Church might be, he would undertake to drive a coach and six through the very severest of its penalties.  Nor were the Catholic priesthood idle during these times of storm and commotion.  At the head of them, and foremost in both ability and hatred of tithes, stood the late Dr. Doyle, the celebrated J.K.L. of that day, Bishop of Kildare and Leighlin; a man to whose great intellectual powers the country at large chiefly owes the settlement of that most difficult and important question.  This able prelate assailed the system with a fiery vehemence that absolutely set the country in a blaze, and reduced the wealthy Establishment to a case of the most unprecedented distress.  Who can forget that memorable apothegm to the Irish people on the subject?  “Let your hatred of tithes,” he said, “be as lasting as your sense of justice.”

Unfortunately it is an easy task to instruct or tempt the Irish peasant to violate the law, especially when sanctioned, in that violation, by those whose opinion and advice he takes as the standard of his conduct.  Be this as it may, the state of the country was now becoming frightful and portentous; and although there had not, as yet, been much blood shed, still there was no person acquainted with the extraordinary pains which were taken to excite the people against the payment of tithe, who was not able to anticipate the terrible outburst and sanguinary slaughters which soon followed.

We have already detailed a midnight meeting of the anti-tithe confederacy; but so confident had the people soon become in the principle of general unanimity against the payment of this impost, that they did not hesitate to traverse the country in open day by thousands; thus setting not only law, but all the powers of the country by which it is usually carried out and supported, at complete defiance.

Threatening letters, and notices of violent death, signed with blood, and containing the form of a coffin, were sent to all such as were in any way obnoxious, or, what was the same thing, who were in any way disposed either to pay tithes or exact them.

In this state matters were, when, one morning about a week after the scene we have just described in O’Driscol’s office, a dialogue to the following effect took place in the proctor’s immense farm-yard, between our friend Mogue Moylan and his quondam sweetheart, Letty Lenehan.  Letty, of late, that is since the morning of the peddler’s conversation with Mogue, had observed that some unaccountable change had taken place in his whole manner, not only towards herself, but in his intercourse with the rest of his fellow-servants.  He was for instance, much more silent that he had ever been:  but although he spoke less, he appeared to think more; yet it might be observed, that whatever the subject of his thoughts was, it evidently had diffused a singular degree of serenity, and a peculiarly striking complacency through his whole manner.  With respect to herself he had ascended from the lover into the patron; and although she had been amusing herself at his expense throughout their previous courtship, if it could be termed such, yet she felt no less puzzled as to the cause of such a change, and quite as anxious to ascertain it.