WHEN Ireland had a parliament, there was stateliness in its Viceregal Court and in the condition of its Viceroy. The executive authority had greater influence assured to it by its association with the legislature; and even ceremonial became aggrandised and august, when regarded as a visible exponent of the power by which laws are promulgated and administered. One extract from the Journals of the Irish House of Lords will show what we

mean:

"On Thursday, October 22, in the first year of the reign of George III., &c., &c., King of Great Britain, France, and Ireland, and in the year of our Lord 1761.

"His Excellency George Dunk, Earl of Halifax, Lord Lieutenant General and General Governor of Ireland, being arrayed in royal robes, entered the House with the usual ceremonies of grandeur; the Earl of Drogheda carrying the sword of state, and the Earl of Cavan the cap of maintenance, two noblemen's sons bearing the train of the royal robe. His Excellency the Lord Lieutenant, making a congé to the throne, ascended the same, and seated himself in the chair of state under the canopy; all the lords spiritual and temporal standing, robed, in their places, uncovered, till their lordships took their seats.

"The Lord Chancellor, kneeling, conferred with his Excellency the Lord Lieutenant, and then, standing on the right hand of the chair of state, commanded the Gentleman Usher of the Black Rod to signify to the Commons that his Excellency the Lord Lieutenant commarded their attendance immediately in the House of Peers.

"And the Comm ons being come, were conducted to the bar by the Gentleman Usher of the Black Rod with the usual ceremonies."

Such was the pageantry of old; consistent in its various parts,-pomp and power meetly associated. We have no wish for its revival; because we could not entertain such a wish without inviting the consequences which would follow were it granted. Henceforth we must be contented to see the work of Irish government executed less ostentatiously, but perhaps more effectually, through the Consta

bulary Office, than it was when the Bank of Ireland was a senate house.

The extract we have made from the Lords' Journals is pertinent to our present subject. The Gentleman Usher of the Black Rod named in it was George Montagu, Esq., writer of the reminiscences which the reader will find subjoined; and the period to which his strictures apply was that in which the Viceregal dignity in Ireland was sustained by his cousin, Montagu, Earl of Halifax.

This was a period very memorable in the history of our country -a period, it has been said, of transition, but to part of which the term parturition would seem more applicable; a period in which Ireland was about to produce, rather than to make accelerated progress. Nations, as it were, struggled within her. For half a century she had been a colonywhat was not of the colony in her was unregarded. George III. ascended the throne, and Halifax entered on the viceroyalty, at a time when the energy of the colony, perhaps because of its unchallenged ascendancy, had begun to relax, when life and enterprise began to quicken in the Ireland which called itself a nation, and when great results for evil or for good might be prognosticated.

A House of Commons which had sat for thirty-one years was dissolved by the demise of George II. A tenure of power or privilege protracted thus, over, it may be said, a whole generation of man, could scarcely fail to cause stagnation in the processes of political life. That old adage, "Short reckonings make long friends," may not be strictly applicable to the accounts which are to be settled between parliamentary representatives and their constituents; but an interval of settlement, of such duration as the reign of George II., was likely to dull the sharpness of scrutiny on one side, and to allay the fear of it on the other. Popular feeling becomes inert when it has been so long left in repose. Par liaments may well be brought to feel

that they owe little deference to constituencies with which their settlements of account can be so long postponed. And thus it is very conceivable, where political virtue is prevalent and energetic, a legislature freed from the embarrassment of ignoble apprehensions may be instrumental in conveying blessings to a people who cannot alarm or coerce it; as it is also conceivable that, where self-interest sways, the members of a legislature so disembarrassed may feel concern in no higher purposes than how they can best advance or entertain themselves. In such a state of things, stagnation in the elements of political life will not be the only evil. Individual and social extravagancies and disorders will arise out of that waveless sea. The faculties of mature man in his strength, the exuberant life of youth, must have object and exercise; and if they are not found in things of public interest, such as concern the well-being of states and peoples, passion and vanity will create them, and turn them to evil uses.

But if there was little to praise in the state of Ireland, social or political, at the time of which we write, there were premonitions of change which has since been wrought in our land, and which might have been looked forward to for years with anxious interest. In the nation there were harbingers of a new power and a new life. A Catholic Committee" had been formed in Dublin; Levellers had been heard of in Kilkenny. The Celt was stirring. In the colony, too, there were symptoms of revival: boroughs, as if in anticipation of the coming struggles, in which they were to prove realities, and representatives of genius and resolute will were to man them, began to look up* in the market.

