PREAMBLE.

THE Editor thinks it right to subjoin the following: comment were superfluous.

"So you have been getting up something Irish; 'Irish Priest,' I hear. Irish bother! Heavens, have we not enough of Ireland? Irish politics, Irish distresses, Irish potatoes, Irish peasants! Irish devil, I say. Let them howl, and die!

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Irish, quotha! By-and-by, I suppose, we must adopt the brogue; send our children to Dublin to complete their education; and ask Her Majesty to arrange so as to present us with an Irish prince, and hold her court i' the Castle, on the strength of it?

"And why not? But I am sick of it; of every thing Irish; the people-the potatoes — the

country; which, from my soul, I wish were a thousand fathoms in the abyss, so that leviathan might choose her brine-washed valleys as the place of his repose !"

It was hoped, however, that one might be excused for taking an interest in the land of one's nativity; in feelings, ways of thinking, unintelligible, perchance, in the high-pressure, albeit narrow, atmosphere of London: for retorting indignant disclaimer to endless falsifications and confident mistatements; and for registering a voice of intensest sympathy in favour of a despoiled, neglected, and ill-used people, whose destitution, the result of revolting omission and long-accumulating wrong, calls to all the gates of heaven for redress; and whose blood, for blood it is, whether shed by the sword, or famine-drained, must otherwise, soon or late, bring down the vengeance of God on the oppressor!

PREFACE.

THIS sees the light with the earnest, single hope, that it may conciliate prejudice, disarm opposition, and peradventure, were it in a single instance, advance the temporal and eternal interests of mankind.