The dramatic faculty was deficient. Yet it was not quite an unfortunate attempt to thus anticipate such a sketch as Dr. Hutchison Stirling has so admirably worked out in his _Burns in Drama_. Into a very different arena he was now to be drawn. Politically and ecclesiastically, it was a period of excitement. In 1829 Catholic Emancipation had no sooner been passed than O'Connell brought in his motions for the Repeal and the Tithe War. The latter was a protest by the Romanists against paying tithes for the maintenance of the Irish Church, whose incumbents were a mere outpost of the Tory and Episcopalian party, converting, as Lord Rosebery has said, nobody, and alienating everybody. On the withdrawal of Grey, and the fall of Peel, Lord Melbourne had carried on for years a sort of guerilla warfare with a varying majority, too dependent on the Irish vote to give general satisfaction. The Tithe Act, however, was passed, and this made the support of the English clergy in Ireland a charge upon rent. The position in which matters then stood with the Government will be clearly seen by a reference to the admirable speech of Macaulay, in May 1839, to the electors of Edinburgh. In Ross-shire, the tension of affairs had been rendered more acute by a wave of Tory reaction which induced the Church of Scotland to cast the weight of her influence against the Whigs; but the people, as has ever been the case upon such aberrations from the national policy, had steadily declined to follow this lead, although the endowment scheme for new chapels had been dealt with by the Whigs in a niggard and unsatisfactory way.