Al

ready Lucas had opened the campaign for freedom, or, at least, had disturbed the repose of irresponsible power, by his efforts to abridge the duration of parliaments; and a generation was growing up in which Grattan, and Flood, and Hutchinson, and Yelverton, and others not unmeet to be associated with them, were preparing for their future distinctions. It was at this pe riod of our history, when light and darkness were about to separate, that

George III. ascended the throne, and Montagu, Earl of Halifax, came as his Viceroy into Ireland and it is of the state of society at this period his Excellency's cousin and Usher of the Black Rod- an associate of the courtiers and wits of England, and a correspondent of Horace Walpole-has left a description in manuscript, under the title "My Expedition to Ireland."

We offer this heretofore unpublished paper to the reader, prefacing it, as a meet introduction, by the author's account of himself:—

"As I have been impartial in giving the character of my ancestors, it will become me to be so in drawing my own at least, I will endeavour it. A little vanity will handle the pencil tenderly, and make the lights and shades fall favourably on the faulty places without spoiling the picture.

"I was of a tender, delicate constitution and turn of mind (and much, therefore, indulged by an affectionate mother), more adapted to reading than exercises, to sedentary amusement than robust play. I had early a passion for poetry; and Cowley, as he was my mother's favourite author, who used to repeat the most humane lines with energy and delight, became mine, and I tasted his works and manner before I knew I did or why I did. At Eton School, I remember, in the fifth form, I presumed to make English verses for my exercise a thing not practised

then.

"Thence I was sent to Trinity College in Cambridge, and entered a gentleman commoner. The gay purple and silver, my great relations, the good friends I made at Eton, and the company I kept when I went home, indisposed me too much to the study of the law that I was destined to by my father and good uncle. Had I properly reflected, I ought to have been as much struck with the figure my ancestors had made in the law, as with the fortune my uncle Halifax had made by his polite literature. From this scene of representation and flattery (for the society was partial to me, and fond of all my family), I was humbled to a student of Coke upon Littleton, to attend bad commons, and associate with dull industrious young men, who

had patience and talents to push their fortunes in a lucrative profession. No; I stole away to the naughty end of the town, like a thief in the night; I found Lord Halifax, Lord Sandwich, Mr. Garrett, Mr. Walpole, Mr. Conway, Lord Euston, birds of too fine feathers for my goose-quill. They were rejoiced to have me with them again. This was too much for my vain romantic turn of mind. I could not bear to be an inferior where I was used to be a companion.

"Here I must declare my opinion to be contrary to the received one, that great schools and great acquaintances are of service to young men. Few can bear the mortification of being reduced; they get too nice a taste, and if they have a prospect of a tolerable subsistence after the death of their parents, they cannot bear the drudgery.

"I was unfortunate in not having an acquaintance in the Temple proper to excite me to take off my fool's coat, and array me in a more seemly and decent attire. The law profession is much slighted, to say no more, by all our female kin, and the practice of it, though, perhaps, laudable, has a tincture of craft not altogether reconcilable to the notions of justice, that young people are apt to be dazzled with, and a certain air of uncourtliness and barbarism quite distasteful to a young spark, with any degree of vanity or partiality to his figure or capacity.

"My uncle died, after I had been a hypocrite for two or three years at the Temple. I am now going to declare a great and most unpardonable fault that I was guilty of. I sold my chambers without acquainting my father, and took lodgings, to be near my sister, not far from him. My father was austere and stern in his deportment; I never was in his favour; so I was sure I had none to lose, but I ought to have declared my intentions. I own I dared not to accost him, nor, indeed, did any of his children without trembling. Had I not had anything to tremble for, but fairly owned I could not study the law, I should have told the truth, but have been never the nearer. 'Twas all allotted for me; my uncle had given me chambers; my ancestors had been judges; I had parts enough to be one too." This would have been my auswer, and 'get you gone back again.'

"I went abroad, with no prospect of improvement, I honestly own, but to avoid my father's anger and inflexibi lity. I staid there between two and three years, the happiest and pleasantest of my life. Some men are born to honour, to riches, to benefit themselves; and others are not. men, too, born indolent, unambitious, whimsical, if you please, and good-fornothing-I am one of these. This is frank enough, surely, to satisfy malice and thrift itself.

