We wish that we could avoid speaking of his treatment by the Church dignitaries of his time. While they ought to have received such a convert with honour, they seem to have made a point of neglecting him. He was not merely a man of talent in the pulpit, but alike accomplished in science and elegant literature; for he had been successively _Professor_ of Rhetoric, and of Natural Philosophy, in (if we recollect rightly) the College of Louvain, at a time when French Mathematics were the pride of the Continent. Yet he never obtained preferment or countenance, and scarcely even civility, except the extorted civility of fear, from any of the ecclesiastical heads of Ireland. The dull and common-place men, with whom it was then customary to fill the Irish Sees, shrank from one who might have been a most willing, as he must have been a most able, instrument in reconciling his Papist countrymen to the Church of England. And, without any other cause than their own somnolent stupidity, they rendered wholly useless--as far as was in their power--a man who, in a position corresponding to his ability, might have headed a New Reformation in Ireland. Kirwan's only dignity was given to him by the Lord-lieutenant, Cornwallis, after nearly fifteen years of thankless labour; and it consisted only of the poor Deanery of Killala, a nook on the savage shore of Western Ireland. He died soon after, of a _coup-de-soleil_--as it was observed the natural death of a man of his genius! But we must break off from this captivating volume. We recollect no political work in which politics are treated with more manly propriety, or personal character delineated with more vigorous truth; in which happier anecdotes abound, or in which the writer gives his own opinion with more firmness, yet with less offence to public feelings. From its evident knowledge of Ireland, it could be written by none but an Irishman; but its sentiments are cosmopolite. If the author sails under his national flag, still, his bark must be recognised as a noble vessel, and welcome in any Port of the World. FOOTNOTES: [18] _Curran and his Contemporaries._ By CHARLES PHILLIPS, Esq., A.B., one of her Majesty's Commissioners in the Court for the Relief of Insolvent Debtors. 1 vol. 8vo. 1850. LORD HOLLAND'S FOREIGN REMINISCENCES.[19]