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'' HOURS WITH 
 
 EMINENT IRISHMEN 
 
 AND A 
 
 GLIMPSE OF IRISH HISTORY 
 
 BY 
 
 JUSTIN H. MCCARTHY, M.R 
 
 BOSTON COLLEGE LIBRARY 
 CHESTNUT HILL, MASS. 
 
 NEW YORK : 
 
 FORDS' NATIONAL LIBRARY, 
 
 17 Barclay Street. 
 
 1886. 
 
^ 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Jonathan Swift 5 
 
 James Clarence Mangan, .13 
 
 Miles B}Tne, 21 
 
 George Berkeley, . 30 
 
 Gerald Griffin, 39 
 
 Patrick Sarsfield, . . 45 
 
 Brian Boroimhe, . 52 
 
 Lord Edward Fitzgerald, 60 
 
 The Earls, 68 
 
 Oliver Goldsmith. 76 
 
 Henry Grattan, .......... 84 
 
 Henry Flood, . * .92 
 
 Edmund Burke loi 
 
 Richard Steele, ......... 109 
 
 Richard Brinsley Sheridan, . . . . . . . .117 
 
 Lawrence Sterne, 126 
 
 Thomas Davis, .......... 134 
 
 Thomas Francis Meagher, "....... 141 
 
 Charles Lever, . . . . . * . . ... 150 
 
 John Mitchell 159 
 
 Some Thoughts on the Eighth of April 168 
 
 The Thirty Tyrants, . . . . . . . .174 
 
 Publishers Note, 180 
 
 The Legends, .......... 181 
 
 Christianity, .......... 193 
 
 The Norman Conquest. 199 
 
 Elizabeth, 210 
 
 The Cromwellian Settlement, . , . . . . . 219 
 
 The Restoration — William of Orange, 229 
 
 The Eighteenth Century, 236 
 
 Emmet — O'Connell, 251 
 
 Young Ireland — Fenianism, 262 
 
 The Land Question, ......... 272 
 
 Home Rule — The Land League, 291 
 
 1591 
 
HOURS WITH GREAT IRISHMEN. 
 
 JONATHAN SWIFT. 
 
 A DIM Stone upon the darkened wall of St. Patrick's 
 Church in Dublin sums up in words at once cruelly bitter 
 and profoundly melancholy the story of a great man's life. 
 That mouldering inscription, niched in high obscurity, 
 which sometimes stray pilgrims from across the seas strain 
 their sight to decipher in the gloom, is the self-uttered 
 epitaph of Jonathan Swift. 
 
 Hie depositum est corpus 
 
 Jonathan Swift, S. T. P. 
 
 Hujus .ecclesiae cathedralis 
 
 Decani. 
 
 Ubi sseva indignatio 
 
 Cor ulterius lacerare nequit. 
 
 Abi viator 
 
 Et imitare si poteris 
 
 Strenuum pro virili libertatis vindicatorem. 
 
 '* Here resteth the body of Jonathan Swift, Dean of this 
 Cathedral Church, where fierce indignation can vex his 
 heart no longer. Go, traveler, imitate if thou canst a 
 champion, strenuous to his uttermost of liberty." 
 
 A little way apart, shadowed by his name in death no 
 less than in life, lies Stella. The pale, dark-eyed child 
 whose wide eyes filled with strange fire as they followed the 
 poor and lonely scholar through stately Shene or the prim 
 rococo epicureanism of Moor Park, sleeps as she lived at 
 her m^aster's feet. She dedicated all the days of her life 
 
b HOURS WITH GREAT IRISHMEN. 
 
 to Swift with a devotion which is well nigh without a parallel 
 in the history of woman's love for man. As we stand, awe- 
 struck and reverential in the quiet presence of the dead, 
 our senses seem troubled by a haunting influence as if a 
 phantom, vague, veiled, impalpable, were flitting by us in 
 the twilit air. It is the haunting influence of the secret of 
 those two tortured lives, the secret that lies buried between 
 their graves. 
 
 Never, perhaps, before or since, has the ordinance of 
 heaven brought two such entities together to play the part 
 of the patron and the patronized as-Sir William Temple and 
 Jonathan Swift. To Moor Park, trim, stately, formal, a 
 piece of not displeasing sham classicism in the midst of 
 the pleasant Surrey hills and woods and waters. Sir William 
 Temple, Baronet, and one time Secretary of State, had be- 
 taken himself to rest his mind and body from the ungrate- 
 ful toils of statecraft. His mind he soothed in an amiable 
 and sufficiently facile commerce with the Latin muses, in a 
 diplomatic assumption of acquaintance with bewildering 
 phases of the Grecian Grammar, which led him to ludi- 
 crous shipwreck over the Letters of Phalaris, and in the 
 not ungraceful exercise of his wit in the composition of 
 essays, of which posterity still remembers at least the 
 names. His body he solaced with the pippins of Shene and 
 the peaches of his sunny walls, with philosophic prom.enades 
 between yew groves adorned with the busts of Pagan wis- 
 dom, with a deferential care of his gout, and a reverential 
 eye to the precepts of the Ancients. 
 
 To this well-meaning, pompous, blameless, periwigged 
 pedant, the most eminently respectable medley of sense 
 and nonsense that even his age produced, there came, in 
 the later years of the dying seventeenth century, a young 
 suppliant from Ireland, a penniless, remote kinsman and 
 patron-seeker. His baronetship's most humble, obedient 
 
JONATHAN SWIFT. i 
 
 servant to command — and, unhappily, his servant at times 
 dedicated himself to the adoration of Temple in terms more 
 complaisant, more servile than these — was Mr. Jonathan 
 Swift, a young student from Dublin, with much wit, less 
 learning, and infinitessimally little means. The great man 
 was gracious. He received the dark, awkward young Irish- 
 man into his service; allowed him to drudge for him, 
 flatter him, fight his battles for him — most notably that im- 
 mortal "Battle of the Books" — wait upon his humors, 
 swallow his sonorous platitudes and tinsel learning, and be 
 in most things, mental and physical, his decorous and de- 
 lighted slave. In return for so much homage the stranger 
 was allotted some twenty pounds a year, a place at the ser- 
 vants' table, the run of the miscellaneous agglomeration of 
 literature which Temple called a library, and the companion- 
 ship of Hester Johnston. 
 
 For the rest of her life Hester Johnston — she was pre- 
 sumably, indeed almost certainly. Sir William Temple's 
 daughter — devoted herself to Swift. There never was in 
 all the world, or out of it, in the illimitable kingdoms of 
 fancy, a more famous pair of lovers than these two. Lelia 
 and Majnun, Romeo and Juliet, Diarmuid and Grainne — 
 repeat what names you please of famous lovers, that the 
 fancies of poets have ever adorned by the Tigris or the 
 Avon or the Blackwater, the names of Swift and Stella are 
 to the full as famous, appeal no less keenly to heart and 
 brain, to the imagination and to pity. Happy they were 
 not, could not be. My mind always turns when I read of 
 Swift -and Stella to that luckless pair of lovers whom Dante 
 saw in the third circle of hell, blown about forever on the 
 racking wind, and finding comfort through the lapse of 
 eternal twilight in the companionship of their common 
 doom. They, too — Swift and Stella — seem driven by the 
 pitiless wind of fate; they have fallen upon evil days; they 
 
» HOURS WITH GREA T IRISHMEN. 
 
 are greatly gifted, noble, greatly unhappy; they are sus- 
 tained by their strange, exquisite friendship, by the com- 
 munity of genius, by a tender affection which was out of 
 tune with the time and with their troubled lives. So long 
 as Stella lived, Swift was never alone. When she died he 
 was alone till the end. I remember nothing in literature 
 more profoundly melancholy than Swift's own eloquent 
 tribute to the memory of his dead wife, written in a room 
 which he has moved so that he may not see the light burn- 
 ing in the church windows, where the last rites are being 
 prepared. 
 
 The chief events of Swift's life may be mentioned well 
 nigh in a breath. He was born in Hoey's Alley, in Dublin, 
 on the 30th of November, 1667; his scholar days at Dublin 
 University were days of poverty, of moroseness, of what 
 those who thought themselves wise called misapplication. 
 He wrote and read what pleased him best, cultivating his 
 genius, walking his own wild way whither it led him — and 
 failed to get his degree. Then poverty compelled him, 
 like most men of genius of his time, to seek a patron. 
 Swift found him in Sir William Temple, a distant connec- 
 tion, by his marriage with delightful Dorothy Osborne, of 
 Swift's mother. Sir William was affable enough, accepted 
 Swift's services, and with Sir William for some ten years 
 Swift lived in a decent bondage, broken now and then by 
 fits of fiery insubordination succeeded by humiliating self- 
 surrender. It was during one of these revolts that Swift 
 took orders. Like Hamlet, Swift lacked advancement. 
 He had known the honor of half-intimacy with royalty, 
 had trod the walks of Shene with William of Orange, and 
 been instructed by the Dutch king in the Dutchman's 
 method of cutting asparagus, and had even been flattered 
 with promises of royal favor. Hut when Sir William Tem- 
 ple died, and the muses had duly mourned for the peri- 
 
JONATHAN SWIFT. ^-" ^ 
 
 wigged seventeenth century Roman, Swift found that his 
 hopes from the King were vain. He prompted most fruit- 
 lessly the regal memory; then in despair he accepted the 
 chaplaincy to Lord Berkeley, one of the Lords Justices of 
 Ireland, and received the two livings of Laracor and Rath- 
 beggin, in the diocese of Meath, worth jointly some two 
 hundred and sixty pounds a year. 
 
 To Ireland and to Swift in Ireland came over soon after 
 Stella, with her companion, and friend, Mrs. Diugley. 
 Stella's youth and beauty and wit made her many friends, 
 and won her many admirers. One gentleman, indeed, 
 pressed her so hard to marry him that he came near to 
 carrying his point. The friendship between Hester John- 
 ston and Swift, however much the heart of each may have 
 throbbed with a warmer feeling, was in its form only friend- 
 ship. Even the scandalous tongue of a scandalous age 
 recognized so much, and spoke with a most unmodish de- 
 corum and respect of him and her. That she was in love 
 with Swift it would be folly to doubt, but she seems to have 
 once thought of marriage with her earnest and eager suitor. 
 Swift, however, dreading the thought of losing her, while 
 seeming to acquiesce in the proposed marriage, put so many 
 ingenious obstacles in the way that the match was broken 
 off. Poor Stella ! She might have been happier with that 
 honest Irish gentleman, the companion of his quiet life, 
 the sharer of his small ambitions, his partner in obscure 
 content during life, and in the world's oblivion after death. 
 But she could not escape from the spell of the curse of 
 Swift's genius. Who now remembers the name of her 
 luckless lover or heeds where he sleeps ? But the world 
 will never forget Stella and her sorrows, or think of her 
 without a pang. 
 
 Suddenly Swift becam.e famous. His writings have at- 
 tracted attention in the great world of T ondon. His destiny 
 
10 HOURS WITH GREAT IRISHMEN-. 
 
 carries him there. He becomes the companion and coun- 
 sellor of statesmen, of scholars and soldiers. He becomes 
 the most remarkable man of an age of remarkable men. Of 
 all the brilliant figures that crowd the Court and the draw- 
 ing-room of St. James' none is more brilliant than that of 
 the Reverend Jonathan Swift, of Laracor, in the county of 
 Meath, in Ireland. Out of that galaxy of genius and wit 
 and statesmanship which has earned for the age of Anne the 
 imperial epithet of Augustan, Swift shines like a kind of 
 central sun, within whose orbit lesser luminaries circle. 
 The poor Irish parson crosses St. Georges' Channel, and 
 in a moment he takes the lead in that wonderful London 
 world, is recognized at once as the peer, and more than the 
 peer, of Bolingbroke and Harley, of Pope and Arbuthnot 
 and Gay, of Addison and Steele. Three names stand out 
 conspicuously in English history during the age of Anne. 
 The name of a statesman, the name of a poet, and the 
 name of one who was both statesman and poet — Boling- 
 broke, Pope and Swift. It is one of the fanciful amuse- 
 ments of the historical student to speculate on the course 
 which Bolingbroke might have run, and the fame he might 
 have earned, if his career had been traced under happier 
 auspices, or if his life had been guided by more fortunate 
 stars. As it is, Bolingbroke must be remembered as the 
 politician whose schemes failed, and whose political career 
 concluded at an age when, in our time, men would be 
 thought almost premature in entering upon public life; as 
 the adventurer, the plotter, clutching at the skirts of for- 
 tune; as the unlovely manufacturer of a false philosophy. 
 Pope was famous in his life, and his fame only increases 
 with the widening generations. But neither the political 
 genius of Bolingbroke nor the literary genius of Pope, had 
 the same influence upon their time and upon posterity as 
 the genius of Jonathan Swift. 
 
JONATHAN SWIFT, 11 
 
 That reign in London was Swift's summer. It was dur- 
 ing this time that Swift wrote for Stella's eyes that immortal 
 journal wherein, with more than the skill of the Egyptian 
 embalmer, the whole of that many colored, fantastic age is 
 preserved for us; wherein, too, we see something more of 
 the heart and soul of Swift than we are ever privileged to 
 find elsewhere. It was during this reign in London, also, 
 that Swift for the second time made the complete conquest 
 of a woman's heart, and that Stella found her only rival. 
 Vanessa is scarcely less famous than Stella. Poor Miss 
 Vanhomrigh is yet more unhappy than Hester Johnston. 
 There is no need to linger over that pitiable tragedy. It 
 was Swift's fate to bring misfortune on those who loved 
 him, and starcrossed Vanessa's last memory of Cadenus is 
 of his raging eyes as he breaks in upon her in her retreat at 
 Marley Abbey, near Colbridge, where the poor soul was 
 cloistered amid her congregated laurels, flings, in awful 
 silence, on her table the letter she wrote in the anguish of 
 her heart to Stella, and so mounts and rides furiously away 
 out of her sight and out of her life forever. The world 
 will always speculate as to which of the tv/o women really 
 won such affection as Swift had to offer. To my mind, 
 Stella was the true star of his life, and poor Vanessa's pas- 
 sion a flamiC he had never meant to kindle. 
 
 Swift's bright resplendent rule in London came to an end 
 with the crash of the Queen's death, and the utter rout and 
 ruin of the Tory party. He returned to Ireland, to his 
 Deanery of St. Patrick's, to write the " Drapier's Letters," 
 to become more famous in the land of his birth than he had 
 been in England, to marry Stella in secret, to lose her and 
 the light of his life, to outlive her for seventeen years, and 
 to die at last in 1745, the year of the Young Pretender, 
 after five darkened years of disease, madness and decay, 
 having outlived his genius, his friends, his love, a human 
 ghost, a shadow's shadow. 
 
12 HOURS WITH GREAT IRISHMEN. 
 
 There is no greater and no sadder life in all the history 
 of the last century. The man himself was described in the 
 very hours when he was most famous, most courted, most 
 flattered, as the most unhappy man on earth. Indeed he 
 seems to have been most wretched; he certainly darkened 
 the lives of two women who were so unfortunate as to love 
 him. But we forget the sadness of the personal life in the 
 greatness of the public career. He was the ardent cham- 
 pion of freedom; he was the good friend of Ireland; he 
 was always torn with '^fierce indignation" against oppres- 
 sion and injustice. Thackeray, whose reading of the 
 character of Swift is far too generally accepted, finds fault 
 with the phrase, and blames somewhat bitterly the man who 
 uses it, *' as if," he says, " the wretch who lay under that 
 stone waiting God's judgment had a right to be angry." 
 But it is certain that. Swift, from his own point of view, did 
 feel a fierce indignation with all wrong doing, with all in- 
 justice, with all dishonesty. He was an erring man, but 
 he had the right to be wrath with crimes of which he was 
 not guilty. His ways were not always our ways, nor his 
 thoughts our thoughts; but he walked his way such as it 
 was courageously, and the temper of his thoughts was not 
 unheroic. He was loyal to his leaders in adversity; he was 
 true to his friends who were sometimes untrue to him; his 
 voice was always raised against oppression; he had the 
 courage to speak up for Ireland and her liberties in some 
 of the darkest days in our history. To Thackeray he is 
 only a " lonely guilty wretch " a bravo, and a bully, a man 
 of genius employing that genius most evilly. To soberer 
 and more sympathetic judgment, Thackeray's study of Swift 
 is a cruel caricature. He may have been " miserrimus," 
 but when Grattan appealed long after to the spirit of Swift 
 he appealed to the memory of one of the truest champions 
 of Ireland's rights and liberties that Ireland ever had 
 
JAMES CLARENCE MANGAN. 
 
 The years immediately preceding 1848 were years of 
 great revolution and counter-revolution. The thrones of 
 Europe were toppling like ninepins. Kings were fighting 
 for their lives, flying for their lives, or clasping eagerly at the 
 red hand of democracy in the desperate purpose of warding 
 off destruction by an assumption of brotherhood. Insur- 
 rection stirred in other than Continental capitals. In 
 London, on Kennington Common and elsewhere, pale- 
 faced, flame-hearted men were clamoring for the six points 
 of their charter and wildly talking of an appeal to arms. 
 Over in Dublin Young Ireland, romantic, rebellious, its lips 
 touched with the fire of Vergniaud, its heart throbbing 
 with a new hope, was speaking, writing, preaching, propa- 
 gandizing, striving passionately to quicken the inert body 
 of the country with a transfusion of its own hot blood. 
 The office of the iV^/zV/^ newspaper was the focus of all this 
 fiery energy; round \.\v^ Nation all that was best and bravest 
 in Ireland rallied; in its pages week after week the noblest 
 voices appealed to the noblest emotions, the love of country 
 and the love of liberty. The list of those who made the 
 Nation^ of those who kept touch with it, of those who taught 
 in its columns or who practiced what is taught, is the roll- 
 call of some of the brightest names in Irish history. All 
 these men were wild, ardent, passionate politicians — all 
 save one. As we read the record over, from Davis who 
 founded to Mitchel who broke away because his strenuous, 
 unyielding spirit found even the Nation lacked gall to make 
 oppression bitter, one name stands out in strange contrast 
 to the rest — the name of Clarence Mangan. 
 
