for acting upon it, as though forty and two days made that act to be reasonable which would not have been so in twenty and one, being suited chiefly to the universities in Laputa, did not meet the approbation of our captious and beef-eating island:  and this second solution also, we are obliged to say; was exploded as soon us it was heard. Thirdly, stepped forward one who promised to untie the knot upon a more familiar principle:  the thunder was kept back for so many months in order to allow time for Mr O’Connell to show out in his true colours, on the hint of an old proverb, which observes—­that a baboon, or other mischievous animal, when running up a scaffolding or a ship’s tackling, exposes his most odious features the more as he is allowed to mount the higher.  In that idea, there is certainly some truth.  “Give him rope enough, and every knave will hang himself”—­is an old adage, a useful adage, and often a consolatory one.  The objection, in the case before us, is—­that our Irish hero had shown himself already, and most redundantly, on occasions notorious to every body, both previously to 1829, (the year of Clare,) and subsequently.  If, however, it should appear upon the trial of the several conspirators for seditious language, that they, or that any of them, had, by good affidavits, used indictable language in September, not having used it sooner, or having guarded it previously by more equivocal expressions, then it must be admitted that the spirit of this third explanation does apply itself to the case, though not in an extent to cover the entire range of the difficulty.  But a fourth explanation would evade the necessity of showing any such difference in the actionable language held:  according to this hypothesis, it was not for subjects to prosecute that the Government waited, but for strength enough to prosecute with effect, under circumstances which warned them to expect popular tumults.  In this statement, also, there is probably much truth, indeed, it has now become evident that there is.  Often we have heard it noticed by military critics as the one great calamity of Ireland, that in earlier days she had never been adequately conquered—­not sufficiently for extirpating barbarism, or sufficiently for crushing the local temptations to resistance.  Rebellion and barbarism are the two evils (and, since the Reformation, in alliance with a third evil—­religious hostility to the empire) which have continually sustained themselves in Ireland, propagated their several curses from age to age, and at this moment equally point to a burden of misery in the forward direction for the Irish, and backwards to a burden of reproach for the English.  More men applied to Ireland, more money and more determined legislation spent upon Ireland in times long past, would have saved England tenfold expenditure of all these elements in the three centuries immediately behind us, and possibly in that which is immediately a-head.  Such men as Bishop Bedell,