We have been taken to task by "An Irish Protestant,"
whose jealousy on behalf of the good fame of his sometimes maligned country we respect, for a misuse of the word "-outrageous " in a description last week of the proceedings at the Longford election. Our correspondent objects, that the word, in its connexion, " produces an impression in the mind of the reader who might have no other source of information, that there was a dreadful tumult at the election, and that the Irish people are of an incu- rably savage, violent, and turbulent nature." We think the inference is rather over overdrawn : but we may at once state, that the term was -not invented by us, but belonged to an account in one of the morning papers, which we copied only in part; and the part to which the term would have been most appropriate—the extraordinary language addressed by Mr. Sleator to a priest at the nomination—was omitted for want of space. Our angry correspondent also refers, by way of aggravation, to what is deemed a similar past offence—to an instance in which we stated that an Irish audience were so excited by a bad conundrum that the police alone prevented a wreck of the theatre. This complaint shows a foolishly thin- skinned fastidiousness : in the first place, the facts were told just as they appeared in an Irish journal ; and in the next place, they were told in no spirit of grave criticism at all.
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