has given before the Committee of the House of Commons. What effect can be anticipated from conciliating such a man as Bishop Doyle? Will he not treat the Emancipation Bill as he has treated the Burial Bill, and the Composition Bill? Can it be supposed that he will desist from denouncing the Protestant church, from hating and calumniating the Orangemen, or from refusing the Bible to his flock? Can it be believed, that the writer of the preceding passages will assist in disfranchising the forty shilling freeholders, or exert himself in tranquillising the minds of Irishmen? As an agitator, he possesses some power; and acts, when his violence will allow him, with effect. As a peace-maker, he promises to be very impartial, by speaking with equal fury against every description of his opponents. The gentry, the clergy, the evangelicals, the sectaries, are treated with the same unmeasured scorn; and, whether he appears in the character of an enemy to tithes, or to the Scriptures, he is equally intemperate. We leave it to himself to reconcile his inconsistencies, and to his friends to make the most of their convert. We trust that the bishop will escape the fate of Mr. Shiel, and continue in high favour with the powers that be; but if a lawyer is compelled to return ingloriously to Ireland, on account of a few discrepancies between his speeches and his evidence, we know not why a prelate should be honoured and rewarded for writing one thing, and saying another.

There is a portion of the subject on which we sympathise with Dr. Doyle; in his complaints, namely, respecting the Bible Society, and its itinerant orators. Our opinion on this subject has been already expressed; but we cannot omit the opportunity of repeating and enforcing it, by calling the reader's attention to the letter to the Archbishop of Tuam. The writer appears to take a correct view of the present state of the church of Ireland, and justly considers the Bible Society and its auxiliaries, as the very worst channel by which Protestantism can be conveyed across the water. No man of common sense can desire to irritate the Catholics. The orators at the meetings have done nothing else but irritate them; and Mr. North and Mr. Grant deny the fact in vain. The Archbishop of Tuam is the only prelate who countenances the proceedings of the Societies; and, with every respect for his Grace's character and intentions, we trust he will not be inattentive to the timely warning which has been given him. A few of the principal passages are well worthy of attention:

"The system of the Bible Society your Grace must, I think,

now perceive never will, never can in Ireland, be attended with success. If the Roman Catholic is to be converted from his errors, it must be through widely different means. Pure Christianity, my Lord, is a religion of reason and of the heart; it never can be forced upon mankind in any way; not more by the indiscriminate and uninstructive mode of cramming the Scripture, as it were, down the throats of the people, adopted by the Bible Society, than by the papal tyranny in withholding it. The understanding must be convinced of its truth, and the affections engaged to its practical duties, before the subject can become a real Christian." P. 10.

"Our Church, my Lord, stands upon a rock; the more the foundation of it is examined, the more stable it appears. It is a branch of the Church founded by our divine Redeemer. We can with confidence rebut the assertion of the Papist, that we are not of apostolic descent. We can rest our feet on firm ground also, when the permanency of the apostolic discipline is attempted to be shaken by the Dissenters.

"The Protestant in our communion is armed, my Lord, on the right hand and on the left; he has a ready answer for the Papist and for the Dissenter. To the Papal accusation of having left the Christian church, to wander with the schismatic in the wilderness of sectarism, he replies boldly and satisfactorily, I must think, to every unprejudiced Roman Catholic, that the English has been proved to be as valid a hierarchy as the Romish; that when we separated from the church of Rome, we retained inviolate the apostolic ordination. That we have no ecclesiastical alliance with the Dissenterthat he is an alien from the Protestant as well as from the Papal church.

"To the Sectarist, who reproaches the members of the pure church with bigotry and oppressive intolerance of the Papacy-with believing that there can be no salvation out of his own pale-and with exercising temporal force to draw every Christian into communion with him to these charges the Protestant churchman can give a positive denial; he may appeal, he may safely appeal, to his pro fession and to his practice; he can shew the distinction between the rule of faith in the church of Rome and the rule of faith in the united church of England and Ireland. The Protestant believes with the Romanist, that the church to which our blessed Saviour ordained those should be added who were to be saved was formed by Himself, in and through the Apostles, and that this church is to continue under His special protection throughout the Christian dispensation; he perceives in Scripture a promise of salvation given to this church, and to no other but he does not, with the Roman Catholic, set bounds to the mercy of the Almighty-he does not place himself in the seat of Omnipotence, and deal out condemna tion to all whom he deems, on scriptural ground, to be without the promise Scripture forbids him to declare them to be within the Christian church, but he leayes them to the judgement and mercy of God.

"Such, my Lord, are the opinions of the members of our church,

and these opinions are marked by their conduct: they are convinced that Christ's church is one and apostolic: they bless God that they are, through His providence, members of a pure branch of this church: they openly declare their creed, and they invite every wanderer to come within the fold; but neither in word nor in deed do they use violence: a ministerial lording over God's heritage, and unqualified condemnation, are not instruments in their hands: reason and argument are the only weapons wielded by Protestants- they judge not their brethren before the time;' they consider that to their own Master they stand or fall.'

"From this high and firm ground, my Lord, the members of our establishment who join themselves to the Bible Society descend, and expose the Protestant church to the attacks of her papal and sectarian opponents. They give the Roman Catholic priesthood too much reason to place the Protestant churchman and the Dissenter before the eye of the laity of that communion in the same rank; and they encourage the sectarist to brand the churchman, who refuses to be leavened in this heterogeneous lump, with papal bigotry.

"The effect, my Lord, of thus weakening-may I not say, breaking down the barrier between the church and the dissenting Protestant, dangerous as it is in every branch of the pure church, is much more dangerous in your Grace's portion of it than in Britain. A large proportion of the population in Ireland is under the direction of the Romish priesthood; and there is, I understand, a very considerable body of Dissenters from the established religion. These opposite assailants, my Lord, though they differ widely in some respects, yet they perfectly agree in one aim and endeavour; the destruction of the Protestant church.

