net
mentions that this army (about 10,000 men, and then encamped
beyond Hounslow) broke into tremendous cheers at the moment
when the news of the acquittal reached them. Whilst lauding
their Creator his majesty was present. But a far more
picturesque account of the case is given by an ancestor of the
present Lord Lonsdale's, whose memoirs (still in MS.) are
alluded to in one of his Ecclesiastic Sonnets by Mr
Wordsworth, our present illustrious laureate. One trait is of
a nature so fine, and so inevitable under similar
circumstances of interest, that, but for the intervention of
the sea, we should certainly have witnessed its repetition on
the termination of the Dublin trials. Lord Lowther (such was
the title at that time) mentions that, as the bishops came
down the Thames in their boat after their acquittal, a
perpetual series of men, linked knee to knee, knelt down along
the shore. The blessing given, up rose a continuous thunder of
huzzas; and these, by a kind of natural telegraph, ran along
the streets and the river, through Brentford, and so on to
Hounslow. According to the illustration of Lord L., this voice
of a nation rolled like a _feu-de-joie_, or running fire, the
whole ten miles from London to Hounslow, within a few minutes;
or, like a train of gunpowder laid from London to the camp,
this irresistible sentiment finally involved in its torrent
evenits professional and hired enemies. Caesar mentions that
such a transmission, telegraphically propagated from mouth to
mouth, of a Roman victory, reached himself, at a distance of
160 miles, within about four hours.

But may not this new conspiracy, which is now mustering and organizing
itself, be put down summarily by force? We may judge of _that_ by what
has happened to the old conspiracy. Put down by martial violence, or
by the police, Repeal would have retired for the moment only to come
forward and reconstruct itself in successive shapes of mischief not
provided for by law, or not shaped to meet the grasp of an executive
so limited as, in these days, any English executive must find itself.
On the other hand, once brought under the cognizance of law, it has
been crushed in its fraudulent form, and compelled to transmigrate at
once into that sincere, substantial, and final form, towards which it
was always tending. Whatever of extra peril is connected with