2 The Dublin Public Dinner, to Lord Morpeth. [Jan. 
cule upon him as long as his existence £dds to the hereditary silliness of 
the name of Carlisle. 
Lord Morpeth is not yet of age—is utterly undistinguished by any 
evidence of ever being beyond the common and unnoted grade of the 
crowd, who pass from school to college, and from college to the clubs ; 
is, of course, without any political experience, knowledge or rank ; is, in 
short, neither more nor less than any of the thousand and one boys who 
ramble through Bond Street all day, are asked out to dance quadrilles in 
the evening, run down to the country in the Autumn, and run up to 
town in the Spring. Yet this nobody, is the individual whose arrival at 
the Irish side of the Channel is enough to put all the dignified energies 
of papistry in motion, sends cards showering through the country, and 
gathers from every lurking-place of liberalism, every liberal of every tar- 
nished dye of morals, manners, and loyalty. 
In the chair of this banquet of the Friends of Civil and Religious 
Liberty—how those words would sound in the ears of their lord and 
master, the pope—sat, for a warning to his class, and for his own future 
sorrow, the Duke of Leinster. By what fatality is it, that the blood of 
the Fitzgeralds is always to be found in those situations. Wise, or weak, 
brave .or poltroon, the ostentatious scatterers of wealth, or its beggarly 
and contemptible hoarders, the generations of the Fitzgeralds have 
always made the same unhappy figure. Among them all, from the days 
of the first holder of the name, there has not been one less fitted to 
flourish at the head of anything than its present possessor ; not one less 
calculated by public ability, by public consideration, by the generous 
employment of wealth in public objects, by individual acquirement, or 
by popular manliness and manners, to lead a party, much less a people ; 
yet the family destiny is upon him—he must bustle and blunder to the 
last—display his natural deficiencies in the most glaring point of expo- 
sure, and, abandoning the seclusion that is the true place for the scale of 
his capacities and virtues, force himself into the unnatural publicity — 
which to him, like sun-shine to the mole, is double blindness. 
Men like this are not made to be taught by circumstances ; but a less 
ardent volunteer in the cause of “ Popish Civil and Religious Liberty,” 
might have been startled by the sight of its supporters. On this occasion 
there met—to use the language of the popish journals, “ the elite of the 
aristocratic, &c. rank, worth, and intelligence of Ireland.” This elite con-— 
sisted of Lord Cloncurry! Lord Rossmore! the Earl of Bective! Lord 
Howth! with the Marquis of Clanricarde! and the Marquis of West- 
mieath, as Vice-presidents ; every man of whom has figured in the news- 
papers. But we leave them to enjoy their fame, and come to their per- 
formance on this day of triumph. 
The Duke of Leinster’s first toast was a plagiarism from the lips of | 
the old Spafields’ Chairmen—*<'The King, and may he never forget 
his own declaration, that he holds his Crown as a trust for the benefit of © 
his People.” Who can feel a moment’s doubt of the nature of a meetin 
prefaced by such a toast? The insinuation is plain. But to such toast=_ 
masters and the rabble that echo, hate, and laugh at them in th a 
4 
same breath, we reply, that their wish is an insolent superfluity ; tha 
the King has never forgotten the objects for which the crown was placed” 
upon the brow of his ancestors ; that he will never forget them ; and that i 
long after radicalism and liberalism, and the whole paltry affectation of = 
public spirit in the breasts of the miserable hunters of popularity, are ; 
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