No, no! you've gone too far! I shall burst, I shall! Me to go on as before! they use me worse and worse every day. Gents, you'll excuse me -I hope you will; but business is business, gents-it is; and if you won't do mine, I must look out for them that will-'pon my soul, I must, and" If Mr Titmouse could have seen, or, having seen, appreciated, the looks which the three partners interchanged, on hearing this absurd, ungrateful, and insolent speech of his

- the expression that flitted across their shrewd faces; that was, intense con■tempt for him, hardly overmastered and concealed by a vivid perception of their own interest, which was, of course, to manage, to sooth, to con■ ciliate him!

How the reptile propensities of his mean nature had thriven beneath the sudden sunshine of unexpected pro■sperity! See already his selfishness, truculence, rapacity, in full play!

" So, gents," said he, after a long and keen expostulation with them on the same subject, "I'm to go to-morrow morning to Dowlas and Co.'s, and go on with the cursed life I led there to-day, all as if nothing had happened!"

"In your present humour, Mr Titmouse, it would be in vain to discuss the matter," said Mr Quirk. "Again I tell you that the course we have recommended is, in our opinion, the proper one; excuse me if I add, what can you do but adopt our advice?"

" Why, hang me, if I won't employ somebody else that's flat! So, good- night, gents; you'll find that Tittlebat Titmouse isn't to be trifled with!" So saying, Mr Titmouse clapped his hat on his head, bounced out of the room, and, no attempt being made to stop him, he was in the street in a twinkling.

"Did you ever see such a little beast!" exclaimed Mr Gammon with an air of disgust.

"Beggar on horseback!" exclaimed Snap.

"It won't do, however," said Mr Quirk, with as chagrined an air as his partners, "for him to go at large in his present frame of mind he may ruin the thing altogether."

"As good as £500 a-year out of the way of the office," said Snap. "Egad, that at least," said Mr Gammon, seizing his hat, " I'll after him,

NO. CCLXXXVIII, VOL. XLVI,

and bring him back at all hazards; and we must really try and do something for him in the meanwhile, to keep him quiet till the thing's brought a little into train." So out went after Titmouse, Mr Gammon, from whose lips dropped persuasion sweeter than honey; and I should not be surprised if he were to be able to bring back that stubborn piece of conceited stupidity.

As soon as Mr Titmouse heard the street door shut after him with a kind of bang, he snapped his fingers once or twice, by way of letting off a little of the inflammable air that was in him, and muttered, " Pretty chaps those, upon my word! I'll expose them all! I'll apply to the Lord Mayor-they're a pack of swindlers, they are! This is the way they treat me, who've got a title to £10,000 a-year! To be sure" - He stood still for a moment, and another moment, and dismay came quickly over him; for it suddenly occurred to him what hold had he got on Messrs Quirk, Gammon, and Snap ?-what could he do?-what HAD he done?

Ah-the golden vision of the last few hours was fading away momentarily, like a dream! Each second of his deep and rapid reflection, rendered more impetuous his desire and determination to return and make his peace with Messrs Quirk, Gammon, and Snap. By submission for the present, he could get the whip-hand of them hereafter! He was in the act of turning round towards the office, when Mr Gammon softly laid his hand upon the shoulder of his repentant client.

" Mr Titmouse; my dear sir, what is the matter with you? How could we so misunderstand each other?"

Titmouse's small cunning was on the qui vive, and he saw and followed up his advantage. "I am going," said he, in a resolute tone, "to speak to some one else, in the morning."

"That, of course, signifies nothing to any one but yourself. You will take any steps, my dear sir, that occur to you, and act as you may be advised." "Monstrous kind of you to come and give me such good good advice!" exclaimed Titmouse, with a sneer.

"Oh, don't mention it!" said Gammon, coolly; "I came out of pure good nature, to assure you that our office, notwithstanding what has passed, entertains not the slightest personal ill feeling towards you, in thus throw.

2 L

ing off their hands a very long, and dreadfully harassing affair."

"Hem!" exclaimed Titmouse, once or twice.

"So good-night, Mr Titmousegood-night! God bless you!": Mr Gammon, in the act of returning to his door, extended his hand to Mr Tittlebat, who he instantly perceived was melting rapidly.

"Why, sir if I thought you all meant the correct thing-hem! I say, the correct thing by me I shouldn't so much mind a little disappointment for the time; but you must own, Mr Gammon, it is very hard being kept out of one's own so long."

