ue as an instrument and flattered his vanity by fulsome
panegyric: when, however, the great agitator suspected the drift of
any movement of Shiel, he turned against him his keen although coarse
satire, and, by his contemptuous sneers and ludicrous and striking
caricatures, turned the tide of popular feeling against his subtle and
unreliable colleague. After Roman Catholic emancipation was achieved Mr.
Shiel became a member of the imperial parliament, where he distinguished
himself by his eloquence more than he ever did as a tribune. His oratory
was, however, characterised more by histrionic passion, rhetorical
artifice, and boldness of declamation, than by logic or truth. Many
times the beauty of his parliamentary orations dazzled his opponents,
and drew forth their admiring eulogy, and often his sarcasms smote them
with a severity more terrible than any launched from his side of the
house. He became a mere whig partisan; his ambition was office, and
he excited the strong resentment of the Irish party, with which he
had acted, by his silence where "Irish or Catholic interests" were
concerned, if the whig party were opposed to their demands. No orator
had espoused with more seeming heartiness various liberal opinions,
which he abandoned when he became a pet of the Whigs. Like O'Connell he
had harangued with great fervour large democratic assemblages in favour
of the voluntary principle in religion, and like O'Connell he mocked it
and vituperated it, when it served his purpose to do so. He had been a
great anti-slavery agitator, uttering fervent sentiments concerning the
equal right of men of all creeds and colours, and the duty and policy of
applying this great principle in the West India possessions of England,
and all over the world; but when his parliamentary party adopted a
course which displeased the anti-slavery party, and a deputation of
eminent philanthropists waited upon him, believing that in Richard Lalor
Shiel the black man had a friend as true as he had been an eloquent
advocate, those gentlemen were received with a haughty insolence, and a
contemptuousness which there was not even a decent effort to suppress.
Upon the Protestant dissenters of England he poured loud and eloquent
praise when he was agitating for Roman Catholic emancipation, as the
English dissenters gave an ostentatious support to that movement.
When the end was gained which he hoped to serve by such flattery,
he manifested a profound animosity