Father, and av the Son, and av the Holy Ghost. Amin-’” Father," said a gentle voice, as Luke drew the other slide, "I am ever so grateful to you for your kindness to my little one. She's gone up to the Lady Altar; and I never saw her look half so happy before. You must have been very gentle with my dear child."

Luke's heart was swelling with all kinds of sweet emotions. Ah, yes! here, above all places, does the priest receive his reward. True, the glorious Mass has its own consolations, sweet and unutterable. So, too, has the Office,

with its majestic poetry, lifting the soul above the vulgar trivialities of life, and introducing it to the company of the blessed. So, too, has the daily, hourly battle with vice the exhilaration of a noble conflict; but nowhere are human emotions stirred into such sweet and happy delight as when soul speaks to soul, and the bliss of forgiveness is almost merged in the ecstasy of emancipation, and the thrill of determination to be true to promise and grateful to God.

RICHARD LALOR SHEIL.

(1791-1851.)

"IT is curious," says Mr. Justin McCarthy in 'A History of Our Own Times,' ,"how little is now remembered of Sheil, whom so many wellqualified authorities declared to be a genuine orator." Lord Beaconsfield, in one of his novels, speaks of Sheil's eloquence in terms of the highest praise, and disparages Canning. It is but a short time since Mr. Gladstone selected Sheil as one of three remarkable illustrations of great success as a speaker achieved in spite of serious defects of voice and delivery; the other two examples being Dr. Chalmers and Dr. Newman. Mr. Gladstone described Sheil's voice as like nothing but the sound produced by "a tin kettle battered about from place to place," knocking first against one side and then against another. "In anybody else," Mr. Gladstone went on to say, "I would not, if it had been in my choice, like to have listened to that voice; but in him I would not have changed it, for it was part of a most remarkable whole, and nobody ever felt it painful while listening to it. He was a great orator, and an orator of much preparation, I believe, carried even to words, with a very vivid imagination and an enormous power of language and of strong feeling. There was a peculiar character, a sort of half wildness in his aspect and delivery; his whole figure, and his delivery and his voice and his matter were all in such perfect keeping with one another that they formed a great parliamentary picture; and although it is now thirty-five years since I heard Mr. Sheil, my recollection of him is just as vivid as if I had been listening to him to-day."

Richard Lalor Sheil was born Aug. 16, 1791, at Bellevue House, on the river Suir, a little below Waterford.

He received his early education from a French abbé. His father's wish was that he should study for the priesthood, and he was sent to the Jesuit College at Stonyhurst. He, however, decided on the bar as a profession, and in November, 1807, entered Trinity College, Dublin. Becoming a member of the College Historical Society, he took a prominent part in its debates. When only eighteen years of age he delivered his first speech in public at a meeting of the Catholic Association. He gained his degree of B.A. in 1811, and completed his studies for the bar at Lincoln's Inn. In 1813 he returned to Ireland and took a leading part in the work of the Catholic Association.

เ

He now turned his attention to playwriting, and produced 'Adelaide, or The Emigrants,' 'The Apostate,' 'Bellamira,' 'Evadne Montoni,' 'The Fatal Dowry,' and 'The Huguenots.' Though they had every advantage, being produced at the best theaters with prominent actors and actresses in the casts, they never secured any abiding success. In the meantime he had married Miss O'Halloran, niece of the Master of the Rolls.

He realized for his dramatic writings a sum of about £2,000 ($10,000) and then in 1822 turned his attention to his profession once more, and set himself to work up the practice so long neglected. He continued to take an active part in the prevailing political agitation, and wrote a severe criticism on O'Connell, which drew forth a not very flattering retort; but all this was forgiven and forgotten when Sheil gave the laudatory portrait of the Agitator which appeared in the Sketches of the Irish Bar' he was then contributing to The New Monthly Magazine. In the same year (1822) Sheil sustained a great blow in the death of his wife, shortly after the birth of an only child. For some time after this calamity he continued to contribute to The New Monthly Magazine papers on the Irish bar, written in conjunction with W. H. Curran. The 'Sketches of the Irish Bar' were afterward collected and published. An accidental meeting of Mr. O'Connell with Mr. Sheil at the house of a common friend in 1822 led to the former antagonists becoming fast friends in the work of Catholic Emancipation. He hurried about from county to county, and the number and variety of his speeches almost equaled those of the great Agitator himself. To escape for a short time from the constant pressure and turmoil of public life he visited France in 1826. Here his friend, the Abbé Genoude, was so much struck with his description of the state of Ireland that he induced him to contribute to L'Etoile, a paper of which he was editor, a series of anonymous articles on the subject written in French.

In 1830 he received the silk gown, and the same year he adopted the name of Lalor, on the occasion of his second marriage, to the widow of Mr. Power of Gurteen, a lady who inherited large property in the County of Tipperary from her father, Mr. Lalor of Crenagh. Sheil now resolved to attempt to enter Parliament. After some disappointment and a defeat in contesting Louth, the Marquis of Anglesea offered him the seat for Milborne Port, which he accepted. His first speech in the House of Commons was made on the Reform Bill in March, 1831, and it produced a favorable impression.

