le,
had brought the question of the disestablishment of the Irish Church, in
the mind of Mr. Gladstone, within the domain of "practical politics"! By
parity of reasoning, one would think, the reception of the heir-apparent
and his wife in Ireland ought to have taken that question out of the
domain of "practical politics."

The Prince of Wales, it is known, brought away from this visit an
impression that the establishment of a prince of the blood in Ireland,
or a series of royal visits to Ireland, would go far towards pacifying
the relations between the two Islands. Mr. Gladstone thought his
Disestablishment would quite do the work. Events have shown that Mr.
Gladstone made a sad mistake as to the effect of his measure. The pains
which, I am told, were taken by Mr. Deasy, M.P., and others to organise
hostile demonstrations at one or two points in the south of Ireland,
during a subsequent visit of the Prince and Princess, would seem to show
that in the opinion of the Nationalists themselves, the impression of
the Prince was more accurate than were the inferences of the Premier.

There is nothing froward or formidable in the aspect of Dublin Castle.
It has neither a portcullis nor a drawbridge. People go in and out of it
as freely as through the City Hall in New York. There is a show of
sentries at the main entrance, and in one of the courts this morning the
picturesque band of a Scotch regiment was playing to the delectation of
a small but select audience of urchins and little girls. A Dublin mob,
never so little in earnest and led by a dozen really determined men,
ought to be able to make as short work of it as the hordes of the
Faubourgs in Paris made of the Bastille, with its handful of invalids,
on that memorable 14th of July, about which so many lies have passed
into history, and so much effervescent nonsense is still annually talked
and printed.

The greater part of the Castle as it existed when the Irish Parliaments
sat there under Elizabeth, and just before the last Catholic Viceroy
made Protestantism penal, and planned the transformation of Ireland
into a French province, was burned in the time of James II. The Earl of
Arran then reported to his father that "the king had lost nothing but
six barrels of gunpowder, and the worst castle in the worst situation in
Christendom."

Here, as at Ottawa, a viceregal dinner-table is set off by the neat
uniforms and skyblue facings of the aides-de-camp and secretaries. Fo