Only Thackeray could properly sing the achievement of the Limerick
Nationalists on Easter Monday, when Mr. Butt and Mr. O'Shaughnessy and Mr. O'Sullivan headed a procession of Home- rulers through Limerick, which was received at the O'Connell Monument by an ambuscade of Nationalists with shillelaghs be- neath their cloaks, who, for a time, succeeded in throwing the procession into confusion, while many men, women, and children were seriously injured by the stones and other missiles which flew fast and far, till the Nationalists, outnumbered, were compelled to take to flight. Mr. Butt subsequently delivered a speech with- out any very distinct allusion to the fight, having either prepared his speech so carefully before that he did not venture to alter it, or thinking, perhaps, that the less he said of his few but daring assailants, the less would be their fame. As the moral-force men. bore down, on the Nationalists of 1848, so on Easter Monday.
ness is not extending, and of new speculation outside the last did the Nationalists bear down on the moral-force men of
1876,—with very much the same result which Thackeray so, graphically depicted :—
With throwing of brickbats, Drowned puppies and dead rats, These ruffian democrats themselves did lower ; Tin-kettles, rotten eggs, Cabbage-stalks and wooden legs, They flung among the patriots of Shannon Shore."
Mr. Butt, however, thought it fitting to descant rather on the prospect of converting England to his views, than on the hope of uniting Ireland in support of them. And perhaps he chose the less hopeless theme of the two.
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