We have all been occupied for a great many years in considering whether we ought to emancipate the Catholics from their disabilities. Let us at last begin to think whether it is not high time to emancipate ourselves from the discussion of them. My respectable and Popish cousin, Arthur M‘Carmick, inhabits a charming _entresol_ in the Rue St. Honoré, where he copies Vernet and reads Delavigne, dreams of Pauline Latour, and spends six hundred a year in the greatest freedom imaginable; yet, because he is not yet entitled to frank letters and address the Speaker’s chair, Arthur M‘Carmick wants to be emancipated. I, whom fate and a profession confine in my native country, am fettered by the thraldom, and haunted by the grievance, at every turn I take. In vain I fly from the doors of Parliament, and make a circuit of five miles to avoid the very echo of the county meeting; my friend in the club and my mistress in the ball-room, the ballad-singer in the street and the preacher in the pulpit, all combine to harass my nerves, and weary my forbearance; even Dr. Somnolent wakes occasionally after dinner, to indulge in a guttural murmur concerning martyrdom and the Real Presence; and Sir Roger, when the hounds are at fault, reins up at my side, and harks back to the Revolution of 1688. Our very servants wear our prejudices, as constantly as our cast-off clothes, and our tradesmen offer us their theories more punctually than their bills. Not a week ago my groom assured me that there was no reason to be alarmed, for the Pope lived a great way off; and my barber on the same day hinted that he knew as much as most people, and that all he knew was this, that if ever the Catholics were uppermost they would play the old bear with the Church. I could not sleep that night for thinking of Ursa Major and the Beast in the Revelations. Yet I, because I may put on a silk gown whenever it shall please His Majesty to adorn me in such radiant attire, and because, some twenty years hence, I may have hope to be in the great council of the nation, the mouthpiece of some two or three dozen of independent individuals--I, forsooth, am to petition for no emancipation.