some French engineers and matrosses to begin the attack. As I was not pleased with the business, any more than with the new general, * * I asked for the command against Enniskillen, and obtained it, and left the camp on the 21st of June, with four hundred horse dragoons, and marched to Cavan Park." The Parliament which assembled in Dublin, in obedience to the king's call, had high and solemn duties to perform, and seems to have been fully impressed with their importance. The country was impoverished; its treasury was empty; its banking-system was completely unhinged; and, as money was the great necessity of the hour, little could be done towards the support of the army until the financial system of the country was established on a satisfactory basis. Though the Williamites of Ulster had fallen away before the national troops, they had still two very important strongholds, Enniskillen and Derry, in their possession; and hostilities might be protracted until the arrival of an invading army, which the king's English agents apprised him might be soon expected, and to raise and equip an army able to cope with it was the real business of the session. But the Parliament was not constituted for that expeditious legislation that the king expected. In the Upper House there were no Catholic prelates, and the Protestant lords, spiritual and temporal, greatly outnumbered the Catholic peers. In the Lower House the Catholic element greatly preponderated, and conflicting opinions are never slow to arise in the greatest emergencies. The Protestant representatives very naturally wished to know whither the king's reforms tended; and the Catholic members, with a desire quite as reasonable, wanted to have their rights secured by constitutional guarantees. The discussions arising in consequence of these different views were long, and not free from religious rancor, and so, much of the time--short enough for the pressing duty of the hour--was wasted on questions that might have been better left for future deliberation. Grattan, in alluding to this Parliament eighty years later, says: "Though Papists, they were not slaves; they wrung a constitution from King James before they accompanied him to the field."[15] This was the view of a great statesman; but yet we think that the first and only duty of that Parliament should have been to grant, even to wring, money from the country, to remove their king's dependence on the bounty of France, and enable him to support an army equal to the necessity of the time; and this it undoubtedly could have done, had the Catholic members been as liberal in voting supplies to James, as their Protestant colleagues were afterwards in casting the wealth of the country at the feet of William. These rights that Grattan appreciated so much--the rights he won himself--where are they? The great duty was to beat the enemy and leave the rest to time.