“I thank you for your pamphlet; but I find that the extract from it in The Times is faithfully given, and I repeat that you have offered me a personal wrong, as unprovoked as it is unwarrantable. You have egregiously mistaken what my opinions were when we met. You have uncharitably misrepresented what they are now; and you have imputed to me suspicious motives for a change, which has no other existence than in your own erroneous recollections and intemperate judgment.
“If what you called the Catholic rights were touched
upon in our table-talk, it is likely that a
| 34 | LIFE AND CORRESPONDENCE | Ætat. 55. |
“With regard to the Quarterly Review, I never will allow that any one
has a right to call upon me individually respecting any composition (not of a
personal character) which has not my name affixed to it. But I maintain every
argument which is urged in that paper; I assent to every assertion which it
contains; I hold every opinion which is advanced there. Elsewhere I have
published arguments, assertions, and opinions of the same kind, bearing upon
the same conclusion. And whosoever charges me with inhumanity for this, or
affirms that it is designed to render the Irish objects of horror and
execration, calumniates me. I have been used to misrepresenta-
| Ætat. 55. | OF ROBERT SOUTHEY. | 35 |
“It is a fair course of argument to assert that the miseries of Ireland were not caused by the laws which exclude the Roman Catholics from legislative power, and to infer that they cannot be remedied by the repeal of those laws; and the question is, whether those premises can be proved by historical facts, and that inference established by just reasoning. You cannot condemn the British Government more severely than I do, for having suffered the great body of the Irish people to remain to this day in as barbarous a state as the Scotch and the Welsh were till they were civilised, the first by their Kirk, the second by the laws. That the Irish have been thus barbarous from the earliest times may be learned by their own annals; that they are so still is proved at every assizes in that unhappy country, and almost in every newspaper. That they should be in this condition is the fault of their aristocracy, their landlords, and their priests, and the reproach of their rulers. But in what state of mind must that person be who accuses another of inhumanity, and holds him up as the enemy of the Irish nation, because he has asserted these truths!
“I could say more, Sir, were it not vain to address one
whose sense of the usages of society is so perverse that he deems it no breach
of honour and hospitality to bring old table-talk before the public for the
purpose of depreciating me; whose prepossessions are so obstinate that rather
than think it possible his own recollections, after more than twenty
| 36 | LIFE AND CORRESPONDENCE | Ætat. 55. |