14 HOURS WITH GREAT IRISHMEN, 
 
 Men still live who knew Mangan. The good priest who 
 soothed the struggle of dissolution between that tortured 
 body and troubled soul still ministers to a generation to 
 whom Mangan is but a memory. And yet he is scarcely 
 more foreign to us of to-day than he was to his friends. 
 I was going to add, to his companions, but that desolate 
 spirit had no companions. He walked the dark way of his 
 life alone. His comrades were strange shadows, the bodyless 
 creations wherein his ecstasy was most cunning. Phantoms 
 trooped to him from the twilight land, lured, as Ulysses 
 lured the ghosts from Hades, by a libation of blood. But 
 the blood was the heart's blood of their master, and their 
 pale lips drained it till he died. These spectres were more 
 real to his eyes than any of the warm-hearted, strong-handed 
 humanities across whose busy, restless, feverous life he 
 sometimes flitted. We seem to see him hurrying, on his 
 life's most melancholy journey, as they saw him gliding 
 through the Dublin streets, like some embodiment of the 
 weird fancies of Hoffmann, a new student Anselmus haunted 
 by the blue eyes of a visionary Veronica, or buried among 
 books as Mitchel first found him, his brain, like a pure flame, 
 refining all he read, and transmitting it to something rich 
 and strange. An eccentric phantasmal figure tightly girt in 
 its quaint black cloak, the fine gold of his unkempt black 
 hair, as delicate in its texture as a wom.an's tresses, escap- 
 ing from the shapeless hat, which shadowed a face as parch- 
 ment pale as that of Richter's " Siebinkaes." Like Jean 
 Paul's immortal *' Poor's Advocate," the eyes of Mangan 
 were ever in the stars and his soul in the blue ether. He 
 seemed a creature too fantastically compounded for the 
 common life and the work-a-day world. The Persian poet, 
 Omar-i Khayyam, declares in one of his verses his belief 
 that when first his clay was fashioned some property of the 
 vine-tree, some flavor and perfume of the grape, was subtly 
 
JAMES CLARENCE MANGAN. 15 
 
 intermixed with it. Applying this fancy of the Persian star- 
 gazer to poor Mangan's story, it might almost seem as if 
 the sands that had fused to form his glassy essence grains 
 of a gold unknown to earth, drop of some elixir compounded 
 of no earthly juices, had oddly blended. His inexplicable 
 spirit seems more afifined to the vaporous presences that 
 hover around Faustus in his study, and that seem to hover 
 around Mangan in his garret, than to the eager, active men 
 who were striving to break up an old world and mould a new 
 one out of its pieces. 
 
 Such was the amazing exterior of a ^reat poet. Mangan 
 is the brother — the intellectual peer — of Moore and of 
 Davis. Certain of his poems are among the most precious 
 possessions of Irish literature. The " Time of the Barme- 
 cides " is perhaps the best known of all his writings; it is, 
 to my thinking, unquestionably the most beautiful. It pro- 
 fesses to be a rendering from the Arabic; but the Oriental 
 student will ransack in vain, for its original, the divans of 
 any of that bright constellation of courtly poets who clus- 
 tered around the throne of the Barbarous Kalifeh Haroun 
 Er Resheed or his illustrious successor. He will pore in 
 vain over that vast anthology of Eastern verses which star 
 the lengthy course of the "Thousand Nights and One 
 Night." The Arabic from which the " Time of the Barme- 
 cides " was taken, never yet flowed from a reed poised in 
 the cunning fingers of a scribe in Cairo or Stamboul or 
 Damascus, never ran from right to left in the fantastic 
 strokes and curves and the dots of Eastern script across the 
 yellow surface of some sweet-scented and gilded skin. 
 Clarence Mangan was not an Orientalist. He needed no 
 knowledge of the "tongues of the sunrise" to bring his 
 fine spirit into sympathy with the fascination of the East. 
 A man may be a poet and a scholar, too, of Oriental sciences. 
 Sir William Jones yesterday and Edwin Arnold to-day are 
 
16 HOURS WITH GREAT IRISHMEN. 
 
 proofs that slumber on divan of Hafiz or sojourn in the rose 
 gardens of Saadi lays no spell for silence or for stammering 
 upon lyric lips. But Mangan pressed the pillows of the 
 couch of Hafiz, and breathed the perfume from the up- 
 turned roses of Saadi' s garden by the right of his fine 
 genius. The liberty of the cities of Shiraz, and Bagdad, 
 and Grand Cairo, and Istamboul was his without crossing 
 the Seven Seas or treading a mile of desert. The shy, 
 blue-cloaked student could touch all common things with 
 the talisman of his marvellous imagination, and life was for 
 him an enchanted phantasmagoria; he lived, not with what 
 he saw, but what he wished to see. The turbid Liffey 
 creeping beneath the civic bridges became in his eyes the 
 Tigris, reflecting in its shining stream the thousand lights 
 from the Kalifeh's windows, or the Nile above whose yellow 
 bosom, starred with Lotus blossoms, the lordly iris winged 
 its way, or Rocknabad reflecting the cypress groves of 
 Mosella and echoing along its silver ripples the ghazels of 
 Hafiz. 
 
 " I see rich Bagdad once again, 
 With its turrets of Moorish mould, 
 
 And the Khalif's twice five hundred men, 
 Whose binishes flamed with gold; 
 
 I call up many a gorgeous show. 
 Which the pail of Oblivion hides — 
 
 All passed like snow, long, long aeo, 
 With the Time of the Barmecides." 
 
 The dreamer and poet of those verses had no need of travel 
 or of grammars to unlock for him the secrets of the East. 
 So potent a fancy could convert, without an effort, the Dub- 
 lin quays into the teeming, glittering bazaar, the Four Courts 
 into the Mosque of the Sultan, the distant trees of Phoenix 
 Park into the palm grove, ending where the yellow desert 
 
JAMES CLARENCE MANGAN, 17 
 
 widens out into immensity. It could transform the passers- 
 by into Mecca pilgrims, merchants from Moussoul, mas- 
 querading Kalifehs and melancholy Khalendeers. . It could 
 conjure up the long caravan of camels in Grafton street, and 
 transmute the drone of the ballad singer in the kennel to 
 the rise and fall of a melody sung long centuries ago by the 
 Prince of Persia beneath the golden lattice of Schemzelnihar. 
 
 The bare facts, the meagre outlines, of Mangan's life are 
 familiar to most students of Irish literature, and need not 
 be here re-enumerated. Of the real life, the existence 
 burning itself fiercely out behind that ghostly mask, few 
 knew anything, none knew much. He once wrote to Duffy, 
 "How little do you know of the man in the cloak," and 
 the words read even now like an enigmatic epitaph upon 
 the being who wrote them. Not long before his death he 
 agreed to write his autobiography, and did pen a handful 
 of pages full of painful interest as a morbid study of his 
 own diseased mind, but valueless, and worse than valueless, 
 as a picture of his life. Goethe ,when he wrote his autobi- 
 ography called it " Truth and Poetry," to warn a credulous 
 world that they must not take all it tells as rigid history. 
 So Mangan in his fragment weaves truth and fancy into a 
 glittering, bewildering web — weaves for a little, and then 
 his fingers fall from the loom, and so De Quincy's *' Opium- 
 Eater" remains without its true companion. 
 
 I have said in the earlier part of this paper that Mangan was 
 not a politician. Nor was he in any active sense, in the sense 
 in which his colleagues on the Nation were politicians, in the 
 sense in which the impetuous brotherhood of Young Ire- 
 land were politicians, but if his student spirit shunned the 
 fervid works and days of those who followed Smith O'Brien, 
 ,who hung upon the burning words of Meagher, and who 
 coined their youth and their energy into prose and verse, 
 and public speeches all devoted to the one purpose of re- 
 
18 HOURS WITH GREAT IRISHMEN, 
 
 generating Ireland, it must not be for a moment imagined 
 that Mangan was indifferent to his country or obHvious of 
 her cause. He served her well with songs that breathe a 
 spirit of patriotism as pure and as passionate as that of 
 Davis. He was prepared to serve her to sterner purpose 
 still if he were called upon. In 1848, when rumors began 
 to circulate of the Government's intention to suppress 
 the United IrisJwian^ Mangan immediately wrote a letter to 
 John Mitchel, which Mitchel quotes as the only expression 
 in prose of Mangan's political sentiments which he had ever 
 seen or heard of. I make no apology for quoting it again 
 as a proof that the lonely, retiring spirit did not shrink from 
 struggle, that the wretched body could knit itself together 
 to face and to brave peril: 
 
 " My Dear M. — There is a rumor in circulation that the 
 Government intend to commence a prosecution against 
 you. Insignificant an individual as I am, and unimportant 
 to society as my political opinions may be, I, nevertheless, 
 owe it, not merely to the kindness you have shown me, but 
 to the cause of my country, to assure you that I thoroughly 
 sympathize with your sentiments, that I identify my view 
 of public affairs with yours, and that I am prepared to go 
 all lengths with you and your intrepid friend, Devin Reilly, 
 for the achievement of our national independence. I mean 
 to write you in a few days, a long letter explanatory of the 
 cause which, I think, it becomes the duty of every Irish 
 patriot to pursue at the present eventful epoch. Meanwhile 
 you are at liberty to make what use you please of this pre- 
 liminary communication. — Yours in life and death, 
 
 " James Clarence Mangan." 
 
 Such is Mangan's political confession of faith, strong 
 enough to satisfy the most devoted disciple of Meagher, or 
 Fintan Lalor or Mitchel himself. It is the only one we 
 
JAMES CLARENCE MANGAN. 19 
 
 have. The "long letter explanatory" which Mangan 
 somewhat naively promises to Mitchel with a sweet un- 
 worldly simplicity, never came to hand, never took definite 
 shape, never more was heard of. By the time that the ris- 
 ing took place, Mangan's career was rapidly running to its 
 close. His fame was shattered, his glorious mind enfeebled; 
 the last months of his life are a pitiable record of squalid 
 and sordid debauchery. Seldom has the flame of a rare 
 genius flickered down more lamentably to its embers. 
 Poor, miserable, abased, defying all the efforts of the few 
 true friends who remained to him to lift him from the hor- 
 ror of his destruction, he drifted from degradation until at 
 last the sea-sick, weary barque of his ruined body and de- 
 throned mind floated into the final harborage of the hos- 
 pital, where on the 20th of June, 1849, he shook the yoke 
 of insuspicious stars from his world-wearied flesh. 
 
 Strangely enough, there died also across the Atlantic in 
 the same year, and also in an hospital, another poet whose 
 gifts were curiously akin to Mangan's, who had found in- 
 spiration for much of his own music in Mangan's writings, 
 and whose life, like Mangan's, became at the last a chronicle 
 of ignominy and of decay. Edgar Allen Poe has been sup- 
 posed, and not unnaturally supposed, to have found in the 
 repeated burdens of such poems as the *' Time of the 
 Barmecides" and "Dark Rosaleen" the suggestion for 
 those complicated and slightly varying repetitions which 
 lend such a weird melody and charm to "Ulalume" and 
 " Lenore." The two poets had much in common, their 
 wild, erratic genius, their hopeless subjection to the treach- 
 erous inspiration of wine and of brain-destroying drugs, 
 their untimely deaths, and their common ending in an 
 hospital ward. But of the two Mangan is the most to be 
 pitied. Poe's career was dark enough, but it was not all 
 unhappy. He had loved and been loved; there were 
 
20 HOURS WITH GREAT IRISHMEN. 
 
 moments in his wasted existence, even long intervals, of 
 calm and peace. But Mangan's life is one of almost un- 
 mitigated gloom. The days of his youth were darkened, 
 it is said, by a hopeless passion, his heart's manhood with- 
 ered into premature old age. We are told that it was her 
 fault; she seems to have been cruel; she blighted his life, 
 but she made him a poet. The price was hard for the man 
 to pay. The poet who in the Persian legend gains the gift 
 of song by a patient vigil for forty sleepless nights, paid a 
 lighter penalty for his immortality than his Irish follower. 
 Life was to Mangan one long denial. *' No one wish of his 
 heart," says Mitchel, '* was ever fulfilled; no aspiration sat- 
 isfied." He was as passionately Oriental in his dreams and 
 in his thoughts as Beranger was Hellenic. His soul thirsted 
 for the desert, for blue domes and white walls and the shade 
 of tropic trees, as the French poet thirsted for the clear 
 sky and the pellucid air and the olive groves of Attica; and 
 both thirsted in vain. Mangan's whole life was passed 
 within the gloomy streets of a populous city. His soul 
 longed for freedom, but his body was bound forever within 
 the limits of the town where he was born; where his miser- 
 able life dragged out its course; where he died and lies 
 buried. If he could have faced the denials of destiny with 
 an austere renunciation, if he could have opposed a monas- 
 tic fortitude to the buffets of the world, his might have been 
 a serener if not a happier story. But the passionate long- 
 ing after the ideal drove him to those deadly essences which 
 fed for a time the hot flame of his genius at the price of 
 his health, his reason, and his life. Genius and misery 
 have been bed-fellows and board brothers often enough, but 
 they have seldom indeed been yoked together under condi- 
 tions more tragic than those which make Mangan's story a 
 record of despair. I am at a loss which most to marvel at, 
 the brightness of his genius or the darkness of his ruin. 
 
MILES BYRNE. 
 
 In the early years of the Nation newspaper, when " Young 
 Ireland " was scarcely yet recognized as the name of the new 
 movement, there came to Gavan Duffy a remarkable letter 
 from abroad. The letter hailed from France; it was written 
 by a distinguished officer in the French service, and it ex- 
 pressed the warmest sympathy with the National agitation 
 which was just beginning to make itself felt throughout the 
 length and breadth of Ireland. The sympathy of that soldier 
 of France was especially dear to Irishmen just then, for he 
 had taken a prominent part in the two insurrections of 1798 
 and 1803, and his name vvas Miles Byrne of Wexford. Miles 
 Byrne was at that time more than sixty years of age. He 
 survived the destruction of " Young Ireland " for fourteen 
 years, and died in Paris in the January of 1862. Many 
 brave and famous Irishmen sleep their last sleep in foreign 
 soil. The European continent, and the new world beyond 
 the Atlantic, are studded with their graves. No one of all 
 these tombs, the illustrious shrines of Irish Nationality, 
 should be dearer in the eyes of Irishmen — not even the 
 twin graves of the Roman Janiculum, where Tyrone and 
 Tyrconnell rest from their labors, nor the grave of Thomas 
 Addis Emmet, in New York — than the monument in Mont- 
 martre which records the resting-place of Miles Byrne. 
 
 Nothing in the history of Ireland is more impressive than 
 the honor and glory earned by Irishmen in foreign military 
 services. The long succession of disastrous wars which 
 drove Irish officers and soldiers to seek service across the 
 seas and beneath other than their own banners has enriched 
 
22 HOURS WITH GREA T IRISHMEN. 
 
 the roll-call of Spanish, of Austrian, and of French regi- 
 ments with some of their best and bravest leaders. There 
 are men at this moment holding high military rank in 
 Madrid and in Vienna who are the bearers of names most 
 characteristically Irish, and who are the descendants of gal- 
 lant refugee ancestors who carried their bright swords into 
 the ranks of foreign states. In France the deeds of the 
 Irish brigade have become a part of her National history. 
 Patrick Lucan, of Sarsfield, and the gallant gentlemen who 
 followed him beneath the lilies of France from the fatal 
 walls of Limerick, Thomond, and Lally and Dillon, and all 
 the rest of the bright names that star its record, taught 
 France that she had no better soldiers beneath her standard 
 than the exiled and impoverished Irish chieftains. For 
 more than two generations the story of the Irish Brigade 
 shines with ever-increasing splendor in the annals of France. 
 We hear of it no more, however, after the French Revolution, 
 after the old order of things had been so fearfully shattered 
 in the cataclysm of 1 789-1794. The Irish Brigade expired 
 with the latest of its illustrious leaders, with Daniel O'Con- 
 nell, the uncle of a man who was destined to make the old 
 name yet more famous. 
 
 The extinction of the Irish Brigade in nowise deprived 
 the French armies of the support of the Irish soldiers seek- 
 ing for a field of honorable action; in nowise decreased the 
 desire of the exiled Irish gentleman to wear the French 
 uniform, or the eagerness of the military authorities of 
 France to accept and appreciate his services. The whiff 
 and wind of the revolution overthrew many things at v/hich 
 it did not directly strike, and the Irish Brigade happened 
 to be one of these. For a time there was chaos. While 
 the ragged armies of the Republic were trampling over half 
 the battlefields of Europe at the heels of leaders nameless 
 yesterday, and striking the terror of the tricolor into the 
 
MILES BYRNE. 23 
 
 hearts of the discipHned armies of Austria and of Italy, 
 there was neither time nor fitness for the formation of 
 special foreign legions. But with the establishment of the 
 Consulate, and the gradual composition of order out of 
 anarchy, the old system revived under a new form and 
 under a new name. The Irish Legion which the First Con- 
 sul called into existence carried out the military traditions 
 of the old historic Irish Brigade. Only the military tra- 
 ditions, however. The Irish Brigade was an eminently 
 monarchical institution. It was largely composed of the 
 scattered adherents of the House of Stuart, and men who 
 drained their glasses to the health of King James the Third 
 and of Charles Edward, of men whose hearts were loyal to 
 St. Germains, and v/ho hated the white horse of Hanover, 
 not merely because it was the standard of England, but be- 
 cause it was the emblem of George the Elector who had 
 supplanted James the King. 
 
 The new Irish Legion was composed of men inspired by 
 widely differing feelings. Its members acknowledged no 
 allegiance to the House of Stuart; were swayed by no deep- 
 seated belief in the principles of absolute government. 
 Their opinions were generally Republican; their theories 
 of statesmanship had been born behind the bayonets of the 
 American Volunteers, had been fostered by the first im- 
 pulses of the French Revolution, and if shaken for a time 
 by the excesses of the Mountain and the spectacle of the 
 revolutionary Saturn devouring its owm children, had been 
 reassured and encouraged by the political order and mili- 
 tary fame of the First Consul. Their devotion to Ireland 
 was devotion to her alone, unmixed with any affection for 
 any English dynasty; their antagonism to England was to 
 the dark mother of the Penal Laws, and not to the up- 
 holder of the House of Hanover and the enemy of the 
 House of Stuart. The men of the Irish Legion wished a 
 
24 HOURS WITH GREA T IRISHMEN. 
 
 plague on both their Houses as heartily as Mercutio. They 
 rallied beneath the red, white and blue of the Republic with 
 the same passionate enthusiasm that spurred their ancestors 
 to serve the Bourbon lilies, but they did so, not at all be- 
 cause France had been the refuge and shelter of the Stuarts, 
 but because France promised to be the friend of Ireland. 
 
