if the lands he holds were fairly let: here is a Christian Bishop, who I am informed is a leading member of the Vice Society, and a subscriber of five-and-twenty guineas annually for putting down blasphemy: here is a Christian Bishop, guilty of a capital offence, the punishment of which with death every moral and even humane mind seems to justify : here is a Christian Bishop, allowed to purchase his life, and an absolution for his crime, from a Christian Magistrate, Mr. Dyer, at the charge of one thousand pounds, and this too after it was notorious that the same Christian Villain had been a regular trafficker in similar abuses of nature, and had got one man tortured with the lash and transported in Ireland, because he had virtue to reject his wages and resist the foul embrace of this brutish Christian Bishop!* Who will

* The following letter has appeared in the Morning Chronicle, and the circumstance which it relates is calculated to harrow up the feelings, even more than the disgusting scene in which the Bishop has just participated. Poor Ireland! the despotism of the Turks over Greece is mildness and humanity itself compared with what the Western Turks have inflicted upon thee.

TO THE RIGHT HON. C. KENDAL BUSHE,

LORD CHIEF JUSTICE OF THE COURT OF KING'S BENCH, IRELAND. MY LORD,

A RECENT detection of a horrible crime here impels me to obtrude upon your Lordship with a suggestion, which your character for humanity and a strict sense of justice gives me reason to hope you will adopt, even though it come to you anonymously.

On your appointment to the office of his Majesty's Solicitor General for Ireland, sixteen or seventeen years ago, you were said to have determined to confine your future practice to the Court of Chancery, except in particular cases.

In a very few instances did you depart from that determination, and one of them was when you appeared in the Recorder's Court of Dublin, about ten years since, as leading Counsel in the prosecution of- Byrne, for imputing to the Honourable and Right Reverend Percy Jocelyn, the Lord Bishop of Ferns, an attempt to commit a certain crime,

Your fee on that occasion was, I believe, exactly one hundred guineas, and I remember your warm eulogium of the Right Rev. Lord for his courage in coming forward to prosecute under such circumstances. I most religiously believe that you then considered his Lordship an innocent and an injured man.

Byrne was convicted. I will not say that conviction was entirely owing to the ability and eloquence of Mr. Bushe; but I well recollect the effect produced upon the Court, the Jury, and the auditory, The Irish Barristers practise indifferently in all the Courts of Law and Equity.

now boast of being a Christian? Who will now doubt a word of what I have written of these worst of brutes called Christians?

by your powerful appeal to their feelings. Most certainly it insured to unfortunate Byrne no mitigation of punishment; for, having been sentenced to be publicly whipped through the streets of Dublin (from Newgate to the Royal Exchange, and back again), the Sheriff, in the zealous discharge of his duty, superseded, for that day, the common executioner, and procured from the Barrack a drummer, nearly six feet high, whose strength and dexterity were fully proved by the manner in which he lacerated the back of the unhappy culprit.

Byrne bore the punishment without a groan-on his being carried into the gaol from the car, to which he had been tied, he solemnly - declared his innocence, and burst into tears. I forget whether his sentence did or did not include transportation, if it did not, the sense of degradation did that which the Judge decreed not. Byrne left the country, and has not since been heard of.

Such are the circumstances of Byrne's case, I find, precisely—I know they are substantially correct. You will, I am sure, recollect all this with pain-it will, 1 trust, operate as an example to future lawyers, to refrain from exaggerating charges, or exciting prejudice against prisoners, in their statement of cases-and the fate of Byrne will, I trust, have the salutary effect of rendering Jurors still more scrupulous in the discharge of their duty, when deciding upon the life or character of their fellow-man.

I now come to the suggestion of which I spoke in the commencement, and which my intimate knowledge of the excellence of your heart, induces me to think you may have anticipated, after learning the detection here, to which I alluded, namely, that you will cause strict inquiry to be made after unfortunate Byrne, and (if he still lives), cause such reparation to be made for the torture of his person and the destruction of his character, as may be within your power; and in making such reparation, you will, no doubt, be munificently assisted by the noble and highly respectable family of his prose

cutor.

I trust it is unnecessary for me to apologise for this appeal to your Lordship's justice.

I have the honour to be, &c. &c.

Here Mr. Chief Justice Abbott may I not fairly call upon you and ask you if you ever assisted in inflicting au unjust punishment on an individual as your Irish brother has here evidently done. Look into Dorchester Gaol and reflect. I dare say that Byrne was denounced as an enemy to the Church and religion in imputing such a crime to one of its heads, and that a great deal was said about the necessity of preserving public morals by the aid of religion, and the justifica

These are the sort of fellows that form the Vice Society. I have received letters in various hand writings, and the last I received came from some person of distinction, enquiring whether I had never heard that the leading Counsel for the Vice Society who has declaimed so much against me and my blasphemy was a notorious sodomite, and wondering why I had never retaliated upon him from the notoriety of this vice. I immediately after the names of my first Jury were pub lished, I received information that one of the talesmen, whose name I mentioned in No. 11, Vol. 1. of the Republican, as one of those who had previously avowed his intention in public company to find me guilty, was obliged to decamp from the neighbourhood of St. Clement Dane's for the same crime; that the charge and his name may be still traced on the books at Bow Street; and that he had not been heard of until he appeared on that trial; which I presume was a sufficient expiation for all such offences. I have the portrait of the fellow now in my mind's eye, and if ever the science of physiognomy be admitted an evidence against him he will be found guilty. I shall make enquiries into this matter when I get to London. I have said nothing about it hitherto, because my information has been altogether anonymous; but the flagrancy and coincidence of this case of the Christian Bishop of Clogher seems to justify me thus far, and has impelled me so to notice it. The Juryman I mention was particularly forward in interrupting me, and condemning my line of defence., Christianity cloaks every vice and expiates all by prayer and fine. As a further proof, I have only to mention, that Robert Hedgher, who was a brothel-keeper for years, and who made a fortune out of that late horrible stew called the Dog and Duck in St. George's Fields, has been

