1831.} Affairs in General 319 



M'hen they have no longer any thing to put in them ? We insert a cor- 

 roborative return from a distinguishing place, which we suppose ought 

 to be undone. It is from Staffordshire : — 



" The goods received into the Potteries last year, and dispatched from them, 

 amounted_to upwards of 106,000 tons : the first price of the raw materials used in 

 their manufacture was but 155,000/., and that of the same materials wrought up 

 ■was 1,300,000/., exhibiting an amount of wealth created, of labour paid, and 

 profit actually reaped, hardly falling short of one million and a quarter sterling." 

 To a statement so melancholy we have nothing more to add. We sup- 

 pose the platters must have been given away. 



Field preaching is lifting up its sacred visage, and shaking its stiff 

 locks among us again. Irving is said to have lately " taken the field," 

 somewhere about St. Pancras, and to have greatly amused the rabble. 

 He has soon found a rival. A few Sundays ago, at an early hour, a 

 young saint, named Rachael Smithson, about 22 years of age, belonging 

 to a sect called " the United Sisters," preached a sermon in the open 

 air, at the foot of Putney-bridge. In the course of her exhortation she 

 stated that she had suffered very much on account of her religious zeal ; 

 that about three years ago she was in imminent danger of losing her 

 life, occasioned by the oversetting of a pleasure boat, in which she was 

 sitting with an aged mother. In this extremity she offered up a fervent 

 prayer for help, and promised that if she and her parent's lives were 

 preserved she would serve her God as long as she livid. Since that time 

 she had given herself wholly to the work of the ministry. And so 

 having made her vow, she performs it by talking nonsense, chattering 

 about matters of which she can have no possible knowledge, and making 

 grave things ridiculous, and sacred things rmintelligible, for the rest of 

 her days. Thus runs the world away — and thus will Rachael Smithson 

 run, till she either runs in debt, and from that into a prison, or a mad- 

 house, or the Regent's canal. How much happier and wiser if she had 

 made a vow to mend her stockings ! 



Ireland is as full of " agitation" as ever ; the agitation now, however, 

 not consisting in speeches made in the tea-houses and taverns of Dublin, 

 but in shootings, burnings, and plunderings throughout the whole 

 popish portion of the country. The special commissions have done 

 nothing — they have tried, and hanged, and transported, but the moment 

 the judges were taking their departure, with congratulations that they 

 had " quieted," and so forth ; the angry spirit of the people, the burnings 

 were behind, before them, and on each side of tliem. The magistrates 

 of the west of Ireland have just applied to have some hundreds of square 

 miles of those " quieted" districts put under martial law. The Lord-Lieu- 

 tenant has replied by " regretting that the special commissions, procla- 

 mations, &c. have had no better effect ;" but promising new activity of 

 the same kind, which will have the same consequences. In the mean 

 time, though the grand agitator is in London, where he is not idle in his 

 vocation, another agitator, to whom O'Connell is a dwarf in influ- 

 ence, is starting into action ; the double-tongued J. K. L., a man 

 capable of great evil from his priesthood, though in all other points con- 

 temptible ; a pitiful writer, and altogetlier an ignorant and trifling crea- 

 ture ; and for this character we may safely ap])eal to the tiresome, and 

 infinitely washy tirade which he has just issued against Lord Farnham, 

 }»is " Letter" to that noble person, being such as would actually degrade 



