PREFACE.

THIS book originated in the train of thought described in the introductory pages, and was begun at the time there specified. For the form which it has taken I am indebted to Boethius; an obligation which perhaps few readers would have suspected, but which I am not the less bound to acknowledge. Farther than this it is only necessary to say, that recent circumstances have produced no change in the author concerning the Roman Catholic Question; no one however can more sincerely wish that timid counsels may be proved by the event to have been wise ones; that government may gain strength by yielding to menaces;

and that the Protestant Constitution of these kingdoms may be secured by abandoning the principles upon which it was established.

And here this Preface would have ended, if a certain Rev. Mr. Shannon, who was three or four times in company with me, three or four and twenty years ago, had not thought proper to affirm in a recent pamphlet, that Mr. Southey expressed to him at that time, "ardent wishes" for the restoration of what he calls "the Catholic rights;" and to assert that such wishes could not possibly have been changed, except from "causes that are liable to suspicion." It is so utterly insignificant what opinions any individual may have advanced upon such a topic, long ago, in the freedom of conversation, at a private table, that I should not think it worth while to bestow any public notice upon such a statement, still less upon the insinuation which accompanies

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it, were there not persons in whom party spirit has so far destroyed the sense of honour and of justice, that any authority however futile is sufficient for them, when the purpose of detraction is to be served by it. But these ardent wishes," and the energy of language in which Mr. Shannon pretends to remember that they were expressed, never had, or could have had any existence, except in the dreams of his own imagination. For it is well known to every one of my early friends, (and few men, as they pass through life, have dropt fewer of their friendships on the way,) that my opinions respecting the Roman Catholic claims to seats in Parliament and certain offices in the state have always been the same. I have ever maintained that the Romanists ought to be admitted to every office of trust, honour, or emolument, which is not connected with legislative power; but that it is against the plainest rules of

policy to entrust men with power in the State whose bounden religious duty it is to subvert, if they can, the Church. These opinions I have uniformly held since the question was brought forward in the first year of the present century; and in these (with leave of Sir James Graham) I expect to continue for the short remainder of my life;..unless that honourable and courteous Baronet, who represents the county of Cumberland, and mis-represents me, should lay before the world such arguments, deduced from his own researches and experience, that I must be enforced in reason and in conscience to submit to them and acknowledge my conviction accordingly... Of the wrongs and sufferings of the Irish people, (which is altogether a different question,) of the condition to which their landlords, their middlemen and their priests have reduced them, and the state of barbarism in which the British

Government, by the grossest neglect of its paramount duty, has suffered them to remain, I have at all times felt, and spoken, as a man who abhors oppression, and earnestly wishes for every possible improvement in the spiritual and temporal condition of his fellow creatures.

Having thus given the most direct contradiction to Mr. Shannon's assertions, I leave him to reconcile his conduct on this occasion with the principles by which our intercourse in society is usually supposed to be regulated, and his insinuations with the charity which as a minister of the Gospel he ought better to have understood and to have practised.

KESWICK, 9th March, 1829.