times may be near when great privations may arise, and nothing but that strength which is given from God can enable, when you and I may be called upon to imitate the noble conduct of our ancestry, and ascend the scaffold rather than renounce our faith. Gentlemen, it is on that account that I view with peculiar regret the appointments which have been made of commissioners, to regulate the education of the people of this country

a commission which does not hesitate to

avow that the Bible is not to be the foundation of their system-that Bible, which alone can enable us to meet the

trials which surround us, and to die in the land in which our forefathers have bled (loud cheers)-which has ever been the birthright of Protestants, and the charter of a Christian's privilege. Is it possible that the Protestants of Ireland will consent to consign their children to a system of education, in which the Book of God is denied them? and garbled extracts of Scripture are substituted for the whole, to meet, forsooth, the prejudices of the Romish priests, or the doubts of the infidels of the day? I trust not! for how can God bless such a system? How can such unchristian trickery ever be submitted to by them ?" (loud cheers.)

That the affairs of Ireland have long been in a most distracted and dangerous condition, is known to all men; but it is not known to all men that by far the most of the misery has been produced by the discountenance and discouragement by Government-not the present only of the great Protestant Conservative Body, by whom alone that country can be saved from ruin. Knowledge there, as every where else in the world now, must be the stability of the state. But what true knowledge ever flourished under the shade of superstition? We mean no insult to our Roman Catholic brethren.

We know, and admire, and love, the virtues of the many thousand enlightened persons belonging, in Ireland, to that faith. But not for their sakes can we be withheld from declaring what all the reformed world knows, that in Protestantism alone resides the power to spread light over that thick darkness of ignorance in which so much of Ireland has so

long been benighted. It is illiberal, forsooth, to prefer one religion to another-it is baseness and bigotry to believe that the soul is made free by breaking up the moral and intellectual bondage which the wisest men have shewn the soul suffers in Papistry, and against which the noblest faculties of a noble race struggle in vain. Were the Church of England in Ireland to be shaken -we shall not say overthrown-into what profounder barbarism would the nation fall! It is cheering, certainly, to hear Mr Stanley declaring the determination of Government to defend and secure the rights of that noble establishment. May the means about to be adopted for that end be wise, and their adoption uninfluenced by clamour and intimidation.Let that wicked faction be silenced who calumniate that establishment

and while they brutally abuse its learned, enlightened, conscientious, and active ministers, keep eternally trumpeting the praises of other pastors, among whom there are many good men, but who, generally speaking, are far down indeed in the intellectual scale, and all unfit for spiritual instructors. But on this mighty subject we shall speak in a series of articles from the pen of one who understands it well in all its bearings, and who will utter not a word which his conscience does not tell him is the truth!

CHARLES MONTFORT's history, from fifteen to five-and-twenty, might be comprised in three words, Eton, St James's, the Guards. The first had sent him forth a tolerable scholar and an intolerable coxcomb; the second had made him a King's page, and taught him the glory of a pair of epaulets, and the wisdom of seeing much, and saying as little about it as possible; and the third had initiated him into the worst mess and the best company in London, into the art of walking St James's Street six hours a-day, and balancing the loss by the productive employment of as many of the night at the Clubs, concluding with a mission to the Peninsula, which returned him with a new step in the Gazette, a French ball through his arm, and a determination to die a generalissimo.

But what are the determinations of men, even of guardsmen? His first intelligence, on rejoining his fellow promenaders on the Campagna felice of St James's Street, was, that fate had decided against his laurels. The venerable Earl, his uncle, was on that bed, from which the stanchest devotion to the bottle, and the minister for the time being, could not save him. A fit of apoplexy had wound up the arrears of the physicians. Expeditious as art might be, nature outran her; and before the most rapid and royal practitioner in town could prescribe a second specific for the Earl, the world had lost one of its "best of men," and steadiest bans vivants-the Treasury one of its most vigorous voters, the opera one of its most persevering patrons, and Charles Montfort his only chance of rivalling Napoleon or Wellington. Charles's father was still alive, and a brother stood between himself and the title. But an earldom in prospect, or possibility, made him a more important object than he had been twenty-four hours before. It was decided, in a grand council of the family, that the son of so ancient a house was fit for better things than the thrust of a French bayonet. A hint from the Treasury, which was

solicitous of keeping up an interest in the family, pointed out diplomacy as the most natural career for the cadet of the noble house; and Charles, with such sighs as a King's page nurtured into the guardsman can heave for any thing under the moon, wore his epaulets for the last time, when at Court he kissed the King's hand, on his appointment to the Secretaryship of the Tuscan mission.

