her a certain flavour, but because they remind her that her
neighbours want it:--a feeling laughable in a priestess, shameful in a
priest; venial when it withholds the blessings of a ham, tyrannical
and execrable when it narrows the boon of religious freedom.

You spend a great deal of ink about the character of the present prime
minister. Grant you all that you write--I say, I fear he will ruin
Ireland, and pursue a line of policy destructive to the true interest
of his country: and then you tell me, he is faithful to Mrs. Perceval,
and kind to the Master Percevals! These are, undoubtedly, the first
qualifications to be looked to in a time of the most serious public
danger; but somehow or another (if public and private virtues must
always be incompatible), I should prefer that he destroyed the
domestic happiness of Wood or Cockell, owed for the veal of the
preceding year, whipped his boys, and saved his country.

The late administration did not do right; they did not build their
measures upon the solid basis of facts. They should have caused
several Catholics to have been dissected after death by surgeons of
either religion; and the report to have been published with
accompanying plates. If the viscera, and other organs of life, had
been found to be the same as in Protestant bodies; if the provisions
of nerves, arteries, cerebrum, and cerebellum, had been the same as we
are provided with, or as the Dissenters are now known to possess;
then, indeed, they might have met Mr. Perceval upon a proud eminence,
and convinced the country at large of the strong probability that the
Catholics are really human creatures, endowed with the feelings of
men, and entitled to all their rights. But instead of this wise and
prudent measure, Lord Howick, with his usual precipitation, brings
forward a bill in their favour, without offering the slightest proof
to the country that they were anything more than horses and oxen. The
person who shows the lama at the corner of Piccadilly has the
precaution to write up--_Allowed by Sir Joseph Banks to be a real
quadruped_, so his Lordship might have said--_Allowed by the bench of
Bishops to be real human creatures_.... I could write you twenty
letters upon this subject; but I am tired, and so I suppose are you.
Our friendship is now of forty years' standing; you know me to be a
truly religious man; but I shudder to see religion treated like a
cockade, or a pint of beer, and made the instrument of