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all its splended train, had long since vanished, fidelity to honourable engagements, and courtesy to the fair sex, were by the leading members of that association most scrupulously adhered to. They were patriots, they were gentlemen; they invoked the spirit of the constitution, but they invoked the spirit of the muse also; and whilst they preserved the former, they gave to the latter its most pleasing employment, the celebration of beauty, and the graces of the female character. The unceasing conquests of the Marlborough daughters were opposed, with an air of gay triumph, to the victories of their father, then in his utmost splendour; and it was with an agreeable extravagance, added in the languge of poetry, that their eyes could alone restrain that freedom so recently established at the Revolution *. All this may be called trifling, but away with moroseness. If it is trifling, it softens and harmonizes the heart. Our politics are not always the most favourable to politeness, and he is a dreary personage indeed who can fastidiously listen to the praises of that sex which has often, in the -midst of temptations, retained those most dear to them in the path of political honour, or, without any opportunity of displaying such heroism, added new charms to social life, and metamorphosed grave and formidable statesmen into obliging and agreeable companions. Yet, while I pay this tribute to them emory of departed worth and departed -genius, it would be a miserable affectation of humility if I did not add, that in point of original talents, in useful or ornamental knowledge, some of the members of the Whig · Club were not altogether distant from their celebrated predecessors. In attachment to true revolution principles and unfeigned admiration of the constitution, which arose with new lustre from such principles, no way their inferior. Were I not, perhaps idly, afraid that even the most sober pane

* See the verses by some members of the Kit Kat Club, especially those by Lord Halifax and Mr. Manwaryng

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gyric might be regarded as something like adulation, I could point to some living characters as sufficiently illus trative of my assertion; but surely on constitu'ional topics, on the varied subjects of polite literature, Lord Somers could have listened to Lord Charlemont with real satisfaction; Lord Burlington* would have found an architectural taste as chastened as his own, in a visit to Marino; and the witty, elegant, and, what is far more valuable, goodnatured Lord Dorset, might have passed from a conversation on Titian or Vandyke, at Charlemont-house, to the eujoyment of humour as smiling as his own, or gay raillery as polished as Arthur Manwaryng's, in the rooms appropriated to the more select members of the Whig Association. I have alluded to some misinformation with regard to their proceedings. It has been stated, that at the Whig Club" were planned and arranged all the measures for attack on the ministry. Each member had his measure or his question in turn. The plans of debate and manœuvre were preconcerted, and to each was assigned that share of the attack he was most competent to sustain +." The respectable author who wrote this was misinformed. I beg leave to say, were there any plans of debate preconcerted, or any share of attack assigned to this or that member at the Whig Club. The meetings of opposition were, if not at Mr. Forbes's house, sometimes at Leinster and more frequently at Charlemont-house. But at none of these houses, much less in a club-room at a tavern, where, latterly, as is always the case, the company was more miscellaneous than could have been wished, did the members undergo this species of marshalling which Mr. Plowden has represented. The opposition must have had the gift

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* Richard Boyle, Earl of Burlington.

Never,

Who plants like Bathurst, or who builds like Boyle." POPE.

† See Mr. Plowden's History of Ireland.

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of prescience, and have known the turn which every debate would take, the particular retort or reply that would be made, the perpetual wanderings from the subject in question, and the necessity, irregular as such deviations were, of sometimes taking notice of them; all this, and much more, must they have been acquainted with before they fixed a speaker in a station which he was invariably to support. No arrangement, therefore, of any question to be spoken to in parliament was ever made at this Whig meeting. Such a representation gives to it, what Mr. Plowden never intended, the air of a Jacobin club at Paris; an institution which it never resembled ; an institution which Lord Charlemont and his friends held in the utmost abhorrence *. Some publications issued from the Whig Club, one especially, in consequence of a contest, in which government entangled itself with the city relative to the rights of the common-council to negative a lord-mayor chosen by the board of aldermen; but this question was before the privy-council, and never came before parliament. The question relative to the catholics, the most important of all, and most connected, not merely with the interests, but with the passions and prejudices of the people, was indeed brought before parliament, and that question the Whig club declined all discussion of. This, surely, was

"The Kit Kat Club once exercised an authority over one of their mem bers, which the Whig Club, I am satisfied, never would have thought of: -When Sir Richard Steele's expulsion from the house of commons was decided on by the opposite party, his friends at the Kit Kat insisted that he should not make his own speech, but such a one as should be dictated to him. Sir R. Walpole instantly spoke, as if in the house, in behalf of Steele, and made an admirable speech, according to Mr. Pulteney's account, who was present. Had the Whig Club, therefore, ever assumed the liberty of arranging any speeches or debates for the house of commons, it seems that it would not have been singular in doing so; and if there was any thing jacobinical, according to the modern phrase, in such a proceed. ing, it was a species of jacobinism that existed long ago."-See Bishop Newton Arce unt of Lord Fatb.

not inflaming the people against the government, but rather, however unjustly, directing popular indignation towards the association itself. Let it be added here, that some of the subordinate resolutions of this society related to bills then! proposed, and often rejected by parliament, such as the place bill, the bill for disqualifying revenue officers from voting at elections, the pension bill, &c. all which are now become the law of the land, though it was repeatedly asserted, in every debate relative to them, day after day, session after session, that they inevitably tended to the separation of this country from England, and would separate both countries in a very few years. Just as Chief Justice Whitshed solemnly assured a jury, and his auditors, that the sole object of the author of a proposal to wear Irish manufactures was to bring in the pretender.

"That some persons, few, very few indeed, were admitted into this society, and inconsiderately admitted, I freely acknowledge. But to fix any other charge on the Whig Association for the reception of such men than either a venial ignorance, or culpable facility and good-nature, it would be necessary to point out the paths of sedition and treason into which it was led by such obnoxious members; or, if you please, into which it led them. It has been said, and truly too, that in parties the tail too often impels the head. Was it so here? They never presumed to influence higher orders of that society. We might as well charge Addison with all the imputed profligacy of Lord Wharton, for both, at a particular period, acted with the same party, and in Ireland one was secretary, and the other viceroy, as attempt to fix an odious suspicion of disloyalty on any class or particular body of men on grounds so utterly untenable."

No. VI.

MR. PELHAM'S LETTER TO GENERAL LAKE, MARCH 5. Dublin Castle, March 3, 1797.

SIR,

"I am commanded by my lord-lieutenant to acquaint you, that, from the information received by his excellency with respect to various parts of the north of Ireland, additional measures to those hitherto employed for preserving the public peace are become necessary. It appears that in the counties of Down, Antrim, Tyrone, Derry, and Donegal, secret and treasonable associations still continue to an alarming degree, and that the persons concerned in these associations are attempting to defcat all the exertions of the loyal and well-disposed by the means of terror; that they threaten the lives of all who shall venture, from regard to their duty and oath of allegiance, to discover their treasons; that they assemble in great numbers at night, and by threats and force disarm the peaceable inhabitants; that they have fired on his majesty's justices of the peace when endeavouring to apprehend them in their nocturnal robberies; that they threaten, by papers, letters, and notices, the persons of those who shalf, in any manner, resist or oppose them; that in their nightly excursions for the purpose of disarming his majesty's loyal subjects, they disguise their persons and countenances; that they endeavour to collect great quantities of arms in concealed hidingplaces; that they have cut down great numbers of trees ou the estates of the gentry, for the purpose of making pikes; that they have stolen great quantities of lead for the purpose of casting bullets; that they privately, by night, exercise in the practice of arms; that they endeavour to intimidate persons from joining the yeomanry corps established by law, in order to resist a foreign enemy; they refuse to

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