tion of every action of those who superintend it by clearing away every imputation of crime. The magistrate who suffered this Percy Jocelyn, Lord Bishop of Clogher, to escape from justice ought to forfeit his own life, for, in so doing, he evidently countenanced and participated in the crime. Had he been a Priest of the sect of Methodists he would have found no such favour. A scoundrel Priest of this gang has been lately tried at the Berkshire assizes and found guilty of seducing the servant of his host and robbing his house. Since I have been confined in this Gaol a methodist Priest has been transported from here under somewhat similar circumstances, or for stealing a watch from a house in which he had been harboured; and whilst confined he was earnest in his faith and wanted permission to preach his tenets and his calling by the Holy Ghost to his fellow prisoners. So much for the morality of religion!

one of the most active leaders of the Vice Society and all the Bible Scieties; and now I see there is a person of that name seated as a Magistrate in Union Hall, Southwark! It has also been notorious, that, though one of the professed objects of the Vice Society has been to prevent or punish seduction, the Bishop of Durham, a man above ninety years old, and one of the principles of that Society, has kept young girls in bis house, in Grosvenor Square, (as I have been informed) in open profligacy, in the face of all his servants. Here Mr. Chief Justice Abbott we have a rare specimen of what is the state of morality as identified with the Christian religion, and our religious institutions, and particularly with the Vice Society. The cases of Hedgher and the Christian Bishop of Clogher are notorious: of the other cases I have yet no other proof than that here stated.

It is fortunate for public morals and the credit of the press that Mr. Cobbett happened to have the management of a daily paper, or the others would have smothered this affair of the Bishop and the Soldier. To Mr. Cobbett alone is due the praise of having published the name of the wretch of a Christian Bishop in full, which I am happy to see has been copied into the provincial papers of this district. How delicious would be the situation to me Mr. Chief Justice to hear you lecturing this Christian Bishop on a trial about the close and inseparable connection of morals and religion. Not a word has ever been heard against the religion of the Bishop; doubtless, he could hold forth in his pulpit as good a tale about morality and religion, and the sin of sedition and blasphemy, as any of his priestly compeers. The public papers being compelled by Mr. Cobbett to notice the case of the Bishop and Soldier, have also told us that a second Irish Bishop is the terror of every chamber-maid at every Inn where he stops, and that a third never put foot on his diocese but spent the revenue of his bishopric, or HIS SHARE OF IRELAND'S HEART-BLOOD, in ranging over the Continent, and in denouncing wherever he went, as a fraud upon mankind, the religion that enriched and supported him! I have found this account in the "Morning Chronicle," but by no names attached to it. It is the bane of public morals that the names which belong to such cases are not published. Had I the command of a daily newspaper I would do as Mr. Cobbett has done in the case of the Christian Bishop: I would publish every name connected with every species of villainy practised among the royalty and the aristocracy of the country, that was well authenticated. Insinuations or half expressed words and sentences are a disgrace to any su

perintendant of a public press, and an outrage upon honesty and moral feeling. It would not be the least important item in the question of Reform to reform the public press of the country, particularly the newspaper press. As it is at present, it is one of Corruption's main springs, and acts with the regularity of clock work, one wheel regulating another, and so keeping the whole in motion.

The priestly fraternity seem to have been rather unfortunate in having so much of their villainy exhibited of late. The Stamford News lately gave an account of one of them exhibiting himself naked to some ladies and respectable families near a bathing-place, in the most offensive manner; and of excusing himself upon the score of drunkenness; the following Sunday went into his pulpit, preached a violent sermon upon the sin of schism, and argued the impossibility of salvation being extended to dissenters from the established Church! A Leicester paper mentioned another case of a Vicar having been more than once of late so drunk in his pulpit as to be unable to proceed, and to drive his congregation away unhallowed and in disgust; and that when some of the parishioners attempted to remove him from the pulpit he assumed the attitude of a boxer and wanted to fight them. All these things, Mr. Chief Justice, must tend to open the eyes of the people as to the value of the morality that is connected with the religious part of our institutions. I must not forget to mention another thing, in your language quite relevant to the case. The inhabitants of the villages or townships of Ashley and Leigh, in Lancashire, have lately had a curate forced upon them by an armed and mounted troop of dragoons because they had refused and resisted him. The inhabitants assembled in the Church-yard to resist the Curate, the latter sent for a party of dragoons, who charged the inhabitants up to the Church door, broke it open, and, after triumphantly placing the Priest in the pulpit, acted as his body guard whilst he went through the service of prayers preached a sermon, and read the thirty-nine articles! Where scenes like unto these are going on, Thomas Paine's Age of Reason will operate most powerfully, and whether or not you Mr. Chief Justice will concede the right to publish it is quite immaterial. It is now in full sale in different editions by different persons, and though a sort of smuggled article, is valued more than India silks and muslins, or French and Dutch spirits.

I have rather travelled out of the record to work in the different cases here stated, so I must now return to the