 In the November of the year 1803 the First Consul, 
 Bonaparte, issued a decree for the formation of an Irish 
 Legion. The Legion was to consist of three regiments — 
 one of cavalry, one of infantry and one of artillery. There 
 v/as a young Irish gentleman then in Paris who was eager 
 to seize the opportunity of serving France. He had only 
 just reached France, under circumstances of the greatest 
 difficulty and danger, and after playing for the second time 
 a prominent part m a desperate and unsuccessful insurrec- 
 tion. Young Miles Byrne — he was barely twenty-three 
 years of age — only three months earlier had waited with a 
 beating heart and high hopes at the Coal quay for the signal 
 from Robert Emmet which was to place Dublin Castle in 
 the hands of the insurgents and herald the establishment of 
 a Provisional Government. Little more than a month had 
 clasped since the execution of Emmet before Miles. Byrne 
 received his commission as a Lieutenant of Infantry in the 
 French service in the Irish Legion. 
 
 At the same time when the young Wexford gentleman 
 was receiving his first commission, another distinguished 
 Irishman, another and more famous actor in the drama of 
 Ninety-Eight, was appointed to one of the highest grades 
 in the French army. This was Arthur O'Connor, Lord 
 Longueville's rebel nephew, the Protestant champion of 
 Catholic liberty in the Irish House of Commons, the dear 
 friend, and comrade of Edward Fitzgerald. After the failure 
 of his trial and his release from his long imprisonment, he 
 came over to France and entered its service. The year 
 
MILES B YRNE. 2o 
 
 after the decree for the formation of an Irish Legion he 
 was made a General of Division, and appointed to the staff 
 of General Augereau, the General-in-Chief of the projected 
 Irish Expedition. It is curious to note that when the Irish 
 movement of 1845-1848 began Arthur O'Connor was still 
 alive, and that he too, like Miles Byrne sent his welcome 
 words of cheer and courage to the young men who were 
 striving, after a generation and a half, with a new courage 
 and a new hope, to accomplish what Arthur O'Connor and 
 Miles Byrne and their peers and comrades had striven un- 
 availingly to do in the dark years in which the eighteenth 
 century ended and the nineteenth century began. 
 
 The great expedition which was to afford the exiled rebels 
 one last chance of striking a blow for Ireland never came to 
 anything. Everything else that could be done to secure 
 •the adhesion and the affection of the Irish Legion was done. 
 Napoleon the Emperor was no less eager to conciliate his 
 Gaelic soldiers than Napoleon the Consul. On the occa- 
 sion of his coronation, when all the French regiments were 
 being presented with colors and an eagle, the Irish Legion 
 was not forgotten. They got their colors, bearing on one 
 side the inscription, "Napoleon the First, Emperor of the 
 French, to the Irish Legion," and on the other side an un- 
 crowned harp with the words, " The Independence of Ire- 
 land." They got their imperial bird, too, and Miles Byrne 
 records with not unnatural pride that the Irish Legion was 
 the only foreign corps in the French service to whom. Napo- 
 leon ever entrusted an eagle. 
 
 But in spite of eagles and colors and high pay the Irish 
 Legion were sorely discontented at the delay of the long- 
 promised expedition. One officer resigned his command 
 in despair and went to America. Arthur O'Connor married 
 the beautiful and gifted daughter of the illustrious and un- 
 fortunate Condorcet, a girl young enough to have been his 
 
26 HOURS WITH GREAT IRISHMEN, 
 
 daughter. With her he lived in his pleasant place of Big- 
 non, in the land of the Loire water, waiting and waiting in 
 vain for the hour when he should be summoned to take a 
 part in the great expedition. 
 
 He retained his rank as a general of division, though 
 without a command, in expectation of the event. 
 
 So bitter, indeed, was the disappointment of the members 
 of the Legion at getting no chance of being at odds with 
 England, that on one occasion the Legion nearly lost a 
 number of its officers in consequence. It was in 1806, 
 when the Legion was at Quimper. The English landed 
 some troops at Concarneau during the night, and the 
 French commandant marched out to repel them with a de- 
 tachm.ent which included none of the Irish officers. 
 
 The next day Miles Byrne and every Irish officer in con- 
 sequence called upon the commandant and deposited their 
 swords with him, refusing to resume them until they had 
 received satisfaction. The infuriated commandant ordered 
 the impetuous officers into arrest; but their case was 
 promptly put before the Emperor, who immediately ex- 
 pressed the highest approval of their conduct and ordered 
 their swords to be at once returned to them. 
 
 Miles Byrne had plenty of fighting to do, though the 
 great expedition never came to pass. He carried his bright 
 sword through the long Spanish campaign — a campaign dur- 
 ing which the brilliant exploits of the Irish Legion made 
 Marshal Junot express his deep regret that such gallant 
 soldiers had not a country of their own to fight for. In 
 Germany and the Netherlands Miles Byrne followed the 
 shining banner on which the delusive affability of imperial 
 promises had inscribed the words, " Independence of Ire- 
 land." Many years later he served in the Greek campaign, 
 and the eyes which in boyhood had rested lovingly upon 
 the Wexford hills and woods and waters, might now behold 
 
MILES B YKNE. 27 
 
 the olive groves and the majestic mountains and the haunted 
 valleys of Hellas, of the one country which might best com- 
 pare for beauty with the land where he was born. To that 
 grave, handsome French officer the war shouts of the wild 
 Klephts must have brought back strange echoes of the bal- 
 lads of Ninety-eight. Their fierce, oddly-weaponed multi- 
 tudes must have kindled in his heart something of the fire 
 which flamed there when he first beheld the sunlight gleam 
 along the levelled line of pikes. To him the cruelties of 
 the Turk can scarcely have appeared unparalleled; for he 
 remembered the yeoman and the officers and soldiers of 
 Lake and Cornwallis. 
 
 He retired at last, full of years and honor, to pass the 
 remainder of his life in Paris, happy in the companionship 
 of his wife, in the admiration and affection of the society 
 in which he most delighted — the society of cultivated men 
 and women, in frequent intercourse with his old brothers in 
 arms. To the end his love for Ireland was the most pas- 
 sionate feeling of his heart. Even at the last, when the 
 wizard fingers of eighty long and stormy years had trans- 
 formed the Wexford lad into a grizzled, gaunt, stately old 
 man, his pulses would always beat quicker, and his keen 
 gray eyes grow brighter, at the thought of Ireland's injuries 
 and the prospect of her regeneration. 
 
 His epitaph, after recording the honors he had earned in 
 the service of France and his Irish birth, pays to his memory 
 a simple and touching tribute, none the less impressive be- 
 cause it was penned by the wife to whom he was devoted, 
 and who has rendered Ireland so great a service by the 
 preservation and publication of her husband's memoirs, 
 " In his long career he was always distinguished by the 
 rectitude and the loyalty of his character, and by the nobil- 
 ity of his sentiments. Truly attached to Ireland, his native 
 land, he faithfully served his adopted country, France." 
 
28 HOURS WITH GREAT IRISHMEN. 
 
 These memoirs are one of the most important contribu- 
 tions that have ever been made to Irish history — certainly 
 the most important that has been given to the period em- 
 bracing the insurrections that preceded and succeeded the 
 destruction of the Irish Parhament. It is only from the 
 personal record of the actors in or the beholders of great 
 political events that posterity is enabled to form any real 
 living picture of the history of a period. London of the 
 age of Anne lives in Swift's journal to Stella; Horace Wal- 
 pole, with all his whimsicalities and modish follies, is worth 
 more than half the grave historians of the later Georges; 
 Pliny, the letter-writer, is more precious than Suetonius; 
 and Mme. Junot and Mme. de Remusat give greater vivid- 
 ness to the life of Napoleon than Bourrienne or Lacretelle. 
 No history that has yet been written of the rebellion of 
 Ninety-eight can possess quite the same peculiar interest 
 that belongs to the memoirs of Miles Byrne. 
 
 Ireland owes Miles Byrne much, for he loved her well 
 and served her with all his heart and soul in 1798 and 
 1803. But not the least part of her debt of gratitude is for 
 the service he rendered to his country and her cause by 
 these memoirs. In their enchanted pages the student of 
 Irish history seems to conquer time and to stand in the 
 presence of the resuscitated dead. The mighty shadows 
 appear to throng about him as the phantoms of his former 
 companions-in-arms crowd around ^neas in the Virgilian 
 story. As he reads of the actions and of the heroes of the 
 time told by one who witnessed those actions and who is 
 himself a hero, history ceases to be a dim, uncertain record, 
 a d becomes instead a living, moving drama. The story 
 of the Rebellion of Ninety-eight by one who played a brave 
 part in the Wexford campaign, the story of the Rebellion 
 of 1803 by one who was a sharer in the plot from the be- 
 ginning to the end, and was one of the last to see the friend 
 
MILES B YRNE, 29 
 
 whom he so touchingly calls *' dear Robert Emmet " on his 
 fatal return from the mountains after the failure in Thomas 
 street — must not such a chronicle naturally and rightfully 
 take its place amongst the most precious possessions of 
 Irish national literature ? 
 
GEORGE BERKELEY. 
 
 In the year 1723 there died in Ireland, at a place called 
 Marley Abbey, some ten miles from Dublin, one of the 
 most miserable women then in the world. Her death dis- 
 closed the denial of her fortune to one great Irishman with 
 whom she had been on terms of close friendship, to whom 
 she had offered up years of passionate devotion, and its 
 bestowal upon another great Irishman with whom she had 
 never so much as exchanged a word. On that fatal after- 
 noon when Swift, with a legion of wild passions tearing at 
 his heart strings, rode over to Marley Abbey to fling back 
 at Vanessa's feet the letter she had written to Stella, Hester 
 Vanhomrigh received her death-blow. But she lived long 
 enough to inflict a curious little piece of vengeance, the 
 only vengeance in her power, except the lofty vengeance 
 of forgiveness, upon the false Cadenus. She had left by 
 will all the property she possessed to the man she had so 
 madly worshipped. With the hand of death upon her, with 
 the raging eyes of the Dean still burning upon her brain, 
 she performed the one little pitiful act of retaliation which 
 is the saddest spot in all her sad story; she altered her will, 
 and disinherited her idol. For the name of Jonathan Swift, 
 Dean of St. Patrick's, she substituted the name of another 
 great Irishman, another great Churchman, another great 
 thinker and teacher, the name of George Berkeley, Dean 
 — only nominally so, indeed, — of Dromore. 
 
 The legacy, this strange gift of chance born of a man's 
 insult and a woman's sense of injury, was in some respects 
 a turning point in the life of the amazed legatee. His 
 amazement is very frankly and simply expressed in a letter 
 
GEORGE BERKELEY 31 
 
 to his friend and patron, Lord Percival, a few days after 
 the unexpected bequest. " Here is something that will 
 surprise your lordship as it does me. Mrs. Hester Vanhom- 
 righ, a lady to whom I was a perfect stranger, having never 
 in the whole course of my life exchanged a word with her, 
 died on Sunday night. Yesterday her will was opened, by 
 which it appears that I am constituted executor, the advan- 
 tage whereof is computed by those who understand her 
 affairs to be worth ;^3,ooo; if a suit she has be carried, 
 it" will be considerably more." Berkeley's first idea on re- 
 ceiving this unexpected windfall was to employ the money 
 thus almost miraculously placed at his disposal in carrying 
 out a scheme which had long been dear to his heart. This 
 scheme was that he should emigrate to Bermuda, should 
 settle there and devote the rest of his nfe to '* the reforma- 
 tion of manners among the English in our Western plan- 
 tations, and the propagation of the Gospel among the 
 American savages." Bermuda was to Berkeley what the 
 Happy Isles were to the hopeful eyes of the visionary Greek 
 sailors. He was nobly convinced of the nobility of his 
 dream, and, which was more remarkable, he succeeded in 
 awaking a latent nobility in unexpected places and in arous- 
 ing an enthusiasm by his dream of a Bermudan Utopia in 
 callous hearts and unsympathetic bosoms. 
 
 Bermuda became the mode in the marvellous medley of 
 London society over which the first of the Georges reigned. 
 People talked Bermuda, thought Bermuda, wrote Bermuda. 
 The wits and gallants of the Scriblerus Club, who had met 
 together to rally Berkeley on his poetic and apostolic fancy, 
 were so stirred by the ardent eloquence of the missionary 
 that, fired with wine and the warmer intoxication of the 
 charm of Berkeley's words, they rose with one accord and 
 shouted lustily encouragements to each other to accompany 
 the Dean of Derry on his crusade. With the morning, when 
 
32 HOURS WITH GREA T IRISHMEN. 
 
 the sparkle of Lord Bathurst's champagne had faded from 
 their jaded brains, we may assume that their enthusiasm 
 for Bermuda had faded too. At least one thing is certain, 
 that we never find the name of a single member of the fel- 
 lowship of Scriblerus on the passenger list of that ship on 
 which Berkeley did trust himself and his hopes, and which 
 sailed with him into the West, indeed, though not to the 
 " still-vexed Bermuthes " of his dreams. 
 
 Who was the remarkable man whose missionary zeal and 
 eloquence could make Bermuda as popular in London with 
 the voice of religion as ever the voice of greed had made 
 the South Sea popular in Change Alley, or the turbid floods 
 of the Mississippi appear a new Pactolus to the wranglers 
 in the Rue Quincampoix ? Who was the man who touched 
 for a moment the cynical nature of Bolingbroke with some- 
 thing of the fire of his own enthusiasm; who induced Wal- 
 pole to swell from his own pocket the subscription list that 
 was raised to further Berkeley's schemes; who actually 
 succeeded in touching the callous organism which the Elector 
 of Hanover and King of England called a heart, and whose 
 one joy on hearing of the Vanessa legacy was at the aid it 
 afforded to his voyage, and his pure unselfish aspirations. 
 
 George Berkeley was born on the 12th of March, 1685, 
 by the Nore water, in the county Kilkenny. His father 
 was an Irishman of English descent, WilHam Berkeley. 
 The founder of the family in Ireland had come to the 
 country in the early part of the reign of Charles the 
 Second in the suite of the first Lord Berkeley of Stratton. 
 George Berkeley seems to have been distinguished for un- 
 usual abilities at Kilkenny School. In the first year of the 
 eighteenth century he went, a lad of fifteen, to Dublin to 
 Trinity College. In Trinity College he remained for thirteen 
 years, studying, thinking, dreaming, bewildering most of 
 the collegians, his colleagues, who seem to have been un- 
 
GEORGE BERKELEY, 33 
 
 able to make up their minds whether he was a genius or a 
 blockhead. They may well have been puzzled by a youth 
 who allowed himself in his earnest pursuit of truth to be 
 half and something more than half hanged by a fellow 
 student, that he might learn the emotions of man on the 
 point of a violent death. Within the walls of Trinity he 
 worked, gradually and laboriously piecing together and 
 thoughtfully shaping out his theory of the metaphysical 
 conception of the material world about him; poring over 
 Locke and Plato, breathing an atmosphere satured with 
 Cartesianism, his active mind eagerly investigating, explor- 
 ing, inquiring in all directions, and his hand recording day 
 by day the notes and stages of his mental development. 
 
 His early philosophical writings rapidly earned him a 
 reputation in the great world of London, to which at thai 
 time the eyes of all men, divines, wits, statesmen, phil- 
 osophers and poets, turned. It is not my purpose here to 
 dwell upon the nature of those philosophical writings or to 
 enter into any study of the great theory of idealism in which 
 he affirmed that there is no proof of the existence of matter 
 anywhere save in our own perceptions. Byron, in his light- 
 hearted way, more than two generations later, dismissed 
 Bishop Berkeley and his theory in the famous couplet — 
 
 " When Bishop Berkeley said there is no matter, 
 It clearly was no matter what he said," 
 
 — a smart saying which Byron did not intend, and which 
 nobody would be likely to regard, as a serious summing up 
 of the mental work of Berkeley. 
 
 To London Berkeley's eyes naturally turned, and to Lon- 
 don Berkeley came in the first winter month of 1713. The 
 Dublin he quitted and the London he came to were vastly 
 different cities from the Dublin and the London of to-day. 
 The Irish Parliament stood, indeed, in College Green, 
 2 
 
34 HOURS WITH GREA T IRISHMEN. 
 
 but its home was not in the building which is now used as 
 the Bank of Ireland, but in Chichester House, the building 
 which George Carew had set up as an hospital toward the end 
 of the sixteenth century, and which adventurous Arthur 
 Chichester made his dwelling-place after the Ulster planta- 
 tion. The change of Patrick's Well lane to Nassau street 
 was as recent to men then as the change of Sackville street 
 to O'Connell street is to the Dubliners of to-day. Dawson 
 street was the newest of the new streets. Molesworth 
 street was not, but the name lived in a great piece of waste 
 land on the site known as Molesworth Fields. 
 
