religious as any nation in Europe; I know no greater blessing; but it carries with it this evil in its train, that any villain who will bawl out, “The Church is in danger!” may get a place and a good pension; and that any administration who will do the same thing may bring a set of men into power who, at a moment of stationary and passive piety, would be hooted by the very boys in the streets.  But it is not all religion; it is, in great part, the narrow and exclusive spirit which delights to keep the common blessings of sun and air and freedom from other human beings.  “Your religion has always been degraded; you are in the dust, and I will take care you never rise again.  I should enjoy less the possession of an earthly good by every additional person to whom it was extended.”  You may not be aware of it yourself, most reverend Abraham, but you deny their freedom to the Catholics upon the same principle that Sarah your wife refuses to give the receipt for a ham or a gooseberry dumpling: she values her receipts, not because they secure to her a certain flavour, but because they remind her that her neighbours want it:—a feeling laughable in a priestess, shameful in a priest; 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 more than horses and oxen.  The person who shows the lama at the corner of Piccadilly has the precaution to write up—Allowed by Sir Joseph Banks to be a real quadruped, so his Lordship might have said—Allowed by the bench of Bishops to be real human creatures. . . .  I could write you twenty letters upon this subject; but I am tired, and so I suppose are you.  Our friendship is now of forty years’ standing; you know me to be a truly religious man; but I shudder to see religion treated like a cockade, or a pint of beer, and made the instrument of a party.  I love the king, but I love the people as well as the king; and if I am sorry to see his old age molested, I am much more sorry to see four millions of Catholics baffled in their just expectations.  If I love Lord Grenville, and Lord Howick, it is because they love their country; if I abhor . . . it is because I know there is but one man among them who is not laughing at the enormous folly and credulity of the country, and that he is an ignorant and mischievous bigot.  As for the light and frivolous jester, of whom it is your misfortune to think so highly, learn, my dear Abraham, that this political Killigrew, just before the breaking-up of the last administration, was in actual treaty with them for a place; and if they had survived twenty-four hours longer, he would have been now declaiming against the cry of No Popery! instead of inflaming it.  With this practical comment on the baseness of human nature, I bid you adieu!

LETTER III.

All that I have so often told you, Mr. Abraham Plymley, is now come to pass.  The Scythians, in whom you and the neighbouring country gentleman placed such confidence, are smitten hip and thigh; their Beningsen put to open shame; their magazines of train oil intercepted, and we are waking from our disgraceful drunkenness to all the horrors of Mr. Perceval and Mr. Canning . . . We shall now see if a nation is to be saved by school-boy jokes and doggrel rhymes, by affronting petulance, and by the tones and gesticulations of Mr. Pitt.  But these are not all the auxiliaries on which we have to depend; to these his colleague will add the strictest attention to the smaller parts of ecclesiastical government, to hassocks, to psalters, and to surplices; in the last agonies of England, he will bring in a bill to regulate Easter-offerings: and he will adjust the stipends of curates, when the flag of France is unfurled on the hills of Kent.  Whatever can be done by very mistaken notions of the piety of a Christian, and by a very wretched imitation of the eloquence of Mr. Pitt, will be done by these two gentlemen.  After all, if they both really were what they both either wish to be, or wish to be thought; if the one were an enlightened Christian who drew from the Gospel the toleration, the charity, and the sweetness which it contains; and if the other really possessed any portion of the great understanding of his Nisus who guarded him from the weapons of the Whigs, I should still doubt if they could save us.  But I am sure we are not to be saved by religious hatred, and by religious trifling; by any psalmody, however sweet; or by any persecution, however sharp; I am certain the sounds of Mr. Pitt’s voice, and the measure of his tones, and the movement of his arms, will do nothing for us; when these tones and movements, and voice brings us always declamation without sense or knowledge, and ridicule without good humour or conciliation.  Oh, Mr. Plymley, this never will do.  Mrs. Abraham Plymley, my sister, will be led away captive by an amorous Gaul; and Joel Plymley your firstborn, will be a French drummer.

Out of sight, out of mind, seems to be a proverb which applies to enemies as well as friends.  Because the French army was no longer seen from the cliffs of Dover; because the sound of cannon was no longer heard by the debauched London bathers on the Sussex coast; because the Morning Post no longer fixed the invasion sometimes for Monday, sometimes for Tuesday, sometimes (positively for the last time of invading) on Saturday; because all these causes of terror were suspended, you conceived the power of Bonaparte to be at an end, and were setting off for Paris with Lord Hawkesbury the conqueror.  This is precisely the method in which the English have acted during the whole of the revolutionary war.  If Austria or Prussia armed, doctors of divinity immediately printed those passages out of Habakkuk, in which the destruction of the Usurper by General Mack, and the Duke of Brunswick, are so clearly predicted.  If Bonaparte halted, there was a mutiny or a dysentery.  If any one of his generals were eaten up by the light troops of Russia, and picked (as their manner is) to the bone, the sanguine spirit of this country displayed itself in all its glory.  What scenes of infamy did the Society for the Suppression of Vice lay open to our astonished eyes! tradesmen’s daughters dancing, pots of beer carried out between the first and second lesson, and dark and distant rumours of indecent prints.  Clouds of