Mr. Sandford, your mother's son is welcome! Mr. Ponsonby, you may sit down." Doubtless, this story might have afforded merriment to the Doctor and his literary friends, at a time when it was fashionable, as well with the rich vulgar, as the low ignorant in England, to deride every thing Irish, even their misfortunes. But that time is now gone by. America has since triumphed, and Ireland, at the present crisis, seems destined to take her place among the nations, or English policy towards her must speedily change. But to our anecdote. The "one of those ancient Irish" alluded to, was the Mac Dermott, usually stiled Prince of Coolavin, (a district in the county of Sligo,) whose direct ancestor invited over Bruce, to rescue Ireland from English tyranny, at the beginning of the fourteenth century. For the meaning of Johnson's words, "the greatest man of the three," I am wholly at a loss, though well aware that the son of the earl of Besborough, whom he mentions as that personage, was descended from one of those rapacious revolutionary adventurers of Cromwell's training; who on 29th May, 21st Charles II. obtained a grant of lands, iniquitously declared forfeited, in the county of Kilkenny. This man's descendants, with those of an obscure London trader, Tristram Beresford, (whose original proposal to the fishmongers of that city, in the reign of James I. for a lease of their escheat of Ballykelly, in Ulster, I have read,) became the Protestant ascendency rulers of Ireland, where, during the last baleful century, they literally exercised the powers of king, lords, and commons. In this sense, undoubtedly the individual alluded to, was "the greatest man of the three," and perhaps therefore, was honored with leave to sit down in the presence of Mac Dermott.
4"And o'er the deep the festering boars shall flee."
The contempt and hatred which the Irish entertained for the English in former times, are expressed without reserve throughout these poems and songs. In the present, they are scornfully