 If Dublin was small then compared with what it now is, 
 London was relatively still smaller. When the young 
 Berkeley dined with his brilliant, loveable, happy-go-lucky 
 countryman, Richard Steele, at his house in Bloomsbury 
 Square, all that is now London to the North of Bloomsbury, 
 a network of narrow streets, a gloomy world of bricks and 
 mortar, was smiling country. St. Pancras was in the coun- 
 try, and Tottenham Court, and Marylebone, and Sadler's 
 Wells, places all of them now black with the daily smoke of 
 a thousand chimneys, and encircled with a wall of houses 
 ten, aye twenty times thicker than the Great Wall of China. 
 But little as seems to us that London of the Augustan 
 days of Anne, as we look back upon it through the lapse of 
 more than a century and. a half, it seemed a mighty big 
 place then in the eyes of its inhabitants, and a mighty big 
 place we may assume that it seemed in the eyes of, the 
 young Irish scholar and gentleman whose reputation had 
 preceded him and predisposed the society of the day to take 
 kindly to his handsome face, and listen willingly to his 
 golden tongue. Swift was a great patron of Berkeley's in 
 those early London days. The greatest genius of his age, 
 Swift was always eager to recognize the genius of other 
 men; the most powerful man of the hour, he was always 
 
GEORGE BERKELEY. 35 
 
 anxious to employ his power in doing a good turn to some- 
 body, in lending a helping hand to unappreciated talent, 
 or giving the jog of his generous patronage to modest ability 
 in danger of being unrewarded and unnoticed by reason of 
 its modesty. Berkeley did not stand in the same need of 
 help as many who found Dr. Swift a true friend; but we 
 may well imagine his services were as welcome as his com- 
 panionship must have been delightful. Swift took Berkeley 
 to Court and introduced him or spoke of him to all the great 
 Ministers, and pushed his fortunes by all the ways — and 
 they were many — in his power. He wrote in that journal 
 which was meant only for the sweet eyes of Stella, and which 
 has since become the priceless property of mankind, his 
 high admiration for the young philosopher, and kindly adds, 
 " I will favor him as much as I can." That was a promise 
 Swift often made, mentally or to Stella, about those who 
 were in need of help; it was a promise he always fulfilled, 
 and he kept his word to Berkeley, not merely in the letter, 
 but in the spirit. Berkeley, with the aid of Swift, was soon 
 made free of the wonderful republic of letters which then 
 held sway in London, and which numbered amongst its 
 members such men as Steele and Addison, Bolingbroke and 
 Harley, Gay and Arbuthnot and Pope. Berkeley was in 
 Addison's box at the first performance of Cato, and tasted 
 of the author's champagne and Burgundy therein, and list- 
 ened with curious delight to the mingled applause and 
 hisses that greeted Mr. Pope^s prologue. He made 
 Arbuthnot a convert to his Three Dialogues over a pleasant 
 dinner at his lodgings in the palace at Kensington, which 
 still to-day preserves to a swollen city some picture of the 
 simpler peace of days before the Elector of Hanover ever 
 set foot in London, It was a dazzling, intoxicating society 
 of poets and statesmen, philosophers and wits, for a young 
 man to freely mingle in; but at its best and brightest, 
 
36 HOURS WITH GREAT IRISHMEN. 
 
 Berkeley could only find himself in the companionship of 
 his peers; his superior would have been, indeed, hard to 
 discover, either there or elsewhere. 
 
 A little later Berkeley w^ent to Italy as the traveling tutor, 
 the bear leader, of the son of Ashe, Bishop of Clogher. In 
 Italy he passed some four enchanted years, reviving the 
 ancient world among the ruins of Rome, reconstructing the 
 lost Parthenope by the blue waters of the Tyrrhene sea, 
 and repeopling the crags and rocks of Sicily with the brown- 
 limbed boys and violet-crowned girls who tend their herds 
 and pipe away their peaceful lives forever in the honeyed 
 Greek of Theocritus. Berkeley came back to England in 
 1720 to find all England writhing in the welter and chaos 
 of the South Sea crash. The shame and misery of the time 
 appears to have inspired him with a kind of horror of the 
 hollow civilization of the age, and to have given him his first 
 promptings towards that ideal community in the remote 
 Atlantic to which his mind turned so strongly a little later. 
 He left England speedily and came home again to Ireland 
 after an absence of eight years. It was in Ireland that the 
 Vanessa windfall came to him and amazed him, and en- 
 couraged him in his Bermuda vision. Bermuda ever re- 
 mained a vision for him; but in 1728 he set sail for Rhode 
 Island in the company of his young wife. Miss Anne For- 
 ster, whom as he quaintly tells us he choose " for her quali- 
 ties of mind and her unaffected inclination to books." For 
 more than three years he dwelt in America a simple, happy, 
 earnest life. But the mission was a failure. To Robert 
 Walpole, Berkeley's plans and hopes would naturally seem 
 about as deserving of the attention and aid of practical 
 men as the ambitions of Don Quixote. The grant promised 
 by the Government was never sent out, and in 1731 Berkeley 
 came back to England. How many, I wonder, of those 
 who are familiar with the line, "Westward the course of 
 
GEORGE BERKELEY. 37 
 
 empire takes its way," which has been taken as the motto 
 for one of the best and best-known frescoes that adorn the 
 Capitol in Washington, know that it comes from the last 
 verse of a poem which Berkeley wrote as he was striving to 
 realize a new Atlantic in Rhode Island: 
 
 " Westward the course of empire takes its way; 
 The first four acts already past, 
 A fifth shall close the drama with the day; 
 Time's noblest offspring is the last." 
 
 Two years of literary and philosophic life in London 
 succeed to the Rhode Island idyll. In 1734 he returned to 
 Ireland for the last time, and dwelt for eighteen years in 
 his Bishopric of Cloyne in studious seclusion with his family, 
 wandering among the myrtle hedges his own hand planted, 
 reading Plato and Hooker, teaching his cherished daughter, 
 suffering from domestic losses, and proclaiming to an 
 astounded world that tar-water was a panacea for all human 
 ills with all the fervor which Dr. Sangrado devoted to the 
 merits of water without the tar. Berkeley's genius and 
 eloquent prose made tar-water as popular as both had made 
 Bermuda some twenty years earlier. The later years of his 
 life at Cloyne are tinged with melancholy. His mind began 
 to be agitated again with the dream of an academic retreat 
 by other though no lovelier streams than the Blackwater and 
 the Lee, and in 1752 he journeyed again to England and 
 set up his tent for the last time beneath the shadow of the 
 Oxford spires. It was mellow autumn when he came to the 
 City of Scholars. In the chill January weather of the fol- 
 lowing year he died quite suddenly and quite peacefully 
 in the midst of his family. He was a great and a good 
 man. The serene purity of his life, his lofty purposes, 
 his nobility of nature, cause him to stand out very conspic- 
 uously in the strange, cynical, cruel world of English life 
 
38 HOURS WITH GREA T IRISHMEN. 
 
 and English thought during the first half of the eighteenth 
 century. He was in that world, but he was never of it. 
 His friends were either noble of life and mind or else he 
 saw in them only their nobler qualities, and took no thought 
 of or no harm from the rest. He seems to have been most 
 happy — and the fact is characteristic of the man — in the 
 society of the sweet, simple and studious women who made 
 him a loving wife, and of the children whom he loved with 
 an affection for the excess of which he sometimes reproached 
 himself. "All his contemporaries," says Sir James Mack- 
 intosh, "agreed with the satirist (Pope) in ascribing 'to 
 Berkeley every virtue under heaven.' Adverse factions 
 and hostile wits concurred only in loving, admiring and 
 contributing to advance him." We may say of him as of the 
 Roman Brutus, that his life, indeed, was gentle. He is an 
 abiding example of the genius and some of the highest vir- 
 tues of the Irish race. 
 
GERALD GRIFFIN. 
 
 Lord Beaconsfield, in orxC of his novels — '* Coningsby," 
 or I do forget myself — dwells with graceful melancholy which 
 he could readily assume, and which at all times became 
 him, upon the number of rarely-gifted beings who died 
 in or about their thirty-seventh year. The "fatal thirty- 
 seven" he calls it; and he enumerates a long list of bright 
 abilities who were its victims. Raphael, Byron, Mozart, 
 Mendelssohn, these and many others whose spirits were un- 
 timely quenched he mentions, paying to each his due meed 
 of mourning. One name will be at once missed by all Irish- 
 men from the list, the name of Gerald Griffin. 
 
 It may well be maintained that in all the brilliant brother- 
 hood of youth recorded by the English novelists, Gerald 
 Griffin would have found only his peers. In none did the 
 fire of genius burn more fervently, to none was fortune 
 kinder or more cruel, by none was the too early death 
 faced under conditions of loftier dignity or serener virtue. 
 
 The story of Gerald Griffin's life is exceedingly simple 
 and straightforward. He was born in Limerick, and his 
 boyhood was passed within the sight and sound of the lordly 
 river which races at its swiftest there between its crowded 
 banks. In very early youth he showed not merely those 
 passionate aspirations for literary distinction which are in- 
 evitable to all finely-tempered boyhood, but abilities of the 
 rarest kind for gratifying those aspirations and gaining the 
 coveted laurels. His keenest desire appears to have been 
 for dramatic fame; he longed to see the creations of his 
 brain taking their place wifeh Cato and Anthony, and the 
 
40 HOURS WITH GREAT IRISHMEN. 
 
 hero of "Venice preserved;" and while still in the very 
 dawn of manhood he crossed the Irish Sea with a manuscript 
 play in his pocket wherewith to conquer London and win 
 immortal fame. The lonely young Irishman fought the 
 old fight in the great city, with poverty, with indifference, 
 with the chilling influences of apathy and disdain. The 
 old, old story of genius and the giant, of the war that is as 
 ancient as the mountains, and that will outlast the cataract. 
 Griffin, with his heart on fire, flung himself against London. 
 His was not the patient merit which takes the spurns of the 
 unworthy humbly. The consciousness of his great gifts 
 informed and inspired him, and he battled strenuously, 
 desperately, w^ith evil fortune. London, swollen with some- 
 thing of the oldAthenian pride and of the exclusiveness of 
 mediaeval Florence, regards all those who come to it from 
 outside, be they Saxon or Gael, r.s "barbarians" and 
 " strangers." It has to be wooed and won, like the 
 Amazon Brunhilda of the German epic, by force of arms; 
 the wooing is desperate, the winning difficult in the ex- 
 treme. Gerald Griffin wooed London bravely, but he did not 
 win. For three years he struggled and suffered, painting 
 his proud ambitious nature with failure. Then he came back 
 to Ireland to find there the fame whose phantom he had 
 pursued in vain in the foreign city. He wrote much mar- 
 vellous prose-fiction, he wrote one masterpiece which must 
 endure as long as literature lasts. Suddenly in the warmth 
 of his youth, on the threshold of his fame, his whole soul 
 became imbued with a profound sense of the vanity of all 
 worldly triumphs and the insignificance of all earthly ambi- 
 tions. He joined the Christian Brothers, and died in the 
 ranks of that order. xVfter his death his play Gisippus^ 
 which he had carefully preserved at a time when he de- 
 stroyed all his other papers, was acted in London, and was 
 successful at a time when success was valueless for its author. 
 
GERALD GRIFFIN. 41 
 
 Gisippus has not held the stage, but it is dear to all lovers 
 of lofty dramatic literature. 
 
 " The Collegians " is one of the most remarkable, as it 
 is one of the most delightful additions that have ever been 
 made to Irish fiction. Some little time ago Mr. Ruskin, 
 in a letter which expressed a sympathy and even an enthu- 
 siasm for Ireland not often manifested by English writers, 
 declared that for the proper appreciation of the Irish Nation 
 and the Irish character a serious study of Miss Edgeworth's 
 fiction was absolutely essential. To my mind, without in 
 any way desiring to underrate Miss Edgeworth's genius, 
 Gerald Grifiin's " Collegians " is the work in Irish prose fic- 
 tion to which the foreign student of our country might be 
 most advisedly referred. Englishmen have for too long 
 drawn their ideas about Ireland from the pages of Lever's 
 novels, have too long deluded themselves into the belief 
 that that grotesque carnival of riotous dragoons, of comic 
 peasants, of Castle hacks, and practical jokers from Trinity 
 makes up the sum and substance of Irish life and Irish 
 character. As a matter of fact, the "Arabian Nights," in 
 spite of their wizards and witches, their incantations and 
 enchantments, their roc's eggs and magic lamps, present a 
 far more faithful picture of the Egypt of to-day than Lever's 
 novels do of the Ireland of his time or of any time. They 
 are fairy-tales, pure and simple, full of wild animal spirits, 
 of rough, good-natured horse-play, of love and battle and 
 adventure. They are excellent as studies of Irish and 
 English life in foreign Continental cities; they are amusing, 
 entertaining, very good company, indeed, but they no more 
 present a faithful picture of Ireland than the Bardic accounts 
 of the dwellings of the Feni resem.ble the London Dublin 
 of to-day. Lady Morgan with all her faults understood some 
 phases of Irish life and of Irish nationalism better than 
 Lever. Her " O'Briens and O'Flahertvs " has fallen into 
 
42 HOURS WITH GREAT IRISHMEN, 
 
 curious obscurity of late; it deserved, and still deserves, a 
 better fate for the sake of its one study of tlie rebellious 
 chieftain of an ancient Irish house, the last of his line, and 
 for its skillful and cruelly sarcastic study of the blended 
 corruption and frivolity of Castle society. But " The 
 Collegians" is far and away the best of all. Ireland, un- 
 fortunately, has not yet found her Walter Scott, but if 
 Gerald Griffin had cared or chosen to write more, if he had 
 given Ireland and the world a series of novels which should 
 have borne the same relationship to " The Collegians " that 
 the Waverley novels do to the first of their race, Gerald 
 Griffin would undoubtedly have made himself the Walter 
 Scott of Ireland, From one cause or another, "" The Col- 
 legians " has never won the success it deserved. Even in 
 Ireland it is not read as much as it should be, and outside 
 Ireland it is practically unknown. Yet curiously enough, 
 there is not a character in the book whose name is not per- 
 fectly familiar wherever the English language is spoken. 
 Danny Mann, Hardress Cregan, Eily O'Connor, Anne Chute, 
 Kyrle Daly, have all been made everyday acquaintances to 
 the theatre-goer everywhere, through Dion Boucicault's 
 " Colleen Bawn,"- and through the opera taken from it and 
 called "The Lily of Killarney." But, for the thousands 
 and tens of thousands to whom the music of the opera and 
 the incidents of the m.elodrama are familiar, how many 
 hundreds have gone to the original of the one and of the 
 other and have studied for its own sake " The Collegians " 
 itself? To the Englishman who desires to have a faithful 
 picture of what Ireland was like at the time in which *' The 
 Collegians " is laid, to the Irishman who wishes to appreciate 
 what must be called the greatest triumph of Irish prose- 
 fiction, " The Collegians " will not be merely a pleasure, it 
 will be an essential of education. 
 
 It is a curious and ironic fact that Gerald Griffin's name 
 
GERALD GRIFFIN. 43 
 
 should be best remembered in most English-speaking coun- 
 tries through that very dramatic art in which he feverishly- 
 thirsted for success. But it is not by Gisippus^ the heart's 
 love of his youth, that his memory is kept green. It is by 
 the adaptation of his great novel made by other hands long 
 after Gerald Griffin was laid in his quiet grave that the 
 dramatic triumph came, and the laurels that were to have 
 crowned Gisippiis have been awarded with full hands to the 
 "Colleen Bawn." 
 
 Gerald Griffin is not merely one of the most masterly of 
 Irish prose writers; he is further entitled to a place, and a 
 proud one, among the poets of Ireland. If he had chosen 
 to devote himself to verse writing alone, or had even dedi- 
 cated his talents chiefly to verse writing, he might have 
 easily taken rank with the foremost of his country's poets, 
 with Moore, Davis and Clarence Mangan. As it is, the 
 mere handful of perfect verses which he has bequeathed to 
 us entitle him, by their flawless beauty of thought and form, 
 to a place only second to that of the three stars in the Orion 
 belt of Irish song. The verses he did write are compara- 
 tively few in number. The whole of them might be in- 
 cluded in such an anthology, such a flower harvest and 
 blossom garland as Meleager and his rivals gathered in an- 
 cient days from the violets, and anemones, and narcissus 
 blooms of the Hellenic Parnassus. Scholars pore in rapt 
 admiration over the epigrams of Rufinus or Agathias, as 
 minute and as finely wrought as Greek gems — pore over 
 them and sigh to think that so little of such honeyed sweet- 
 ness has been spared to us by cormorant, devouring time. 
 Yet, well nigh as much is preserved of Rufinus as would 
 outweigh in bulk the poems of Gerald Griffin, and the most 
 impassioned admirer of the Grecian lyrist must recognize 
 that for delicate perfection of workmanship he has found at 
 last his peer in the sweet and melancholy singer whose 
 
44 HOURS WITH GREA T IRISHMEN. 
 
 Ilissus was the Shannon and whose Athens was the City of 
 the Violated Treaty. 
 
 The verses that star the sombre pages of "The Colle- 
 gians," lighting up its tragic beauty with their serene, fixed 
 lustre, are, perhaps, the very highest proofs of his literary 
 genius. Where is there to be found in the literature of the 
 English-speaking races a lovelier lyric than that which 
 Hardress Cregan wrote for Anne Chute, and which begins — 
 
 " A place in thy memory, dearest, 
 Is all that I claim. 
 To pause and look back when thou hearest 
 The sound of my name." 
 
 Lofty passion, and pathos, and brave resignation were 
 never expressed in more melodious numbers. The pangs 
 of despised love have been the fruitful theme of poets ever 
 since man first discovered the magic of rythmic measures. 
 Mimnermus sighing for Nanno in plaintive Ionian by the 
 blue waters of Smyrna Bay, the Persian telling the cypress 
 groves and sparkling waters of the Sharazi maiden whose 
 night-black tresses he may not hope to touch, Ronsard 
 rhyming innumerable sonnets to innumerable lady-loves, 
 Petrarch building for Laura a monument more enduring 
 than brass, never surpassed the simple beauty of form, 
 never approached the lofty dignity of purpose which belong 
 to the lines of the pure-minded and melancholy genius of 
 the Irish singer. 
 
SARSFIELD. 
 
 In Limerick city there stands a statue of one of the great- 
 est of Irish patriots and one of the most gallant of Irish 
 soldiers. There are not a great many statues in Irish towns 
 of the heroes and the martyrs of her cause. The country 
 has been too oppressed, and too busy battling with oppres- 
 sion, and too poor, to be able to adorn her public places with 
 many monuments to the illustrious dead. Perhaps for this 
 very reason such statues as have been put up possess an 
 added interest and impress the spectator with a profounder 
 significance. No Nationalist Irishman can ever pass with- 
 out a thrill of deep emotion that effigy of William Smith 
 O'Brien which stands in one of the busiest centres of Dublin 
 life. Little more than a generation ago the man whom that 
 carved stone commemorates, was sentenced by the hideous 
 formality in which the law then expressed itself to be 
 hanged, drawn and quartered for the offence of treason 
 against the British Crown — in other words, for loving his 
 country well. It is a curious proof of the greatness of the 
 Young Ireland movement, and of the gratitude which Ire- 
 land left to the brave, gentle man who led that movement, 
 that the statue of Smith O'Brien, a convicted and condemned 
 rebel, is to-day one of the proudest ornaments of the city 
 which servility has christened with the epithet of Viceregal. 
 
