confirm them in these sanguine expectations; and there was hardly
one amongst them who would lose the air of contributing by his
intrigues to the Restoration, which, he took it for granted, would
be brought about, without him, in a very few weeks.

Care and hope sat on every busy Irish face. Those who could write
and read had letters to show; and those who had not arrived to this
pitch of erudition had their secrets to whisper. No sex was
excluded from this Ministry. Fanny Oglethorpe, whom you must have
seen in England, kept her corner in it, and Olive Trant was the
great wheel of our machine.

I imagine that this picture, the lines of which are not in the least
too strong, would serve to represent what passed on your side of the
water at the same time. The letters which came from thence seemed
to me to contain rather such things as the writers wished might be
true, than such as they knew to be so: and the accounts which were
sent from hence were of the same kind. The vanity of some and the
credulity of others supported this ridiculous correspondence; and I
question not but very many persons, some such I have known, did the
same thing from a principle which they took to be a very wise one:
they imagined that they helped by these means to maintain and to
increase the spirit of the party in England and France. They acted
like Thoas, that turbulent AEtolian, who brought Antiochus into
Greece: "quibus mendaciis de rege, multiplicando verbis copias
ejus, erexerat multorum in Graecia animos; iisdem et regis spem
inflabat, omnium votis eum arcessi." Thus were numbers of people
employed under a notion of advancing the business, or from an
affectation of importance, in amusing and flattering one another and
in sounding the alarm in the ears of an enemy whom it was their