“Terrible work in Yorkshire with the Pope!  I fight with the beasts at Ephesus every day....  This week I publish a pamphlet on the Catholic question, with my name to it.  There is such an uproar here that I think it is gallant, and becoming a friend of Lord Grey’s, to turn out and take a part in the affray....  What a detestable subject!—­stale, threadbare, and exhausted; but ancient errors cannot be met with fresh refutations.”

Not with fresh refutations, perhaps, but with a wonderful prodigality of fresh illustrations and conceits. A Letter to the Electors upon the Catholic Question begins with the thrice-repeated question, “Why is not a Catholic to be believed on his oath?”

“What says the law of the land to this extravagant piece of injustice?  It is no challenge against a juryman to say he is a Catholic, he sits in judgment upon your life and your property.  Did any man ever hear it said that such or such a person was put to death, or that he lost his property, because a Catholic was among the jurymen?  Is the question ever put?  Does it ever enter into the mind of the attorney or the counsellor to enquire of the faith of the jury?  If a man sell a horse, or a house, or a field, does he ask if the purchaser be a Catholic?  Appeal to your own experience, and try, by that fairest of all tests, the justice of this enormous charge.

“We are in treaty with many of the powers of Europe, because we believe in the good faith of Catholics.  Two-thirds of Europe are, in fact, Catholics; are they all perjured?  For the first fourteen centuries all the Christian world were Catholics; did they live in a constant state of perjury?  I am sure these objections against the Catholics are often made by very serious and honest men, but I much doubt if Voltaire has advanced any thing against the Christian religion so horrible as to say that two-thirds of those who profess it are unfit for all the purposes of civil life; for who is fit to live in society who does not respect oaths?

* * * * *

“I have lived a little in the world, but I never happened to hear a single Catholic even suspected of getting into office by violating his oath; the oath which they are accused of violating is an insuperable barrier to them all.  Is there a more disgraceful spectacle in the world than that of the Duke of Norfolk hovering round the House of Lords in the execution of his office,[89] which he cannot enter as a peer of the realm? disgraceful to the bigotry and injustice of his country—­to his own sense of duty, honourable in the extreme:  he is the leader of a band of ancient and high-principled gentlemen, who submit patiently to obscurity and privation rather than do violence to their conscience.  In all the fury of party, I never heard the name of a single Catholic mentioned, who was suspected of having gained, or aimed at, any political advantage,