"Let me then entreat your Grace to consider seriously, the consequences of your continuing to sanction with your high title and presence, a Society whose constitution and practices do not accord with the discipline of the Protestant Church, and are most discordant with the feelings of a Roman Catholic priesthood and population. Should I be successful in convincing your Grace of the inexpediency and danger, particularly in Ireland, of the religious fraternization of churchmen with dissenters, in the system adopted by the British and Foreign Bible Society, no popular outcry of illiberality and bigotry which may be raised, will, I am sure, have any effect upon your Grace; the civium ardor prava, we have been taught, my Lord, will not shake your resolution: you will, I am persuaded, instantly withdraw your name from the roll." P. 12.

ART. XV. Miscellaneous Observations and Opinions on the Continent; by the Author of " The Life of Michel' Angelo," and "The Subversion of the Papal Government." Royal 8vo. 199 pp. 11. 5s. Longman. 1823.

Ir is a great pity that a gentleman like Mr. Duppa, who, as every body must know from his former works, possesses a correct knowledge and a cultivated taste in the Arts, should not be able to travel as much to his own content, as he afterwards narrates his travels to the content of his readers. Here is a volume, fitted, in many respects, to rank among the delicia of some future Dibdin: in height, proudly looking down upon all ordinary octavos; richly mosaiqued with inlaid cuts; lavish in depth of margin; voluptuous in creaminess of paper; and dilating to 214 pages not more matter than Mr. Brougham would compress into 50 for one of his mechanics circulating libraries: nevertheless, amid all this ex post facto luxury, a tone of dissatisfaction reigns through the whole book, from which we are led to believe, not exactly that wherever Mr. Duppa rides post equitem sedet atra Čura; but that, whenever he mounted the dicky during the journey now under our notice, a blue devil got up upon the rumble. In spite of the justice of many of his remarks, and the general qualifications which he displays for a guide and Cicerone, if he always travels in that which we conjecture to be his present temper, we would just as soon have made the grand tour with Smollett himself.

As we are by no means anxious to force this belief upon our readers, we shall leave them to adopt or reject it, as they please, after a perusal of the whole volume, and our present business will be rather to cull the flowers than the nettles from its pages. In doing this we claim the privilege of wandering as chance or fancy directs us, and in the first instance, we shall proceed at once to Lyons.

"The cathedral of Lyons has but few attractions, except a clock, celebrated from 1598, when it was first made, down to the present time; and is a curious exhibition of puerile ingenuity. It is a pile of mechanism, presenting, in its general form, an irregular tower, part square, and part octagonal, terminated by two small cupolas; the uppermost surmounted with a cock which is made to crow every hour when the clock gives warning to strike; then succeeds a dramatic exhibition of the Annunciation, of which this is the account affixed against the clock itself.

"Premièrement le coq, qui termine le dôme, à chaque heure bat les âiles, et haussant le col, à la façon des coqs naturels, chant pour avertir que l'heure va tonner. Aussitôt après, les anges, qui sont dans le frise du dôme, sonnent les cloches avec un accord si

juste, qu'ils imitent lechant de l'église sur l'hymne de St. J. Baptiste. UT QUEANT SAXIS.

"Pendant cet agréable musique, un ange ouvre la porte d'une chambre, dans laquelle il trouve Nôtre Dame. Il la salue; elle se tourne de son coté, et d'abord le lambris de cette chambre s'entrouvrant, le St. Esprit descend sur elle, et le Père Eternel, que l'on voit dans le ciel, ayant lui donné sa bénédiction pour trois fois, pour signifier qu'après le consentement de Nôtre Dame le mystère est accompli; le St. Esprit retourne au ciel, le lambris se rejoint: l'ange s'en va; et le carillon étant fini, l'heure sonne.'

"In addition to this ridiculous pantomime, there is a wooden angel flourishing a baton, to denote its approbation of the performance. Of the value of the mechanical powers which are here displayed I am ignorant; but, of the religious instruction meant to be conveyed, our Reformation makes us now look back to such a profane and ludicrous contrivance with amazement." P. 64.

It is the fashion now a-days to find fault with the system of English roads and turnpikes, and, if the latter could be dispensed with, without the imposition of some still greater annoyance, we should be among the last to advocate their retention; but it is too much to be told that they do those things better in France, and that Buonaparte's internal legislation is a model of comfort in this respect, Let us hear from Mr. Duppa, what this system is, in its details.

"As the government makes the highways, and keeps them in repair, there are but few great roads that can be travelled by post. In the heart of France there are upwards of thirty thousand square miles lying together, where no post-horses can be obtained; and, in this extent, there are no less than seven chief cities or towns of departments; Tulle, Le Puy, Aurillac, Privas, Mende, Rhodez, and Alby; to which you can only go on horseback, or by voiturin.

"At first, it might be supposed to be but a slight evil to travel by voiturin, when you cannot proceed by post-horses, but that this may be better understood, I will state a case.

66

Being at Toulon, I wished to go to Grenoble. The shortest and most direct way is, to go to Brignolles, Digne, and then to Gap. From Toulon you may travel to Brignolles with post-horses, but here there are no post-horses to proceed to Digne and Gap; a distance of more than an hundred miles, The voiturier, at Brignolles, knowing the situation in which you, are placed, makes a much larger demand than the expense of posting the same distance, added to which, he will take five days to perform a journey, which, by posting, could be made in twenty-four hours.

"If posting were open to competition, as in England, and the roads made and repaired by tolls or rates, there is no reason to suppose that the public would not be as well served; and from increased travelling, which would be the consequence of increased facilities, the revenue would be augmented by an increased posthorse duty.