dishonesty, faction, intrigue, and vacillation, seemed to embody all that was best in politics, to provide a way of safety for the country, and to promise an escape from the vanity of political pretenders, and from the selfishness of party wire-pullers. When that Ministry fell, all his hopes for his country were gone : he saw nothing before him but the continued triumph of those who, as he deemed, pursued only narrow, petty, and factious aims. In the days of his power, he had half despised reward because he knew how it was obtained, and half sought it, as a means of influence, and because his sarcastic insight taught him how insincere was the commonplace assumption of indifference to personal advancement. When the Deanery of St. Patrick's fell to him, he regarded it as a recompense ill-proportioned to his deserts, and as a provision uncongenial to his taste : but he accepted it as a refuge after the wreck of all his hopes.
He came to Ireland, then, filled with that hatred for her soil which made him, in spite of the accident of Irish birth, ever cling to his English parentage : disappointed with the result of all his efforts, his weapon of satire sharpened by the bitterness of political strife , and hopeless of the future. The one element of his genius which now overshadowed all others was its sarcastic force: and that sarcasm found abundant food amidst his new surroundings. The glaring wrongs of Ireland: the contemptuous indifference of English statesman: the pettiness of the circle round him : the waste, the misery, the oppression — all these burned into a spirit only too ready to lash itself into rage, and to wreak its anger on the nearest victim. During all these earlier years of Irish banishment, he was in constant correspondence with those in England whose genius was the one redeeming feature of the time to him, but who, like himself, looked on the new world around them with profound disgust.
The first subject that drew him back to activity was the wrong suffered by Ireland. He saw her commerce crippled, her finances
