atholics as any English Parliament could be. The Parliament in
Dublin was merely an assembly of English and Protestant colonists. Yet
it is worthy of remark, that, then and after, the sympathies of the
people, when they had any means of showing them, went with the Irish
Parliament simply because of the name it bore. It was, at all events,
the so-called Parliament of Ireland; it represented, at least in name,
the authority of the Irish people. So long as it existed there was
some recognition of the fact that Ireland was something more than a
merely conquered country, held by the title of the sword, and governed
by arbitrary proclamation, secret warrant, and drum-head court-martial.

Death had been busy among eminent men for some few years. The Duke of
Shrewsbury, the "king of hearts," the statesman whose appointment as
Lord Treasurer secured the throne of Great Britain for the Hanoverian
family, died on February 18, 1717. William Penn, the founder of the
great American State of Pennyslvania, closed his long active and
fruitful life in 1718. We have here only to record his death; the
history of his deeds belongs to an earlier time. Controversy has now
quite ceased to busy itself about his noble character, and his life of
splendid unostentatious beneficence. His name, which without his
consent and against his wishes was {180} made part of the name of the
State which he founded, will be remembered in connection with its
history while the Delaware and the Schuylkill flow. Of his famous
treaty with the Indians nothing, perhaps, was ever better said than the
comment of Voltaire, that it was the only league between savages and
white men which was never sworn to and never broken. Addison died,
still comparatively young, on June 17, 1719. He had reached the
highest point of his political career but a short time before, when, on
one of the changes of office between Stanhope and Sunderland, he became
one of the principal secretaries of State. His health, however, was
breaking down, and he never had indeed the slightest gift or taste for
political life. "Pity," said Mrs. Manley, the authoress of "The New
Atlantis," speaking of Addison, "that politics and sordid interest
should have carried him out of the road of Helicon and snatched him
from the embraces of the Muses." But it seems quite unjust to ascribe
Addison's divergence into political ways to any sordid interest. He
had political friends who loved him, and he we