venial when it withholds the blessings of a ham, tyrannical and
execrable when it narrows the boon of religious freedom.

You spend a great deal of ink about the character of the present
prime minister. Grant you all that you write--I say, I fear he will
ruin Ireland, and pursue a line of policy destructive to the true
interest of his country: and then you tell me, he is faithful to
Mrs. Perceval, and kind to the Master Percevals! These are,
undoubtedly, the first qualifications to be looked to in a time of
the most serious public danger; but somehow or another (if public
and private virtues must always be incompatible), I should prefer
that he destroyed the domestic happiness of Wood or Cockell, owed
for the veal of the preceding year, whipped his boys, and saved his
country.

The late administration did not do right; they did not build their
measures upon the solid basis of facts. They should have caused
several Catholics to have been dissected after death by surgeons of
either religion; and the report to have been published with
accompanying plates. If the viscera, and other organs of life, had
been found to be the same as in Protestant bodies; if the provisions
of nerves, arteries, cerebrum, and cerebellum, had been the same as
we are provided with, or as the Dissenters are now known to possess;
then, indeed, they might have met Mr. Perceval upon a proud
eminence, and convinced the country at large of the strong
probability that the Catholics are really human creatures, endowed
with the feelings of men, and entitled to all their rights. But
instead of this wise and prudent measure, Lord Howick, with his
usual precipitation, brings forward a bill in their favour, without
offering the slightest proof to the country that they were anything