was put about as though to annoy me, but they are pleasing me without intending it." This was the good-humoured way in which he took all that was personal in the journalistic tirades. It gives one an idea both of his great zeal and the great virtue with which he accompanied it. He now writes to the Irish Archbishops, and receives very encouraging answers. So much did they enter into his sentiments that, in a meeting of the Irish episcopate in Dublin, they gave his proposals a good share of their attention, and approved of them. This he accounted great gain. It was the prayer of the martyr for his persecutor, of Stephen for Saul, and of Our Lord for the Jews. Poor Ireland had groaned and writhed in Saxon bondage for centuries. She saw her children scattered to the winds, or ground by famine and injustice beneath the feet of the destroyer; and, at the voice of a Saxon priest, she turned round, wiped the tear from her eye, {253} pitied the blindness of her oppressor, and offered up her sufferings to Heaven to plead for mercy for her persecutor. The cry was a solemn universal prayer, framed by her spiritual leaders, and carried to every fireside where the voice of the Church could drown the utterings of complaint. F. Spencer thought more of the prayers of the Irish than of all the Continent put together; these were good, but those were heroic. He began to love Ireland thenceforward with an ever-increasing love, and trusted chiefly to the faith and sanctity of her children for the fulfilment of his zealous intentions. He pushed his exertions to Rome also, by writing to Dr. Wiseman, and asking him to see the devotion carried out in the Eternal City and the provinces. It met the same success as in France, Belgium, Holland, and Ireland. There is a letter extant which Dr. Wiseman wrote to F. Spencer about this time (it is dated Ash Wednesday, 1839), and it must be interesting, both for its intrinsic merit as well as the giving an evidence of the harmony of feeling and sentiment that bound the great cardinal and the zealous priest together since their first acquaintance until they both went, within a few months of each other, to enjoy the eternal reward of their labours in England and elsewhere, for God's glory:-- "Rome, _Ash Wednesday_, 1839.