 But the statue of which I was thinking when I wrote the 
 opening lines of this paper was not the statue of a Young 
 Irelander, not at least of a Young Irelander of the nine- 
 teenth century. It is the statue of Patrick Sarsfield, Earl 
 of Lucan, and never was statue more appropriately situated 
 
46 HOURS WITH GREA T IRISHMEN. 
 
 than that of the heroic soldier within the compass of the 
 city of the Violated Treaty. All that a man could do to 
 secure the rights of his country, and the civil and religious 
 liberties of his countrymen, was done by Sarsfield. His 
 conduct of the immortal defence has been told a thousand 
 times, but every fresh repetition of the familiar tale only 
 serves to confer an added lustre to the genius and the cour- 
 age of Sarsfield, and to add a darker stain to the treachery 
 of those in whom Sarsfield, with the generous simplicity of 
 a soldier and a gentleman, had been induced to place a 
 mistaken confidence. 
 
 The seige of Limerick is one of the most famous events 
 in history. Seldom have the fortunes of two countries and 
 of two kingly causes depended more definitely upon the 
 result of one single episode in a great campaign. The fight 
 by the Boyne water, the capture of Athlone, the rout of 
 Aughrim, all these defeats and disasters might yet have 
 been repaired if only the seige of Limerick had ended other- 
 wise, or, ending as it did, had been followed by faith from 
 the faithless. The cause of King James looked gloomy 
 enough, but the cause of Ireland was hopeful. The Stuart 
 prince had promised much, had performed somewhat. 
 Poyning's act had been repealed. A measure had been 
 passed restoring the dispossessed Irish to their property. 
 But the King lost heart and head in the hour of adversity, 
 and abandoning the Irish and the French, who had served 
 him so well, he fled with more than royal rapidity to France, 
 and left the last act of the great drama to be played out 
 without him by the Shannon River and behind the walls of 
 Limerick. The Stuart princes, with all their faults, were 
 not wanting in personal courage, although actual heroism 
 was not included among their virtues then or thereafter. 
 But James lives in the Irish ballad literature, which has 
 preserved so well and so truly the salient features of her 
 
FA TRICK SARSFIELD. 47 
 
 Story at a time when any other kind of chronicling was well 
 nigh impossible, as " Craven Shemus," and under the bur- 
 den of yet more uncomplimentary epithets. 
 
 But James had fled and St. Ruth was dead, and the last 
 hopes of Ireland were hidden behind the walls of Limerick, 
 where Talbot of Tyrconnell and Patrick Sarsfield were mak- 
 ing the last stand. The two men were widely different. 
 Richard Talbot, Earl of Tyrconnell^ witnessed as a boy the 
 Cromwellian massacres in Drogheda. The memory of those 
 horrors never left him, we are told. We may easily imagine 
 that the light-hearted Irish nobleman, who plays so con- 
 siderable apart in the De Grammont "Memoirs" of the 
 Court of the second Charles, could not easily banish from 
 his memory the fearful political baptism of his boyhood. 
 Even in merriest and maddest hours, at Whitehall, while 
 conversing with the " languishing Boynton," whom he after- 
 wards wedded, or jesting with Killegrew and Hamilton and 
 Buckingham, or losing money to his Merry Majesty, we 
 can readily believe that often and often thoughts came 
 across his brain which turned the lustre of the flambeaux to 
 the glare of burning houses, the chatter of the courtiers to 
 the cries of Cromwell's Ironsides, the soft speech of Lely's 
 painted beauties to the groans of murdered women, and the 
 shining Thames beyond to the Boyne, rushing fearful of its 
 bloody foam to the sea. Talbot, of Tyrconnell, had always 
 been faithful to the Stuart cause. He had followed the 
 young prince of the house to exile over seas; the histori- 
 cal " twenty-ninth of May," when " the king did enjoy his 
 own again," was a glorious day in his eyes, as in the eyes 
 of hundreds of other cavalier gentlemen. Under the re- 
 stored Stuarts he had been appointed to the Governorship 
 of Ireland, the first Roman Catholic who had held the post 
 since the introduction of the Protestant faith into the coun- 
 try. His rule was characterized by his strenuous efforts to 
 
48 HOURS WITH GREAT IRISHMEN. 
 
 undo the anti-Catholic legislation of the Ormond Administra- 
 tion. As I have said elsewhere, the fact that he, a Catholic 
 and an Irishman, should wish to see justice and religious 
 liberty allowed to his countrymen and the companions of 
 his faith, has made his name too often the obloquy and the 
 scorn of historians who are unwilling to see liberty, either 
 political or religious, enjoyed by any but themselves and 
 their own people or party. 
 
 When the war between James and William broke out, the 
 Stuart king found his fastest and best ally in the Duke 
 of Tyrconnell. Talbot had been the Duke of York's closest 
 friend and confident; he was now, in the hour of stress, for 
 a time the prop of his hopes and the buttress of his tottering 
 throne. The Catholics in Ireland fought for the Stuart 
 monarch less for that monarch's sake than for love of Tal- 
 bot, of Tyrconnell, and the name he bore. But victory 
 went with William, and so in the course of time Talbot, of 
 Tyrconnell, found himself shut up in Limerick to make the 
 last stand for a lost cause, with only one man to help him 
 in the inevitable hour. But that one man was worth a hun- 
 dred, for his name was Sarsfield. 
 
 Sarsfield's courage and daring, his military genius, his 
 ready enterprise and unfailing resource had kept the flag 
 of Limerick flying in the face of disaster after disaster. His 
 famous midnight raid, which resulted in the destruction of 
 the Williamite siege train, is one of the most gallant as it 
 is one of the most desperate deeds recorded in history. 
 Perhaps, however, the qualities which most especially de- 
 serve our admiration in Sarsfield are the patient dignity and 
 soldierly composure with which he consented again "and 
 again to take a secondary place to men of abilities and 
 capacities infinitely below his own. The young Duke of 
 Berwick, indeed, might complain that Sarsfield's imperial 
 tongue, like that of Shakespeare's Suffolk, was sometimes 
 
FA TRICK SARSFIELD. 49 
 
 "rough and stern, used to command, untaught to plead 
 for favor," but the marvel rather is that a man of the 
 military genius of Sarsfield should have played so long and 
 so patiently a secondary part to commanders so much his 
 inferiors ? — and a man might be a very able soldier, indeed, 
 and yet remain inferior to Patrick Sarsfield — with no further 
 display of impatience than an occasional rough word to a 
 royal or semi-royal duke. But a little while and Sarsfield 
 was practically alone in Limerick. Tyrconnell, whose body 
 had long been wasted by disease, died suddenly of apoplexy. 
 Death behind the walls of Limerick was a not unfitting close 
 to a career that had practically begun behind the walls of 
 Drogheda. Between those two fatal sieges how much that 
 strange, brilliant, fitful life had experienced. Exile in 
 Flanders, faithful adherence to what seemed a ruined cause, 
 triumphant return, flight from Popish plot, phantasm, and 
 Titus Gates' accusations, the glitter and riot of an evil 
 court, rule in Ireland, once again a struggle for the Stuart 
 cause, this time going out for ever, and then the end. A 
 month and a half after Tyrconnell' s death, the treaty was 
 signed, the city was surrendered, and Sarsfield marched out 
 with all the honors of war. 
 
 All the world knows the eventful scene which followed. 
 The standards of England and France, set up outside the 
 city, wooed the Irish soldiers with a choice of foreign service. 
 Out of 15,000 men only 1,000 turned to the banner of the 
 Boyne. ■ The great bulk of the Irish army, with the excep- 
 tion of a few who chose neither service and sought their 
 homes, rallied beneath the lilies of France. The Dutch 
 General, Ginkle, who had been most eager to swell the 
 ranks of William with the heroic defenders of Limerick, 
 was bitterly disappointed at the failure of his hopes. He 
 endeavored in vain to induce Sarsfield to remain in Ireland. 
 Promises of all kinds were plentifully proffered, but Sars- 
 
50 HOURS WITH GREAT IRISHMEN. 
 
 field was not to be tempted. He crossed the sea and laid 
 his bright sword at the feet of King Louis. The French 
 monarch, who thoroughly appreciated the value of his Irish 
 adherents, welcomed the hero of Limerick, and immediately 
 appointed him to the command of the second troop of the 
 Irish Guards, the first troop being under the command of 
 the impetuous young Duke of Berwick. 
 
 The rest of Sarsfield's record may be thus briefly sum- 
 marized from O'Callaghan. On the defeat at Steenkirk in 
 July, 1692, of the allies under William III. by the French 
 under the Marshal De Luxembourg, the marshal compli- 
 mented Lord Lucan, as having acted at the engagement in 
 a manner worthy of his previous military reputation in 
 Ireland. The marshal wrote to Louis XIV. of the Duke 
 of Berwick's bravery and added — " The Earl of Lucan was 
 with him; in whom we have particularly noticed the valor 
 and the intrepidity of which he had given proofs in Ireland. 
 I can assure your Majesty that he is a very good and a 
 very able officer." In March, 1693, in addition to his rank 
 of Major-General in the service of James 11. , he was created 
 Marechal-de-Camp in that of France; and at the great over- 
 throw, in July, of the allies under William by Luxembourg, 
 at the battle of Landen, he received his death wound. 
 Everyone knows the sad and lovely legend according to 
 which the dying soldier, putting his hand to his wound and 
 drawing it back wet and red with his best blood, sighed out 
 the heroic aspiration that that blood had been shed for 
 Ireland. He died of his wounds a few days after the battle. 
 His wife. Lord Clanricarde's daughter, married some two 
 years after his death that very Duke of Berwick whose 
 hot youth had protested against Sarsfield's superior judg- 
 ment. It is one of the curiosities of history that almost all the 
 women who were loved by the great heroes of Ireland married 
 after the deaths of their lovers — Lady Lucan, Lady 
 
PA TRICK SARSFIELD. 51 
 
 Edward Fitzgerald, the wife of Wolfe Tone, and Sarah 
 Curran. Historians of all schools agree in praise of 
 Patrick Sarsfield. Macauley, who had little love for Ireland 
 and for any champion of the house of Stuart, admits that 
 he was " a gentleman of eminent merit, brave, upright, 
 honorable, careful of his men in quarters, and certain to 
 be always found at their head in the day of battle." A 
 Williamite historian quoted by Mr. O'Callaghan, says — 
 *'Arminius was never more popular among the Germans 
 than Sarsfield among the Irish. To this day his name is 
 venerated — canitur adJmc. No man was ever more attached 
 to his country or more devoted to his king and his religion." 
 It may indeed be declared that all Irish history does not 
 boast a nobler gentleman than the gallant soldier, great of 
 mind as he was gigantic of body, whose brave heart ceased 
 to beat in the little town of Huy in 1693. 
 
BRIAN BOROIMHE. 
 
 Many persons of playful temperament and unincumbered 
 by any wealth of historical or other information are ac- 
 customed to allude to Brian Boroimhe in all lightness of 
 heart as a more or less mythical individual whose deeds 
 and words are to be placed on the same footing as those 
 of Cucullain or Finn MacCoul. I am not at all prepared 
 myself to abandon the right to distinct historical recognition 
 of so distinguished a warrior as Cucullain or so eminent 
 a monarch as Finn. In an age which excavates Troy Town 
 and unearths from the dusts of Mycena the mouldering 
 remains of the King of Men, the scholar would be rash, 
 indeed, who denied to the Feni and their forefathers the 
 respect due to the heroes of Homeric epic and Athenian 
 tragedy. But while we may frankly admit that the case 
 for the historical existence of Oisin or Dermat is not- yet 
 conclusively made out, we must insist, wherever such insist- 
 ance is necessary, upon the very different degree of authen- 
 ticity which attaches to the memory of the famous and 
 fearless king who made himself the terror of the Danes. 
 Brian Boroimhe is as historical a personage as O'Connell 
 or Grattan, or Silken Thomas or Shane O'Neill. To rele- 
 gate him in any way into the ghostly company of Ossianic 
 heroes who haunt the twilight regions of romance, is to 
 commit a grave offence of lese majestie against that most 
 high and potent prince. 
 
 Brian Boroimhe, or Brian of the Tribute, was the greatest 
 king of the old Dalcassian line, which was founded by 
 Cormac Cas in the third century. In alternation with 
 
BRIAN BOROIMHE. 53 
 
 the princes of the Eugenian Hne the Dalcassian princes had 
 ruled over Munster for seven centuries, when a son was 
 born to Cinneidigh, who was christened Brian. Before I 
 explain the signification of the surname which was after- 
 wards given to the glory of the Dalcassian House, I may 
 not inappropriately quote a passage from O'Curry's delight- 
 ful lectures, in which one valuable social reform, in itself 
 enough to illuminate a kingly reign, is set forth: 
 
 *' Previous to the time of the Monarch Brian Boroimhe — 
 about the year looo — there was no general system of family 
 names in Erin; but every man took the name either of his 
 father or of his grandfather for a surname. Brian, however, 
 established a new and most convenient arrangement — 
 namely, that families in future should take permanent names, 
 either those of their immediate fathers or of any person 
 more remote in their line of pedigree. And thus Murie 
 Adhach, the son of Carthach, took the surname of Mac- 
 Carthaigh (now MacCarthy), ' Mac ' being the Gaelic for 
 * son.' Toirdhealbhagh, or Turloch, the grandson of Brian 
 himself, took the surname of O' Brian or ' the grandson of 
 Brian' — O' being the Gaedhlic for ' grandson; ' Cathbarr, 
 the grandson of Donnell, took the name of O'Donnell; Don- 
 nell, the grandson of Niall Glendubh, took the surname of 
 O'Neill; Tadgh or Teige, the grandson of Conor, took the 
 name of O' Conor of Connacht; Donogh, the son of Mur- 
 chadh, or Murogh, took the surname of MacMurogh of 
 Leinster; and so as to all the other families thoughout the 
 kingdom." 
 
 Brian was born in the year 941. When he was ten years 
 old his brother Mahon succeeded to the kingship. At that 
 time the Danes were the scourge and the dread of the native 
 Irish princes. Their wild Vikings came from the far north 
 in their long ships and settled eagerly upon the smiling Irish 
 shores, plundering and devastating in all directions, and 
 
54 HOURS WITH GREA T IRISHMEN. 
 
 ever encroaching more and more upon the soil, and pushing 
 the lines of the settlements farther and farther away from 
 the sea. From his earliest boyhood Brian seems to have 
 been animated by the fiercest hatred against the invaders, 
 arid by consuming indignation at the humiliation involved 
 in the presence of the marauding encampments on Irish 
 soil. Hitherto no prince or league of princes had been 
 found strong enough to drive the Danes back over the 
 swan's bath to their homes in the frozen North. The 
 desperate courage, the vast physical strength, the gigantic 
 frames of the Northmen, made them exceedingly dangerous 
 adversaries, and moreover, they settled upon the country 
 in such numbers as made any attempt to overthrow them 
 difficult in the extreme. Brian's patience seems to have 
 given way when Mahon, in his sovereign capacity as King 
 of Munster, withdrew from what looked like a hopeless 
 struggle with the Danes, and entered into a solemn treaty 
 with them. The treaty could not bind Brian. He rallied 
 around him a mere handful of the bravest and most desper- 
 ate chieftains, and fought the hostile Danes wherever and 
 whenever he could, and to such good purpose that he suc- 
 ceeded in restraining their onward advance. Fired by the 
 courageous example of Brian, his brother Mahon and other 
 princes took heart and joined together in a comprehensive 
 bond against the common enemy. Limerick, in which the 
 power of the Munster Danes was massed, was assailed and 
 carried after some hot fighting, and the Irish found them- 
 selves masters of many prisoners and a vast quantity of 
 treasure. Still, in spite of this signal victory, such was the 
 power of the Danes, and such the strength of their arms 
 from constant reinforcements, and such the dread of their 
 desperate reputation, that after a while they were permitted 
 to re-enter Limerick as traders, and become masters of the 
 town again. 
 
BRIAN BOROIMHE. 55 
 
 The reinstated Danes were full of bitter feelings towards 
 Mahon as head of the great enterprise which had for a time 
 struck so heavy a blow at their influence, and they deter- 
 mined on revenge. A conspiracy was formed between Ivar, 
 head of the Danes of Limerick, and a renegade Irish prince, 
 Molloy, son of Bran, Lord of Desmond, who had long been 
 a jealous rival of Mahon, whom Mahon had expelled from 
 Desmond, and who was thirsting for revenge. Between 
 the pair a scheme was laid for the assassination of Mahon, 
 which was carried out under conditions of peculiar and re- 
 volting perfidy. Molloy summoned Mahon to an amicable 
 conference, at which the claims of the two rival princes 
 might be discussed and settled. The meeting was to be 
 held at the house of Donovan, a Eugenian prince. Mahon 
 went to the meeting without any suspicion of the meditated 
 treason; he was imm.ediately seized, made prisoner, hurried 
 to the mountains, and slain. The manner of his death was 
 particularly horrible, for it is told that when the murderers 
 drew their weapons the betrayed king caught up a copy of 
 the holy gospels and placed the open volumes as a shield 
 against his breast. But neither the sacred book, nor the 
 presence of two priests, who had courageously followed the 
 doomed king, stayed the murderous hands. The assassins 
 closed round the king, a ring of levelled points, and plunged 
 their weapons again and again through the book into his 
 body. Mahon fell to the ground dead; the priests caught 
 up the sacred volume, its pages torn with treason's swords 
 and blackened with Dalcassia's noblest blood, and hurried 
 from the scene of slaughter to bear the news of the murder 
 far and wide. Whether even such assassins were unwilling 
 to lay hands upon a hply man, or whether they wished the 
 news of Ivar's vengeance and Molloy' s treason to be bruited 
 abroad as soon as might be, they seem in no wise to have 
 interfered with the departure of the priests. Perhaps the 
 
Ob HOURS WITH GREAT IRISHMEN. 
 
 murderers deemed that in slaying Mahon they had sapped 
 the strength of Munster. But they reckoned without the 
 young chieftain who had been foremost in the late war, and 
 whose courage and genius made him a far more dangerous 
 enemy to the Danish strength than the monarch who had 
 been so foully done to death in the Knocinreorin Moun- 
 tains. 
 