Some

"Were all men equally ambitious, bustling and industrious-are there seats enough on the bench for five hundred judges? Can there be bishops for every parish? and so on. There are vessels of honour and dishonour in Fortune's kitchen; I am contented to range as a trencher. Well to return-I came home just before my father died; there was a design of getting me to be with the secretary of Lord Waldegrave, at Paris, but that was never prosecuted; not through my fault. I took a house, in order to help to maintain my sisters in the way they had been brought up, and who were slenderly provided for. Here I lived some years in great tranquillity and happiness.

"There was a vacancy at Northampton, on the death of Mr. Wilmer; and the Comptons very honourably informed Lord Halifax there was a turn due to him by an old composition between the families, upon my father's being given up by the ministry to oblige Lord Wilmington; my cousin as honourably made me an offer to bring me in, and pay half the expense. I was chosen very cheaply, and with

out contest.

"Here again, improper notions and scruples filled my head and influenced my conduct. I felt myself the grandson of John Hampden, and nephew to Algernon Sydney. I should have taken advantage of being second cousin to the mighty Pelhams. I would act according to my opinion (one must not use the word conscience there, no more than in a court sermon): luckily it tallied with my lord's system, who was, virtuously, an opponent of the minister; and for some time I was right to be in the wrong. But when Mr. Pelham and the Duke of Newcastle came into the plenitude of their power on Lord Grenville's dismission, after a transi tory German administration, I could

not induce myself to lean upon Mr. Pelham's arm in the House of Commons, and was regarded by him as a leper. I was applied to to join the party of the Prince of Wales, with his choice retinue, but there I thought I should become one indeed.

"So I continued near three sessions acting as I thought fit, but blamed by all my family. At length I declared my resolution to my cousin, of retiring from an expense that was too great for me, and giving him an opportunity of choosing a fitter person for him, as he had been some time in an employment that he administered with great reputation to himself, and real benefit to the public, and, indeed, no one in that office behaved so well, perhaps no one may. I then quitted my house in town, and came and settled at Grasarth, with my dear sister, whose health had been long declining with a severe illness. Here, if anywhere, I behaved well by my care and attendance on the most deserving of women, by alleviating her melancholy hours, by doing all in my power to prolong so precious a life, or make it more supportable. -three years I should have been completely happy had I the consolation of seeing her easy; but it pleased God to receive her into heaven, who lived free from fault on earth, and put a period to her sufferance.

For

"Since that melancholy time, I believe there has not passed a day that I have not regretted her loss, and felt the insipidity of my home deprived of her. She had the sweetest disposition, the best understanding, and the truest friendship for me I ever experienced, and there never was, from her infancy, an action or thought of hers that displeased me, or could be blamed by the most severe observer. Such a love of truth and integrity of heart, such a courage to profess her opinion and regard for persons and things worthy of regard, that was, if I may so say it, according to my own thinking; for, amongst all my errors, faults, and vices, I had a love for truth and justice, though I have not always followed it. I hope my insignificancy in the world has atoned for deceiving my father. I am sure I never reflect upon it without shame and confusion; I wish it could be deemed an adequate punishment.

"I make this acknowledgment with

sincerity, and would own my other faults and frailties. They may have their alleviations-this has none. This has none, and will torment me whenever I think of it. I desire not to be excused. Can I be pitied? 'Tis all I could wish for."

Such are the confessions of George Montagu, Esq., nephew to the first Earl of Halifax, whose life was written by Johnson, lineally descended from the first Earl of Manchester, who was an eloquent senator and an uncorrupt judge, in the reign of James I., and who, in the honourable discharge of the duty of his office in the succeeding reign, carried off the great seal, when about to be seized on by the republican party, and, at much peril and with great fatigue, rode as its bearer, until he reached the Sovereign's camp, and delivered it to his royal master.