"True, very true, Mr Titmouse. Very hard it is, indeed, to bear, and we all felt deeply for you, and would have set every thing in train-" "Would have"

"Yes, my dear Mr Titmouse, we would have done it, and brought you through every difficulty-over every obstacle."

"Why-you don't-hardly-quite -mean to say you've given it all up? - What, already!" exclaimed Titmouse, in evident alarm.

Gammon had triumphed over Titmouse! whom, nothing loth, he brought back, in two minutes' time, into the room which Titmouse had just before so rudely quitted. Mr Quirk and Mr Snap had their parts yet to perform. They were in the act of locking up desks and drawers, evidently on the move; and received Mr Titmouse with an air of cold surprise. " Mr Titmouse again!" exclaimed Mr Quirk, taking his gloves out of his hat. "Back again!-an unexpected honour." "Leave any thing behind?" enquired Mr Snap-" don't see any thing."

"Oh no, sir! No sir! This gentleman, Mr Gammon, and I, have made it all up, gents! I'm not vexed any more not the least."

"Vexed, Mr Titmouse!" echoed Mr Quirk, with an air sternly ironical. "We are under great obligations to you for your forbearance!"

"Oh, come, gents!" said Titmouse, more and more disturbed, " I was too warm, I dare say, and-and-I ask your pardon, all of you, gents! I won't say another word, if you'll but buckle to business again-quite exactly in your own way-because you

"It's growing very late," said Mr Quirk, coldly, and looking at his watch; "however, after what you have said, probably at some future time, when we've leisure to look into the thing"

Poor Titmouse was ready to drop on his knees, in mingled agony and fright.

"May I be allowed to say," interposed the bland voice of Mr Gammon, addressing himself to Mr Quirk, "that Mr Titmouse a few minutes ago assured me, outside there, that if you could only be persuaded to let our house take up his case again-"

" I did I did indeed, gents! so help me --!" interrupted Mr Titmouse, eagerly backing with an oath the ready lie of Mr Gammon.

Mr Quirk drew his hand across his chin, musingly, and stood silently for a few moments, evidently irresolute.

"Well," said he at length, but in a very cool way, "since that is so, probably we may be induced to resume our heavy labours in your behalf; and if you will favour us with a call to-morrow night, at the same hour, we may have, by that time, made up our minds as to the course we shall think fit to adopt."

"Lord, sir, I'll be here as the clock strikes, and as meek as a mouse; and pray, have it all your own way for the future, gents-do!"

"Good-night, sir-good-night!" exclaimed the partners, motioning to. wards the door.

"Good-night, gents!" said Titmouse, bowing very low, and feeling himself at the same time being bowed out! As he passed out of the room, he cast a lingering look in their three frigid faces, as if they were angels sternly shutting him out from Paradise. What misery was his, as he walked slowly homeward, with much the same feelings (now that the fumes of the brandy had evaporated, and the reaction of excitement was coming on, aggravated by a recollection of the desperate check he had received) as a sick and troubled man, who, suddenly roused out of a delicious dream, drops into wretched reality, as it were out of a fairy-land, which with all its dear innumerable delights is melting overhead into thin air-disappearing for ever.

[To be Continued.]

We resume with pleasure our remarks on these volumes. Every thing connected with Ireland has a powerful interest in our minds. Its history, that of a singularly intelligent, brave, and high-minded race of men, misled by national fantasies, deluded by political artifices, and misruled by virulent faction, perhaps more than any other people of the globe, strongly demands the attention, not less of the philosopher than the patriot. To point out their true friends to such a people, to direct their fine talents and their glowing energies into the path of public prosperity, would be among the noblest services of statesmanship; and though Ireland, papist and partisan, must only rivet her own chains by the fires of her own impure altars, we do not despair of the time when she shall be what nature intended her to be a bulwark to the great empire of pure religion and public virtue.

Among the chief values of these volumes, we have already alluded to their sketches of remarkable men. It is one of the important peculiarities of a free country, that all public necessities immediately raise up a generation of vigorous minds. Public necessity will not create genius, but it turns the general powers of the people into its own direction. Genius is the especial gift of heaven, an intellectual miracle, and therefore rare; but the average ability to which we allude, may be called the child of circumstances, and is as much a matter of succession as the seasons, in which the winds of March are called on to dry the soil after the rains of winter, the sun of summer to warm the bosom of the earth after this drying, and the winter's frost to give the ground at once rest, and new principles of fertility after the exhaustion of the year. But the intellectual process can be relied on only in free countries, for there alone man is enabled to shape himself to the changing shapes of the time. Despotism is a dungeon in which the external influences of things go for nothing; its world is its walls, and its only dwell

