that at a future trial I would have to apprehend a similar wrong from a Ministry of whom you were one. But so it stands. Mitch el, Martin, and O'Doherty, who have been already tried and convicted, were tried by juries on which there was not so much as one Catholic. And a similar one is predestined for me a week hence. Now, I am curious to know what you, Richard Sheil, the Catholic champion (of whom I have still certain boyish recollections not altogether effaced), think of this business? It will save you the embarrassment of weighing all the ingenious excuses for putting aside the particular Catholics in my case, which doubtless will be forthcoming at the proper time, if you consider the question now in the abstract, when the jury is not sworn, nor the panel so much as arrayed. For I forewarn you that it is determined to allow no Catholic on my jury—not one; no more than if John Keogh and all succeeding Catholic agitators had never existed. This is the fact we have to deal with in this nineteenth year after Emancipation.
"Perhaps a poor prisoner under the ban of the angry law has no right to trouble your repose with disagreeable questions. I trust, however, you will not think so; for I forewarn you that I promise myself an answer now or at some other time and place, when it will be still less agreeable to be questioned on this matter. Pack they my jury never so securely, you and I will meet again, where a thousand echoes will take up my question and repeat it in every tongue that has syllabled the name of Richard Sheil."
Mr. Macaulay, who was now a Cabinet Minister, had been emphatic against jury-packing four years earlier. The first volumes of his "History of England" were just published, in which he made execrable the jury-packing under James II. I thought it would be reasonable and pleasant to make the great Whig enemy of injustice compare what was done by Tories in England in the seventeenth century and by Whigs in Ireland five generations later. I enclosed the panel prepared for my trial, and bade him remark that it had practically the sanction and authority of the philosophical historian of the Jacobite era, who was also a Cabinet Minister. I was somewhat known to Mr. Macaulay; in 1843 he had done me the favour of sending me the three volumes of his essays with a
