of them Catholics and Protestants _could_ meet in
this insipid harmony: it was a harmony resembling the religious toleration
of people--tolerant, because careless of _all_ religion. Had they, like
ourselves, possessed a constitution of slow growth, a representative
system, a popular mind, all stimulating to noble political feuds,--in that
case they would have had high principles like ourselves; they, like
ourselves, would have faced the action and reaction of endless contest;
and their political progress, like ours, would have been written on every
page of their history and legislation. It was because they slept and
snored for ages with no instincts of fiery political life, that they were
able, in modern times--Catholics and Protestants--to fraternise in
effeminate raptures of maudlin sentimentality.

We apply this last topic specially to our conclusion:--In pointing to the
yet unappreciated difference between our own feuds with popery and those
of other nations--which foreign feuds, at the very best, (if they rose at
all to the grandeur of civil strife,) moved through butchery and violence,
as in France, not through laws and scaffolds--moved like the uproars of
Afghans, not like the grand tribunitial contests of ancient Rome--we could
only indicate a feature or two of the inexhaustible case. And naturally it
was to England that we pointed. But now--but by this Maynooth revolution,
it is not England that is primarily menaced. Ireland it is upon which that
evil will descend, which, by the wisdom of Parliament, backed by the
protesting tumults of the people, did _not_ descend on England. For
England, Parliament was cautious and retarding in all its steps. The
"return of the Heracleidae" was by graduated movements; and, had it even
been abrupt, a thousandfold greater were the resources for combined
resistance of Protestants against combined reaction of Papists. But in
Ireland, deeper are the vindictive remembrances, more recent are the
deductions of claims to property, and louder the clamours for wide
resumption; from massacre and counter massacre, from Cromwell, from
Limerick, from Londondery, from Boyne, from Aughrim, the wounds are yet
green and angry; and the hostile factions have never dissolved their
array. This is the land into which a Moorish recoil is now threatened. The
reader understands us to speak of a return--not for the physical men--but
for the restored character of supremacy in which they will be able to ac