188 Notes of the Month on [Fxs. 
another, and slip through life as quietly and uselessly as any casino- 
hunter of them all. 
To a soft-souled personage like my lord, the life of popish champion-_ 
ship was abominable; it was, at once, dulness and defilement—trou- 
blesome and base compared with his caléche during the morning, and 
his picture-fancying till dinner, and his quadrilling and private thea- 
tricals till midnight. He accordingly fled his “ beloved country,” left 
the “ glorious cause” to take its chance, and alike left her “ illustrious 
champions” to the fate that, if there be any virtue in law, or any vigour 
in government, will overtake them, great and small, before his dilettante 
lordship’s return. 
For this timely fugitation—the only act of his life that implies the 
possession of brains—he has fallen under the lash of the popish parlia- 
ment ; and its acting executioner, in the absence of his chief, has laid the 
scourge on as handsomely as a fugitive lord could wish. Yet it must 
be owned that Lord Shrewsbury did all that he could before he escaped. 
He published a book, as thick as ever was penned by peer ; and, though 
he might be guiltless of having written a line of it (the work being pro- 
bably compiled by the priests harboured under his roof), he yet had the 
fortitude to issue it with his name. The work, thereupon, went instantly 
down to the lowest depths of forgetfulness. He next made a speech: 
nothing could be more similar, in compound and fate, to the book. 
What more could man do? He accordingly, having put down ten 
pounds, as the worthy contribution of a man of forty thousand pounds 
a year, to the rent that was “to save his country and his religion!” 
ordered his coach for Italy, and is now serving her “ glorious cause” in 
leoking at Punchinello, and in buying bargains of old pictures. 
But the Dublin radicals will not let him sigh and smoke away his 
soul in peace ; and their flagellation has extorted from him a succession 
of sorrowings, in the shape of a letter nearly as long as the noble per- 
sonage himself. The letter is, as might be expected, nonsense from 
beginning to end—finished, for sentimental perusal, with a little of that 
whining about “ lost privileges” (the lost*privileges of a dandy !), and 
the asseveration of an eternal passion for his long-suffering and hard- 
drinking country, which will last till—he gets to Calais, and be remem- 
bered as honestly at Rome as every other duty that this generous absentee 
has thought proper to have forgotten. 
At Rome let him stay. The society of shuffling picture-dealers, dan- 
glers about decayed belles, yawning Opera-loungers, and the whole name- 
less and contemptible mixture of vicious and unmarked life that makes 
Rome the sink of Europe, may be the fittest for his capacities, as it is 
evidently the most congenial to his tastes. We must lament that chance 
should have thrown the means of doing good, that his income implies, 
into hands that can make no better use of them than by a wretched spirit 
of shrinking from all the honourable and humane offices of an English 
landholder. But there iet him go; we are better without men like him. 
Let him, a thousand miles off, talk of wishing well to the country that 
he has deserted ; let him propitiate, by paltry flattery, Shiel, who lashed 
him, and who must scorn this attempt to qualify his deserved correction ; 
let him kiss the Pope’s toe, who must despise a man hiding his head 
in perpetual exile ; let him linger out his life in cabarets and casinos, 
spend his rents and his years abroad, and, with his last breath, play © 
Scrub to the old Lady of Babylon ! 
ee 
