful submission afterwards proved to be a very mistaken policy. Still, for the time, the Catholic leaders were quiet, and abided until their time of action should come.

Not so the populace and the peasantry. They much more speedily awoke to a sense of their boundless folly in the gala days of the King's visit; and before the physical evidences of it had vanished-before the decaying decorations of the sometime rejoicing city had wholly dis