22 AUGUST 1896, Page 3

The Westminster Gazette of Wednesday prints some de- li ghtful extracts

from an address "To Irish Nationalists throughout the World," issued in view of the approaching Convention, which show that the Irish still retain to per- fection the inimitable art of grotesque invective. "You know as well as we that in the immense Imposture called the English Constitution there is no place for the Restitution of National Right, and that you might as well play a concertina to a tiger as prate of Liberty and Justice to the pirate caste which, from Westminster and Whitehall, suck the blood and gnaw the marrow of Four Hundred Millions of Enslaved Humanity." Irishmen may as well extol "Constitutional cholera" as Constitutional agitation ; and "the Great Betrayal has been followed by the Great Cowardice and the Great Corruption." The "present degradation of the Renegades" is thus described :—" Pitiful John Dillon, the stilted peacock of judicial drawing-rooms, ridiculous and solemn, promenades the melancholy humbug of his Puppet Leadership before the contempt of London and West- minster !" Other Members of the Irish party, says the Westminster Gazette, are spoken of as " reptiles," who "sprawl in the smoking-rooms of London Liberal clubs." One cannot but notice the intense delight that the writer evidently got out of his grandiose invective. There is a certain class of Irishmen who positively wallow in the luxury of rhetorical insult as if it were a bed of down.