ermented into a
splendid blunder. The culprit, who ought to have been tried at the Old
Bailey, was elevated into a national criminal; and the assembled
majesty of the legislature was summoned to settle a case in the lapse
of years, which would have been decided in a day by "twelve good men
and true," in a box in the city. It was in this ardour of spirit that
he adopted the Romish cause. No man knew more thoroughly the
measureless value of an established church, the endless, causeless,
and acrid bitterness of sectarianism, and the mixture of unlearned
doctrine and factious politics which constitute their creeds. Against
Popery in power, Italian, German, or French, in the days of Louis
Quatorze, he would have pledged himself on the ancestral altar to
perpetual hostility. But the romance of popery in Ireland struck his
fancy; he saw nothing but a figure drooping with long travel in
pursuit of privilege; a pious pilgrim, or exhausted giant. Sitting in
his closet at Beconsfield, he pictured the downcast eyes and
dishevelled hair; the limbs loaded with fetters, and the hands help up
in remediless supplication. He grew enamoured of his portraiture, and
without waiting a moment to enquire whether it in the slightest degree
resembled the reality, he volunteered the championship of Irish
popery. His son was commissioned to represent him in this disastrous
connexion. But Richard, once on the spot, was instantly and completely
undeceived. Instead of his "fair penitent," he found a brawny,
bustling Thalestris, wild as the winds, and fierce with the
intoxication of impunity. The mild temperament of the plodding
missionary was baffled, burlesqued, and thrown into fever: he laboured
with humble diligence, but laboured in vain; he talked of
conciliation, while popery talked of conquest; he proposed concession,
while faction shouted triumph; and, when he suggested the suppression
of the old and sharp acerbities of the sects, he was answered by
universal laughter.

Burke, awakened at last to the truth of things, recalled him, in a
long despatch, concluding in these words--"If you find the Roman
Catholics _irreconcilable with each other_, and that government is
resolved to side with them, or rather, to direct those who _would
betray the rest_, then, my clear opinion is, that you ought not to
wait the playing the _last card of a losing hand_. It would be
disreputable to you. But when you have given your instruction to the
_very few_ in wh