indifference to public opinion which makes the tranquillity of the base. The taunts of men incalculably his inferiors in intellect, and who were soon to display how far they could sink below him in political degradation; vexed his graceful faculties, exhausted his sparkling animation; and, after a brief period, clouded by the increasing embarrassments of useless allies and insidious adversaries, by painful consciousness, and the discovery that he had toiled for a shadow after all, tormented him out of the world. Thus perished, after a four months' premiership, a minister of whom the nation had once formed the highest hopes; the friend of Sheridan, and with no slight share of his genius; the pupil of Pitt, and the ablest defender and most chosen depositary of his principles; a man of refined scholarship, the happiest dexterity of conversation, keen public sagacity, and the most vivid, diversified, and pungent oratory in the legislature. Some suspicions were thrown on Canning's religion; from the circumstance that, in his last illness, he was not attended by a clergyman. But if this be not directly attributable to the rapidity of his disease, or the negligence of those round him; we cannot suffer ourselves to conceive that Christianity was either unknown or unfelt by him who could write the following epitaph, one of the most pathetic and beautiful in the whole compass of the language. 66 TO THE MEMORY OF George Charles Canning, eldest Son of the Right Honourable George Canning and Joan Scott his Wife; born April 25, 1801 — died March 31, 1820. Though short thy span, God's unimpeach'd decrees, For mild, redeeming virtues, — faith and hope, And, since this world was not the world for thee, "O! mark'd from birth, and nurtur'd, for the skies! Simple as unwean'd infancy, and pure! Pure from all stain (save that of human clay, While I reversed our nature's kindlier doom Pour forth a father's sorrows on thy tomb." CHAPTER XX. THE CATHOLIC QUESTION. THIS light (the light of Christianity in the apostolic day) was soon put down by its own ministers; and on its extinction, a beastly and pompous priesthood ascended: political potentates, not Christian pastors, full of false zeal, full of worldly pride, and full of gluttony; empty of the true religion. To their flock oppressive, to their inferior clergy brutal, to their king abject, and to their God impudent and familiar. They stood on the altar as a stepping - stool to the throne, glozing in the ear of princes, whom they poisoned with crooked principles and heated advice; and were a faction against their king, when they were not his slaves." "Their power went down; it burst of its own plethory, when a poor REFORMER, with the Gospel in his hand, and with the inspired spirit of poverty, restored the Christian religion.' This was the celebrated Grattan's opinion of popery, when he looked on it in his capacity of legislator.* * Speech on Tithe, July 14, 1788. The statutes against popery in England and Ireland were the restrictions, not of a religious faith, but of a political faction; enacted not against dissidents from the church of England, but against rebellious partisans of the house of Stuart. The question was one, not of the liturgy, but of the sword. The Stuarts lost the day. They were exiled; and the soldiers whom they left behind, were disabled by the provisions of law from again stirring up rebellion, and again shedding the blood of freemen in the cause of tyrants and slaves. But the decline of the exiled dynasty no sooner made the relaxation of those penalties in any degree safe, than they were relaxed. The oath of allegiance,* leases for 999 years, † the full purchase of landed property, the extinction of all disabilities relative to education, the unrestrained public exercise of their religious rites and tenets; elevated the sons of that soldiery, from the condition natural to a defeated army, to a rank of privilege never possessed by Protestants under a popish government. The question was then laid aside. It slept from 1782 to 1792, ten years of peace and singular prosperity in Ireland. But in 1789 France began to disturb the world. The manufacturing districts in the north of Ireland, much connected with America by * 13th and 14th Geo. III., сар. 35. + 17th and 18th Geo. III., cap. 49. By the act of 1782. trade and individual intercourse, rapidly adopted the idea of emulating the American revolt, while England was in the first perplexities of an approaching war. The Presbyterian of the north scorned the Roman Catholic of the south; and would have disdained the republic which was to be buttressed by the popish altar. But all that could embarrass government must be tried. Some millions of peasantry in tumult would form an important diversion; and the agents of a faction that owned neither a king nor a God, were sent out to tell the Roman Catholic that he was excluded from the favour of his king, and restricted in the exercise of his religion. The topic, which was adopted by the Presbyterian republican to embarrass the English cabinet; was adopted, of course, by the Whigs, in the Irish parliament, to embarrass the Irish minister. From Ireland it was transmitted, for the use of Opposition in England. The purpose in these pages is not to discuss the point of theology, but to give a glance at the progress of the question. After years of contest, it was brought into the cabinet by Canning. In his reluctant exile from office, he had taken it as the common burden of Opposition, and he bore it back with him. It now formed the endless taunt of his late colleagues. "Will you repeal the Test Act, and overthrow the establishment? Will you bring in Catholics to legis |