Letter X. begins with some observations on the Law of Tithe in Ireland.  “I submit to your common sense, if it is possible to explain to an Irish peasant upon what principle of justice he is to pay every tenth potato in his little garden to a clergyman in whose religion nobody believes for twenty miles round him, and who has nothing to preach to but bare walls.”  Let the landowner pay the tithe, and charge the labourer a higher rent.  This, Peter seems to think, will meet all the difficulties of the case, and yet not impoverish the Established clergy.  And he is more than ever persuaded that the best way to check the predominance of the Roman Church in Ireland is to deliver the Romanists from every species of religious disability.  On this theme Peter harps in a vein which, if he were a clergyman writing over his own name, would be justly described as cynical.—­

“If a rich young Catholic were in Parliament, he would belong to White’s and to Brookes’s; would keep race-horses; would walk up and down Pall Mall; be exonerated of his ready money and his constitution; become as totally devoid of morality, honesty, knowledge, and civility, as Protestant loungers in Pall Mall; and return home with a supreme contempt for Father O’Leary and Father O’Callaghan....  The true receipt for preserving the Roman Catholic religion is Mr. Perceval’s receipt for destroying it:  it is to deprive every rich Catholic of all the objects of secular ambition, to separate him from the Protestants, and to shut him up in his castle with priests and relics.”

However sound this estimate of theological results may be, Abraham thinks that a period of universal war is not the proper time for innovations in the Constitution.  This, replies Peter, “is as much as to say that the worst time for making friends is the period when you have made many enemies; that it is the greatest of all errors to stop when you are breathless, and to lie down when you are fatigued.”

Abraham, and those who think with him, hold that concession to Roman Catholics ought to be refused, if for no other reason, because King George III. dislikes it.  This is an argument which Peter cannot away with.  He respects the King as a good man, and holds that loyalty is one of the great instruments of English happiness.—­

“But the love of the King may easily become more strong than the love of the Kingdom, and we may lose sight of the public welfare in our exaggerated admiration of him who is appointed to reign only for its promotion and support.... God save the King, you say, warms your heart like the sound of a trumpet.  I cannot make use of so violent a metaphor; but I am delighted to hear it, when it is a cry of genuine affection:  I am delighted to hear it when they hail not only the individual man, but the outward and living sign of all English blessings.  These are noble feelings, and the heart of every good man must go with them; but God save the King, in these