Page:The Irish Parliament; what it was, and what it did.djvu/25

 Bishops, "in artful folds of sacred lawn," which adorn the college halls, to conclude that the special mission of England during the eighteenth century was to evangelise ungrateful Ireland. Swift's description of the Irish Bishops of the middle of the eighteenth century must, it is feared, dispel this agreeable impression. He characterised them as highwaymen, who murdered on Hounslow Heath the gentlemen appointed to the Irish sees, stole their letters patent, came to Dublin, and were consecrated in their place.

At the close of the eighteenth century the episcopal character had not visibly improved. "The Church of Ireland," says Curran in 1787, "has been in the hands of strangers advanced to the mitre, not for their virtues or their knowledge, but quartered upon this country through their own servility or the caprice of their benefactors, inclined naturally to oppress us, to hate us, to defame us." Commenting on the systematic exclusion of Irish Churchmen from the Bench, and more especially the disregard of the claims of, the most celebrated pulpit orator of the day, Grattan draws a full-length portrait of the Anglo-Irish Bishop of his period. " Had he (Dean Kirwan) been a blockhead, bred a slave, and trained up in a great English family, and handed over as a household circumstance to the Irish Viceroy, he would have been an Irish Bishop and an Irish Peer with a great patronage, perhaps