the monarchs of that time was that its pension list served to provide for the maintenance of Royal favourites as to whose income they wished no questions to be asked.  Curran thundered against the Irish pension list as “containing every variety of person, from the excellence of a Hawke or a Rodney to the base situation of a lady who humbleth herself that she may be exalted.”  In saying this he was understating rather than overstating the case, since a very cursory inspection of the State papers will reveal the fact that the mistresses and bastards of every English King, from Charles II. to George II., drew their incomes from the Irish establishment free from the inquisitive prying of the English House of Commons.  Although George III. had no need to conceal any palace scandals in this way, we have seen how the bigotry of “an old, mad, blind, despised, and dying king” postponed Emancipation for more than a generation, and one of the “princes, the dregs of their dull race,” of whom Shelley went on to speak, the Duke of York, declared in the House of Lords in 1825—­“I will oppose the Catholic claims whatever may be my situation in life.  So help me God.”

The respectful reception accorded to Queen Victoria—­whose dislike of Ireland was notorious—­on the very rare occasions on which she visited the country serves to show the absence of hostility to the Crown on the part of the great mass of the people, but the small number of these visits during the course of the longest reign in English history lends point to a question asked by Mr. James Bryce in a book published more than twenty years ago—­Why has the most obvious service a monarch can render been so strangely neglected?  When the present King visited the South of Ireland as Prince of Wales in 1885, at a time when Mr. Charles Parnell’s prestige was at its zenith, he was greeted with the half humorous sally—­“We will have no Prince but Charley,” which at any rate contrasts favourably with the shouts of “Popish Ned,” which his alleged sympathy with the popular side evoked on his visit a few years later to Londonderry.

The trivial fact that the English National Anthem was drowned at the degree day of the Royal University a few years ago by the fact that the students insisted on singing “God Save Ireland” at the end of a ceremony which even in the decorous surroundings of the Sheldonian and the Senate House is marked by a large amount of disrespectful licence, nevertheless provided the Times and the Unionist Press in general, for several days with a text upon which they hung their leading articles in the exploitation of their favourite theme, but no attention has been drawn in these quarters to the periodical threat of Orange exponents of a contingent loyalty to “throw the Crown into the Boyne” as a protest against the various assaults which have been made upon their prerogative by Parliament, and no mention was made in the English Press of the fact that on the day of the postponement of the coronation, owing to the illness of the King, the organ of the “disloyalists”—­the Freeman’s Journal—­ended its leading article with the words “God Save the King,” which were a mere expression of the feelings of the bulk of its readers.