and equipment of the army which made the conquest! Look at the conduct of the allied army which invaded France, and had possession of Paris in 1815! Look at the account of the pecuniary sacrifices made upon that occasion under the different heads of contributions, payments for subsistence and maintenance of the invading armies, including clothing and other equipments, payments of old repudiated state debts due to individuals in the different countries of Europe, repayment for the contributions levied, and movable and immovable property sold in the course of the revolutionary war. But such an account cannot be made out against this country. No; but I believe that the means of some demands would not be wanting. Are there no claims for a fleet at Toulon in 1793? None for debts left unpaid by British subjects in France, who escaped from confinement under cover of the invasion in 1814 by the allied armies? Can any man pretend to limit the amount of the demand on account of the contributions de guerre? Then look at the conditions of the treaties of Paris, 1814-15. France having been in possession of nearly every capital in Europe, and having levied contributions in each, and having had in its possession or under its influence the whole of Italy, Germany, and Poland, is reduced to its territorial limits as they stood in 1792. Do we suppose that we should be allowed to keep-could we advance a pretension to keep —more than the islands composing the United Kingdom, ceding disgracefully the Channel Islands, on which an invader had never established himself since the period of the Norman conquest? I am bordering upon seventy-seven years of age passed in honour. I hope the Almighty may protect me from being the witness of the tragedy which I cannot persuade my contemporaries to take measures to avert.-Believe me, ever yours sincerely, WELLINGTON. ABOLITION OF THE LORD-LIEUTEN ANCY OF IRELAND.1 I will not trouble your lordships with details; but I will advert to one or two circumstances which will show clearly to your lordships what may be the consequences of putting down this great office of the lord-lieutenant. Among 1 From a speech in the House of Lords, June 27, 1850. the first operations I had to contemplate after being appointed to the office which I have the honour to hold, were the measures necessary to be adopted to put an end to what were called by the individual who promoted them the "monster meetings" in Ireland. There were several important legal as well as political questions involved in the consideration of those measures. Upon every one of these it was essential to refer to my noble friend Earl de Grey, then the Lord-lieutenant of Ireland; and it was also necessary that he should be in close communication with the military authorities. Those measures could not have been adopted, proceeded with, or carried into execution, without the constant communication and conference of the two authorities-the civil and political authority-the lord-lieutenant and the military officer commanding the troops; and it was likewise necessary that there should be communications with the government in this country. I say, then, that no part of these proceedings could have been adopted if you had not had an officer in Ireland with the constitutional power and authority of the lord-lieutenant. Since that time there has been a constant series of military operations in the course of being carried on in Ireland. The persons who rendered those operations necessary adopted the usual course of modern revolutionists, of publishing their designs, so that they were known to those who were to oppose them as well as to themselves; and though these designs were not so formidable as others that have been seen, yet it was very necessary to attend to them, to oppose the barricading of the streets, the interruption of the communications, and other proceedings, which, if they had succeeded, would have occasioned very great inconvenience, if not disastrous consequences. The requisite measures of precaution were necessarily to be discussed by the military authorities with the lordlieutenant and the civil authorities of the government, no part of which could have been carried into execution without the knowledge, consideration, and full concurrence of the lordlieutenant. Withdraw the lord-lieutenant from Ireland, and who becomes the chief civil authority in different parts of the country? In Dublin the chief civil authority would be the lord-mayor. Now I think that, in less than three months after the adoption of the measure to put down the monster meetings in Ireland, I had the honour of attending her majesty at court, and there I saw Mr. O'Connell as Lord-mayor of Dublin, followed by some of his suite, presenting an address to her majesty | time ago to carry on military operations in the on the throne. Now, will any one say that the military authorities would have ventured to concert any military operations with the then lord-mayor of Dublin, elected by the democratic corporation created by a recent act of parliament? I will take another