there may not be a time when it is necessary to suspend the execution even of such Laws as are most essential to the Liberties of the People? 2. Whether this is such a time or no? (London, printed for J. Baker and T. Warner, at the Black Boy, in Paternoster Row, 1716, pp. 40.), and which is noticed in Boyer's list, has infinitely more both of Defoe's style and manner of treating a subject than the other pamphlet. I entertain no doubt that it was written by him, though it has never hitherto been attributed to him; and it is far from being unlikely that his recollection may have deceived him and that he may have thought that Boyer's praise applied to this pamphlet, written on the same side, and not to the other. It

will be observed that Defoe does not give the title of the pamphlet, and that he does not notice that it was attributed by Boyer to Addison; which he would scarcely have omitted doing if he had written his letter with Boyer's words before him, in which also the term "inconsistency" is not used. Such is my solution of the difficulty, which unexplained would throw a new, and certainly a very unfavourable light on Defoe's character as a pamphleteer and politician.

James Crossley.

ARTHUR O'CONNOR.

From the French recent papers we learn that Arthur O'Connor, one of the prominent actors in the Irish Rebellion of 1798, has just closed his prolonged life at his residence, the Château de Bignon, near Nemours (Seine et Marne) in France. When, in 1834, by permission of the government of Lord Grey, he and his accomplished wife were in this city (Cork), with the view of disposing of his inherited and not confiscated property, in order to invest the produce in France, I was almost in daily intercourse with them; and, from my recollection of the lady's father, the Marquis de Condorcet, a distinguished mathematician, but better known as the biographer and ardent propagator of Voltaire's infidel principles, as well as the zealous partisan of the Revolution, though finally its victim, I was always a welcome visitor. O'Connor, whom Bonaparte had raised to the rank of General of Division, equivalent to that of General in full in our service, being next to the degree of Marshal, told me that the disunion and personal altercations of the Irish Legion engaged in the service of the then republican France had deservedly and utterly estranged and disgusted the French successive rulers, particularly Napoleon, in whose triumphs they consequently were not allowed to participate as a national body. The rancorous duel between two officers, McSweeny and Corbet, both from Cork, had made a deep impression on the great soldier, and the Legion was disbanded. Having inquired from O'Connor whether he did not intend to publish the events of his variegated life, he told me that he was preparing the narrative; but, on mentioning to his wife that he had made this acknowledgment, she immediately called on me with an earnest request that I would dissuade him from doing so. She did not explain her motive, and I only promised to avoid the future renewal of the subject in our conversations. As yet, whatever preparations he may have made, the press has not been resorted to; though, if in existence, as may be presumed, the work, or its materials, will not, most probably, be suffered to remain in closed and mysterious secrecy. The Memoirs, for so he entitled it, cannot fail to be most interesting; for he was a man of truth, and incapable of misrepresentation, though, of course, liable to misconception, in his recital of events; nor can it be denied, that a history, in any degree worthy of the theme—that is, of the Irish Rebellion, is still unpublished.^[1] Whatever objection may have prevented the publication during his life, none, I should suppose and hope, can now be urged after his death, which, singularly enough, in an article devoted to him in the Biographie Universelle, I find as having occurred so long since as 1830. His son, too, is there represented as the husband of his own mother! the writer, with other confusions of facts, having mistaken Arthur for his elder brother, Roger O'Connor, father of the present eccentric Feargus, M.P. It is thus, too, that the great vocalist Braham is in the same voluminous repository stated to have died of the cholera in August, 1830, though, several years subsequently, I saw him in hale flesh and blood; but the compilation, valuable, it must be admitted, in French biography, teems with ludicrous blunders on English lives, which, in the new edition now in state of preparation, will, I hope, be corrected. Even the articles of Newton, though by Biot, and of Shakspeare and Byron by Villemain, are not much to their credit, particularly the latter, in which the national prejudices prominently emerge.

O'Connor, after having for sixteen years occupied apartments in the house of an eminent bookseller and printer, Monsieur Renouard, in the Rue de Tournan, leading to the Luxembourg, and the only street that I remember, now sixty years since, had a flagged footpath in that, at present, embellished metropolis, purchased his late residence, the Château de Bignon, with the proceeds of his paternal estates sold here, as previously stated, in 1834. The purchase was made from the heirs of Mirabeau, who was born in that mansion, and not in Provence, as generally supposed, because that southern province was the family's original seat. The great orator's father, distinguished, per antiphrasim, as "l'Ami des hommes," for he was the most unamiable of men, had acquired and removed to the castle so called, in order to approach the royal court of Versailles. The renowned son's bursts of eloquence still, I may say, resound in my ears, dazzling and entrancing my judgment, as Lord Chatham is reported similarly to have affected his hearers. Yet my old friend Vergniaux's genuine oratory and reasoning power struck me as far superior; and I can well believe that Chatham's son's were to those of his father, which his contemporary, Hume, no incompetent judge, and doubtless his

hearer, by no means exalts, though the effects on his parliamentary audience appear to have been so extraordinary. "At present," writes Hume (Essay xiii.), "there are above half-a-dozen speakers in the two houses, who, in the judgment of the public, have reached very nearly the same pitch of eloquence, and no man pretends to give any one a preference over the next. This seems to me a certain proof that none of them have attained much beyond mediocrity in this art." Hume's Essays first appeared in 1742, when the elder Pitt was, indeed, young in parliament; but he survived till 1776, during which interval Chatham's fame reached its culminating point. Yet, in all the ensuing editions, the author never thought it necessary to modify his depreciation of British eloquence.

O'Connor, it is said, published his father-in-law Condorcet's collective works; but whether the edition of 1804 in 21 volumes is meant, I cannot determine, though I know no other; nor does this contain his mathematical writings. While outlawed in 1793 with the Girondist faction, he evaded, from October to March, 1794, the revolutionary search, when he poisoned himself, unwilling, he said, in some verses addressed to his wife, the sister of Marshal Grouchy, further to participate in the horrors of the period, though he had been most instrumental in preparing the way for them. He chose, however, the better side, in his conception, of the proposed alternative or dilemma:

Madame