At this period, when the persecution ran high against the Catholics, but with peculiar bitterness against their priesthood, it is but justice to a great number of the Protestant magistracy and gentry--nay, and many of the nobility besides--to state that their conduct was both liberal and generous to the unfortunate victims of those cruel laws. It is a well known fact that many Protestant justices of the peace were imprisoned for refusing to execute such oppressive edicts as had gone abroad through the country. Many of them resigned their commissions, and many more were deprived of them. Amongst the latter were several liberal noblemen--Protestants--who had sufficient courage to denounce the spirit in which the country was governed and depopulated at the same time. One of the latter--a nobleman of the highest rank and acquirements, and of the most amiable disposition, a warm friend to civil freedom, and a firm antagonist to persecution and oppression of every hue--this nobleman, we say, married a French lady of rank and fortune, who was a Catholic, and with whom he lived in the tenderest love, and the utmost domestic felicity. The lady being a Catholic, as we said, brought over with her, from France, a learned, pious, and venerable ecclesiastic, as her domestic chaplain and confessor. This man had been professor of divinity for several years in the college of Louvain; but having lost his health, he accepted a small living near the chateau of ----, the residence of Marquis De------, in whose establishment he was domesticated as chaplain. In short, he accompanied Lord ------ and his lady to Ireland, where he acted in the same capacity, but so far only as the lady was concerned; for, as we have already said, her husband, though a liberal man, was a firm but not a bigoted Protestant. This harmless old man, as was very natural, kept up a correspondence with several Irish and French clergymen, his friends, who, as he had done, held professorships in the same college. Many of the Irish clergymen, knowing the dearth of religious instruction which, in consequence of the severe state of the laws, then existed in Ireland, were naturally anxious to know the condition of the country, and whether or not any relaxation in their severity had taken place, with a hope that they might be able with safety to return to the mission here, and bestow spiritual aid and consolation to the suffering and necessarily neglected folds of their own persuasion. On this harmless and pious old man the eye of Hennessy rested. In point of fact he set him for Sir Robert Whitecraft, to whom he represented him as a spy from France, and an active agent of the Catholic priesthood, both here and on the Continent; in fact, an incendiary, who, feeling himself sheltered by the protection of the nobleman in question and his countess, was looked upon as a safe man with whom to hold correspondence. The Abbe, as they termed him, was in