“It is strange (said the Prince,) that the earliest British writers should be as diffuse in the praise, as the moderns are in calumniating our unhappy country. Once we were everywhere, and by all, justly famed for our patriotism, ardour of affection, love of letters, skill in arms and arts, and refinement of manners; but no sooner did there arise a connexion between us and a sister country, than the reputed virtues and well-earned glory of the Irish sunk at once into oblivion: as if (continued this enthusiastic _Milesian_, rising from his seat with all his native vehemence,)--as if the moral world was subject to those convulsions which shake the _natural_ to its centre, burying by a single shock the monumental splendours of countless ages. Thus it should seem, that when the bosom of national freedom was rent asunder, the national virtues which derived their nutriment from its source sunk into the abyss; while on the barren surface which covers the wreck of Irish greatness, the hand of prejudice and illiberality has sown the seeds of calumny and defamation, to choke up those healthful plants, indigenous to the soil, which still raise their oft-crushed heads, struggling for existence, and which, like the palm-tree, rise, in proportion to those efforts made to suppress them.” To repeat the words of the Prince is to deprive them of half their effect: his great eloquence lies in his air, his gestures, and the forcible expression of his dark-rolling eye. He sat down exhausted with the impetuous vehemence with which he had spoken. “If we were to believe Dr. Warner, however,” (said the priest) “the modern Irish are a degenerated race, comparatively speaking, for he asserts, that even in the days of Elizabeth, ‘the old natives had degenerated, and that the _wars of several centuries_ had reduced them to a state far inferior to that in which they were found in the days of Henry the Second.’ But still, like the modern Greeks, we perceive among them strong traces of a free, a great, a polished, and an enlightened people.” Wearied by a conversation in which my heart now took little interest, I made the _palinod_ of my _prejudices_, and concluded by saying, “I perceive that on this ground I am always destined to be vanquished, yet always to win by the loss, and gain by the defeat; and therefore I ought not in common policy to cease to _oppose_, until nothing further can be obtained by opposition.”