represented as enemies of Christianity; nor can we forget in much later times the obloquy so long, encountered, and at length triumphed over, by the adventurous and unwearied benevolence of Mr. Wilberforce, in that immortal work in which he bore so large a part, the Abolition of the African Slave Trade.

tr. In one respect, if I knew no more of them, I should be encouraged to place confidence in the Roman Catholics. I find that they have a religion. Discover that a man has a religion, and you have then an additional and a powerful tie by which his conscience may be bound. And whether he be a Jew who swears on the law of Moses, or a Turk who swears on the Koran, or a Hindoo who stretches out his hand to the East, or whether he be a Catholic who, like ourselves, kisses the volume of our common redemption; or whether he be one of that moral and wellordered sect of Christians whose simple affirmation is taken by our courts as equivalent to an oath; we have, politically speaking, the self-same bond. In my opinion it is not wise so to have framed your tests as, admitting those who do not believe at all, to exclude those who only believe a little differently from ourselves. It is untrue to say that these are securities in favor of the connexion between church and state; because they are not tests of conformity to the church. They are only tests of dissent from two special tenets of another religion. Tests, not of belief, but of disbelief. If we are right in this policy, so would other countries be in pursuing the same; and then the only universal qualification would be universal unbelief.

Thus I have endeavored to set forth all the grounds I desire to have for the practical view I take of this question. 1. Policy. 2. Justice. 3. Unredeemed Pledge. I have endeavored, by appealing to the understandings of my constituents, to justify my own conclusions; and I wish to give them these as the reasons for which I always have supported, and, until convinced of their fallacy, shall continue to support, the Catholic claims.

Believe me ever, my dear Sir George,

With the greatest truth, your attached friend,

December, 1826.

NUGENT.

P.S.-I cannot close a letter necessarily so superficial as this, without feeling that I owe it to those to whose judgment it is addressed, to refer them to two or three works in which those who

wish to make themselves masters of the historical cases will find it stated ably and in full. In truth, a competent judgment can hardly be formed on it by those who are unacquainted with these works: Mr. Charles Butler's History of the Laws affecting the Roman Catholics; Sir H. Parnell's History of the Penal Laws; and our friend Archdeacon Glover's two most able pamphlets, published by Ridgeway. I must also take the liberty of recommending the perusal of the short but most important declaration made this year by the Roman Catholic titular Bishops of Ireland, and by the Vicars Apostolic of Great Britain, on the subject of divided allegiance, and the other tenets ordinarily objected to them; also the declaration of the Roman Catholic nobility and gentry of England and Scotland on the same subject; both published by Keating. To those who have had the opportunity of reading these works, the foregoing letter is indeed superfluous.

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1

THE

PROTESTANT TORY REFUTED:

IN REPLY TO A PAMPHLET

ENTITLED,

"THE GRAND VIZIER UNMASKED."

Here's a stay

That shakes the rotten carcase of old death

Out of his rags! Here's a large mouth, indeed,
That spits forth death and mountains, rocks and seas;
Talks as familiarly of roaring lions,

As maids of thirteen do of puppy dogs!
What cannoneer begot this lusty blood?

He speaks plain cannon, fire and smoke and bounce;
He gives the bastinado with his tongue;
Our ears are cudgelled; not a word of his,
But buffets better than a fist of France:

Zounds! I was never so bethump'd with words
Since I first called my brother's father, dad,

SHAKSPEARE.

LONDON:-1827.

THERE is nothing so laborious as to answer a bungler. He who undertakes to reply to such a work as "The Grand Vizier Unmasked," has to arrange the meterials of two pamphlets at once: first, he must put in an intelligible form that of his opponent, and then his own. Which of these tasks will prove the most difficult in the present instance, no man who has read the production of the Protestant Tory can long doubt. For our own part, when we cast it behind us after the first perusal, we little thought, as we smiled at the soreness and simplicity of the author, that it would ever occupy another moment of our time, or exist again in our memories. But it seems that we underrated its value; and when the public prints announced that a third edition was about to appear, we were induced to consider whether the opinion which we had at first formed of its merits, was well founded or not. Accordingly, with this candid intent we resolved to bring the little

treasure again to light and having, after sconsiderable search, rummaged it out from some of our various heaps of waste paper and other lumber, we patiently set ourselves to work, and gave it a second hearing. But, alas! there are some minds so irretrievably benighted that nothing is sufficient to illumine them; and at the happy termination of this our labor, we found ourselves not only as blind to its excellence as we were before, but obstinately convinced that a more shallow effusion never issued from the press.

In consequence of this opinion, which we did not conceal, we were called on to reply to it; and most reluctantly do we answer the call, candidly confessing, even now, with pen in hand, that we know not how to grapple with a work which, according to our ideas of composition, has neither beginning, middle, nor endwhich is totally destitute of all clear arrangement, or even the attempt at it; which pretends not to the semblance of argument from the first word to the last; and which, by exhibiting all the malignity of satire, though without the wit, evidently means to be severe, but ends in being no more than ridiculous; since, in effect, it contains nothing but a tissue of abuse without proof, and of the most uncourteous and intemperate invective, without so much as the shadow of evidence. How, then, is it possible to reply to such a tirade as this, in which not only are there no two conse→ cutive pages which have uniform reference to each other, but where there is scarcely a single page containing any thing more argumentative than what is afforded by personal censure, alleged facts without references, or arbitrary opinions unsupported by reasoning?

This gentleman, in truth, seems to have discovered that the perfection of logical analysis is, his ipse dixit.

Writers of a less celestial intellect, and yet great names in their 'time, pursued a different course. Before the days of the Protestant Tory, lived one John Locke. (Did the Tory ever hear of him? At any rate he has not copied his style.) He wrote a book on the human understanding, and formerly was esteemed a wise man: we, haply in our foolishness, have coincided with that once so generally-received opinion; and having acquired from his writings a habit of looking for the reason of things, and of preferring the argumentative to the Protestant-Tory mode of conducting an inquiry, feel ourselves greatly at a loss on the present emergency, and altogether unprepared to enter on so novel a species of warfare.

The only effectual method, indeed, of dealing with this pam phlet, would be to take the whole by sentences, each in the order in which it is placed, and to answer them paragraph by paragraph; but as this would be rather too much for our readers as well as