demands of stranger and of friend. A | Prince of Wales desired Fox to utter single but noteworthy instance throws light upon the whole field of our observation. The movement for a reform of the representation, which had stirred the young blood of the House of Commons, touched a responsive chord in the quarter where our parliamentary system had sunk to its lowest stage; where depression had become normal, and passed into degradation. County elections in Scotland were decided upon polls in which the aggregate number of votes did not exceed a score; but in the Scotch burghs there were no elections at all. The town councils chose themselves, and also chose the members of Parliament apportioned to them by the Union, so that the wine of municipal as well as political life was altogether upon the lees. An effort was made to obtain some redress from Parliament. Grey, Lambton, Wilberforce were invited to undertake the championship of their wishes, and declined. When a deputation waited upon Fox, he pleaded his ignorance of the constitutional law of Scotland! and advised them at the same time to apply to the over-driven manager of Drury Lane. Sheridan undertook the case; and, in the years from 1787 to 1792, brought it twelve times before the House of Commons. His modest demand, for a reform merely municipal, was ruthlessly rejected. The man, who was thus chosen to hew the wood and draw the water for his party, was also the chosen instrument for its most delicate operations. He it was who found brains for the Prince of Wales by supplying him, in the difficulties entailed on him through his marriage and his debts, with the letters which he had to write, and which required the utmost care and skill united with promptitude. Of his patriotism Sheridan gave splendid proof when he energetically sustained, and even committed himself by advising, the ministry at the critical period of the mutiny at Portsmouth and the Nore. When a most formidable difficulty arose, in consequence of the falsehood which the in Parliament respecting his marriage to Mrs. Fitzherbert, it was to Sheridan that recourse was had to discover an expedient to meet the case, by using language which would soothe the feelings of that injured woman without any fatal prejudice to the position of others. He shared, as it seems, the errors of his party, in regard to the coalition, the commercial treaty with France, and the Regency; but, if he was a partner in these errors, there is no reason to suppose he was their author. He does not come down to us like Fox, as having taught that France was our natural enemy, or that the Prince ot Wales had an absolute right to the Regency upon the incapacity of George the Third. The grand occasion, on which Sheridan is found in occupation of a separate political position, is that of the Irish Union. Mr. Fox, completely united with Sheridan in condemning the enactment of such a Union in defiance of the sense of the Irish people, found in secession from the House of Commons a convenient cover for his indolence, and thereby of course diminished, both in numbers and in credit, the small residue of those who stood to their guns. At their head was that true, and brave, and also wise politician, whose position on the page of the final his torical record we are now considering. He resolutely fought the battle through, supported by minorities, which were, numerically, little better than ridiculous. But the insignificance of his resistance as measured by a merely external criterion is the true measure of its moral grandeur. His work would have been an easy one in comparison, had he been sustained by such volleys of cheering as sounded forth from the crowded benches of the ministerial side. The truest test of a statesman's worth is to be sought and found in the conduct he pursues under the pressure of adversity, and no statesman can better stand the application of that test than Sheridan on the occasion of the Irish Union. It must be admitted that the case of of obligation to anybody. It is possible that his immersion in the affairs or the theatre may have been deemed an objection. But, if this was so, ought he not to have had an opportunity given him of removing the impediment, by finding, if he could find them, means for releasing himself from that connection? There is no parallel case in our political history; and, happily, it may now be assumed with confidence that there never will be. Sheridan, as we now have it before us, | accepted it without the smallest sense appears to give some additional pungency to the question how it was that he did not rise higher upon the ladder of official preferment. I remember conversing, forty or more years ago, with Lord Lansdowne (the Lord Henry Petty of All the Talents) on the subject of the traditional imputation on the Whigs, that they would allow no one to enter the Cabinet unless qualified by some nobility of origin. I observed that the name of Burke was the mainstay of