Mr. Trevelyan seems to us to have made a rather
feeble reply to Mr. Lewis's inane attack on Judge O'Hagan of the Irish Land Commission, for certain verses about the Union, said to have been contributed by him to the Dublin Nation, about forty years ago, when ho can hardly have been out of his teens. It is not even certain, we believe, that Judge O'Hagan wrote the verses. He certainly has not, as the St. James's Gazette says, "recently thought fit to republish them," or in any way authorise their publication. But the truth is, the verses are a, rough statement, in street-ballad form, of very common-place fact:--
" How did they pass the Union?
By perjury and fraud."
Well, who has ever doubted that P The language used by Lord Plunket in the Irish House of Commons, and for which he, thirty years afterwards, declared himself impenitent in the English House of Lords, is far and away more fierce and violent than anything in these lines ; and all Liberal statesmen of those days in Ireland and England spoke of the means adopted by Pitt and Castlereagh in carrying the Union, and repressing the previous rebellion, in language quite as coloured as the re- mainder of the verse. It is not necessary to repeal the Union because of the means by which it was carried ; but the historian has yet to be born who will discover that those means were other than base and execrable.
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