Burke knew nothing of those feelings which strew scorpions on the pillow of the artificial and perfidious; yet this is the letter of a vexed heart, ready to exclaim that all was vanity. But his triumph was to come; and the time was now fast approaching when, with prouder objects in view than the struggle for the narrow distinctions of office, he was to stand forth the champion of the surviving religion, manliness, and loyalty of Europe; a light to England, and a redeeming honour to her legislature and her people.

The king's recovery had closed the contest in the English parliament; but the luckless fortune of Ireland reserved her for one of those blunders which are supposed to be indigenous to the soil. The Irish parliament had acknowledged the unlimited right of the regent almost by acclamation. There never had been a more precipitate worship of the rising sun. The Irish ministers were overwhelmed by this rush of new-born allegiance, or suffered themselves to swell the tide. All was principled hypocrisy and magnanimous defection; and the holders of office, the wearers of blue and green ribands, and the bearers of gold keys, black rods, and white sticks, exulted in being able to give such costly attestation of their new faith as the sacrifice of their badges on the altar of the regency. But from fraud the progress is easy to mountebankism, and from folly to faction. In the midst of this carnival of party success, perfidy began to fix its eye on darker objects; murmurs were heard that were little short of treason, the key-note of rebellion was touched more than once in this chorus of new-born loyalty; and in the wild resolutions of the Irish whigs, and their still wilder speeches, were first founded those just alarms, which predisposed the English cabinet to the calamitous measure of the Union.

But, whatever might have been the original plot of the drama, it finished in characteristic burlesque.

The last scene of the tragedy found a substitute in farce. The lord-lieutenant having naturally refused to make himself a culprit by forwarding the " resolutions," an embassage from the lords and commons was sent with them to London. The deputation reached London, and made their first bow to the prince, a week after the announcement of the king's convalescence! Thus vanished into thin air the fabric of place, pension, and general spoil, which patriotism had erected with such triumphant anticipation. The rewards of the deputies were, a gracious answer from the prince, informing them that they were too late, and the shrinking thanks of the Irish parliament, conscious that it had committed an irreparable folly, and trembling through all its limbs at the just indignation of the throne.

But the first infliction was the laugh of the empire: caricatures of "the six deputies riding on bulls," and satirical squibs and verses of every kind, were poured upon this unhappy failure. Some of those sports of scorn may be still remembered.

EPIGRAM. THE BULL-RIDERS.

Though Pats are famed for sportive sculls,
This feat all feats surpasses;

For, not content with breeding bulls,

Those bulls are rode by asses.

THE GLORIOUS HALF-DOZEN.

Six rogues have come over our pockets to pick,
And dispose of their second-hand ware;
To play the buffoon, to jump, tumble, and trick,
But they've come-the day after the fair.

Productions like those are made only for the moment; but one more, as giving the names of the commission, must be quoted. It is obviously founded on Horace's Ode, "Pastor диит traheret."

THE PROPHECY.

When the packet o'er the tide
Bore Ierne's patriot pride,
Harry Grattan's delegates,
Pregnant with a nation's fates,
Pondering all on bribes and places,
Making all, all kinds of faces,
Schemes of native thievery brewing,
Scoundrels, made for fools' undoing;
While along the loaded deck
Sickening lay the human wreck,
Right beneath the pilot's nose
From the wave a phantom rose;
Bull-necked, black-mouthed, water-bloated,
Still buff-vested and blue-coated;
Round of belly, round of chin,
Thus began the shape of sin.

"Asses, from the land of asses,
Ere your cargo this way passes,
While your worships have an ear,
Hear your true-blue Prophet, hear!
Hear me, every party hack!
Scoffed at ye shall all come back,
Scoffed at as the tools of tools,

All incorrigible fools!

"Hear me, purse-bound, lack-brained Leinster! Model of an ancient spinster;

Hear me, mountebank O'Neill,

Tied to every rabble's tail;

Hear me, Conolly! the prime

Of talkers against sense and time;

Hear me, sullen Ponsonby!

Thou of the place-hunting eye;

Hear me, Stewart, of beaux supreme,
Thyself thy everlasting theme,
Bold defier of the wave
(Thine's a terra firma grave);
Hear me, simpering Charlemont,
With thy Machiavellian front,
With thy opera lisp and smile,
Israelite that knows no guile;
Compound soft of softest cant,
Faction's gentle figurant.

"Hear me, dotards, one and all-
Sudden scorn shall on you fall;
Laughter follow on your track,
Laughter drive you flying back;

Scoffs from people, king, and prince!

Till your ass-skin withers wince.

Not a dinner for your pains,
Not a stiver for your gains;
Till, though naked, not ashamed,
All your patriot fires are tamed;
Till your mob-bepelted souls
Wish your senders at the poles,
Curse the hour they first harangued,
And long to see them drowned or hanged."

Then before their spell-bound view
Dived the phantom buff and blue-
Laughter from the Cambrian rocks
Mingled with the name of Fox;
Laughter from the British main
Came with clanks of lash and chain;
Laughter in the tempest's roar

Rolled from cloud, and sea, and shore.

The consternation of the ministerial deserters in Ireland was boundless, and for once they were not disappointed. They were cashiered in all directions. Office was cleared of every timeserver of the whole tribe; and the minister was justly said to have “made more patriots in a day than patriotism had ever made in a year." Sheridan's brother Charles, the Irish secretary of war, was among the culprits, and was cast out like the rest. But his fall was softened by some unaccountable job, which gave him a pension of 1200l. a-year, with a reversion of 300l. to his wife!

In England the king's recovery broke up as many dreams of office as were ever engendered between vanity and selfishness. Opposition had cut royal patronage into suits of every shape. Every partisan, and every partisan's partisan, was to be provided for; and the whole loose and pauper mob who hang on the skirts of politics, were each to find a covering for his multitude of sins. To take the single instance of Sheridan himself; he was to have the treasurership of the navy; an office totally unfit for his careless habits. But this was not the limit; his brother-in-law, Tickell, an idler, was to have a seat in parliament; and his associate, Richardson, another

idler, was to have a commissionership of stamps. Who can regret that those caterpillars were shaken off the public tree; or that the objects of a party, which thus linked itself with avarice and intrigue, were defeated? The man must be fertile in tears who could grieve that an association for the purposes of plunder should be deprived of the public spoil; or that mercenaries should be stripped of the honours due only to patriotism and virtue.

CHAPTER IX.

The Prince's Marriage.

THE regency question drove the prince from politics. No experiment could have been more disheartening. Fond of popularity, he saw it crush his last hope; relying on the wisdom of his friends, he saw their councils ignominiously baffled, their connexion threatened by personal jealousy, and the great antagonist of both prince and party raised into undisputed power; while, attached to his royal father by duty, he found his personal conduct the object of reproof, and his defence answered only by more open displeasure.

The result was disastrous to himself, to the kingdom, and to the king. It abandoned him to pursuits still more obnoxious than those of public ambition. It encouraged his natural taste for those indulgences which, however common to wealth and rank, are in all their shapes hostile to the practical values and high-minded purposes of life; and it embarrassed his circumstances, until, pressed by creditors, and entangled by a multitude of nameless perplexities, he suffered himself to be urged into a marriage, formed