The mitres were chiefly bestowed on the Fellows of English colleges, and tutors of English noblemen. Every new Viceroy imported a succession of chaplains, and quartered them all upon the Irish Church. The majority of those men looked upon their position with the nervous alarm of settlers in the wilderness, thought only of the common-room of the colleges from which they had been torn, or of the noble houses in which they had been installed; and reproached the ill luck which had given them dignities which only excited popular disgust; and wealth, from which they could derive no pleasure, but in its accumulation. We can scarcely wonder that, through almost the whole of the eighteenth century, the Irish Church lay in a state of humiliation, repulsive to the public feelings. This, too, has changed; and the Church now possesses many able men. Commerce, which plays so vigorous a part in the world, was then a swathed infant in Ireland, and swathed so tightly by provincial regulations, that there was scarcely a prospect of its ever stepping beyond the cradle. Manufactures--that gold-mine worth all the treasures of the Western World--were limited to the looms of the north; and the only manufacture of three-fourths of this fine country consisted in the fatal fabrication of forty-shilling voters. The Squiredom of Ireland was the favourite profession of busy idleness, worthless activity, and festive folly. But this profession must have an estate to dilapidate, or a country to ride over, and English mortgagees to pamper its prodigality and accelerate its ruin. Gout, the pistol, broken necks, and hereditary disease, rapidly thinned this class. Perpetual litigation stood before their rent-rolls, in the shape of a devouring dragon; and, with a peasantry starving but cheerful, and with a proprietary pauperised, but laughing to the last, they were determined, though hourly sinking into bankruptcy, to be ruined like a _gentleman_. All those circumstances coming together, made the Bar almost the sole assemblage of the ability of Ireland. But they also made it the most daring, dashing, and belligerent body of gentlemen that Europe has seen. It was Lord Norbury's remark, in his old age, when he reposed on the cushions of the peerage, had realised immense wealth, and obtained _two_ peerages for his two sons--that all this came out of fifty pounds, and a case of pistols, his father's sole present as he launched him in life. The list of duels fought by the leading members of the Bar might figure in the returns of a Continental campaign; and no man was regarded as above answering for a sarcasm dropped in court, by his appearance in the field.