 News of his brother's death was brought to Brian at Kin- 
 kora. Every historian has recorded the passion of grief 
 and rage which seized upon the young prince; every historian 
 has told how, like a leader in Israel or a Hellenic hero, 
 he immediately seized his harp and sang the death-song of 
 his brother and king; every historian has quoted the mighty 
 words in which he pledged himself to vengeance: 
 
 " My heart shall burst within my breast 
 Unless I avenge this great king; 
 They shall forfeit life for this foul deed, 
 Or I must perish by a violent death.'' 
 
 Bravely and resolutely Brian fulfilled his vow. Rousing 
 all his following, he flung himself first upon his Danish foes 
 under Ivar of Limerick, and routed them completely. Ivar, 
 the chief of the traitors, with his two sons, was slain. Then 
 he turned the edge of his sword against the false Eugenian 
 Donovan. Donovan raised a mighty power of his own 
 people and of Desmond Danes, but they could make no 
 head against Brian; they were scattered like chaff, and 
 Donovan himself was slain. One alone now remained of 
 Mahon's murderers, Molloy, son of Bran. Brian sent him 
 a summons to fight, which Molloy answered by taking the 
 field with a swollen armament. But these, too, like the 
 others, were dispersed and scattered by Brian's army, and 
 Molloy himself was slain in the thick of the fight by Mur- 
 jough, Brian's valiant and high-spirited son. Such was the 
 swift fate that overtook the slayer of Mahon. < 
 
BRIAN BOKOIAIHE. 57 
 
 While this blood-feud was being consummated Brian's 
 dominions were invaded by Malachy Mor, the famous 
 Malachy of the Collar of Gold. The precise cause of the 
 quarrel between these two illustrious princes seems now to 
 be somewhat uncertain, but it must have been fierce, indeed, 
 when it moved so gallant a warrior as Malachy to the un- 
 generous action of cutting down the sacred tree at Adair, 
 under which Brian himself, and the long line of his Dal- 
 cassian ancestors, had been crowned. As soon as Brian 
 had his brother's vendetta off his hands he turned the 
 strength of his arm against Malachy, by ravaging West- 
 meath. For some time the quarrel between Brian and 
 Malachy raged with intermittent fury, victory sometimes in- 
 clining to one prince and sometimes to another. At last, 
 however, a common peril and a common enemy united those 
 hostile monarchs. The Danes, their decimated ranks stiff- 
 ened by reinforcements from the far North, were again pur- 
 suing their old policy of aggression against the native Irish. 
 Brian and Malachy clasped hands in amity, concluded a 
 truce which proved to be a lasting one, joined their forces, 
 beat back the desperate Danes, and entered Dublin. With 
 this crushing defeat of the foreign foe came the hour of 
 Brian's triumph. He claimed the kingship of Ireland, and 
 called upon Malachy Mor to acknowledge him, a course 
 which Malachy, after a little faltering and some unsuccess- 
 ful attempts to stir up certain Irish princes to mutiny, finally 
 adopted. 
 
 Why was Brian called Brian of the Tribute ? The story 
 is curious. O'Curry tells it at considerable length, and 
 from O'Curry it may be briefly summarized thus: In the 
 first century there appears to have been a very fierce land 
 agitation. The Aitheach Tuatha, who appear to have 
 occupied something of the position, of the tenant farmers of 
 our time, and to have been no less oppressed, issued a sort 
 
58 HOURS WITH GREA T IRISHMEN. 
 
 of No Rent Manifesto, which they enforced by rising in 
 swift and successful rebellion. The power of the landlord 
 was overthrown, and the Attacots, as the Aitheach Tuatha 
 have come to be correctly called, set up a ruler of their own. 
 King Cat-Head. Cat-Head's successor was defeated and 
 slain by a prince of the legitimate line some quarter of a 
 century after the revolution. This prince, Tuathal Teacht- 
 mar, had two fair daughters whom he loved passing well. 
 One of them was wedded to Eachaidh Aincheann, Lord of 
 Leinster. This false prince, hearing that the second sister 
 was fairer than the first, shut his wife into close confine- 
 ment, pretended that she was dead, and obtained from 
 Tuathal the hand of his second daughter. The first wife es- 
 caped from her prison, confronted her false husband and de- 
 ceived bride. The new queen died immediately of shame 
 and horror at her situation, and her sister followed her to the 
 grave soon after. When Tuathal heard of the insult to his 
 children and of their fate, he carried fire and sword into 
 Leinster, ravaged the province from north to south, and im- 
 posed upon its people forever the payment of a triennial 
 tribute, which, as it consisted largely of cows, was called 
 the '*Boromean" tribute, from the Gaedhlic word "Bo," 
 meaning a cow. For five centuries this tribute was the 
 cause of fierce and bloody wars until, in the year 680, it was 
 abolished by Finnachta the Festive. Brian revived it as a 
 punishment for the adherence of Leinster to the Danish 
 cause, and hence his surname of Boroimhe. 
 
 Brian's reign as King of Ireland was brilliant and pros- 
 perous. Commerce, arts, education all flourished, and the 
 wealth and peace of the country became proverbial. But 
 the old hatred of the Danes, long smoldering, blazed at last 
 into determined insurrection. Aided by treason among the 
 Irish chiefs and princes, a formidable army was levied 
 against the aged king. But age had not cooled the fiery 
 
BRIAN BOROIMHE. 59 
 
 courage of Brian's nature. He raised all his power and met 
 his foes at Clontarf on Good Friday, the 23d of April, 1014. 
 The fortunes of that fight are a familiar story. The Danes 
 were defeated, but victory was scarcely less terrible to vic- 
 tors than to vanquished, for in the very ebb of the battle a 
 Danish chief struck down and slew the greatest prince who 
 ever ruled over Ireland, one of the greatest monarchs whose 
 name is recorded in the history of the world. 
 
LORD EDWARD FITZGERALD. 
 
 In the finest and most famous of the speeches of Thomas 
 Francis Meagher, the orator appeals to "the ducal palace 
 in this kingdom where the memory of the gallant and sedi- 
 tious Geraldine enhances more than royal favor the splen- 
 dor of his race." There is not in the whole history of ora- 
 tory a finer passage than that from which those words are 
 taken. Demosthenes from his rock-stand beholding "un- 
 stable Athens heave her stormy seas " beneath him; Cicero 
 defying the menaces of armed men within the sacred pre- 
 cincts of the Senate House; Vergniaud, lending to the pas- 
 sions of the French Revolution a lustre it was destined soon 
 to lose, never uttered a more pow^erful appeal to the tradi- 
 tions and the emotions of a people than that in which the 
 enthusiast of Young Ireland conjured his hearers and all 
 the world to cast aside the " miserable maxim " of his ad- 
 versaries. If it were permissible to suggest any possible 
 improvement in such a rush of magnificent and immortal 
 language — and I, for one, am so intense an admirer of 
 Meagher's speeches that to hint at any alteration of them is 
 scarcely less bold than a Mussulman proposition to amend 
 the Koran — it might be suggested that there is a spot more 
 intimately connected with the " gallant and seditious Geral- 
 dine," and more appropriate even than the ducal palace of 
 his race, to point such an appeal to his countrymen That 
 spot is the small room in Thomas street where Lord Edward 
 fought so desperately against arrest; and where with his 
 capture and subsequent death the last hopes of the United 
 Irishmen were extinguished. A tradition common to many 
 
LORD ED WARD FITZGERALD. 61 
 
 countries is fond of declaring that in places where a great 
 murder has been committed the blood of the victim has 
 stained forever the floor with an ineradicable mark. Thus, 
 in Holyrood the traveller who has come to the foot of 
 Arthur's vSeat is shown by his cicerone the darkened corner 
 which is said to have borne ineffacable testimony of blood 
 ever since the angry daggers of the Scottish gentlemen met 
 in the body of the Italian favorite. Over in Hanover, in 
 the ancient palace of the Guelphs, there is a blood-stained 
 spot in the Hall of the Knights where Count Konigsmarck 
 met his death, at the hands, some say, of the dissolute 
 Elector who afterwards became King of England under the 
 title of George the First. The tradition which lingers 
 around the scenes where the feeble Italian music-maker and 
 the sinful Swedish adventurer were slaughtered has not been 
 repeated for the gallant and seditious Geraldine. No trace 
 of his brave blood stains the walls where he made his last 
 stand, and where the short struggle raged so fiercely that 
 all the narrow place was splashed with his life current. But 
 in the mind's eye of the pilgrim to that shrine those sordid 
 walls are still reddened and sanctified by the bravest blood 
 that ever yet was offered up in the cause of national liberty. 
 My thoughts have been specially turned in the direction 
 of that room and of Lord Edward Fitzgerald this week by 
 a letter which has just come into my possession, and which 
 has a special bearing upon his story, and most of all upon 
 the closing scene of it. The letter, which comes from New 
 South V/ales, was written in the December of last year by 
 a grandson of the soldier named Ryan who was chiefly in- 
 strumental in effecting the capture of Lord Edward, and 
 who died of the wounds he received in the struggle with the 
 Geraldine. Yeomanry Captain Ryan's grandson objects 
 very strongly to the description given of the scene in which 
 Mr. Froude's " English in Ireland in the Eighteenth Cen- 
 
63 HOURS WITH GREAT IRISHMEN. 
 
 tury," wherein he represents Major Swan as *' being 
 wounded through and through, and cHnging to Lord Ed- 
 ward." The Mr. Ryan of to-day appeals against this to 
 the statement of his father, yeomanry Captain Ryan's son, 
 as given in the memoirs and correspondence of Viscount 
 Castlereagh, edited by Lord Londonderry, and to the account 
 given in Haverty's History to maintain his case, that to 
 Captain Ryan, and to Captain Ryan alone, is it due that 
 the arrest of Lord Edward Fitzgerald was effected. As 
 Mr. Ryan is exceedingly anxious to have the actual facts 
 of the tragedy of Thomas street made known, and as it is 
 the historian's duty to seek for accuracy even in the minutest 
 details, I cannot do better than set forth and give publicity 
 to those portions of Mr. Ryan's case upon which he most 
 strongly relies: 
 
 "Unwillingness," says Mr. Ryan, "to offend the sus- 
 ceptibilities of Swan's survivors doubtless caused my father 
 to content himself with simply repudiating any important 
 part being taken by Swan on that occasion without em- 
 phatically stating that he had left the room; but when I find 
 subsequent historians of Mr. Froude's literary rank and 
 reputation giving such a false representation of Swan's ser- 
 vices (or rather non-services) in the.affair, I cannot but feel 
 sorely aggrieved and indignant, and will not hesitate to 
 strive to have the truth manifested. I consider Sirr's letter 
 to my father in '38 (published in my father's statement), so 
 far as it relates to Swan, both evasive and hypocritical. My 
 father had asked him whether he had sanctioned the ac- 
 counts published in the Times of that day, wherein Swan's 
 share in the transaction was grossly exaggerated, I think. 
 Yet he declines to meet that simple question in a straight- 
 forward and manly way, and because he was not present at 
 the scene of that struggle, forsooth, ' he k?iew nothing about 
 it.,' as if any one can for a moment believe that those two 
 
LORD EDWARD FITZGERALD. 63 
 
 men, Sirr and Swan, who were on most intimate terms, 
 officially and privately, had not often discussed between 
 themselves that most eventful occurrence with all its sad 
 and thrilling attendant circumstances. His silence, there- 
 fore, about Swan's affording any help in the actual conflict, 
 in my mind, recoils on his friend's reputation with most in- 
 jurious effect — as either, if present, he held aloof from 
 practical assistance, which Sirr would be ashamed to admit; 
 or if, as I believe, he had early left the room, and was 
 therefore not present to render help, so he (Swan) could 
 give no account of it. Thus, Sirr evades answering the 
 question altogether, as in either case it could only reflect 
 disastrously on Swan's character. . . . I was always told 
 by my father that Swan on being wounded left the room, 
 when his father immediately entered, and effectually pre- 
 vented Lord Edward's escape by the staircase communi- 
 cating with the roof of the house, and that his father had 
 to deal with Lord Edward single-handed. This information 
 he derived from his mother, a lady member of the Bishop 
 family — one of the best families in the county Cork in those 
 days — and she had received it from her dying husband." 
 
 Mr. Murphy's account of the arrest goes to confirm Mr. 
 Ryan's case. 
 
 "On the night of Friday, the i8th May, 1798, Lord 
 Edward came to my house (153 Thomas street) at about 
 seven o'clock. On Saturday, the 19th May, I went to Lord 
 Edward's sleeping room, and found he was in bed. I was 
 not in the room three minutes when in came Major Swan 
 and a person following him, in a soldier's jacket and a sword 
 in his hand. When I saw Major Swan I was thunderstruck. 
 He looked over me and saw Lord Edward in bed. He 
 pushed by me quickly, and Lord Edward seeing him, 
 sprang up instantly, like a tiger, and drew a dagger, which 
 he carried about him, and wounded Major Swan slightly. 
 
64 HOURS WITH GREA T IRISHMEN. 
 
 Major Swan had a pistol in his waistcoat pocket, which he 
 fired without effect. He immediately turned to me and 
 gave me a severe thrust of the pistol, under the eye, at the 
 same time desiring the person who came with him to take 
 me into custody. I was immediately taken away to the 
 yard; there I saw Major Sirr and about six soldiers of the 
 Dumbarton Fencibles. Major Swan had thought proper to 
 run as fast as he could to the street. Mr. Ryan supplied 
 Major Swan's place, he came in contact with Lord Edward, 
 and was wounded seriously. Major Sirr at that time came 
 upstairs, and, keeping at a respectful distance, fired a pistol 
 at Lord Edward in a very deliberate manner, and wounded 
 him in the shoulder. Reinforcements coming in. Lord Ed- 
 ward surrendered, after a very hard struggle. Ryan lived 
 for about a fortnight after. Lord Edward died of his 
 wounds on the 4th June, 1798." 
 
 I have dealt at so much length with Mr. Ryan's case be- 
 cause, as I said, accuracy even in the small details of a 
 great event is of importance alike to the historian and to 
 the student of history. The latter are greatly indebted to 
 Mr. Fitzpatrick for having with great pains ascertained 
 definitely that the betrayer of Lord Edward Fitzgerald's 
 hiding-place to the Government was Higgins, the ^' Sham 
 Squire." In the same way, and to give completeness to 
 every point of the great tragedy of Ninety-eight, a certain 
 interest does attach to the name of the individual who was 
 instrumental in effecting the capture of Lord Edward Fitz- 
 gerald. Yeomanry Captain Ryan seems to have performed 
 an office which certainly cannot endear his memory to Irish- 
 m.en with a courage in which the two chief instruments of the 
 raid were lacking, and he sacrificed his life in the discharge 
 of his task. The establishment of Yeomanry Captain 
 Ryan's right to recognition as the chief actor in the tragedy 
 has at least the effect of adding a slightly darker stain to 
 
LORD EDWARD FITZGERALD. 65 
 
 the memories of Sirr and Swan. I must, at the same time 
 confess that I fail to appreciate the desire of any man to be 
 associated with the arrest of Lord Edward Fitzgerald; but 
 it is the part of the chronicler to accept facts and to be glad 
 of accuracy, even in matters of comparative insignificance. 
 
 The whole range of Irish historical literature can hardly 
 afford a more delightful or a more melancholy volume than 
 Thomas Moore's Memoirs of Lord Edward Fitzgerald. 
 Written on that principle which governs all the best bi- 
 ographies, it tells its story largely in the words of its own 
 hero, and where these most inevitably are wanting it calls 
 in the aid of contemporaries to fill the void. Thus the book 
 has in a great measure all the indefinable charm which must 
 belong to autobiography, and where this is missing we get 
 from the letters and writings of those who were themselves 
 actors in or spectators of the age that realistic impression 
 which is the highest quality of history. In Moore's fasci- 
 nating pages the wild, checkered, heroic life loses nothing by 
 being recorded by a poet's pen. From the first page to the 
 last the fortunes of the greatest of the Fitzgeralds are fol- 
 lowed with the appreciative sympathy of a man of genius 
 for a man of genius. The eager boy fed his spirit with all 
 the details of the military art, and he writes joyously to the 
 mother who was so long the dearest confidante of all his 
 thoughts, hopes, and ambitions about " a very pretty survey 
 of the fields round the Garonne " which he has made. " I 
 have tired you now pretty well by my boastings," he adds, 
 simply, *' but you know I have always rather a good opinion 
 of whatever I do." While still very young he joined the 
 army and entered upon the career of adventure which was 
 destined to end so tragically while still in the flower of his 
 age. 
 
 His life for some years ran much on those two themes of 
 war and love, which are popularly supposed to be the chief 
 3 
 
66 HOURS WITH GREAT IRISHMEN. 
 
 emotions of a soldier's mind. All sorts of fair women flit 
 across the pages of his letters to his mother. Shadowy 
 presences to us, dim ghosts of those last century beauties 
 who fired the warm heart and chivalrous soul of the young 
 Geraldine ! Miss Sandford, *' the charming girl, very pretty, 
 with a great deal of wit, and very sensible and good- 
 humored," appears early in his correspondence. " If I had 
 had time," he declares, "I should have fallen desperately 
 in love with her." Then came the American War and his 
 own brave deeds. Some years later he is convinced that he 
 is devoted to the lady Catharine Mead, Lord ClanwiUiam's 
 daughter, who afterwards marries Lord Powerscourt; and of 
 the fair Kate he writes very sweetly and sadly to the invari- 
 able recipient of all his confidences and all his joys and 
 sorrows, his mother. "Pretty dear Kate" is, however, 
 gradually obliterated from his memory by another passion 
 which influenced him profoundly, but in which he was 
 doomed to disappointment. He sought absence and for- 
 getfulness in America, where he became a member of the 
 Bear tribe of Indians, through the good graces of the Chief 
 of the Six Nations. But it took him long enough to be 
 cured of this heart's sorrow. The tragic story which 
 Madame de Genlis tells of the unhappy admiration which 
 Lord Edward's youth and wit, courage and manly bearing, 
 aroused in the beautiful wife of Richard Brinsley Sheridan 
 would happily appear to be without foundation. That he 
 was a friend and sincere admirer of Mrs. Sheridan was 
 natural, and the close resemblance which the woman he 
 finally married, the fair Pamela, bore to Mrs. Sheridan was 
 the chief cause, no doubt, of the legend. It was in Paris 
 that Lord Edward first met Pamela, in Moore's words, ** the 
 adopted, or, as may now be said without scruple, actual 
 daughter of Madame de Genlis by the Duke of Orleans." 
 Paris was full of excitement to Lord Edward. The revolu- 
 
LORD EDWARD FITZGERALD. 67 
 
 tionary fever was at its height, and carried away by it. 
 Lord Edward solemnly renounced his title at a Republican 
 banquet, and insisted upon being addressed as citizen Ed- 
 ward Fitzgerald. This and his marriage to a daughter of 
 Philippe Egalite roused English anger, and Lord Edward 
 was removed from the roll of the British army. Then came 
 his life in Dublin, his impassioned championship of his op- 
 pressed country, his adhesion to the United Irishmen, his 
 plans for a revolution, which but for the machinations of 
 traitors, promised every chance of success, and, finally, 
 the fight in Thomas street, the death in prison, and the 
 grave in St. Werburgh's churchyard. Another Irishman, 
 no less gallant, no less devoted to the cause for which he, 
 too, was destined to be no less a martyr, Theobald Wolfe 
 Tone, wrote: '' I knew Fitzgerald very little, but I honor 
 and venerate his character, which he has uniformly sustained 
 and in this last instance illustrated. His career is finished 
 gloriously for himself, and, whatever be the event, his 
 memory will live forever in the heart of every honest Irish- 
 man." 
 
