The whole policy of the Whig party in Ireland was the counterpart of their policy in England, only on a smaller scale. It was, to the performances of Fox and Opposition here, what the little stage-play in _Hamlet_ is to the tragedy itself--the same characters and the same crime performed in imitation of the larger guilt that gazes on it. The wretched shortsightedness of supporting any demand of the populace whom they at once deluded and despised; the perpetual agitation to give the franchise to classes who _must_ use it without the power of discrimination, and who must be careless of it but for the purposes of corruption; the reckless clientship of the Popish claims, ending in the sale of Irish independence by the Papists; the universal conspiracy, and the sanguinary civil war, followed by the political suicide of the Parliament--_all_ the direct and rapid results of the Whig policy in Ireland--show either the headlong ignorance or the scandalous hypocrisy of Irish faction. Yet, in all this blaze of fraud and falsehood, the name of Grattan was never degraded by public suspicion. He was an enthusiast; and his robe of enthusiasm, like one of the fire-resisting robes of antiquity, came out only brighter for its passing through the flame. But the Legislature (all impurities) was left in ashes. Mr Phillips seems to regret Grattan's transfer to England, as an injury to his oratorical distinctions. He tells us "that it is in the Irish Parliament, and in his younger day, that his finest efforts are to be found!" Reluctant as we are to differ from such an authority, yet, judging from his _published_ speeches, it appears to us that his powers never found their right position until they were within the walls of the British Parliament. These walls shut out the roar of the populace, which disturbed him, but to which he once must listen. These walls sheltered him from that perpetual clinging of Popery, which dragged down his fine tastes to its own level. Within these walls, he was relieved from the petty interests of partisanship, and raised from the feuds of an island to the policy of an empire. In Ireland, popularity required perpetual submission to the caprices of the multitude, and no man had more fully felt than Grattan the impossibility of taking a stand on his own principles--he must be either on the shoulders of the mob, or under their heels. In England, no longer wearied with the responsibility of leading parties who refused to be guided, or the disgust of following his inferiors through the dust of their hurried "road to ruin," he had before him, and embraced with the gallantry of his nature, the great Cause for which England was fighting--the cause of human kind. In Ireland, Grattan, with all his intrepidity, would not have dared to make his magnificent speech on the war with Napoleon, or, if he had, would have been denounced by the roar of the million. In England, he was in the midst of the noblest associations; he was