se they secure to 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