In the House of Commons the same evening, Mr. Dillon
made a furious attack on the Roman Catholic Bishop of Limerick, and also, if the report of the Freeman's Journal can be trusted, on the Pope, for the line they have taken in dis- couraging and condemning boycotting and the " Plan of Campaign." Dr. O'Dwyer was said to be guilty of writing "one of the most infamous, most cowardly, most dastardly letters ever penned by an ecelesiastic,"—the letter, namely, on the Glensharrold estate, in which the Bishop of Limerick strongly advised the tenants to accept the terms offered by
the Land Court. But Mr. Dillon does not spare epithets, especially on absent prelates. Nor is the Bishop of Limerick, on his side, afraid to use tolerably strong language :— " I will tell him this, that if at any time I should find myself put into prison for a cause that I professed to believe just, I would rot there before I allowed my friends to send up a miserable whine for my release from every end of the country on the plea of health, and that if I sneaked out thus, and then went off to the Antipodes on a twelve months' tour until the storm blew over, and my vows to defy the Act of Parlia- ment under which I had been imprisoned were forgotten, that he might call me a dastard without fear of contradiction." And the Bishop goes on to inveigh especially against "the dirt flung at the successor of St. Peter, Leo XIII., amid the cheers of English Protestants." Mr. Dillon himself denies having flung this dirt at the Pope ; but it is attributed to him in the report of the Freeman's Journal, which can hardly have drawn upon its imagination for the language. The truth is, that these Celtic orators are very often quite unconscious of the details in their own flights of rhetoric.
