1829.] The Dublin Public Dinner to Lord Morpeth. 5. 
influence of the time on the discretion of the orator. We are perfectly 
aware that Mr. Shiel’s sagacity, half an hour before, would have 
suffered him to leap into the Liffey, as soon as plunge into the slough 
of his Pennenden speech. However, fate is not to be evaded, and in he 
dashed, to pluck up his drowned honour by the locks. His catastrophe 
was inevitable, and he since remains at the bottom. 
We can scarcely condescend to notice the compound of feeble sophisms, 
and monstrous mis-statements through which this speaker dabbled on to 
the conclusion, that popery and freedom were compatible. 
“Existence saw him spurn her bounded reign, 
And panting Time toiled after him in vain.” 
We all know that there have been periods in the history of national 
evil, when the evil has been too bitter to be borne—when human nature 
was roused from its habitual submission by the necessity of the effort, and 
men broke the strongest chains, and burst upwards from the deepest 
dungeons, without caring whether pope or prince were the tyrant. God 
has not made man to be for ever crouching under the heel of an oppres- 
sor, even though he wear the triple crown. 
England, a country whose destination from many an age seems to 
have been the great office of receiving and holding the principles of Civil 
Liberty for the future good of mankind, affords the most memorable ex- 
amples of this noble repulsion of the human heart against the spirit of 
the popedom ; of this native and generous consciousness that her laws 
_ “and crown were not.given to be the toy and the plunder of a foreign 
_ pretender to universal power ; of this proud and saving development of 
the vigour that was yet to make her the refuge of true religion and true 
freedom in the day of the perplexity of nations. 
| It is undeniable that every advance to liberty was tantamount to a 
struggle with Rome. It is equally undeniable that the whole foundation. 
___ of British freedom, which the orator boasts to have been laid under the 
_ auspices of popery, was laid before popery was known in England. And 
it is as clear as either of those principles, that every attempt to erect an 
_ additional right on this foundation, was opposed by the direct and furious 
_ indignation of Rome. 
__ Alfred is the orator’s first example. But what suggestion of Alfred’s 
reform arose from popery ? That extraordinary man found his king- 
dom paralyzed by the corrupt religion inflicted on it by Rome. He 
found the ancient Saxon vigour decayed, and, probably alike for the 
ishment of Romish idolatry, and for that renewal of national strength 
yhich often arises from national adversity, England in the hands of the 
orthern invaders. After desperate years of battle, he broke the power 
the Danes, and knowing that his ancestors had been powerful through 
ee institutions, he re-established the Saxon assemblies of representa- 
ves, the laws, courts of justice, and jury. But what lawyer, not a 
pish delegate, would venture to say that this restoration of the spirit 
d power of England had any thing to do with the Pope ; or that its 
rmission to exist did not result altogether from the remoteness of Eng- 
ind from the seat of the papacy, the contempt of Rome for a depend- 
ency looked on by the haughty Italians as completely barbarian, and 
_ the common papal presumption, that when England should arrive at 
that degree of importance which made it worth being fleeced or trampled 
on, a wave of the pontifical hand would scatter its rights and institutions 
+ 
