1828.] The Brunswick Clubs. 563 
fifty to a hundred thousand men. He did rouse the north. But it was 
tu a sense of their duty, as honest and brave men, who found that they 
must rely on no strength but that which God and the Constitution have 
given to every man to defend himself. The north were roused in arms 
—they knew the absurdity of waiting to claim tardy justice ; and, on 
the borders of their province, the men whose fathers had bought the 
Revolution of 1688 with their blood, stood, musquet in hand, to repel 
marauding and murder, under whatever pretext their cottages were to 
be sacked, and their lives sacrificed. 
Then the secret of this boasted heroism was found out ; the Catholic 
army of the faith shrank at once—the brawler at their head trusted for 
his safety to his heels—the popish parliament suddenly discovered that 
the time of glory was not fully ripe, and discountenanced the warrior ; 
and—last and most unexpected result—the dormant Cabinet opened it: 
eyes, discovered that mobs of legislators and apostles, gathered by the 
hundred thousand, from the raggedness, ferocity, and superstition of the 
Trish hovel, were not the safest settlers of the state, and actually ordered 
the seizure of the defeated chieftain. 
Yet even this lagging deference to common sense was due to the 
English Cabinet. The Irish were at the moment involved in an integ- 
change of gracious civilities with the hero, which might have compen- 
sated a less sensitive spirit for the withering of his laurels. The young 
secretary, a nobleman whom we lament to see plunged from his accom- 
plished pursuits’ into the mire of provincial office, was occupying his 
polished paragraphs in elucidating the law to the law-breaker ; and the 
old viceroy was smilingly conducting this model of native graces into the 
presence of his daughters and his wife, when the missive of the Privy 
Council came, like a thunderclap, to break up the whole commerce of 
_ republican and royalist courtesies. 
- __-But one act of resolution, wrung from the reluctant bosom of the 
Cabinet, was enough for one season ; and the blacker offenders are suf- 
fered still to insult the feelings of the country. The popish parliament 
is still furious, and labouring in its vocation of spreading fury through 
the land ; and the whole tribe of the scribblers and spouters are 
hourly pouring out libels on individual character, treasons against the 
connexion of the countries, and open incentives to rebellion, that, in 
less tender times, would have summoned indignant justice to raze the 
walls, burn the journals, and send orators, warriors, and scribblers, to 
_ New South Wales for the term of their forfeited lives. 
Under those circumstances of insolence in the aggressors and supine- 
ness in the defenders of the Constitution, the Protestant community has 
been compelled to take its defence into its own, hands—to assemble, 
and show its numbers—to speak, and declare its principles —and, by its 
firmness and vigour, shew that it is not to be extinguished at the 
mercy of either indolence or bigotry. England, in conformity to her 
character, took the lead, and the British Brunswick Clubs already com- 
rehend a vast multitude of the most honourable, informed, and patriotic 
‘men of the empire. The meeting on Penenden Heath, showed the 
actual superiority of the friends of the Constitution, in public weight 
d in personal respectability. Their numbers refuted, at a glance, the 
perpetual exaggerations of radicalism ; and the myriads that figure in the 
speeches and journals of ebehions cme down into a ludicrous 