case. I had afterwards to provide against barricades in the streets of Dublin, to take measures for attacking them if they should be formed, and to secure the free passage of the streets. For this purpose it was necessary to have confidential communications with the secretary of state here and with the Lord-lieutenant of Ireland. Could I have ventured to do this with the Lord-mayor of Dublin? Could I have written a line on the subject without ordering the commander-in-chief on the spot in Dublin to take care that the lord-mayor and the gentlemen of the Dublin corporation should know nothing about the matter? I will give you another instance. The Corporation Act passed some years ago enabled the corporations in the country parts of Ireland to elect their mayors, and some very nice mayors they have elected. It was necessary some . very neighbourhood of Kilkenny. Who was the elected mayor there at that time? Dr. Cane. And what became of Dr. Cane? Why, before the operations of Kilkenny were over, he was in prison under the provisions of the act for the suspension of the habeas corpus. And yet such was the gentleman with whom the general officer, carrying on his operations with his troops, must have consulted in the absence of the Lord-lieutenant of Ireland. . . I entreat noble lords opposite to consider well this proposition for abolishing the office of lord-lieutenant, and let them reflect whether it would be expedient, with the view of saving some £20,000 a year, or any paltry sum of that kind, to remove from a country in such a state of constant disturbance as Ireland is in, has been in, and possibly may continue to be in for some time, the authority which is required to put down this state of disturbance by taking advantage of every favourable opportunity to secure tranquillity. I entreat noble lords to consider well the difficulty of carrying on the government under such circumstances. JAMES ROCHE. BORN 1771- DIED 1853. [James Roche, a miscellaneous writer of some note, often referred to in the Prout Papers as "the Roscoe of Cork," was born in Limerick in 1771, and, like many Irish youths of the period, was sent to France to receive his education. On its completion he returned for a short time to Ireland, and then settled in Bordeaux, where he carried on business for several years. During this time he became familiar with the history, literature, and political constitution of France, and had many friends among the Girondist leaders of the period, with whose republican views he sympathized so deeply, that he was arrested and imprisoned in Paris during the Revolution of 1793, and had a narrow escape from the guillotine. On the death of Robespierre he was released, and returned to Ireland. He now, in partnership with his brother, opened a banking house in Cork, which was conducted successfully for several years, until a monetary crisis in 1819 brought ruin upon his and many other firms. He afterwards acted for a time as a parlia mentary agent in London, and ultimately again settled in Cork, where he became a director of the National Bank and a magistrate. Roche's wonderful memory had stores of valuable information at command, and his talent as a linguist was remarkable. It was therefore natural that he should turn his attention to literature, and his valuable critical and miscellaneous essays on various subjects, which appeared in The Gentleman's Magazine, The Dublin Review, and other periodicals, under the signature of "J. R., of Cork," attracted considerable attention on account of their erudition and clearness of view. He was the founder and president of many literary and art institutions in the city of Cork, and to the student and literary inquirer his stores of knowledge and generous assistance were at all times available. In 1851 he published his collected essays in two volumes, of which he says, "They comprise my various contributions to The Gentleman's Magazine, The Dublin Review, and other periodicals, all composed from Born on the 8th of May, 1737 (N.S.), he, Gibbon, was delicately constituted, and until he had reached his fifteenth year was more or less afflicted with recurring sickness. Never, he says, did he possess or enjoy the insolence of health; no very correct phrase, by the way; for how could he enjoy what he never possessed? After some irregular tuition at home he was sent to Oxford before he had completed his fifteenth year, and arrived there "with a stock of erudition that might have puzzled a doctor, and a degree of ignorance of which a schoolboy would have been ashamed." His description of England's first university is anything but creditable to the institution, in a moral or instructive sense; and in this unfavourable representation he is confirmed by Adam Smith, after a residence there of some years. To the University of Oxford he emphatically denies all obligation. Gibbon, in one of the college vacations, while resident with his father at Buriton, in Hampshire, undertook to write a book, which he entitled The Age of Sesostris, in imitation of Voltaire's Age of Louis