known to your Lordships that of the troops which our gracious Sovereign did me the honour to entrust to my command at various periods during the war-a war undertaken for the express purpose of securing the happy institutions and independence of the country-at least one half were Roman Catholics. My Lords, when I call your recollection to this fact I am sure all further eulogy is unnecessary. Your Lordships are well aware for what length of period and under what difficult circumstances they maintained the Empire buoyant upon the flood which overwhelmed the thrones and wrecked the institutions of every other people;-how they kept alive the only spark of freedom which was left unextinguished in Europe. My Lords, it is mainly to the Irish Catholics that we all owe our proud predominance in our military career, and that I personally am indebted for the laurels with which you have been pleased to decorate my brow. . . We must confess, my Lords, that without Catholic blood and Catholic valour no victory could ever have been obtained, and the first military talents might have been exerted in vain."1

4. Let these noble words of tender Justice be the first example to my young readers of what all History ought to be. It has been told them, in The Laws of Fésole, that all great Art is Praise. So is all faithful History,

2

1 [The attribution of these words to the Duke of Wellington cannot be accepted. Sir William Butler made his extracts from a speech as printed at pp. 615-616 n. of J. C. O'Callaghan's History of the Irish Brigades (Glasgow, 1870), where it is given as spoken by the Duke "in 1829 when addressing the House of Lords in favour of Catholic emancipation.' But O'Callaghan (who does not give his authority) was mistaken. No such words occur in any of the numerous reports of the Duke's speeches on Catholic emancipation, and the rhetoric would have been uncongenial to him. In the House of Commons on February 22, 1837 (on an Irish Municipal Reform Bill), Richard Lalor Sheil, referring to Lord Lyndhurst's description of the Irish as "aliens,” exclaimed that the Duke ought to have risen from his seat at the word and said that he "had seen the aliens do their duty." Sheil then followed with a celebrated passage describing the speech which the Duke might have made. Sheil's oration may be found in the volume of his speeches edited by Thomas Macnevin (Dublin, 1845), and the passage in question is included in Bell's Standard Elocutionist. It is precisely similar in sentiment to the apocryphal speech attributed by O'Callaghan, Butler, and Ruskin to the Duke, but the rhetoric is finer and more impassioned. O'Callaghan's quotation may have come from some other rhetorical exercise of the kind, but search both at Dublin and in the British Museum has failed to discover its source.]

[See Vol. XV. p. 351.]

and all high Philosophy. For these three, Art, History, and Philosophy, are each but one part of the Heavenly Wisdom, which sees not as man seeth, but with Eternal Charity; and because she rejoices not in Iniquity, therefore rejoices in the Truth.'

For true knowledge is of Virtues only: of poisons and vices, it is Hecate who teaches, not Athena. And of all wisdom, chiefly the Politician's must consist in this divine Prudence; it is not, indeed, always necessary for men to know the virtues of their friends, or their masters; since the friend will still manifest, and the master use. But woe

to the Nation which is too cruel to cherish the virtue of its subjects, and too cowardly to recognize that of its enemies!

1 [1 Samuel xvi. 7; 1 Corinthians xiii. 6.]

2 [Compare Pleasures of England, § 20 (below, p. 431).]