A TITLED DEMOCRAT.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XVI, Issue 29, 9 November 1888, Page 7

A TITLED DEMOCRAT.

" How glad I am not to be Irish ! I should hate England too much.' So wrote Lady Georgiana Fullerton, the eminent English novelist and fervpnt and humble convert to the faith, to Mr. Charles Greville in 1845, on reading his book on the past and present policy of England towards Ireland. We quote from the correspondence iucluded in her life, lately adapted into English from the French of Mrs. Craven by the Rev. Heary James ColeiiJge, S.J, and published by Richard Bentley and Son, of London.

Lady FullertoD, were she iving now, would undoubtedly stand, with Caidinal Manning, Bishep Bagshawe, Lord Ripon, Wilfrid Blunt, Edward Lucas and toe best representatives of English Catholic brainß and virtue, in advocacy of Irish Home Rule. At the time of O'Connell'B agitation, she deplored Repeal of the Union, but regarded it as sure to come. And she could not understand why, in the event of its happening, England a id Ireland should always detest each other. More enlightened than most of the statesmen of her day, she wrote : " 1 cannot understand why, even, while deprecating the Repeal of the Union, if it must be, there should not bu an effort made to retain Ireland as part of the Empire."

The daughter of one of England's oldest and proudest families, her sympathies were all on the side of democracy. The crown and throne-worshipping spirit which characterises the mass of her country people was abhorrent to her.

" I do not feel tha least more loyalty to Queen Victoria," she vtrot6 in 1853, " than, aa an American citizen, I might feel towards Mr. FiUmcre." '

She sympathised with the English Radicals ; and believed that tkeir views of religious liberty and equality would tend greatly to the advancement of the Catholic Faith ; " which is the foremost thing I have at heart," she added.

The devotion of this noble woman to the poor wag what made her an author, She wrote that she might have more money to dispense in charity. The Irish poor, of whom she met many in London, were in her eyes the very personification of her faith . " She was much touched." says her biographer, " to find herself at work among them in their extreme misery ; she could detect and admire the remarkable purity of manners which so many of them retain, even under such trying circumstances, in the miserable dens in which their lot was cast."

Lady Fullerton was a near relative of Lord Frederick Cavendish, the Irish Chief Secretary who was murdered in Pho»nix Park, Dublin, May 6, 1882. His death was a great grief to her, but it does nut appear that it changed her Irish sympathies. " How glad I am not to be Irish 1 I should h»»te England too much." This was the thought of her btrong and happy young womanhood. The word of her old age, one of the last things she ever wrote, was a tender, comprehending little poem in response to the impassioned verses of a young Irith pjet, whose heart was wrung with the miseries of her people. We are sorry the compiler of the English life did not ace fit to include this characteristic utterance. — Pilot.