Montagu's censorship of himself is in many respects worthy of attention, and not the less so for its unsuspicious, because unconscious, revelations as to the principles, or rather absence of principle, religious and political, which influenced the characters of gentlemen at the period of our history in which he aimed unsuccessfully at advancement or distinction. His poignant sense of sorrow for the offence against his father; his hope that the "insignificancy" to which he had been condemned would be accepted as atonement for the wrong; his naive apology for permitting recollections of ancestry and hereditary feelings of honour to prevail against temptations to win power and place, by an abandonment of principle; and the marked absence of allusion to any hopes, or fears, or obligations of graver moment than those of what was called "natural religion," remind us how little revelation entered into "the religion of a gentleman" in the days of Horace Walpole and George Montagu, and forbid us to be surprised at the extent to which those days were darkened by infidelity. Well fared it for England, in that season of eclipse, that among the agencies which contributed to the power of her “natural religion," there was in her aristocracy a pride of birth and family" which felt a stain severer than a wound;" and that there was, throughout the masses, a respect for old nobility and old institutions, and a love of old England, which made her whole people patriot.

The altered estate of parties consequent upon the accession of a new monarch had the effect of withdrawing Mr. Montagu from his retirement. Under what influences, and with what views, he emerged into such publicity as an office of state in Dublin Castle opened to its bearer, can be best learned from himself. The enterprise upon Irish ground was, it would appear, his last political venture. The failure of it rankled long in memory, and frequently furnished matter for his pen. The paper which we subjoin, on this irritating subject, is entitled by the writer, My Expedition to Ireland.” It proceeds thus:

66

"Lord Halifax was appointed Lord Lieutenant. I had been on cool terms with him for some years. However, he had humbled himself, after many painful neglects of me, to invite me, with many more of his relations, to dine with him, and was particularly civil. He had been appointed that day. My aunt C- was among the company. I had spoken to her a day or two before, that if her nephew should be nominated, and she would, from herself, move him to take me with him, I would willingly allow her a hundred a-year out of my salary, and wished the place to be Usher of the Black Rod. Lord Fitzwilliam's son had held it- Lord Lanesborough before he was a peer, and always people of family and distinction.

"After dinner we went to cards, and she took my lord aside, and he said he was extremely glad to oblige me. It was the only thing he had at command, and he should be glad to have so near a relation, and an old friend in whom he could confide, with him.

I set out for Dublin, and got safe to Stephen's-green, where my brother, General Montagu, had a house, and lived in great splendour, for so, indeed, he did, and was much respected there, which was a great, if not one of the chiefest, reasons for my undertaking this new scene of life; for by this means I had a sure and independent home, and could live as I pleased. I landed some three weeks before my cousin, and this last name I intended to be my passport through the kingdom. I would not appear his creature, nor the attendant upon favour. If he provided for me, so much the better. If he did not, still the revenue of my place would heal my finances, and put

a few supernumerary hundreds in my purse, and make me easy in my cir cumstances for some years to come. At the worst, I had reason to believe my lord would provide for me as nobly as others in his station had done for more distant relations.

"I was visited by the Chancellor, the Primate, and the chief people of rank in Ireland (for all were willing, for their private ends, to be acquainted with, and civil to, the Lord Lieutetant's nearest relations); the Primate, to imform himself, to recommend himself, to spit his venom; the Chancellor, to drive a dirty trade, and cheat me, which he had done before I came over.

"The Lord Lieutenant came over. We were invited by the lords justices, archbishops, chancellors, speaker, and grandees of the place to meet him at all their dinners, for near three weeks running. Nothing at first more cordial, more communicative, than his Excellency-really more than I desired. I knew enough of the world, to be assured that the person to whom you impart your secrets is either your master or your slave; I loved my freedom and independency too well to be either. It was a painful pre-eminence at best, and a dangerous employment; and when he ever began to disclose his sentiments of persons, or his designs of government, I appeared inattentive or unfit; I would have none of his secrets or confidence. It was too ticklish a commodity for me. I need not have been so cautious. Soon, very soon, that ray of sunshine was obscured. He could shine by himself, and wanted not a paltry star of inferior ray or hue to rise or set with him. He grew cool, took state, and every day hid his diminished light from me.

"He needed not have been so reserved, for I was a true friend to his glory, and wished and strove to augment his lustre, and make every one sensible of his influence and fire.

"The Primate, who was eclisped by it, was always for interposing some cloud, or raising some envious storm, to obscure it. One Sunday - a properer day he could not have chosen to brew a tempest - he invited me, and many more of his Excellency's family, to dine with him. He lived like a spiritual prince. Everything was in profusion, but nothing was elegant nor with propriety, and the rake took the place of the archbishop. Well, we