XIV., then a recent publication; but the boyish project was soon abandoned. Lord Brougham, by a strange oversight, has transformed the title into the Age of Socrates, which can hardly be imputed to the press, nor is it in the "Corrigenda." But an event that occurred while Gibbon was still at Oxford produced and justified considerable sensation. This was his conversion to the Catholic faith-an act then legally fatal both to the neophyte and proselytizer, under the unrepealed statute, which, at page 48, he quotes from Blackstone's fourth book and chapter. It is there stated, "that when a person is reconciled to the Church of Rome, 1 From a notice of Dean Milman's edition of the De or procures others to be reconciled, the offence amounts to high treason," with its consequent barbarous penalties, on which we cannot too often or too impressively insist, in flagrant demonstration of Anglican intolerance. Dr. Conyers Middleton's Inquiry into the Miracles of the Early Ages of the Church, published in 1749, created doubts in Gibbon's mind, which he felt could receive no satisfactory solution, except in the belief of an indefectible doctrine. He told Lord Sheffield, however, that the arguments of Robert Persons had the chief influence on his mind; and England then scarcely possessed a nobler work than that Jesuit's Three Conversions, associated especially with Cardinal Allen's various labours in the same field of controversy. Resolved to profess the religion he had embraced, Gibbon was received into the Church by a Jesuit father named Baker, one of the Sardinian ambassador's chaplains; for no member of a monastic order could, without fatal consequences, then reside in England unless under foreign protection. He had been introduced to this gentleman by a Mr. Lewis, a bookseller, who was summoned on the occasion before the privy-council, but it would appear without any penal result. Chillingworth and Bayle, temporary proselytes like Gibbon, are here noticed by him. The former yielded to the arguments, as we learn from himself, of the Jesuit Fisher (or rather Perse, his true name according to Southwell's Scriptores Societatis Jesu, p. 429), but he quickly retracted, and, though promoted to rich benefices, the seductive bait, we may believe, of his relapse, he is supposed, and so Gibbon gives to understand also, to have subsided in Pyrrhonism, or general doubt and indifference; but Bayle's example is in clearer analogy with Gibbon's eventual and continued infidelity. . . For the purpose of counteracting this change Gibbon was hurried to Lausanne, and committed to the charge of a Calvinist minister, a Mr. Pavillard (not Pavilliard, as, from unacquaintance with French pronunciation, the name is written by Mr. Milman and Lord Brougham), and with whom he remained from July, 1753, to April, 1758. His newly adopted creed, after some struggle, gradually gave way, to end, as his history unhappily shows, in the malignant aspersion of Christianity; but he diligently pursued a comprehensive sphere of study, which laid the foundation of his extensive acquirements, and then, too, insured the cline and Fall of the Roman Empire in Critical and Mis- lasting friendship of George Deyverdun, a cellaneous Essays by an Octogenarian. native of the place, and not more than two sensation in his Life, page 289, he invited the seductive lady to breakfast, when, in a bower fragrant with encircling acacias, he selected for her perusal various striking passages from the concluding sheets. Enchanted with the masterly performance, her ladyship complimented him on the successful completion of his mighty task with a warmth of language which his prurient fancy, much too licentiously indulged, as his writings prove, construed into effusions of tenderer inspiration. Falling on his knees, he gave utterance to an impassioned profession of love, greatly to the surprise of its object, who, recoiling from his contact, entreated him to rise from this unseemly posture; but prostrate in the attempt, he vainly sought to regain his feet, until, with the aid of two robust peasant-women, he was replaced in his arm-chair, from which it was pretexted he had slipped. An irrepressible laugh (“solventur risu tabulae") escaped the lady, who could hardly view with displeasure this demonstration of the Promethean - puissance of her charms, in quickening into vivid emotion such a mass of seemingly inert physical matter; and the circumstance consequently in no degree disturbed their friendly intercourse. years the senior of Gibbon, whose associate he ... Considered as a whole, the Decline and Fall presents, we must admit, with the reservation of occasional antichristian misrepresentations, fewer historical errors than almost any extant composition of equal compass; insomuch that on the Continent, we are assured by M. Guizot, the work is constantly cited as authority, similar to that, we may say, assigned by Gibbon to Le Nain de Tillemont's Ecclesiastical and Imperial Annals of the first six centuries of the Christian era. We are therefore the more surprised at the