ers the captive and the turnkey. But the free country is the open field, where every aspect of heaven and earth has its influence, and where every man has his individual enjoyment, or is compelled to exert his independent vigour. The condition of the great continental governments, during the last hundred years, is strongly illustrative of this truth. Spain, Austria, Prussia, and Russia, have produced no addition and no change in the forms of individual character. They required soldiers, and they had them; but all the vigour of the national talents was circumscribed within the cabinet, and the king and his ministers were the only names in the kingdom. Among the minor powers of Germany which were partially free, literature gave distinction to some individuals. In France, towards the end of the eight. eenth century, the growing license of the people, and the rapid feebleness of the government, the only freedom which France seems ever likely to enjoy, gave a larger and more fatal scope to individual character; until what ought to have been only an illumination, burst into ablaze, and France, like the habitual drinker of ardent spirits, perished of spontaneous combustion.

The case of Ireland was nearly in point. It would be absurd to speak of her as enslaved, for all the efforts of the British Government for centuries had been exerted to give her the faculty of freedom; but Popery, the wars which it produced, and the public exhaustion produced by those wars, had worn out all the natural exeitements of public character. For three hundred years Ireland had scarcely produced a name, except of some barbarous chieftain, rendered conspicuous only by crimes, and ascending into historie remembrance only by treading on the neck of his country. But, from the period when the Parliament began to resume its functions, the people to grow opulent with the increasing opulence of England, and the sanguinary feuds of Popery to give way to a general conviction of the value of peace, a crowd of able men started up at the national summons; practised into moral activity,by the labours of the legislature; shaped into the proportions of public manliness by public struggle; and bequeathing to their country the knowledge, that, if Irish talents had been hitherto obscure, it was because they were unsought for; that, like her minerals, they were to be found in every height and depth of the land, and that their uselessness hitherto was like that of her minerals, owing not to the penury of nature, but to the negligence of man.

Among those remarkable men was John Hely Hutchinson, the ancestor of the present Lord Donoughmore. He was a lawyer, and called to the bar in 1748. Hutchinson was a man of great natural ability, but more dishonourably conspicuous for a most extraordinary grasp at public office in every shape. Appointed Prime Sergeant early in the reign of George III., and with all the honours and emoluments of his profession fairly before him, he contrived, as he moved along, to pick up the pay of a major in the army. Another grasp in the opposite direction, equally singular, and not less tenaciously held, was that of the provostship of the Dublin University. His next seizure was one of power and emolument combined: he became Irish Secretary of State. To what he might have reached, if he could have kept death at arm's length, is to be conjectured only from his universal rapacity; but that great disturber of the designs of ambition, who reduces statesmanship to dreams, and puts a veto even on the pension list, grasped the grasper at last, and extinguished one of the ablest, wittiest, most eager and most reckless candidates of the goods of this world, who ever turned a shilling into a guinea. This rapacity was so obvious, as to become the subject of the well-known sarcasm of Chesterfield, that "if Hutchinson had been offered England and Ireland for an estate, he would ask the Isle of Man for a cabbage-garden." He had begun, according to the usual routine of determined placemen, by being a furious patriot. He abused the Government, until in its timidity it proposed to buy him. The rapid changes of Irish viceroys gave peculiar opportunity to these patriot recruitings. As every new viceroy came in under some promise of a

change of measures, the patriot's conscience was salved; he became a placeman without the scandal of a deserter, and had the comforts of salary to reconcile himself to any casual compunctions of honour. Hutchin. son's chief personal fault was satire, which he lavished liberally on all characters. He called Flood a "spouter of periods," an "artificer of attitudes;" and, in allusion to his involved and pompous style, "a petty dealer in sevenfold phraseology." Oddly as those expressions sound in our ears, they seem to have been either dexterously conceived or skilfully launched, for they still hang on the fame of the orator. But every thing in Ireland has a touch of oddity. What can be more curious than the answer of the Attorney-General Tisdall to this man? The Prime Sergeant and this high legal officer having been combined in some public operation, Hutchinson said to Tisdall, "Now that we have done the service of the Government, what do you think if we were to do something for the country." Tisdall replied, with his wonted air of gravity, " Mr Hutchinson, if we attempt that, we are undone ruined, ruined; the Opposition may bear that we should take the emoluments, but if we lay claim to the popularity we are ruined for ever." They came as oddly into collision. Hutchinson, when provost, having quarrelled with Duiguenan, and thinking it beneath his dignity to take notice of him, or more probably unsuitable to his office for Duiguenan was one of the fellows of the collegethe Provost called on Tisdall to make him responsible for his friend the Doctor's conduct. He said that one of his retainers had insulted him, that he must make him answerable for it, and that therefore he must consider that he, the Provost, now intended to insult him."