Nelson said, in his sailor-like way, "That he never met an Italian who was not a fiddler or a scoundrel."

- But to the honourable Charles Montfort, Tuscany was a bed of roses. Whatever the Court may have become during the last ten years, it was then the consummate scene of la belle folie. The men were all preux of the first distinction, high-bred, happy, and heroicthe women, the perfection of grace, constancy, and quadrilling. All was accomplishment. Dukes led their own orchestras, Marchionesses presided at the piano, Sovereign Princes made chansons, and premier Barons played the trombone. whole atmosphere was music. The influence spread from the ear to the heart, and the lingua Toscana required no bocca Romana to transfuse into the very "honey dew" of the tender passion.

The

It is true, that there was not much severity of labour going on in this land of Cythera. The envoys were not often compelled to forego the toilet for the desk, nor the beaux secretaires to give up their lessons on the guitar for the drudgery of copying dispatches. A "protocol" would have scared the gentle state from its propriety; and the arrival of the Morning Post, once a week from London, with the account of routs in which they had not shared, and the anticipation of dinners and déjeunés which they were never to enjoy, was the only pain which Diplomacy suffered to raise a ripple on the tranquil surface of its soul.

The Tuscan ladies are proverbially the most frightful among the females of Italy, a country to which

nothing but patriotic blindness, or poetic rapture, ever attributed the perfection of womanhood. But all the world goes to Tuscany-of all the Italian principalities, the one which offers least to the lover of the arts, past or present, but which has the softest name. Romance is the charm of the sex; and all the fairest of the fair, of every land, tend to Florence, like shooting stars darting from every quarter of the heavens to the zenith. And fairest of the fair was the Lady Matilda Mowbray. The description of female beauty is like the description of pictures and churches, out of taste; and, like the architect of old, who desired to rest his claims, not on his words, but on his performances, Lady Matilda's charms are best told by what they effected. In the first hour after her display at court, the honourable Charles Montfort quarrelled, pro tempore, with the Countess Carissima Caricoletta. In a week, he confined himself to a single opera box, and that the Lady Matilda's—and in a month, he had constituted himself her declared attendant, abandoned the Casino and five guinea points, drawn upon himself the open envy of the cavalieri, and earned the irreconcilable hostility of as many duchesses and countesses as would have made a female legion of honour.

The Lady Matilda had not much in her favour-she was only young, animated, and beautiful. Her rivals were pre-eminent in rouge and romance. The cavalieri wondered round all the circles, ice in hand, how a man of the secretary's tact could contrast the brown skins, fire darting eyes, and solid shapes of the enchantresses of Florence, with the niaiseries of the English physiognomy, with dove-like eyes, cheeks of rose, and the proportions of a sylph. But the secretary had been but six months in Tuscany, and that must account for it. His education was incomplete; he was still but a diplomatic barbare; and he would still require six months to mature his taste, make him see the beauties of a half negro skin, and worship a female cento of rappee, macaroni, and airs from the last opera.

But the Lady Matilda had her admirers even among the cavalieri. She possessed one charm, to which

