1831.] Affairs in General. 435 



Rounder in the waist than Bacchus, 

 Rides little Jeffrey on a jackass. 



Let the Tories now attack us; 

 Tooth and nail let Wetherell sack us ; 

 Let indignant Sadler thwack us 

 Here's little Jeffrey on his jackass. 



Loss of place and pence may rack us, 

 Not a soul on earth to back us ; 

 To the devil the king may pack us 

 Welcome Jeffrey, Whig, and jackass ! 



Now and then coincidences start up, that seem the oddest, and yet the 

 most natural things in the world : 



" The mace carried before the officer of the Royal Society, at the queen's 

 drawing-room, was presented to that body by King Charles the Second, 

 having previously belonged to the House of Commons summarily dissolved 

 by Oliver Cromwell. 



The relic of an extinguished Parliament the fall of a dynasty an illus- 

 trious reformer and the year 1831 ! We leave the subject to poetry, 

 and the prediction to time. 



The news from Ireland is invaluable to all the lovers of conciliation, 

 liberalism, and the power of sending papists to the " Grand Council of 

 the nation/'' The papist bill has issued in a demand for the separation 

 of the countries. The panacea of peace has been followed instantly by 

 the spreading of midnight murders and robberies, and the outcry of the 

 country gentlemen for placing the counties under martial law ; and the 

 new policy, which was to produce plenty in every cabin, is answered by 

 the immediate prospect of a famine : 



" In the barony of Costello, county of Mayo, distress still continues without 

 any prospect of mitigation. It appears that while several families are at the 

 present moment quite destitute of food, many hundreds, with a view of econo- 

 mizing their scanty store, are dragging on a wretched existence on one meal 

 in twenty-four hours, and that the entire stock of potatoes in the whole dis- 

 trict will be consumed early in May." 



This is tolerably well for one proof. Another list states that 40,000 

 people, in a single corner of the most popish of the provinces, where all 

 was loyalty, liberty, and rejoicing, at " being freemen once more, and 

 not Helots, bondsmen, slaves/ 7 and so forth, are now actually begging 

 from door to door. Another promises that, before a month is over, for 

 every thousand starving now there will be a hundred thousand. Subscrip- 

 tions have been attempted to be raised. In Ireland they always fail ; for 

 the Irish know each other, and know that the money of charity is sucked 

 into the pocket of the priest, or the orator of rebellion. In England, large 

 sums of money were raised scarcely more than two years since, which 

 conciliated the peasantry neither then nor now. We should like to know 

 how Ireland is to be either fed, or conciliated. 



Exclusive studies are sometimes unfortunate things. Who could 

 doubt that Spencer Perceval had been for the last forty years reading 

 John Bunyan ? 



" He would illustrate his view of the question by a reference to the structure 

 of the human eye. He would suppose two medical men one, whom he 



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