Tisdall calmly replied, " Mr Provost, I will consider no such thing;" and he instantly walked into the King'sBench, and applied for an information! This was a source of high amusement and excitement to the bar. Seventeen counsel were engaged! Hutchinson defended himself, but the information would have been granted except for his accustomed luck. Tis. dall died in the mean time. This event appeared doubly lucky; for the Attorney-General having been mem

ber for the University, and a vacancy being thus created, the Provost pushed his son into his place. However, the most fortunate have some rubs in their career. His system had been too precipitate with the electors, (to use the gentlest phrase;) a scrutiny was demanded, his son was thrown out, and he had the additional mortification to see him succeeded by Fitz-Gibbon, (afterwards Earl of Clare and Lord Chancellor,) and who had been one of Tisdall's counsel.

a

Hutchinson died in 1795, singularly fortunate in his career, having founded a family, and being the father of two peers, his eldest son possessing the title of Lord Donoughmore, and his second son, General Hutchinson, gallantly earning his peerage by the defeat of the French in Egypt. The fact was, that the only grand mistake of Hutchinson's life was the work of his love of place; the provostship of a learned university was the last situation which a man of his habits should have chosen. The seat was formed for a Churchman, as the head of a college, all whose fellows, with one or two exceptions, were necessarily in holy orders. Having been founded expressly for the maintenance of the Protestant religion in the land, it was evidently unsuited to a layman, and that layman bustling, intriguing, ambitious man of the world. He besides wanted the exact literature and science which were required to preside at the public examinations, and other essential business of the college. This want, especially, exposed him to scorn among the fellows, and became the source of constant ridicule. A volume by his old enemy Duiguenan, entitled "Lachrymæ Academice," was a long and bitter burlesque of his literary deficiencies. But the provostship was three thousand pounds a-year, and the college returned two members to Parliament. Those were strong temptations. They were evidently too strong for his prudence, and equally so for his peace. The chief discomforts of his latter years arose from them; and, singularly fortunate as his general life had been, his headship of the reluctant university might supply an important lesson to avarice and ambition, if either the one or the other was ever within the reach of experience, or reclaimable by human wisdom.

Thus

Grattan's entrance into Parliament is thenceforth an era in the history of his country. He took his seat, for the first time, on the 11th of December 1775, for the borough of Charlemont, in which the death of the earl's bro. ther, who was drowned in the Irish Channel, had left a vacancy. the great Irish Whig, like all the leading English ones, was indebted to the borough system, which they made a hypocritical theme of libel, for the very opportunity of uttering the libel. No popular constituency in Ireland at that time would have received Grattan, simply a young barrister, without fortune or public notoriety. But what the multitude and the Reform Bill never would have done for him, was done by an amiable and intelligent man of rank, possessed of just influence, and exerting it with an honesty and a discrimination which will never be found, to the end of time, in the corrupt and brawling crowd of the ten-pounders of a great town. The members now chosen for London, Dublin, and Edinburgh, the three capitals of the empire, are sufficient proofs of the utter inadequacy of the Reform Bill to provide qualified representatives, and of the sure victory of the vulgar, the time-serving, and the revolutionary. Thanks to the mischiefs concocted by the native virulence and long festering venom of old Lord Grey, aided by the fresh bile of his son-in-law Lord Durham, and put in action by the meagre servility of the menial of both, Lord John Russell!

In 1777, Fox visited Ireland, and happened to hear Grattan in the House. Afterwards, meeting him at dinner at Lord Moira's, (afterwards Marquis of Hastings,) he complimented the young orator on his speech, and quoted some of the passages with compliment. This instance of Fox's habitual politeness made a great impression on him, and probably afterwards constituted one of his strongest links to Whiggism. The newspapers, too, gave him due encouragement; the verdict of one seems to have been adopted by the whole:"Mr Grattan spoke-not a studied speech, but in reply the spontaneous flow of natural eloquence. Though so young a man, he spoke without hesitation; and, if he keeps to this example, will be a valuable weight in the scale of patriotism." That Grattan spoke