the foreign heart has been sensitive in every age from Clovis, and in every corner of the continent, from the White Sea to the Black. She was the mistress of five thousand pounds sterling a-year; a sum which, when converted into any shape cognizable by the foreign eye, rixdollar, franc, or milrea, seemed infinite. She had at once a Polish prince at her feet, a German sovereign, with a territory of a dozen square miles, and an army of half a regiment, honouring her each night with his supplication for her hand, in the first valse-and an Ex-French count, who had been distinguished in the runaway from Moscow, the runaway from Leipsic, and the runaway from Waterloo, until he had become so expert in fugitation, that he had run away from his creditors and his king alike, in Paris, and was free to exhibit his showy figure, and a dozen stars, at every ridotto, ball, and billiard-table in Christendom. The Lady Matilda was not born a coquette; but "Who can hold a fire within his hand, By thinking on the frosty Caucasus ?'' In this blaze of cordons, and perpetual glow of homage, what female heart, not absolutely stone, could resist a little nitrification? Besides, the dolce far niente, which an Englishman devotes to the infernal gods every hour he remains under his own foggy sky, molested by the sight of the myriads round him, all busily making their way through life, is the very principle of existence under the bluest of heavens, and in an atmosphere which burns out the activity of man at the summer heat of 150 of Reaumur. Those who must shut their casements at ten in the morning, or be roasted alive, find the necessity of consuming the next six hours in sleep, and the next in paying or receiving the attentions due to the sex in every quarter of the globe. The Chevalier melts down the twelve desperate hours of his day in regulating his mustaches, counting his fortunes at Faro, or preparing those exquisite civilities of the moment, those impromptus faits a loisir, which establish a lord among wits, and a wit among lords; the brilliant fanfaron of a brilliant circle; and among women, the happy title of the "most

dangerous of men." With the fairer portion of the earth, the natural resource is a French novel, or a poodle, inveterate scandal, or a cabinet council with Madame Vaurien, the most celebrated marchande that ever added loveliness to the lovely on the sunny side of the Apennines.

In this world of rapture and yawning, this central paradise of passion indescribable, and tediousness beyond a name, the Lady Matilda was gradually assimilating to the clime. She had already discovered that English reserve was a remnant of the original Pict, which could not be abolished too soon by an aspirant after the graces. The Polish prince was found to be essential to her toilet; the German potentate was the best carrier of an opera-glass within the limits of civilisation, and the ex-aide-de-camp of the ex-emperor was the soul of quadrilles, polonoises, and pas a la Turque. The fair Matilda was on the point of becoming a figurante of the most ardent quality - when Montfort stept in between her and this height of foreign fame. He was handsome, manly, and sincere. The heart of the lady recovered its right tone, like an instrument struck by the master's hand. The foreign plating was found light beside the solid material of his honourable heart and matured understanding. The mustached adorers grew tiresome. Foreign love-making is an art, and when the secret is found out, the whole affair is too easily copied to be worth caring for. But Montfort had not been long enough in the school to have acquired the style. He was in love, seriously, gravely, with his whole sober soul. Let the world, whether of St James's or St Petersburgh, say what it will, this is the true victor after all. "L'homme qui rit,” says Voltaire, "n'est pas dangereux." The adage is true in more than politics. And when Montfort "pulled his hat upon his brows," forgot, like Hamlet, his custom of exercise, and saw this gentle heaven and earth but a pestilent congregation of vapours, when he was seen at Court only to be pronounced dull, and sat in the operabox of the brilliant Condessa di Cuor'ardente, like one of the carved Cupids on the back of her gilded chair, the English heart of the fair Matilda pronounced him instinctively

the most animated of all companions, the most intellectual of all envoys, and the most promising of all lords and masters to be. Obsolete as the phrase is, and suspicious as it makes the history, they were both prodigiously in love.

But the denouement lingered; for of all passions the true one has the least power of the tongue. That member which acquires such sudden faculties in general after a month of matrimony, is as generally paralysed a month before. Montfort, by nature eloquent, and by habit conversant in the happiest turns of levee language, found his art of speech unable to express what his footman could have told in three words. The Lady Matilda, the mistress of three languages, could not find one to say for her what lay before her glance in the first page of every novel on her dressing-table. But there is a time for all things, and the time for the recovery of their organs was at hand.