this imputation. Lord Lansdowne replied that Burke was an impossible colleague in a Cabinet, by reason of his fractious and ungovernable temper. But there was no mention of the case of Sheridan; who presented, together with Fox and Lord North, an example of gentleness and equability never surpassed in that best of all schools for temper, the House of Commons. I am at a loss to conceive what, had the case of Sheridan been put to him, would have been Lord Lansdowne's answer. He was a most fair-minded and appreciative man. Why then was Sheridan, who stood so high in all the great public qualities of a politician, always relegated to a secondary position? Gambling ought not to have disqualified him more than Fox. But, much to his credit, he never gambled, and he condemned the abominable practice. With respect to wine, it may be said that there was nothing in his habits down to the latest of his opportunities of taking office (in 1806) which could constitute so much as a pretext for it. The cause could not lie in his debts; his trespasses upon others were trifling, in comparison with the liabilities of other foremost men. In the early days, the presence of a Burke excluded might have been a bar to the inclusion of Sheridan in the Cabinet; but Burke was dead and gone long before the latest and best of these occasions. He felt it acutely; a worse man would have felt it vengefully. It is no wonder that, when accepting the office of treasurer to the navy, he should have written to Fox and said that he It is impossible to close this rapid and slight sketch without one word at least on Mrs. Sheridan. One of the strong titles of Sheridan to the favor of posterity is to be found in the warm attachment of his family and his descendants to his memory. The strongest of them all lies in the fact that he could attract, and could retain through her too short life, the devoted affections of this admirable woman, whose beauty and accomplishments, remarkable as they were, were the least of her titles to praise. Mrs. Sheridan was certainly not strait-laced; not only did she lose at cards fifteen and twentyone guineas on two successive nights, but she played cards, after the fashion of her day, on Sunday evenings. I am very far from placing such exploits among her claims on our love. But I frankly own to finding it impossible to read the accounts of her without profoundly coveting, across the gulf of all these years, to have seen and known her. Let her be judged by the incomparable verses' (presented to us in these volumes) in which she opened the floodgates of her bleeding heart at a moment when she feared that she had been robbed, for the moment, of Sheridan's affections by the charms of another. Those verses of loving pardon proceed from a soul advanced to some of the highest Gospel attainments. She passed into her rest when still under forty; peacefully absorbed, for days before her departure, in the contemplation of the coming world. 1 Vol. ii. pp. 138-40. From The New Review. AN IRISH PEASANT-WOMAN. Mrs. Quinn has been a great traveller. Born in a suburb of Cork, about the year 1826, she has been that voyage, common to the poor Irish, "over the green fields to Americay," and up and down the Union, and back again to Ireland, and to England and Scotland, before she settled down to end her days at the foot of the Dublin Mountains. She has yet the remains of the beauty that made the comfortable IrishAmerican shopkeeper, in whose service she was, fall in love with and marry her. Dark grey eyes, rosy cheeks, regular features, and hair black as the raven's wing, with a wave in it; she still has these, though she is an old woman. Her age shows itself by an increasing fragility of look, a sharpening of the delicate features, and a hectic heightening of color that makes one fear on every visit to the old country, that this glimpse of a faithful old friend may be the last. She is honesty and faithfulness incarnate; and her strong vein of poetry reveals itself in her devout attachment to old loves and old friends, and the scenes of her youth, and the old ballads she remembers. Her attachment to Pat Quinn, who promoted her from the kitchen to a place at his side in shop and parlor, was very pathetic. One of my earliest memories of her was her coaxing me to save an occasional newspaper or storybook for Pat to read. "Pat Quinn is a scholar and a gentleman," she used to say proudly. As long as I remember her, she earned her living, and his till his days were ended, as a field-worker on my father's farm, with occasional jobs of house-work thrown in. Little by little she came to be more about the house and less in the fields, till in these latter days she spends all her time in the farmhouse kitchen, except when she takes a day or two off work, and spends it like a lady, sitting up in bed reading a story-book. Her cottage is over the fields, and she has one companion, her cat Tibby. Tibby is a handsome, nearly white