At the next general election, in 1832, he was returned for the County of Tipperary, which he continued to represent in Parliament till 1841, when he became Member for Dungarvan. His wife's fortune rendering him entirely independent of his profession, he now retired from the bar and devoted himself exclusively to a political career. His speeches on 'Repeal of the Union,' in 1843, Turkish Treaties' in the same year, Orange Lodges' and the Church of Ireland' in 1839, the Corn Laws' in 1842, Vote by Ballot' in 1843, and Income Tax' in 1845, were among his most important political utterances. In 1839 he was made Vice-President of the

Board of Trade.

He opposed the movement for Repeal in 1840, but did so under the conviction that it could effect no good end, and that the House of Commons would not concede it. In 1841 he was appointed Judge Advocate-General, a more remunerative office than the one which he held in the Board of Trade.

With the beginning of the year 1844 the O'Connell trial came on. Sheil ably defended John O'Connell, son of the Liberator and in his

speech exposed the system of jury-packing, bringing forward as a sample of this great injustice the case of Charles Gavan Duffy and his notable trial for an article in the Belfast Vindicator.

In 1845 the death of his only son at Madeira, where Mrs. Sheil and he had gone for the sake of the young man's health, threw him into a deep melancholy, and for a time he could not be induced to leave the island. Ultimately, in 1846, he was prevailed upon to return to England, and again to enter upon public life. On the accession of Lord John Russell to power, Sheil was appointed Master of the Mint, a state office usually held by members of the Cabinet. He went to Florence in 1850 as Ambassador at the court of Tuscany, where he spent some very happy days, surrounded by treasures of art, in which his poetical nature delighted. His familiarity with French enabled him to mix in society, where his wit and geniality were highly appreciated. In that city he died, May 25, 1851. His remains, which were conveyed to Ireland in a ship of war, are interred at Long Orchard in Tipperary. Several editions of Sheil's 'Speeches' with a memoir by T. MacNevin have appeared; also Memoir and Speeches of Richard Lalor Sheil,' by W. Torrens M'Cullagh, two vols., London, 1855.

IRELAND'S PART IN ENGLISH ACHIEVE

MENT.

From the Speech in the House of Commons in 1837.

Wherever we turn our eyes, we see the national power dilating, expanding, and ascending; never did a liberated nation spring on in the career that freedom throws open towards improvement with such a bound as we have; in wealth, in intelligence, in high feeling, in all the great constituents of a state, we have made in a few years an astonishing progress. The character of our country is completely changed; we are free, and we feel as if we never had been slaves. Ireland stands as erect as if she had never stooped; although she once bowed her forehead to the earth, every trace of her prostration has been effaced.

But these are generalities; these are vague and abstract vauntings, without detail. Well, if you stand in need of specification, it shall be rapidly, but not inconclusively, given. But hold: I was going to point to the first law offices in the country, filled by Roman Catholics; I was going to point to the second judicial office in Ireland, filled by a Roman Catholic; I was going to point to the crowds of Roman Catholics, who, in every profession and walk of life, are winning their way to eminence in the walks that

lead to affluence or to honor. But one single fact suffices for my purpose: Emancipation was followed by Reform, and Reform has thrown sixty men, devoted to the interests of Ireland, into the House of Commons. If the Clare election was a great incident; if the Clare election afforded evidence that Emancipation could not be resisted, look at sixty of us (what are Longford and Carlow but a realization of the splendid intimations that Clare held out?), look, I say, at sixty of us-the majority, the great majority, of the representatives of Ireland-leagued and confederated by an obligation and a pledge as sacred as any with which men, associated for the interests of their country, were ever bound together.

Thank God, we are here!

I remember the time when the body to which I belong was excluded from all participation in the great legislative rights of which we are now in the possession. I remember to have felt humiliated at the tone in which I heard the cause of Ireland pleaded, when I was occasionally admitted under the gallery of the House of Commons. I felt pain at hearing us represented as humble suppliants for liberty, and as asking freedom as if it were alms that we were soliciting. Perhaps that tone was unavoidable: thank God, it is no longer necessary or appropriate. Here we are, in all regards your equals, and demanding our rights as the representatives of Britons would demand their own. We have less eloquence, less skill, less astuteness than the great men to whom, of old, the interests of Ireland were confided; but we make up for these imperfections by the moral port and national bearing that become us. In mastery of diction we may be defective; in resources of argument we may be wanting; we may not be gifted with the accomplishments by which persuasion is produced; but in energy, in strenuousness, in union, in fidelity to our country and to each other, and, above all, in the undaunted and dauntless determination to enforce equality for Ireland, we stand unsurpassed. This, then, is the power with which the noble lord courts an encounter, foretells his own victories, and triumphs in their anticipation in the House of Commons. Where are his means of discomfiting us? To what resources does he look for the accomplishment of the wonders which he is to perform? Does he rely upon the excitement of the re