THE EARLS. 
 
 On a September midnight in the early years of the seven- 
 teenth century a small ship bore away from the coast of 
 Ireland, having on board a little company of men and 
 women. Through the darkness those on board strained 
 their eyes wistfully to catch the last glimpses of the receding 
 shore which was so dear to them, and which they were destined 
 never to behold again. The weather was wild and stormy, 
 as if the very elements were entering their fierce protest 
 against the fate that compelled the bearers of best and 
 bravest names in Ireland to seek for safety and for shelter 
 on a strange soil among foreign faces far from their own 
 roof-trees and their own hearth-stones. 
 
 "It is certain," say the Four Masters, "that the sea 
 never carried and the winds never wafted from the Irish 
 shores individuals more illustrious or noble in genealogy, 
 or more renowned for deeds of valor, prowess, and high 
 achievements. The words of the Four Masters might even 
 have been bolder. Seas, never bore and winds never wafted 
 from any shores men of nobler name, of braver hearts, or 
 of more melancholy fortunes than the two chieftains who 
 stood upon the deck of that little vessel and watched through 
 the driving spray the fading outlines of their fatherland, 
 while the raging wind shrieked in their ears a boding fare- 
 well. 
 
 The two chieftains were Hugh O'Neill, Lord of Tyrone, 
 and Rory O'Donnell, Lord of Tyrconnell. Hugh O'Neill, 
 the elder of the two by more than a generation, was one of 
 the most remarkable Irishmen of his time, or of any time. 
 
THE EARLS. 69 
 
 He came of an ancient and illustrious house. When Henry 
 the Eighth was carrying fire and sword into Ireland, when 
 he was working hard to destroy with one hand the power of 
 the Irish princes, and with the other the power of the Irish 
 Church, he found among the number of his foes a certain 
 noble upon whom Henry had been pleased to spend some 
 former favor. Con O'Neill, nicknamed the Lame. Con the 
 Lame flung himself into the desperate revolt of the famous 
 Fitzgerald, Silken Thomas. Everyone knows how the forces 
 of the Fitzgeralds were shattered by the English artillery, 
 which was then, for the first time, employed in Irish warfare 
 against them, and how Silken Thomas and his five uncles 
 surrendered, were taken to London, and hanged at Tyburn. 
 Con O'Neill held out for a while; then he " came over " most 
 lamentably and shamefully. He apostatized from his faith, 
 made his way to England and presented himself before 
 Henry VIII. as a supple and servile vassal. Henry endued 
 him with the title of Earl of Tyrone, in return for which 
 high honor and dignity Con the Lame renounced his ances- 
 tral name of O'Neill, pledged himself and his heirs to adopt 
 English dress and English language, to loyally serve, honor, 
 and obey the English King. "And for his reward," says 
 Henry VIIL, in a document quoted by Mr. Webb, in his 
 admirable "Compendium of Irish Biography," "we gave 
 unto him a chayne of three score pounds and odde; we 
 payd for his robes and the charges of his creation three 
 score and fyve poundes tenne shillings two pens, and we 
 gave him in redy money oon hundreth poundes sterling.'* 
 
 For this base price. Judas O'Neill sold his honor and the 
 honor of his house. Repentance, however, seems to have 
 come upon him too late. He died disgraced, degraded and 
 broken-hearted, leaving, it is said, his solemn curse upon 
 any of his descendants who should ever learn to speak the 
 English tongue. His grandson, the Hugh O'Neill who was 
 
'J'O HO URS WITH GREA T IRISHMEN. 
 
 now flying for his life from Ireland, had been brought up 
 at the English Court and confirmed in the Lordship of 
 Tyrone by the English Government. Even in the brilliant 
 Court of Elizabeth, crowded as it was with statesmen, with 
 philosophers, and with poets, with men who, like the Danish 
 prince, were "soldier, scholar, courtier, eye, tongue, 
 sword," the young Irish chieftain was eminently distin- 
 guished for his rare gifts of mind and body. He was one 
 of the most remarkable figures of all the brilliant assembly 
 who thronged the halls and gardens of Kenilworth when 
 Leicester entertained with almost Oriental splendor his im- 
 perious mistress. After a time O'Neill was allowed to return 
 to his own country and to the earldom of his grandfather. 
 Sapient English statesmanship argued with itself comforta- 
 bly that a young Irish nobleman who had had the rare good 
 fortune to pass his youth beneath the enchanted influence 
 of the Court of Elizabeth must be forever confirmed in his 
 allegiance to the Crown of England, and must prove a 
 potent engine of the English propaganda on his return to 
 his own land. Sapient English statesmanship was however, 
 woefully mistaken. \Vhen the young O'Neill found himself 
 free from that atmosphere of Elizabeth's court, and treading 
 the soil of his fathers, he proved that he had been by no 
 means Anglified. " It was not very long before he assumed 
 his ancestral title of The O'Neill, the proud title which Con 
 the Lame had so basely surrendered, and revived all the 
 customs of ancient Irish chieftains. Here was at once a 
 severe blow to the bland English belief that a process of 
 early transplantation could convert the heir to an ancient 
 Irish house into the courtier creature of his foreign masters. 
 But though Hugh O'Neill was ready to display his affec- 
 tion for his own land and his own people, he did not for 
 long enough take any part in plots or movements against the 
 supremacy of the English crown. Indeed he was so long 
 
THE EARLS. 71 
 
 tranquil that English statesmanship, recovering from its 
 first shock, might well reassure itself with the solacing 
 thought that though the Lord of Tyrone might amuse him- 
 self and flatter the pride of his following by certain conces- 
 sions to Irish custom, still his heart was in the right place, 
 and ,beat with proper loyalty to the country which had pro- 
 cured him the privilege of breathing the same air as Burleigh 
 and Bacon, as Raleigh and Sidney and Spenser. Indeed 
 Hugh O'Neill was ready enough in his assurances of loyalty, 
 and even in avowed predilection for the English manners, 
 customs, and language, so that for a time he seemed as 
 good a " Queen's man " as heart could wish. 
 
 Many things, however, the ties of friendship and the ties 
 of love, combined to drive him into rebellion. The fierce- 
 tempered Lord Deputy Sir John Perrott, had most treach- 
 erously captured Hugh Roe, or Red Hugh O'Donnell, son 
 of Hugh O'Donnell of Tyrconnell, and had kept him a 
 prisoner in Dublin as a hostage for his father's good behavior. 
 This act of treachery, while it made Red Hugh O'Donnell 
 a bitter and dangerous enemy to the Crown, deeply angered 
 Hugh O'Neill, who was Hugh O'Donnell's kinsman. When 
 at length Red Hugh succeeded in escaping from his bond- 
 age, burning with a sense of his wrongs and a desire for re- 
 venge, he found shelter with Hugh O'Neill, and brought 
 all his influence to bear upon the Lord of Tyrone to draw 
 him into confederation against the Government. Another 
 and a more romantic cause had great influence in urging 
 Tyrone into revolt. After the death of his wife, Hugh 
 O'Neill had fallen deeply in love v/ith the beautiful sister 
 of Sir Henry Bagnal, the Lord Marshal, and the lady had 
 returned his love. In defiance of the fierce opposition of 
 her brother she eloped with the Irish chief, and made 
 Bagnal, who never looked with any good-will upon O'Neill, 
 his remorseless enemy. 
 
72 HOURS WITH GREA T IRISHMEN. 
 
 From this point the story of Hugh O'Neill's career runs 
 with a rush to the water's edge where that ship is waiting to 
 bear him to long years of exile. I will give it, in its most 
 condensed form, in my own words: 
 
 " Bagnal used all his influence to discredit Tyrone in the 
 eyes of the English Government, and he succeeded. Urged 
 by Red Hugh and the rebellious chiefs on one side, and by 
 the enmity of Bagnal and the growing distrust of the English 
 Government on the other, Tyrone in the end consented to 
 give the powerful support of his name and his arms to a 
 skillfully planned confederation of the tribes. On all sides 
 the Irish chiefs entered into the insurrection. O'Neill was 
 certainly the most formidable Irish leader the English had 
 yet encountered. He was a brilliant general and a skilled 
 politician, and even Mr. Froude admits that ' his career is 
 unstained with personal crimes.' He defeated an English 
 army under Bagnal at the Blackwater, after a fierce battle, 
 inflamed by more than mere national animosity. Each 
 leader was animated by a bitter hatred of his opponent, 
 which lends something of an Homeric character to the 
 struggle by the Blackwater. But Tyrone was fortunate in 
 war as in love. Bagnal' s forces were completely defeated, 
 and Bagnal himself killed. Fortune seemed to smile on 
 Tyrone's arms. Victory followed victory. In a little while 
 all Ireland, with the exception of Dublin and a few garrison 
 towns, was in the hands of the rebels. Essex, and the 
 largest army ever sent to Ireland, crossed the Channel to 
 cope with him; but Essex made no serious move, and after 
 an interview with Tyrone, in which he promised more than 
 he could perform, he returned to England to his death. 
 His place was taken by Lord Mountjoy, who, for all his love 
 of angling and of Elizabethian ' play books,' was a stronger 
 man. Tyrone met him, was defeated. From that hour the 
 rebellion was over. A Spanish army that had come to aid 
 
THE EARLS. 73 
 
 the rebels hurriedly re-embarked; many of the chiefs began 
 to surrender; wild Red Hugh O'Donnell, flying to Spain to 
 rouse allies, was poisoned and died." 
 
 Tyrone had to come to terms. He and Rory O'Donnell, 
 Red Hugh's brother, alike surrendered, alike made a mel- 
 ancholy and humiliating submission, and were alike received 
 into nominal favor by the English Sovereign, James the 
 First, who had just succeeded to the vacant throne of Eliza- 
 beth. Both O'Neill and O'Donnell had to make formal 
 surrender of all their estates, and in return they received 
 free pardons, the re-grant of their lands under bitter and 
 onerous conditions, and new confirmation in their titles of 
 Tyrone and Tyrconnell. Tyrone visited England and met 
 his new master. King James. He stayed at Wanstead as 
 Mountjoy's guest, where four-and-twenty years before he 
 had made one of the splendid company assembled at the 
 bidding of Leicester to welcome Elizabeth. Then he re- 
 turned to Ireland, but not to peace. James was and his 
 deputies were savagely intolerant of the Catholics. The 
 King had promised the Irish Catholics on his accession the 
 privilege of exercising their religion in private; but he soon 
 revoked his promise, and the state of the Irish Catholics 
 was worse than before. " Tyrconnell himself was called 
 upon to conform to the English faith. Lest these and 
 kindred exasperations might arouse once more the danger- 
 ous wrath of the chiefs, Chichester enforced a rigorous dis- 
 armament of the Kernes. It is hardly to be wondered at if 
 the reforming spirit of James did not greatly commend itself 
 to two such national leaders as Tyrone and Tyrconnell; it 
 would not be very surprising if they had thoughts of striv- 
 ing against it. Whether they had such thoughts or not, 
 they were accused of entertaining them. They were seen 
 to be dangerous enemies of the King's policy, whom it 
 would be convenient to have out of the way, and they were 
 
74 HOURS WITH GREA T IRISHMEN. 
 
 proclaimed as traitors. They seemed to have been con- 
 vinced of the impossibility of resistance just then; they saw 
 that it was death to remain, and they fled into exile. 
 Tyrone and his wife, Tyrconnel with his sister and friends 
 and followers, ninety-nine in all, set sail in one small boat 
 on the 14th September, 1607, and tossed for twenty-one 
 days upon the raging waves of the sea. We hear of O'Neill 
 trailing his golden crucifix at the vessel's wake to bring 
 about a calm; of two storm-worn merlins who took shelter 
 in the rigging and were kindly cared for by the Irish ladies. 
 On the 4th of October they landed at Quilleboeuf, on the 
 coast of France, and made their way to Rouen, receiving 
 kind treatment at all hands. James demanded their sur- 
 render, but Henri Quatre refused to comply, though he ad- 
 vised the exiles to go into Flanders. Into Flanders they 
 went, their ladies giving the Marshal of Normandy those 
 two storm-worn merlins they had cherished as a token of 
 their gratitude for his kindness. From Flanders, in time,, 
 they made their way to Rome." 
 
 There, in the shadow of the Sacred City the chieftains of 
 Tyrone and Tyrconnell breathed their last. Tyrconnell was 
 the first to fall. Within a few weeks of the entry of the 
 exiles into the Eternal City he sickened and died, and was 
 buried in the Church of San Pietro di Montorio, where the 
 Janiculum surveys the city and the river and the distant 
 Alban Hills. His brother, Caffar, soon followed him, and 
 was laid beside him. One by one the httle band of exiles 
 was thinned out by death until at last the great O'Neill was 
 left almost alone. " He found, "the Rev. Father Meehan tells 
 us in the volume which is one of the richest contributions 
 to modern Irish history, "The Fate and Fortunes of the 
 Earls of Tyrone and Tyrconnell," '^ some alleviation of his 
 sorrows, chiefly in the assiduous practices of religion, and 
 partly in visiting every object of interest, Christian and 
 
THE EARLS. 75 
 
 Pagan, within the walls of the Eternal City." We have 
 a melancholy picture of the exiled chief wandering about 
 in Rome, sorrowing for his sons, vainly appealing to be 
 allowed to return to Ireland, and wishing hopelessly to be 
 back in his own land, and able to strike one more good 
 blow for her. Later on he became blind, and, at last, after 
 eight years of desolate exile, he died on the 20th of July, 
 1 616, in the seventy-sixth year of his age. He was buried 
 by the side of his companion, Tyrconnell, in the Church of 
 San Pietro di Montorio. The dust of the Earls lends a 
 new dignity to the hallowed spot which religion and art unite 
 to endow with an especial sanctity. Close at hand tradition 
 marks the spot where Peter met his martyrdom, Raphael had 
 painted his transfiguration for the grand altar of the church, 
 Sebastiano Del Piombo had colored its walls with the scourg- 
 ing of the Redeemer. Travellers come to-day from all parts 
 of the world to make a pilgrimage to the church wherein 
 the honored ashes of the Earls are enshrined. 
 
OLIVER GOLDSMITH. 
 
 Trayfllers delight in wandering over the surface of the 
 world in search of ruins and the sentiments which the sight 
 of ruins give rise to. In the words in which Schiller's 
 soldier of fortune describes the followers of Wallenstein, 
 "they are, like the wind's blast, ever-resting homeless," 
 and they "storm across the war-convulsed earth" in per- 
 petual pursuit of decay, and all the phantom dreams decay 
 can generate. They will stand spell-bound on the plain of 
 Argos and watch the eagle wheel his fierce flight through 
 the keen air which once gleamed with the leaping flames 
 that bounded from hill to hill, and shore to shore, to awaken 
 an answering flame in the eyes of Clytemnestra. They will 
 sigh by the stunted columns of earliest Doric mould, which 
 are all that remain of the glories of Corinth, and will envy 
 even plundering, blundering Mummius the sight which the 
 queenly city presented to his scornful, conquering, Roman 
 eyes. They will stand entranced at moonlight in the long 
 Hall of the Kings at Karnak, and heedless of the hushed 
 lapse of the sacred river or the cry of the jackals in the 
 plain beyond the mouldering walls, or the Anglo-Arabic 
 chatter of the donkey boys, will piece together those 
 ruined monuments, and people the regenerated aisles with 
 the stupendous shadows of mummied Egypt. They will 
 feed their fantastic thoughts with fallen columns and 
 shattered obelisks and crumbling arches and the wind 
 swept solitude of deserted halls, and summon in those gaunt 
 spaces more spirits from the vasty deep than ever Glen- 
 dower boasted to have at his command, and, more fortunate 
 
OLIVER GOLDSMITH, 77 
 
 than Glendower, will find the thin shades obedient. And 
 yet there are times and places when they will experience a 
 greater sense of solitude, a more awful consciousness of the 
 loneliness of life, of swift destruction and of inevitable 
 change in some thronged, populous place, some buildings 
 which the restless, restoring hands of man have never suf- 
 fered to fall into decay, where men's voices never cease to 
 echo, and the hurrying footsteps of man never die away 
 into silence. 
 
 Such a spot — more melancholy in its brisk variety, more 
 ghost-haunted in all its crowded bee-hive activity of life 
 than Corinth or Karnak, is the agglomerations of halls and 
 houses, cloisters and courts and libraries which is known 
 to all the world as the Temple by the Thames. A great 
 poet has sought to paint the sense of solitude thus: 
 
 " The palace that to Heaven his pillars threw, 
 And kings his forehead on his threshold drew; 
 I saw the solitary ringdove there, 
 And *Coo, coo, coo,' she cried, and 'Coo, coo, coo.'" 
 
 But the plaint of the loneliest bird in the loneliest place 
 has not a more pathetic music than the ebbing, flowing, 
 never silent sea of human noise which surges all day and 
 every day through the walks and ways of the Temple. 
 There are fewer ghosts in the hollows of the Alban Hills 
 than within its humming, jostling liberties. Of all the 
 ghosts that go so thickly through the Temple, flitting silently 
 side by side with the restless, breathing, busy generation now 
 quick within its walls, one phantom is most familiar and 
 most famous — the phantom of a kindly, impulsive presence; 
 of a noble nature, shining star-like through sordid surround- 
 ings and the squalidest trials and tribulations; of one on 
 whom the curse of Swift had fallen, in that he was a man 
 of genius and an Irishman — the genial, gentle, glorious 
 ghost of Oliver Goldsmith. 
 
