Glasgow Courier. — 1848-01-13 (Glasgow, Strathclyde, Scotland)

THE ENGLISH ROMAN CATHOLIC ARISTOCRACY, AND THE IRISH ROMAN CATHOLIC PRELACY. (From Ike Morning lierald.)  We cannot say that we are now, or ever have been, very great admirers of the English Roman Catholic aristocracy as a body. They are, for the most part, haughty, reserved, bigoted, timid, narrow-minded, and unusually intolerant and exclusive. For the most part men of most ancient lineage and descent, they look down on the modern Hanover and Pitt-created aristocracy, their superiors in all useful acquirement, in most civic virtues, and undoubtedly so in that energy, liberality, and freedom from prejudice, the chief characteristics of sensible and well-informed Eng.. Salmon. This small clique of Rotten Catholic Lords, though turning up their super-aristocratic noses at the great mass of Protestant nobility and gentry in these realms, who-have something better than blue blood in their veins, and something more solid than idle pride in their heads, never scrupled in the life-time of the late Daniel O'Connell to fraternise with any dirty demagogue or any greasy rogue whom the deceased agitator commended to their embraces. But now that the demagogue is gone to his last account—now that the prestige of his name has passed away, and that even with Roman Catholics themselves many of his deeds seem more than questionable, some of the Roman Catholic Peers have become disenchanted of their delusions' and at length —though late in the day—perceive the abyss to which the Irish Demos and the Irish priest, whose mere instrument the demagogue is, are fast hurrying them. That Lord Arundel and Surrey, with the chivalry of a soldier, should escape from the trammels of Thuggee, is not wonderful. But that Lord Shrewsbury, heretofore considered as the most bigoted and priest-led of the Roman Catholic Peers—the miracle-monger of our age and time—and the patron of relics, scapularies, Agnus Deis, and such-like exploded fancies, should so emancipate himself, is a proof of the prevalence of an improved and improving spirit among the Roman Catholic aristocracy, on which we congratulate the body and compliment the individual. It is indeed a bright and glorious thing to see the descendant of the celebrated John Talbot of the French wars, after a lapse of more than four centuries, enunciating sentiments worthy of his brave and chivalrous ancestor, who fell at the battle of Chastillon, in 1453, and writing to the priests and bishops of his Church in a strain worthy q 4 an honest man and a well-born gentleman. On the 9th of DecYmber in the past year, stung, doubtless, by the indignant comments of the Berold and the Times, in which the Chronicle, greatly to its credit, joined —Lord Shrewsbury addressed a letter to the Right Rev. Dr. Brown, Roman Catholic bishop of Elphin, then at Sligo,expressing his astonishment that no spiritual investigation had taken place into the alleged denunciations from the Roman Catholic altars, and intimating pretty plainly a wish, for the honour of his Church, that such investigation should precede a criminal prosecution on the part of the Government. It was hinted to the titular of Elphin by his co-religionist, the Premier Earl, that the Episcopal hierarchy possessed peculiar facilities for such inquiries and investigations, not possessed by the Government—that they had expostulatory censures and excommunications at hand, which they might wield with most wholesodic and murder-preventing effect, and that, indeed, such admonitim had already been resorted to by the Roman Catholic Bishop oi Limerick with an efficacy very salutary, though undoubtedly los. ing some of their weight because of their solitariness—the Bishoi of Limerick standing alone in such denunciations. But althougl Lord Shrewsbury thus pressed his proper and Christian views m Dr. Brown of Elphin, and pointed Bodily at that meek priest Mac dermott; the "dove of Elphin" nevertheless preserved a more the] turtle taciturnity, and treated the epistle from Alton Towers wit] ineffable disdain. Nothing daunted by this supercilious silence o M'Hale's suffragan, the descendant Of the proud Shrewsburjs a