a threat, and the time for acting upon it, as though forty and two
days made that act to be reasonable which would _not_ have been so in
twenty and one, being suited chiefly to the universities in Laputa, did
not meet the approbation of our captious and beef-eating island: and this
second solution also, we are obliged to say; was exploded as soon us it
was heard. _Thirdly_, stepped forward one who promised to untie the knot
upon a more familiar principle: the thunder was kept back for so many
months in order to allow time for Mr O'Connell to show out in his true
colours, on the hint of an old proverb, which observes--that a baboon, or
other mischievous animal, when running up a scaffolding or a ship's
tackling, exposes his most odious features the more as he is allowed to
mount the higher. In that idea, there is certainly some truth. "Give him
rope enough, and every knave will hang himself"--is an old adage, a useful
adage, and often a consolatory one. The objection, in the case before us,
is--that our Irish hero _had_ shown himself already, and most redundantly,
on occasions notorious to every body, both previously to 1829, (the year
of Clare,) and subsequently. If, however, it should appear upon the trial
of the several conspirators for seditious language, that they, or that any
of them, had, by good _affidavits_, used indictable language in September,
not having used it sooner, or having guarded it previously by more
equivocal expressions, then it must be admitted that the spirit of this
third explanation _does_ apply itself to the case, though not in an extent
to cover the entire range of the difficulty. But a _fourth_ explanation
would evade the necessity of showing any such difference in the actionable
language held: according to this hypothesis, it was not for subjects to
prosecute that the Government waited, but for strength enough to prosecute
with effect, under circumstances which warned them to expect popular
tumults. In this statement, also, there is probably much truth, indeed, it
has now become evident that there is. Often we have heard it noticed by
military critics as the one great calamity of Ireland, that in earlier
days she had never been adequately conquered--not sufficiently for
extirpating barbarism, or sufficiently for crushing the local temptations
to resistance. Rebellion and barbarism are the two evils (and, since the
Reformation, in alliance with a third evil--religious hostility to the
empire) w