(UNITED IRELAND, JUNE 16.)

Mr. John F. Taylor owes everything he has or is to the Irish National Party; nor is he slow to confess it where the acknowledgment will serve his personal interests.  His sneers are all anonymous, and, like Mr. Fagg, the grateful and deferential valet in The Rivals, “it hurts his conscience to be found out.”  There is no honesty or sincerity in the man.  His covert gibes are the spiteful emanation of personal disappointment; his lofty morality is a cloak for unscrupulous self-seeking.  He has always shown himself ready to say anything or do anything that may serve his own interests.  In the general election of 1885 he made frantic efforts to get into Parliament as a member of the Irish Party.  He ghosted every member of the party whose influence he thought might help him—­notably the two men, Mr. Dillon and Mr. O’Brien, at whom he now sneers, as he fondly believes, in the safe seclusion of an anonymous letter of an English newspaper.  During the period of probation his hand was incessant on Mr. Dillon’s door-knocker.  The most earnest supplications were not spared.  All in vain.  Either his character or his ability failed to satisfy the Irish leader, and his claim was summarily rejected.  Since then his wounded vanity has found vent in spiteful calumny of almost every member of the Irish Party—­whenever he found malice a luxury that could be safely indulged in.

“His next step was a startling one.  We have absolute reason to know, when the last Coercion Act was in full swing, this pure-souled and disinterested patriot begged for, received, and accepted a very petty Crown Prosecutorship under a Coercion Government.  As was wittily said at the time, he sold his principles, not for a mess of pottage, but for the stick that stirred the mess.  Strong pressure was brought to bear on him, and he was induced for his own sake, after many protests and with much reluctance, to publicly refuse the office he had already privately accepted.  Mr. Taylor professes to model himself on Robert Emmet and Thomas Davis; it is hard to realise Thomas Davis or Robert Emmet as a Coercion Crown Prosecutor in the pay of Dublin Castle.  Since then there has been no more persistent caviller at the Irish policy and the Irish Party in company where he believed such cavilling paid.  When Home Rule was proposed by Mr. Gladstone, he had a thousand foolish sneers for the measure and its author.  When the Bill was defeated, he elected Mr. Chamberlain, Mr. Goschen, and Mr. T.W.  Russell as the gods of his idolatry.  Such a nature needs a patron, and Mr. Webb, Q.C., the Tory County Court Judge who doubled the sentence on Father M’Fadden, was the patron to be selected.  It is shrewdly suspected that he supplied most of the misguiding information for Dr. Webb’s coercion pamphlet, and it is probable that Dr. Webb gives him a lift with his weekly letter to the Manchester Guardian.

    (UNITED IRELAND, JUNE 23.)