; of personal exertion, struggling into a profession, where, by the pious exercise of his talents, he may make the fame, the wealth, the flatteries of this world, so many angel-heralds to the happiness of the next. His precept is a treasure to the poor; his practice, a model to the rich. When he reproves, sorrow seeks his presence as a sanctuary; and in his path of peace, should he pause by the death-bed of despairing sin, the soul becomes imparadised in the light of his benediction! Imagine, Gentlemen, you see him thus and then, if you can, imagine vice so desperate as to defraud the world of so fair a vision. Anticipate for a moment the melancholy evidence we must too soon adduce to you. Behold him by foul, deliberate, and infamous calumny, robbed of the profession he had so struggled to obtain, swindled from the flock he had so laboured to ameliorate, torn from the school where infant virtue vainly mourns an artificial orphanage, hunted from the home of his youth, from the friends of his heart, a hopeless, fortuneless, companionless exile, hanging, in some stranger scene, on the precarious pity of the few, whose charity might induce their compassion to bestow, what this remorseless slanderer would compel their justice to withhold! I will not pursue this picture; I will not detain you from the pleasure of your possible compensation; for oh! divine is the pleasure you are destined to experience :-dearer to your hearts shall be the sensation, than to your pride shall be the dignity it will give you. What! though the people will hail the saviours of their pastor: what! though the priesthood will hallow the guardians of their brother; though many a peasant heart will leap at your name, and many an infant eye will embalm their fame who restored to life, to station, to dignity, to character, the venerable friend who taught their trembling tongues to lisp the rudiments of virtue and religion, still dearer than all will be the consciousness of the deed. Nor, believe me, countrymen, will it rest here. Oh no! if there be light in reason, or truth in Revelation, believe me, at that awful hour, when you shall await the last inevitable verdict, the eye of your hope will not be the less bright, nor the agony of your ordeal the more acute, because you shall have, by this day's deed, redeemed the Almighty's persecuted Apostle from the grasp of an insatiate malice-from the fang of a worse than Philistine persecution. SPEECH IN THE CASE OF CONNAGHTON v. DILLON: DELIVERED IN THE COUNTY COURT-HOUSE OF ROSCOMMON. My Lord and Gentlemen, In this Case I am one of the Counsel for the Plaintiff, who has directed me to explain to you the wrongs for which, at your hands, he solicits reparation. It appears to me a case which undoubtedly merits much consideration, as well from the novelty of its appearance amongst us, as from the circumstances by which it is attended. Nor am I ashamed to say, that in my mind, not the least interesting of those circumstances is the poverty of the man who has made this appeal to me. Few are the consolations which soothe-hard must be the heart which does not feel for him. He is, Gentleman, a man of lowly birth and humble station; with little wealth but from the labour of his hands, with no rank but the integrity of his character, with no recreation but in the circle of his home, and with no ambition, but, when his days are full, to leave that little circle the inheritance of an honest name, and the treasure of a good man's memory. Far inferior, indeed, is he in this respect to his more fortunate antagonist. He, on the contrary, is amply either blessed or cursed with those qualifications which enable a man to adorn or disgrace the society in which he lives. He is, I understand, the representative of an honourable name, the relative of a distinguished family, the supposed heir to their virtues, the indisputable inheritor of their riches. He has been for many years a resident of your county, and has had the advantage of collecting round him all those recollections, which, springing from the scenes of school-boy association, or from the more matured enjoyments of the man, crowd as it were unconsciously to the heart, and cling with a venial partiality to the companion and the friend. So impressed, in truth, has he been with these advantages, that, surpassing the usual expenses of a trial, he has selected a tribunal where he vainly hopes such considerations will have weight, and where he well knows my client's humble rank can have no claim but that to which his miseries may entitle him. I am sure, however, he has wretchedly miscalculated. I know none of you personally; but I have no doubt I am addressing men who will not prostrate their consciences before privilege or power; who will remember that there is a nobility above birth, and a wealth beyond riches; who will feel that, as in the eye of that God to K whose aid they have appealed, there is not the minutest difference between the rag and the robe, so in the contemplation of that law which constitutes our boast, guilt can have no protection, nor innocence no tyrant; men who will have pride in proving, that the noblest adage of our noble constitution is not an illusive shadow; and that the peasant's cottage, roofed with straw and tenanted by poverty, stands as inviolate from all invasion as the mansion of the monarch. My client's name, Gentlemen, is Connaghton, and when I have given you his name you have almost all his history. To cultivate the path of honest industry comprises, in one line, "the short and simple annals of the poor." This has been his humble, but at the same time most honourable occupation. It matters little with what artificial nothings chance may distinguish the name, or decorate the person: the child of lowly life, with virtue for his handmaid, holds as proud a title as the highest-as rich an inheritance as the wealthiest. Well has the poet of your country said that "Princes or Lords may flourish or may fade, A breath can make them, as a breath has made; For all the virtues which adorn that peasantry, which can render humble life respected, or give the highest stations their most permanent distinctions, my client stand conspicuous. An hundred years of sad vicissitude, and, in this land, |