your

moved, and you appear in your natural colours, with all the marks of monkish deformity ;-interested bigotted, servile and venal. Your court embraces, have outrun even immoderate matrimonial desires,* and are only to be equalled by the unexampled duplicity with which you have treated your representative. Men are at a loss whether to feel more disgusted at you for having abandoned Mr. Plunket, or for having sent for Mr. Croker, and on your behalf they feel a degree of shame to which you alone appear to be insensible.

Had your plan succeeded, the University would have been taught arts as depraved as could be inculcated by any corrupt ministerial magistrate, or by any interested set of Jesuitica! professors. Your object was to return to Parliament a Court Candidate; you have been disappointed; you have begun but you have not accomplished your disgrace: you have, however, done much mischief, for you have sown the seeds of interested speculation in the bosom of your University.

The principles of liberty which you should implant and cultivate, you have banished from your Seminary. The youthful talent of the country has been placed under restraints and privations that neither tend to liberalise or to improve narrow and illiberal principles have been propa

* Several of the Fellows addressed their representative to procure the removal of a College Statute that prevents them from marrying; and some have declared they would vote for which ever of the two candidates was most likely to accomplish this great national object.

DEDICATION:

gated with care, and are fast gaining ground under the fostering protection of a pernicious assiduity; the favour of the great is the object sought for, and spirit and virtue are the sacrifice.

Forgetting the circumstances in which your University is placed, inasmuch as the sons of the nobility and of the principal gentry of Ireland, are sent to receive their education in England,-you proceed to encrease this disadvantage, and as if it were to add to the estimation in which you stand, you adopt such internal regulations, you display -such political principles, and volunteer such electioneering artifice, as every honest man and every honourable mind must be ashamed of. These proceedings will lower you, they will lower the character of your University, they will impair its spirit, and they will destroy its independence.

It is unnecessary to say which of you seek for promotion; in your Chancellor you will find a patron; perhaps the transaction of 1807* is now forgotten, or if its virtue is not forgiven by his generosity, it may at least be atoned fo, by

* The Vice Chancellor attempted to procure a petition from the University against the claim of the Roman Catholicks, the attempt, much to the credit of that body, was resisted and failed,-in the debate on the 9th of April, 1807, Mr. Plunket observed "when his (the "Duke of C * *** ** 1 d) first letter was not attended to, he wrote a second, and he was sorry to say that in that letter the Roy“al Duke had conveyed an insinuation too plain to be misunderstood, "that the only way for the University to recommend itself to his favour

m

was to present such a petition as he required."

your compliance. ver a multitude of political offences, it is still lucrative and tempting, and some one among you may hope to be raised to the Reverend bench for having trampled upon the rights of his countrymen.

The trade of Anti-Catholicism will co

Proceed then! and adorn Society with those principles and those precepts in which yon have attempted to initiate the University; your fame will descend to posterity, for the evil which you have done will outlive your memory; no man however will write your epitaph, for no language could af ford words strong enough to paint the rankness of your character; or the treachery of your conduct.

Your actions need not the aid of comment, they speak for themselves, and will furnish posterity with a sad spectacle of abandoned virtue and prostituted ambition,—it is however to be hoped that the lesson will be of utility to mankind; that they will view your conduct with honest indignation, and though they cannot efface the shame they will avoid the example.

CROKERIANA,

&c. &c.

LETTER I.

TO THE PROVOST AND FELLOWS OF TRINITY COLLEGE.

GENTLEMEN,-Your conduct is singular; I wish it were only novel and not censurable; you return to Parliament as representative of your University, a man every way qualified for that honourable and important duty; high in his profession at the Bar; high in his station in the Senate; able as a lawyer; cautious and sagacious as a politician; his principles those of regulated liberty; his mind that of a scholar; his manners and his education that of a gen tleman.

Thus qualified, you depute him to Parliament at the precise moment that a financial question, highly interesting to you, highly interesting to Ireland, and of great moment to the Empire at large, is brought forward amid the solitude of Irish members, who

to hear it said,' that grave, discreet, and composed members of Alma Mater, should allege, as a serious ground of complaint against Mr. Plunket, that he did not sufficiently press, on their behalf, this favourite and abstemious scheme of matrimonial connexion. Even suppose this modest and blushing pretence to have any solid foundation, will any rational man in the community say that it formed a good or sufficient ground for abandoning their old representative, and setting up a competitor? Or will any man be so base and abandoned as to assert that it could, by any possibility, justify the unprecedented manner adopted on this occasion-that silent, sworn and secret cabal, or even the coldblooded, cold-hearted, spirit that led to this subterraneous plot, laid in the absence of their representative, and levelled at his peace and his character.

What terms of reproach? What feelings of indignation too strong to express our disgust at such unworthy, underhand Jesuitical proceeding? You pride yourself on being the first of Corporations, and you act little inferior to the lowest.

You are

gentlemen and men of honour, and yet you suffer yourselves to be seduced, deceived, or entrapped into such a line of conduct against an honest individual, your own representative, which if any person from among your body had experienced in private life, he would and must have resented and punished in the most exemplary manner.

I look for some other excuse to shelter you from the general, undivided sentence of condemnation, with which, in every circle and society, your con