another religion perpetually succeeding? I ask him his opinion of a
jobless faith, of a creed which dooms a man through life to a lean
and plunderless integrity. He knows that human nature cannot and
will not bear it; and if we were to paint a political Tartarus, it
would be an endless series of snug expectations and cruel
disappointments. These are a few of many dreadful inconveniences
which the Catholics of all ranks suffer from the laws by which they
are at present oppressed. Besides, look at human nature: what is
the history of all professions? Joel is to be brought up to the
bar: has Mrs. Plymley the slightest doubt of his being Chancellor?
Do not his two shrivelled aunts live in the certainty of seeing him
in that situation, and of cutting out with their own hands his
equity habiliments? And I could name a certain minister of the
Gospel who does not, in the bottom of his heart, much differ from
these opinions. Do you think that the fathers and mothers of the
holy Catholic Church are not as absurd as Protestant papas and
mammas? The probability I admit to be, in each particular case,
that the sweet little blockhead will in fact never get a brief;--but
I will venture to say, there is not a parent from the Giant's
Causeway to Bantry Bay who does not conceive that his child is the
unfortunate victim of the exclusion, and that nothing short of
positive law could prevent his own dear, pre-eminent Paddy from
rising to the highest honours of the State. So with the army and
parliament; in fact, few are excluded; but, in imagination, all:
you keep twenty or thirty Catholics out, and you lose the affections
of four millions; and, let me tell you, that recent circumstances
have by no means tended to diminish in the minds of men that hope of
elevation beyond their own rank which is so congenial to our nature:
from pleading for John Roe to taxing John Bull, from jesting for Mr.
Pitt and writing in the Anti-Jacobin, to managing the affairs of