tom-cat, just out of kittenhood, and very timid and graceful. To my mind, Tibby redeems the whole cat race from the imputation of being selfish and luxurious. He comes seeking his mistress every night at a certain hour. He is too fearful of the dogs to venture into the kitchen, or nearer than the window-sill. The window looks on the orchard, and Tibby knows that a stout gate intervenes between him and the enemy. If his mistress goes home in good time, he comes to meet her in the fields; if not, he appears suddenly at the kitchen window like a substantial cat-ghost and, rearing himself on his hind paws to his full length, looks his eloquent appeal to her to come home. Tibby has his responsibilities. His mistress visits the village most evenings and returns rather elevated. She is popular, and meets many friends who "stand treat." Lest this disclosure alienate sympathy from my heroine, let me add that she is never more than genially elevated. It is at such times she will sweep her skirts about her, and perform you a real Irish jig with its multitude of steps and paces. Or it is then that she will remember the ballads of her youth, and sing them for you with emotion. During these performances Tibby watches her with a mingled anxiety and reprobation on his expressive countenance. "Look at Tibby now!" his mistress will cry with belated consideration: "Sure he's sayin', Come home, you foolish ould womau, and don't be makin' a show of yourself. Sure my heart's broke wid ye, so it is.'" She says "Tibby has more civility than a child." She is somewhat impatient of children, her chief experience of them being limited to the trick-playing urchin. The tale of how Mrs. Quinn came to her humble ending after her fine coup of marrying Pat Quinn, is rather a remarkable one. It might make the text for a superior sermon on Irish improvidence. After they had kept the shop for a number of years, being childless, the idea came to them of realizing their bit of wealth and returning to Ireland. Ireland draws her children back to her as the sea draws the children of sailors, a moist winter day; she was never too fagged to do up Pat Quinn's shirt or to perform a thousand and one offices for him. If she could beg a rose for him to stick in his vest on Sundays, her felicity was at its height. As for Pat's attitude towards her, it was one of kindly commiseration. He rewarded | her by reading to her scraps from his newspaper, or by imparting to her his opinions about various matters in a long-winded monologue, full of those polysyllables the peasant loves. with a heart-hunger consuming and irresistible. They sold out their property, but before taking passage for Ireland they made a grand tour of the principal cities of the United States. This made a hole in their little fortune, but instead of being ultra-thrifty afterwards, they sailed as saloon passengers to Queenstown, and on arrival made a considerable stay in Cork. After this they visited England and Scotland, and then, coming back to Ireland, they put up at a hotel and lived in glorious idleness till every stiver was gone. Mrs. Quinn pretends to regret this extraordinary improvidence if she is lectured upon it, but in her heart I am sure she never regrets it. Better a year or two of piping life and then work and poverty, than a long monotonous stretch of well-to-do years, unenlivened by even a spree. Pat Quinn never came to hard work. After they had settled down in their county Dublin village, he assumed the state of an invalid. He generally kept to his bed where, well propped up and wearing a very clean white shirt, he read the newspapers, and thought over knotty | problems in his mind, drawing couclusions which he was ready to impart to the chance visitor. The neighbors were agreed that "Mr. Quinn,"-he always kept the genteel title was a very knowledgeable man, though the more cynical described him as a play boy and a great ould schamer, lyin' in his bed while that foolish ould woman earned the bit and sup for him." 66 | It was amusing to see the pair together. When I made a call on Pat he used to discuss politics, religion, and society, in a very stately manner, with much waving of his hands and a toplofty air, for all the world like an old hedge-schoolmaster. His wife meanwhile, squatted by the hearth, would listen to the oracle with a look of worship directed upon his grizzled old face. She would break out, "Isn't Pat Quinn a beautiful scholar?" to which he would respond, "Hould your tongue, you foolish ould woman!" and then to me: "I'm always tryin' to insinse somethin' into her foolish ould head. But there: faymales have no more head than a hin, an' Hannah's no worse than her sec." She was Hannah Daly before she was Hannah Quinn, and had ballads made to her handsome face in Cork. She boasts that she had once an offer of marriage from "a rale young gintleman:" the romance of it pleases her; he was the son of the house where she was in service. "And why