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The officer on duty receives an allowance of two dollars and a half for his dinner. At the Bank of England he gets instead a dinner for himself and a friend, and a couple of bottles of wine. The interior of the Parliament-house is almost the same as when Ireland had her own separate legislature. The House of Lords is in precisely the condition in which it was left in 1801.
It was in the Parliament-house that 'the ordinary Lords of Session, the Scotch Judges, that is to say, held their courts. Ante, p. 39. Dr. Johnson modestly said, he had not read Homer so much as he wished he had done. But this conversation shews how well he was acquainted with the Maeonian bard; and he has shewn it still more in his criticism upon Pope's Homer, in his Life of that Poet.
In this wild parliament-house, clouds, rocks, sun, and winds met and consulted. The 'old' men, too, had left their spirits among the great stones, which lay couched like lions on the hill-tops, under the white clouds, and their brethren, the hunting buzzard hawks.
Among other things, my Lord Sandwich tells me, that he hears the Commons will not agree to the King's late declaration, nor will yield that the Papists have any ground given them to raise themselves up again in England, which I perceive by my Lord was expected at Court. 25th. 26th. Sir W. Batten and I by water to the Parliament-house: he went in, and I walked up and down the Hall.
They averred that they meant to be loyal; that no law, however grievous, had in the execution of it been opposed in the Province; but, they said, as they came as of right to their old Parliament-House, to exercise, as of right, perfect freedom of debate, they found a standing army in their metropolis, and a military guard with cannon pointed at their very doors; and, in the strong way of the old Commonwealth men, they protested against this presence as "a breach of privilege, and inconsistent with that dignity and freedom with which they had a right to deliberate, consult, and determine."
Being in talk to-day with Sir W. Batten he tells me that little is done yet in the Parliament-house, but only this day it was moved and ordered that all the members of the House do subscribe to the renouncing of the Covenant, which is thought will try some of them. There is also a bill brought in for the wearing of nothing but cloth or stuffs of our own manufacture, and is likely to be passed.
I paid a visit to the Bank of Ireland, the edifice on which the hopes of so many patriotic Irishmen have been centred, insomuch as it is the old Parliament-house. The elderly official who conducted us over the building took us first through the bank-note manufacturing rooms, where we espied in a corner a queer wooden figure draped in a queerer uniform.
The counsellors and presidents were all assembled, and as they sat there in their crimson robes, they seemed, to the excited imagination of those who loved their country, like embodiments of the impending and most sanguinary tragedy. As the monarch left the parliament-house a faint cry of 'God save the King' was heard in the street.
Of the earlier part of my life it is only necessary to say, that I swept the boards of the Parliament-House with the skirts of my gown for the usual number of years during which young Lairds were in my time expected to keep term got no fees laughed, and made others laugh drank claret at Bayle's, Fortune's, and Walker's and ate oysters in the Covenant Close.
Arthur suggested that the tree-tops thereabout might form a parliament-house to the surrounding nation of parrots, and that, their session having commenced, they had met to discuss some new legislative act for the good of the community, or, perhaps, some point calculated to lead to a general war, the overbearing conduct of the macaws, or the increasing insults of the parakeets.
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