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their representative, to carry out their views, and not his own? Nothing of the kind can be imputed to Burke. When, six years before, in 1774, they had nominated him, without his leave, and then, by deputation, begged of him to allow them to put him in, free of all election expenses, upon his acceding he gave them distinctly to understand his position and their claims upon him in words of singular wisdom.1 "Certainly, gentlemen, it ought to be the happiness and glory of a representative to live in the strictest union, the closest correspondence, and the most unreserved communication with his constituents. Their wishes ought to have great weight with him, their opinions high respect, their business unremitted attention. It is his duty to sacrifice his repose, his pleasures, his satisfactions, to theirs; and, above all, ever, and in all cases, to prefer their interest to his own. But his unbiassed opinion, his mature judgment, his enlightened conscience, he ought not to sacrifice to you, to any man, or to any set of men living. These he does not derive from your pleasure; no, nor from the law and constitution. They are a trust from Providence, for the abuse of which he is deeply answerable. Your representative owes you not his industry only, but his judgment; and he betrays instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion." In these terms of great political wisdom he emancipated himself from the narrow selfish views sought to be thrust upon him by his constituents, the people of Bristol. In 1780, six years later, he vindicates the course he had taken, in despite of their representations.

"I did not obey your instructions. No: I conformed to the instructions of truth and nature, and maintained your interests against your opinions with a constancy that became me. A representative worthy of you ought to be a person of stability. I am to look, indeed, to your opinions; but to such opinions as you and I must look to five years hence. I was not to look at the flash of the day. I knew that you choose me in my place, along with others, to be a pillar of the state, and not a weathercock on the top of the edifice, exalted for my levity and versatility, and of no use but to indicate the shiftings of every popular gale."2

The second offence, in the eyes of his constituents, was his vigorously supporting a bill for the relief of the Catholics, then much oppressed by the severity of the laws. "The Irish," said Dr. Johnson, at his time, "are in a most unnatural

1 Prior's "Life of Burke," p. 172, &c.

See the entire of page 180 (Prior's "Life of Burke") for more thoughts, most powerfully expressed on the duties of an M.P. to his constituents.

state, for we see there the minority prevailing over the majority. There is no instance, even in the ten persecutions, of such severity as that which the Protestants of Ireland have exercised against the Catholics. Did we tell them we have conquered them, it would be above board; to punish them by confiscation and other penalties, is monstrous injustice."

This was worthy of the great Dr. Johnson, and of his friend Edmund Burke. Such liberality, however, was very uncommon in those days. Burke lost his seat for Bristol because of his enlightened policy, so much in advance of that intolerant age. Nor can we be surprised thereat. The greatest popular leader that appeared in Ireland from the days of Hugh O'Neill to Daniel O'Connell was Dean Swift. He was the ruling spirit of the first half of the eighteenth century in Ireland. Now, Swift lent all the sanction of his great name, power, and abilities to support and enforce these atrocious penal laws. John Mitchell has put this fact with his accustomed graphic force. The sixth chapter of the first volume of his "History of Ireland" should be read by all desirous to know the practical action of the penal code. I extract only the passage relating to Swift :-"He was a country clergyman, in Ireland, during all the period of the enactment of the whole penal code, both in William's reign and in Anne's: he was himself witness to the ferocious execution of those laws, and the bitter suffering and humiliation of the Catholic people under them; yet neither then nor at any other time, not even in the full tide of his popularity as a patriot,' did he ever breathe one syllable of remonstrance or of censure against those laws." In his "Letter concerning Sacramental Test," as quoted by Mitchell, Swift writes:"The Popish priests are all registered, and without permission (which I hope will not be granted), they can have no successors." Let us hear another authority on this point.

Swift and the Penal Laws-" The letter of these laws, it may be said, was not in force. It was not because it could not, but their spirit was not inactive or without result. It kept the people from wealth; it kept the people from education; it kept the people from the means of education; it broke their spirit, bowed them down into submission, and went far to extinguish in them for ever the life of independent manhood— this is the truth, and there is nothing to be gained in denying or concealing it. Read the pamphlets and speeches of those times, and you cannot but feel to what social degradation the Catho1 See Burke's defence of his conduct in speech at Bristol (Duffy), pp. 156 to 167, all very fine and noble.

Burke was re-elected for Malton, when Bristol had turned him out.

VOL. IX.

8

lics of Ireland were reduced. Swift, in his political and polemical writings, always refers to the condition of the Catholic Irish as that of the lowest and the most hopeless submission. And this was such as Swift approved: such as from principle and inclination, he would counsel, confirm, and perpetuate. For the physical destitution he beheld around him, he had a sort of savage pity; he would willingly have relieved the distressed, and he was zealous for the general prosperity of the country; but if a proposal were possible, in his day, to extend civic freedom to the Catholics of Ireland, or even religious toleration, Swift would have been the first to denounce it with all the fierceness of his temper, and with all the vigour of his genius."1

Whether the Dean was an Irishman or not, we leave to the critics. Thackeray denies that he was Irish, and assigns as his reason the most complimentary thing he ever said or wrote of this country :-" He (Swift) insulted a man as he served him, made women cry, guests look foolish, bullied unlucky friends, and flung his benefactions into poor men's faces. No; the Dean was no Irishman. No Irishman ever gave but with a kind word and a kind heart."

