mmediate demands of his installation and speech-making, although he
drew his emoluments from the Irish revenues. In the "List of Absentees"
instances are given where men appointed to Irish offices would land on
Saturday night, receive the sacrament on Sunday, take the oath in court
on Monday morning, and be on their way back to England by Monday
afternoon.

It has been calculated that out of a total rental of L1,800,000, as much
as 33-1/3 per cent. was sent out of the country. [T. S.]

[20] Sheridan, in the sixth number of "The Intelligencer," contributes
an account of the state of Ireland, written to the text, "O patria! O
divum domus!"

"When I travel through any part of this unhappy kingdom, and I have now
by several excursions made from Dublin, gone through most counties of
it, it raises two passions in my breast of a different kind; an
indignation against those vile betrayers and insulters of it, who
insinuate themselves into favour, by saying, it is a rich nation; and a
sincere passion for the natives, who are sunk to the lowest degree of
misery and poverty, whose houses are dunghills, whose victuals are the
blood of their cattle, or the herbs in the field; and whose clothing, to
the dishonour of God and man, is nakedness. Yet notwithstanding all the
dismal appearances, it is the common phrase of our upstart race of
people, who have suddenly sprang up like the dragon's teeth among us,
_That Ireland was never known to be so rich as it is now_; by which, as
I apprehend, they can only mean themselves, for they have skipped over
the channel from the vantage ground of a dunghill upon no other merit,
either visible or divineable, than that of not having been born among
us.

"This is the modern way of planting Colonies--Et ubi solitudinem
faciunt, id Imperium vocant. When those who are so unfortunate to be
born here, are excluded from the meanest preferments, and deemed
incapable of being entertained even as common soldiers, whose poor
stipend is but four pence a day. No trade, no emoluments, no
encouragement for learning among the natives, who yet by a perverse
consequence are divided into factions, with as much violence and
rancour, as if they had the wealth of the Indies to contend for. It puts
me in mind of a fable which I read in a monkish author. He quotes for it
one of the Greek mythologists that once upon a time a colony of large
dogs (called the Molossi) transplanted themselves from Epirus to AEtolia,
where