In
default however, of this weighty fact, the attorney-general favors us with
memorializing the very best piece of doggerel that I remember to have
read; viz., that upon divers, to wit, three thousand papers, the rioters
had wickedly and maliciously written and printed, besides, observe,
_causing_ to be written and printed, 'No Popery,' as also the following
traitorous couplet--
'The Protestants want Talbot,
As the Papists have _got all but_;'
Meaning 'all but' that which they got some years later by means of the
Clare election. Yet if, in some instances like this, Mr. Pearce has too
largely drawn upon official papers, which he should rather have abstracted
and condensed, on the other hand, his work has a specific value in
bringing forward private documents, to which his opportunities have gained
him a confidential access. Two portraits of Lord Wellesley, one in middle
life, and one in old age, from a sketch by the Comte d'Orsay, are
felicitously executed.
Something remains to be said of Lord Wellesley as a literary man; and
towards such a judgment Mr. Pearce has contributed some very pleasing
materials. As a public speaker, Lord Wellesley had that degree of
brilliancy and effectual vigor, which might have been expected in a man of
great talents, possessing much native sensibility to the charms of style,
but not led by any personal accidents of life into a separate cultivation
of oratory, or into any profound investigation of its duties and its
powers on the arena of a British senate.
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