glaring anachronism in his fifty-ninth chapter, where he makes Pope Gregory the First (in full letters) implore the aid of Charles Martel, in 740, against the Lombards, whereas that pontiff had ceased to live nearly ninety years before the French hero's birth, in 604. An inadvertence, too, relating to the classical history of Rome, has been overlooked by all reviewers. In the thirty-first chapter it is asserted that the Anician family was unknown during the five first ages1 of Rome, and that its earliest date, found in the Annals of Pighius, was that of Anicius Gallus, a tribune of the people in the year of the city 506. But we are surprised that Gibbon, in the vast extent of his reading, 1 This is a faulty order of words, and should be the first Maitland's Essays on the Dark Ages, at page 230, the fallacious grounds on which Gibbon rests his sarcastic note in vol. x. p. 193, on the imputed superstition of the dignitaries of the Church relative to Gog and Magog. Still, notwithstanding these, or any other indicated drawbacks on his accuracy, the work, as he anticipated, has taken root, and with the unhappy exception of his antichristian sentiments, few are entitled, with a firmer tone of confidence, to say, "What care I what curious eye doth quote deformities?" (Romeo and Juliet, act i. sc. 4), or adopt Ovid's peroration to his Metamorphoses should have passed unobserved the explicit | The reader may likewise see in the Rev. Mr. mention in Pliny (Hist. Natur. xxxiii. 6) of Quintus Anicius as Curulus Edilis, colleague in that office of Cneius Flavius, in the year 449 of the usual Roman chronology, or 442 of Niebuhr's more accurate reckoning, that is, full sixty years anterior to Gibbon's statement. That edileship, besides, was one of marked celebrity, for Flavius divulged the secrets of the civil law held in mysterious reserve by the pontiffs as an instrument of popular control, by compelling a recurrence to themselves on every contention which arose. "Civile jus repositum in penetralibus pontificum evulgavit Flavius," says Livy (ix. 46). Aulus Gellius (vi. 9), Cicero de Oratore (cap. 41) and de Republica (lib. i.), with Pighius himself, at page 377 of his Annals (Antwerpiæ, 1613), dwell on what was deemed a memorable event, as occurring during the office of Anicius and Flavius; but the languid health of the former made him so little conspicuous, that, like Cæsar's colleague in the consulship, M. Calpurnius Bibulus, his name was eclipsed by that of Flavius. It continued, however, an authentic record, and holds a prominent place in one of the noblest monuments of Roman genius. Pliny's great work, "opus non minus varium quam ipsa natura," is the emphatic eulogy of his adopted nephew (Epist. lib. iii. 5). "Jamque opus exegi, quod nec Jovis ira, nec ignes, Nec poterit ferrum, nec edax abolere vetustas.”" Metamor. lib. xv. 871-2. The reverend editor, we must observe, in conclusion, cannot be presumed to have revised the biography, teeming as it does with errors, of which not less than a hundred disgrace the impression. For his information, too, we may state that the name at page 262 of that volume, and note, left in blank, is the Prince of "Beauveau," the personal friend of Louis XVI., whom he accompanied from Versailles to Paris, on the 6th of October, 1789, a day of which the terrors have been so vividly depicted by Burke. SIR MARTIN ARCHER SHEE. BORN 1769- DIED 1850. artists, and also with the art-loving public, who patronized him extensively. After the death of Lawrence, in 1830, Shee was elected president of the Academy, receiving at the same time the honour of knighthood.. [Sir Martin A. Shee, the eminent portrait- | rise rapidly in the estimation of his brother painter, and a writer of considerable merit, was born in Dublin on the 20th of December, 1769. He early showed a taste for the fine arts, and became a scholar of the Dublin Royal Society. On the death of his father, a reduced Dublin merchant, young Shee, although only sixteen years of age, had made so much progress in his profession that he was able to start as a portrait-painter in his native city. He soon obtained extensive patronage, but wishing to acquire a wider reputation he left Dublin in 1788 and went to London. Here he was introduced to Sir Joshua Reynolds, procured admission to the school of the Royal Academy, and in 1789 contributed his first picture to the Academy exhibition. In 1798 he was elected an associate, and in 1800 a member of the Academy. He continued to VOL. III In the midst of his career as a successful portrait-painter Shee constantly turned to another loved art-that of poetry, and in 1809 astonished those who thought him only a painter by the production of Rhymes on Art, a poem in six cantos. In 1814 he published Commemoration of Sir Joshua Reynolds, and in 1825 Alasco, a tragedy of very considerable power, but which was never acted. In 1829 he published Old Court and Harry Calverley, both novels, and in 1837 Outlines of a Plan for the Natural Encouragement of Historical Painting in the United Kingdom. He died 46 |