Montfort and his fair one had met at a bal masque-danced together, supped together, put on, and taken off their masks together. Still the mysterious word which each pined to utter, was unpronounced, when the lady chaperon came to declare that it was the hour of retiring. The command was like the law of the Medes and Persians, and Montfort saw with a sigh the withdrawing vision of that beauty which carried away all his aspirations. As he was leaning, in the true lover-like wistfulness, on the rose-wreathed balustrades of the concert-room, his ear was caught by a whisper from one of the attendants. The fellow was hurrying one of the fiddlers to get rid of his task, to change his silk draperies for a surtout, his instrument for a case of pistols, and be on the watch at the corner of the Casa Doralice. The name startled Montfort. The Lady Matilda tenanted the two-and-twenty marble salons of the Casa. He sprang from his position to seize his informant; but as the crowd were gathering at that moment round a Signora with an irresistible voice, and a panache presented to her by the Autocrat of all the Russias he might as well have charged a division of cuirassiers. The valet escaped, and Montfort's sole resource was to fly on the

wings of the wind to the Casa Doralice.

But when did " the course of true love run smooth ?" The night without was the most formidable contrast to the night within. Tempest in all its shapes was doing its wild will, from the Zenith to the Nadir. Thunder, lightning, and rain had met, as if by general consent, to celebrate their orgies over the capital of Tuscany. Cavalry, cabriolets, and chasseurs, all had disappeared, and the lover, raging with impatience, fear, and passion, felt how empty a thing it is to be but an ambassador, or even that more potential thing, the secretary to an ambassador.

However, the lady's danger prohibited delay, and throwing his cloak round him, he rushed into the deserted streets, through ways that might have repulsed Hannibal or Napoleon at the head of their braves, and under a deluge from skies and roofs, which left little to be filled up by the imagination on this side of Niagara.

The streets of Florence at the best of times share but little of the illumination of the nineteenth century. The little Virgins in the niches had all put out their lamps—the last ray of sanctity or safety had expired on the first blast, through a circuit of five miles of streets, that even in daylight make one of the most difficult tours of Europe. An Englishman in a foreign city, is proverbially of all animals the most easily perplexed. He loses his way by nature. Montfort was no more gifted with the " organ of direction" than the rest of his countrymen, and at the first turning from the palace, and while the flash of its hundred windows was still gleaming in his eyes, he was as much astray as if he had bivouacked in an American prairie.

But Cupid never deserts his true votaries. The storm which had drenched him, and the darkness which had forced him to feel his way from portico to portico, brought him full upon an overturned coach. A group of muffled figures were round it, and the twinkle of a lantern in one of their hands, showed him the fair Matilda fainting on the shoulder of a tall ruffian, with a

huge In

mask on his face, and spruck cut-and-thrust flourishing in his hand.

This was an adventure in the established style. A more considerate lover would have paused to ascertain whether the design was upon the lady's person or her purse;

whether she was not carried off with her own consent, and whether an intruder might not get the Inspruck cut-and-thrust through his præcordia. But Montfort was in love a l'Anglaise, which accounts for all kinds of frenzies. He rushed upon the group, they gathered round the leading cavalier,-some of the straggling police came up,-a regular mêlée ensued. Pistol-shots were fired, sabre-cuts were exchanged; and after a skirmish of a few moments, in which the Italians thought that they were assailed by the majesty of the fiends in person, the paroxysm finished by Montfort's finding the bandits fled, the street empty, the chaperon clinging to his knees, the fair Matilda breathless in his arms, and the whole drenched from top to toe in sheets of immitigable rain.

A

The morning rose in poetic glory. Homer's Aurora never scattered her roses more profusely than on the skirts of the retiring storm. The story of Montfort's heroism, and the lady's escape, had run through every boudoir before its fair tenants had drawn out the first papillot. rescue is, by all the laws of romance, an irresistible claim. In the course of that memorable day, Montfort found his lost faculty of speech, the. Lady Matilda had acknowledged his right to the hand which he had so gallantly preserved, and at her soirée, the whole circle of the Tuscan comme il faut presented themselves with renewed homage; the German Prince and M. le Comte alone sending their excuses, as "suffering under sudden and severe colds." Their indisposi tion was severe, for the Court Chronicle rapidly let out the secret. The Count's cold had taken the form of a pistol-shot in his knee, which disqualified him for Mazurkas for life, and the German Landgrave had, by the same unaccountable accident, received a sword-cut across his cheek, which laid it open, and swept away one half of his mustaches for the rest