We have alluded to this fragment of Irish history, because it illustrates the system of fraud and falsehood under which pretended patriotism in Ireland has libelled, and continues to libel, England—a system which talks of peace, while it is perpetually provoking hostility; which boasts of its zeal for the country, while it is cutting up every root of national hope; and which is equally boastful in the streets, and cowardly in the field. But another crisis came, and the manliness of the national character was to be tried in a still severer emergency. The Penal Laws were virtually extinguished, on the presumption that Popery was reconcilable by benefits, and that Irish patriotism was not always the language of conspiracy. The mistake was soon discernible in a Popish League for the subversion of the English Government. The “United Irishmen”—a name in itself a falsehood, for the object was to crush one-half of the nation, by establishing the tyranny of the other—were formed into a League. But the League was broken up, not in the field, but in the dungeon, and the insurrection was extinguished by the executioner. Wolfe Tone, the Secretary of the United Irishmen, came over in a French ship of war, to effect the _peaceful_ liberation of his “aggrieved country,” was imprisoned, and cut his own throat. Lord Edward Fitzgerald, the hero of novels, and the martyr of poetry, lurked in the capital, in the _soldierly_ disguise of a milkwoman, was taken in his bed, wounded in the arrest, and died of the wound. Not one of the leading conspirators died in the field; all who were not hanged begged their lives, delivered up their secrets for their own contemptible safety, and were transported to America, there to recover their courage, and wipe off their shame, by libelling England. But among the most cruel acts of those villains was the attempt to involve the students of the University in their crime. Their converts were few, and those among the most obscure; but those were effectually ruined. A visitation was held under the Lord Chancellor Clare, and the delinquents were chiefly expelled. On this occasion Moore was questioned. His intimacy with the family of the Emmetts, who seem all to have been implicated in the charge, and his peculiar intercourse with the unfortunate and guilty Robert Emmett, who, a few years after, was hanged for open insurrection, rendered him liable to suspicion. He was accordingly examined at that formidable tribunal. But his stature was so undersized, his appearance so boyish, and his answers were given with such evident simplicity, that, to suppose _him_ intrusted with the secrets of conspiracy, still less the sharer of a sanguinary revolt, seemed next to impossible, and he was dismissed without animadversion. Thus the future author of so many strains on the slavery of Ireland, and the tyranny of England, the publisher of such stores—