didn't you marry him?" we used to ask. "Indeed thin, 'why didn't you marry him?" (with sarcastic emphasis) ""Twould be a quare day for me to go marryin' a wid no more sinse than to go lookin' after Hannah Daly." Never had any one more loyal service, and more delightedly rendered. Mrs. Quinn used to declare openly that it was an honor, so it was, to earn for Pat Quinn. She admired his fastidious-gintleman! an' he a little bit of a bo-o-oy, ness in the matter of his linen and such things immensely, and the very tax it put upon her made her esteem Pat Quinn a more precious belonging. She was never too fagged-not after a day's haymaking in summer, or of following the reaper on a blazing August day, or harder still attending the threshing mill; never though she came home wringing wet or scarcely able to stand after dragging through the soft land on Her own mother died when Hannah received "a fairy blast." She was three years old, and going out on a fairy rath to pick blackberries she fell asleep in the sun. When she was discovered after some hours she was black down all one side with "the blast." Now in the ordinary course of events, the child would have died in a few months, but there is an occult ceremony to be performed by a fairy-doctor with the aid of an anvil and a smith's fire, which lifts the fairy blast. The fairy-doctor in this case happened conveniently to be the smith. It is a ticklish thing to meddle with a fairy blast, for if it is lifted from one it is passed on to another. But the smith took the risk because of his friendship for little Hannah's mother. The charm was worked secretly, because the smith's wife must be kept in ignorance, lest "the blast" pass to her or her children. The occasion was the misty dawn of a summer morning. The child was cured; but the young mother was dead within six months. Afterwards Hannah Daly fell on hard times, for her father provided her with a stepmother of the legendary kind. She was made the drudge of the house, and when she could scarcely walk herself, began to totter under the burden of the first of a long line of fat babies. Perhaps that subjection accounts for something of Mrs. Quinn's jaundiced view of children. Any dereliction of duty was punished with cruel severity. But little Hannah's striped back had no power to keep her next time from following the ballad-singers, which seems to have been her principal sin. Let a ballad-singer appear at the end of the street, and Hannah's tears were dried; her memory and her dread of a flogging were alike wiped clean off the slate of her irresponsible little mind, and off went Hannah and the babies in an intoxication of delight. Surely those ballads never fell on a hungrier ear or more retentive mind. Even yet she will act for you the duets between the ballad-singer and his wife, the rough humor of which enchanted the crowd. An Irish crowd is the most responsive of audiences. It punctuates the emotion of the ballad-singer's song, as it does the speech from the hustings or the sermon from the altar, with groans and ejaculations. There is the song of "Brennan on the Moor" which relates the adventures of a famous highwayman, to the Irish peasant mind a mix ture of the qualities of a Duval and a Robin Hood. "Brennan on the Moor" I have not transcribed, because I should be poaching ungenerously on the preserves of one who is making a special study of this gallant robber, whose only victims were the rich man and the extortioner. I have a picture in my mind of Mrs. Quinn seated on the ground before a red-hot fire, and searching in the mists of fifty years for some missing verses of "Brennan." "Give me time, give me time," she would cry, "and I'll have it." Then she would mutter over a bit of verse, and brightening up would say: "I remember there where Brennan's wife drew out the pistol, and the faces of the crowd, all round, and the ould women groanin' out: 'Sure my blessin' on her, wasn't she the great woman entirely! I was a little shaver then, not up to the elbows of the others. Wait, sir, give me time. Or wait till I've a drop taken! Sure, comin' home along the road at night I do be rememberin' them as plain as prent. An' then the next mornin' they're gone entirely." The crowd likes its sentiment of a tearful kind. I took down from Mrs. Quinn's lips many famous old ballads now forgotten, or superseded by the broad-sheets issued by Nugent, of High Street, Dublin, to meet every political and social contingency. Who is the anonymous poet that thus makes contemporary history? I have never been able to discover. Here is one of the old ones, which might have come out of Autolycus his pack - a very pitiful ballad: MOLLY BAWN. A story, a story, to you I will relate Concerning of a fair maid whose fortunes were great; She roved out one evening, she roved all alone, She sat below a green bower a shower for to shun. Young Jimmy being fowling with a gun in his hand, Fowling all the day till the evenin' came an, |