Certain it is that Swift was a very great power in Ireland. He bound the middle and trade classes together so firmly that they were able to defy the English Government in its jealous malignity against Irish trade. His "Drapier Letters" evoked a spirit of union and intelligent resistance to unjust aggression upon trade rights that dare not be defied or despised. But Swift was no advocate of Catholic claims. The masses of the Irish nation might remain enslaved, and their priests be exterminated with Swift's sanction, because they were Catholic; and so the intolerant bigotry, which was always a mark of the Protestant Church as a body, from the time of the learned Ussher to the present day—that bigotry warped and stained the genius of Swift, of Berkeley, Bishop of Cloyne, of Lord

1 Giles's Lectures, pp. 86, 87.

Berkeley's Intolerance of Catholics.-"He lived at a time when the greatest political crime recorded in our history was deliberately perpetrated-the enactment of the Penal Code against his Catholic fellow-countrymen-the code justly described by Macaulay as having polluted the Irish Statute Book by intolerance as dark as that of the Dark Ages. But he never uttered a word against its unexampled and vindic ive cruelty. He was a member of the Irish Parliament for seventeen years, when the same atrocious policy, of which we are still reaping the bitter fruits, was in the ascendant. But he never seems to have urged the relaxation of Penal Laws that were a reproach to human nature, and a legalized assault on the welfare, and even the existence, of the Irish race."-Edinburgh Review, p. 40, July, 1872.

Sir Walter Scott was one of the most amiable of men, yet Lockhart is compelled to write thus of him:-" He, on all occasions, expressed manfully his belief that the best thing for Ireland would have been never to relax the strictly political enactments of the penal laws, however harsh these might appear. Had they been kept

Charlemont, and of many other celebrated Irishmen of the last century. This, then, is the first great claim that Burke has upon our love for his memory. He watched over our rights as Irishmen ; he denounced our persecutions as Catholics; and he gained the first instalment of our emancipation from oppression for conscience' sake.

(To be continued.)

LOUISE LATEAU.-PART II.

HER LIFE AND ITS WONDERS.

"Mirabilis Deus in Sanctis Suis."-Ps. Ixvii. 36.

§ 1. INTRODUCTORY.

HAVING seen so much of Louise Lateau it was impos

sible not to wish to know something more about her. A hundred questions arose in my mind, as to the details of her life, and the history of those extraordinary phenomena of which I had witnessed but a single manifestation. I was delighted, therefore, to learn that an eminent Belgian physician, Doctor Lefebvre, Professor of Pathology and Therapeutics in the University of Louvain, had been called upon professionally to study the physical condition of the ecstatic girl; that he had conducted a long and patient investigation of the case, extending over eighteen months; and that the results of this investigation he had recently given to the world in a Volume, which bore all the marks of calm deliberation and scientific accuracy.

Few men could be found better qualified than Doctor Lefebvre to conduct an inquiry of this kind. He had been,

in vigour for another half century, it was his conviction that Popery would have been all but extinguished in Ireland."-Life of Scott (abridged), pp. 579, 580. Hence, O'Connell's eldest brother refused Scott a stag-hunt at Killarney in 1824-5, and served him quite as he deserved from a Catholic.

Burke was offered £500 by the Irish Catholics for his defence of them. He declined the offer, and advised any money they collected to be spent in getting up schools at home, when the Government would allow of such. The last interview that he had with the Ministers of the Crown, was occupied by Burke in seeking to protect the Irish Catholics from tyranny and oppression.-All useless.-See Letter of Burke in 1797 to Right Rev. Dr. Hussey. It is very interesting.—Fitzwilliam edition of Burke's Correspondence, vol. iv., p. 450.

for fifteen years, at the head of the medical staff of two lunatic asylums; and for the same period, had been engaged in giving lectures on mental diseases. Thus he had been led, as he tells us, by his duties as well as by his tastes, to explore both practically and theoretically the whole range of nervous affections. For the purpose of his inquiry, he was allowed free access to Louise at all times, even without previous notice; and he was requested by the ecclesiastical authorities, under whose sanction he acted, not to shrink from any test or experiment which the severe exigencies of modern science might seem to demand. In the execution of his task Doctor Lefebvre did not trust to his own judgment alone. To make sure that he was not deceived in his observation of the facts, and to guard himself against one-sided views, he generally took with him, on the occasion of his visits to Louise, some other witness of professional eminence. In this way, during the course of his investigation, he submitted her case to upwards of a hundred Physicians. Furthermore, it is worthy of notice that he entered on the inquiry himself with a strong feeling of distrust. "A suspicion," he says, "generally prevailed that this was some pious fraud, which the first glance of science would be sufficient to unmask: and I frankly confess that I was completely under the sway of this prejudice, when I entered, for the first time, the humble cottage of Bois d'Haine."

A memoir carefully elaborated by so competent an authority, under such favourable circumstances, could not but be regarded as singularly authentic. I eagerly sought out Doctor Lefebvre's book, as soon as I heard of it, and having procured a copy, with some difficulty, as it happened unfortunately to be out of print, I read it with great pleasure and intense interest. It furnished an answer to most of my questions, and dispelled some light clouds of doubt which had been floating in my mind. Possibly these doubts and questions may have occurred to my readers as well as to myself; and a short account of the facts, laboriously verified and recorded by Doctor Lefebvre, will not be uninteresting.

§ 2. HER LIFE.

Louise Lateau was born at Bois d'Haine, in the house where she now lives, on the thirtieth of January, 1850. Her father, who was then twenty-eight years of age, was a plain labouring man, employed at a neighbouring foundry. He is represented as having been upright and industrious, frugal in his way of life, robust and vigorous in his physical constitution. Before the end of three months, however, from the birth of

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