78 HOURS WITH GREA T IRISHMEN. 
 
 "Dr. Goldsmith," said his most famous friend of the 
 man who was then lying in the Temple earth, " Dr. Gold- 
 smith was wild, sir, but he is so no more." This epitaph 
 has been quoted a thousand times, but it must in no sense 
 be taken as a summing up of the dead man's career. It 
 was a just rebuke rightly and wisely addressed to the critic 
 who at such a moment could find heart or inclination to say 
 that Oliver Goldsmith had been wild. Dr. Johnson, who 
 uttered the rebuke, put the same thought even more pro- 
 foundly in a letter addressed to Bennet Langton shortly 
 after Goldsmith's death. In this letter he announces Gold- 
 smith's death, mentions his " folly of expense," and con- 
 cludes by saying, "but let not his frailties be remembered; 
 he was a very great man." The words are more impressive 
 than the labored magniloquence of the Greek epitaph which 
 Johnson wrote on Goldsmith. 
 
 The writings of Oliver Goldsmith are distinguished in the 
 literature of the English language, and, indeed, in the litera- 
 ture of the world, by their sweet, pure humor, fresh and 
 clear and sparkling as a fountain whose grassy edges the 
 satyr's hoofs have never trampled, by their tender humanity 
 and gentle charity, by the nobility of their lesson — a no- 
 bility only heightened by the intense vital sympathy with 
 the struggles and sorrows and errors of mankind. A new 
 St. Martin of Letters, he is ever ready to share his mantle 
 of pity with the sad and the sinning. He had himself suf- 
 fered so much, and been so tempted and tested, and had 
 retained through all his trials so much of the serenity of a 
 child, that all his writings breathe compassion for frailty and 
 failure, and something of a schoolboy sense of brotherhood 
 which sweetens even his satire. The flames of London's 
 fiery furnace had blazed and raged about him, but he passed 
 through them unconsumed; their scorching breath never 
 seared his soul, their fierce heat had no power to dry his 
 
OLIVER GOLDSMITH. 79 
 
 heart or brain. The age in which he lived was not an age 
 of exalted purity; the city wherein he abode was scarcely 
 saintly. He dwelt in some of the most evil days of the 
 eighteenth century, but his writings and his life escaped 
 pollution. Through all the weltering horror of Hogarth's 
 London we seem to see him walk with something of the 
 sylvan freshness of his boyhood still shining on his face; 
 the reflection of the Irish skies is too bright upon his eyes 
 to let them be dimmed by the squalor and shame of a squalid 
 and shameful city. 
 
 With the true instinct of his fine nature he made his 
 friends amongst the best and noblest of his time; his in- 
 timates and companions were, first and foremost, his great 
 countryman, Edmund Burke, and the rough, true-hearted 
 moralist, physically and mentally gigantic, Dr. Johnson and 
 he "on whose burning tongue truth, peace and freedom 
 hung," and the high-minded painter who has preserved for 
 us all that glittering restless world of lovely women and 
 brilliant men, and in the back-ground the opiniated, clever, 
 hypocondriac, venerating little Laird of Aughinleck taking 
 his notes on his great man's aphorisms, and smiling to him- 
 self when Dr. Goldsmith, in one of his transient flashes of 
 peevishness, protests against being addressed as "Goldy," 
 even by the ingenious author of " Rasselas, ' the esteemed 
 Dr. Johnson. He had women friends, too, as wisely chosen 
 as the men, women who were kind to him and admired him, 
 women whose kindness and admiration were worth the win- 
 ning, women whose friendship brightened and soothed a life 
 that was darkened and vexed enough. Mary Horneck and 
 her sister were the stars of his life — his heroines, his idols, 
 his ideals. Sweet Mary Horneck he has made immortal as 
 the *' Jessamy Bride." In the dark hours of his poverty 
 he was cheered by the thought of her, while he lived he 
 worshipped her, and when he died a lock of his hair was 
 
80 HOURS WITH GREAT IRISHMEN. 
 
 taken from his coffin and given to her. Thackeray tells a 
 touching little story of the Jessamy Bride. She lived long 
 after the death of the man of genius who adored her, lived 
 well into the Nineteenth Century; and " Hazlett saw her an 
 old lady, but beautiful still, in Northcote's painting room, 
 who told the eager critic how proud she always was that 
 Goldsmith had admired her." Well she might be. No 
 poet ever c. ^ferred a serener immortality upon the mistress 
 of his songs than Goldsmith gave to the Jessamy Bride; no 
 woman had the happiness to be loved by a sweeter, or a 
 simpler child of genius. 
 
 Goldsmith was a companionable being, and loved all com- 
 pany that was not vicious and depraved. He could be 
 happy at the Club in the society of the great thinkers and 
 teachers and wits of the time; he could be more than happy 
 at Barton in the enchanted presence of the fair Mary and 
 her sister; but he could be happy, too, in far humbler fellow- 
 ship. "I am fond of amusement," he declares, in one of 
 his most delightful essays, "in whatever company it is to 
 be found; and wit, though dressed in rags, is ever pleas- 
 ing to me.'' There was plenty of wit dressed in rags drift- 
 ing about the London of that day. Men of genius slept on 
 bulkheads and beneath arches, and starved for want of a 
 guinea, or haunted low taverns, or paced St. James's square 
 all night in impecunious couples for sheer want of lodging, 
 cheering each other's supperless mood with political con- 
 versation and declarations that let come what might come 
 they would never desert the ministry. But Goldsmith un- 
 earthed men of genius whose names nobody ever heard of, 
 and made merry with them, and studied them, and trans- 
 ferred them to his pages for us to make merry withal more 
 than a century after Goldsmith has fallen asleep. We must 
 suspect that Goldsmith never really found those wonderful 
 beggars he chronicles. He is not their discoverer as Colum- 
 
OLIVER GOLDSMITH. 8] 
 
 bus discovered America; he is their inventor as the fancy 
 of poets invented the Fortunate Islands. Goldsmith's Stroll- 
 ing Player is as real as Richard Savage, with whom he was 
 contemporary, and it must be admitted that he is a more 
 presentable personage. What a jolly philosophy is his about 
 delights of beggary. It has all the humor of Rabelais, with 
 no smack of the Touraine grossness; all the wisdom of the 
 Antonine, only clad in homespun — and somewhat tattered 
 homespun, too — instead of the imperial purple. " Oh, the 
 delights of poverty and a good appetite ! We beggars are 
 the very fondlings of nature; the rich she treats like an 
 arrant stepmother they are pleased with nothing; cut a steak 
 from what part you will, and it is unsupportably tough; 
 dress it up with pickles, and even pickles cannot procure 
 them an appetite. But the whole creation is full of good 
 things for the beggar; Calvert's butt out-tastes champagne, 
 and Sedgeley's home-brewed excels Tokay. Joy, joy, my 
 blood ! Though our estates lie nowhere, we have fortunes 
 wherever we go ! If an inundation sweeps away half the 
 grounds of Cornwall I am content — I have no lands there; 
 If the stocks sink, that gives me no uneasiness — I am no 
 Jew." Was ever the philosophy of contentment more 
 merrily or more whimsically expressed ? A whole synod of 
 sages could not formulate a scheme in praise of poverty that 
 should be half so impressive as the contagious humor of 
 this light-hearted merriment. The strolling player has the 
 best of the argument, but he has it because he is speaking 
 with the persuasive magic of the tongue of Oliver Goldsmith. 
 The same pervading cheerfulness, the same sunny phi- 
 losophy, which is, however, by no means Panglossian, per- 
 vades all his work. Beau Tibbs boasting in his garret. Dr. 
 Primrose in Newgate, the Good Natured Man seated be- 
 tween two bailiffs, and trying to converse with his heart's 
 idol as if nothing had happened. Mr. Hardcastle foiled for 
 
82 HOURS WITH GREA T IRISHMEN. 
 
 the five hundreth time in the tale of "Old Grouse in the 
 Gun-room," are each in their own way excellent examples 
 of Goldsmith's method and Goldsmith's manner. If Gold- 
 smith did not enjoy while he lived all the honor, all the 
 adniiration, all the rewards that belonged of right to his 
 genius, the four generations that have succeeded to him have 
 amply made amends for the errors of their ancestors. She 
 Stoops to Conquer is still the most successful of stock 
 comedies, and a rising actress seldom misses the chance 
 of appearing in it. "The Good-Natured Man'' still 
 keeps the stage, and is a never-failing delight to the 
 student in his closet. What satires are better known 
 than the letters of the "Citizen of the World?" what 
 spot on the map is more familiar than " Sweet Auburn," 
 whose essays are more deserving of study for the easy 
 grace and beauty of the style ? As for the *' Vicar of 
 Wakefield," what words could be added to its praise that 
 would not be profitless. It has taken possession of the 
 world, it is dear to every country, and known in every lan- 
 guage; it has assumed its place by an unquestionable right 
 with the masterpieces of all time, and the hundred best 
 books would be an odd assemblage, indeed, which did not 
 include the deathless story of Dr. Primrose and his sons 
 and daughters. 
 
 The memory of Oliyer Goldsmith is still green in the 
 place of his birth. In Ballymahon, in the pleasant reading- 
 room of the local library, there stands a bronze statuette, 
 a graceful reproduction in liitle of the famous figure in 
 College Green, of the great author who was a child of the soil. 
 Like many great men of genius Goldsmith sleeps afar from 
 the scenes of his boyhood. He lies in an English church- 
 yard. The noise and rattle and roar of a great city rave 
 about his grave; of a great city which has grown and swollen 
 and extended its limits, and multiplied its population out of 
 
OLIVER GOLDSMITH. 83 
 
 all resemblance to that lesser London where Goldsmith lived 
 and was loved, and dunned and starved, and sorrowed for. 
 If Goldsmith's ghost could, indeed, as I have fancied, visit 
 again the scenes of his hardly-used manhood he would feel 
 like a stranger in a strange land. Over in the place of his 
 birth, time has moved a gentler measure. Many genera- 
 tions of summers have glided, many generations of winters 
 have softly silvered the same pleasant Longford meadows 
 over which his childish feet wandered, across which his 
 childish eyes gazed at their widest into the cloud-girdled 
 horizon where he saw sights and read secrets which other 
 eyes could neither see nor study. Alike in the feverish 
 metropolis and in the tranquil country his memory is 
 honored. But if his bones sleep in ahen earth his true 
 monument, his real resting-place, is in the hearts of his 
 countrymen. 
 
HENRY GRATTAN. 
 
 Just now the thoughts of men when they are at all able 
 to free themselves from the immediate considerations of a 
 great national crisis turn naturally and even inevitably 
 toward the men who are grouped in history around the old 
 Parliament House. Of all that group of soldiers and states- 
 men, orators and poets, men of the robe and men of the 
 sword, the name which rises most promptly to the mind at 
 this juncture is the name of him who watched over the 
 cradle and followed the hearse of the free Irish Parliament 
 — the name of Henry Grattan. 
 
 Mr. Lecky, who in the days before he became the alarmed 
 and illogical mouth-piece of Loyal and Patriotic Unions, 
 promised to prove a sincere, if not a sympathetic, student 
 of Irish history, tells in his essay upon Grattan an affecting 
 anecdote. After the death of Swift a paper was found in 
 his desk containing a list of the Dean's friends, a list which 
 Swift, with the melancholy irony of his nature, had classi- 
 fied as grateful, ungrateful and indifferent. It is gratifying, 
 though it is not surprising, to learn that the name of Henry 
 Grattan occurs three times, and each occasion it is marked 
 as grateful. The verdict of history and the sentiments of 
 his country endorse the judgments of the Dean of St. 
 Patrick's. There is no man whose name is more truly 
 *' grateful" to the Irish people, and if we cared to pursue 
 the fanciful parallel further we might even assume that there 
 are three special episodes in Grattan' s life, corresponding 
 with the three entries in the list of Swift, which especially 
 endear him to his nation— his connection with the volun- 
 
HENR V GRA TTAN. 85 
 
 teers, his advocacy of the claims of his disabled fellow-citi- 
 zens, and his heroic battle against the act of Union. 
 
 Henry Grattan was born in Dublin, on the 3d of July, 
 1746. His father, who was Recorder of Dublin and member 
 of the Irish Parliament, was a fierce-tempered, narrow- 
 minded man, of a temperament always ready to entertain 
 violent animosities, and to adhere stubbornly to them. Such 
 an animosity he displayed towards Lucas; such an animosity 
 he displayed towards his own son, Henry Grattan, for ven- 
 turing to entertain opinions whose Liberal tendency was 
 highly distasteful to the stern Recorder. When Grattan's 
 father died his animosity toward his son survived him, and 
 manifested itself in his will, in which the family mansion 
 was bequeathed to another. A small provision was, how- 
 ever, secured for Grattan through the influence of his 
 mother, which enabled him to devote himself to the career 
 he had marked out for himself. From his very boyhood he 
 had distinguished himself by a passionate devotion to letters, 
 and of all branches of human art that of oratory appeared 
 at an early age to have the most attractions for him. After 
 a shining record at Trinity he was called to the Bar, and 
 crossed St. George's Channel to devote himself in London, 
 in the Temple, to the profession which in the eighteenth 
 century offered the most prizes to its disciples, the legal 
 profession. But it seems certain that his rooms echoed 
 more often to the sound of lofty passages of ancient and 
 modern eloquence than to the dry repetition of leading 
 cases. Oratory was the young man's passion, and in London 
 he was able to gratify his passion to the full. London, in 
 the middle of the eighteenth century, was a pleasant place 
 enough for the stranger — even a dangerously pleasant place 
 for the imprudent and unwary. But to Grattan the chief 
 charm of London lay in its suburb of Westminster. He 
 preferred the debates in the House of Lords, to the attrac- 
 
 BOSTON COLLEGE LI BRAKY 
 CBJCSTNUT HILL, MASS, 
 
86 HOURS WITH GREAT IRISHMEN, 
 
 tions of the play-house, the ambitions of the great man's 
 levee, or the intrigues of the masquerade. The genius of 
 Chatham taught him that oratory was as powerful as it had 
 been in the Bema or the Rostrum, and he listened with a 
 breathless fascination to the majestic periods and glowing 
 language of the foremost statesman of his time. 
 
 What he heard at Westminster Grattan studied, imitated, 
 exercised himself upon in all manner of likely and unlikely 
 places. We hear of an alarmed landlady imploring Grattan' s 
 friends to look after the wild young man who paced his 
 room of nights when decent folk were abed, muttering to 
 himself and apostrophizing some mysterious individual 
 whom he hailed as Mr. Speaker. Another even more fan- 
 tastic story is recorded of him. Wandering one day in 
 Windsor forest he came upon an abandoned gibbet. His 
 moody imagination — at that time his mind was strangely 
 moody — fired by the strange scene inspired him, and he was 
 declaiming to himself energetically before the deserted 
 gallows when his eloquence was interrupted by some one 
 touching him on the shoulder, and on looking round he was 
 addressed by a passer-by, whom the strange spectacle had 
 attracted, with the whimsical query: ** Pray, sir, how did you 
 get down," a query significantly pointed by a ge^ure in the 
 direction of the tenantless gibbet. 
 
 In 1768 he returned to Ireland to become the close friend 
 of Henry Flood, and more gradually of all the eminent men 
 of the day. Charlemont, scholarly, travelled, urbane; Her- 
 cules Langrishe renowned more as the recipient of Burke's 
 famous letters than for his own actions; Hussey Burgh, 
 eloquent and eager. These and many others were in the 
 nearest circle of Grattan' s friendships. In such company 
 his political zeal could not fail to flourish, and his political 
 ambition to increase. His rare talents were well-known, his 
 friends were influential; a Parliamentary career was essen- 
 
HENR V GRA TTAiV. » < 
 
 tial. In 1775 he entered Parliament as member for the 
 borough of Charlemont, to which he had been nominated 
 by Lord Charlemont. He entered Parliament at a peculiar 
 time — a time which afforded him an opportunity of imme- 
 diately distinguishing himself, and his enemies of accusing 
 him of acting ungenerously toward a friend. Flood, most 
 unfortunately for his fame, had gratified the natural desire 
 of Lord Harcourt by accepting a lucrative office. As Vice- 
 Treasurer he was practically muzzled, and the indignant 
 patriots found themselves without a leader. Grattan, by 
 natural right, stepped into the vacant leadership. It is prob- 
 able that even if Flood had not accepted office and alienated 
 his party, Grattan' s superior genius would have given him 
 the leadership; but with Flood swathed and silenced by office, 
 Grattan' s only possible course and duty was to take the lead 
 of the Patriot party, and he can in no sense be said to have 
 acted unfairly toward Flood. Flood lost the confidence of 
 his followers and his friends by his ow^n fault; he could no 
 longer lead his party nor would the party longer submit to 
 be led by him. Grattan came upon the scene in a timely 
 hour to rally the Patriots and carry on the important work 
 of opposition. 
 
 It is indeed deeply to be regretted that one result of 
 Flood's action was the quarrel which followed between 
 Grattan and him. Undoubtedly Flood's action in accepting 
 the vice-treasurership seemed to Grattan an act of base 
 poHtical apostacy. On the other hand. Flood, striving 
 eagerly to justify to his own mind his action, smarted at the 
 swift success with which Grattan took his place as leader of 
 the Patriots. The alliance between the two orators was 
 definitely broken off. They had been the closest friends; 
 they had worked jointly on that marvellous " Baratariana " 
 which upset Lord Townshend. They had seemed destined 
 by their common genius and their common aims to be com- 
 
88 HOURS WITH GREA T IRISHMEN. 
 
 rades for life. But the hot friendship cooled after Flood's 
 acceptance of office; it was finally severed in the fierce dis- 
 cussion that took place between them some years later in 
 the House of Commons, when Flood tauntingly described 
 Grattan as a mendicant patriot, and Grattan retorted by 
 painting Flood as a traitor in one of the most crushing and 
 pitiless pieces of invective that have ever belonged to oratory, 
 Grattan's career in the Irish Parliament is as familiar in 
 our mouths as household words. It was his ambition to 
 secure for the Senate of his country the legislative inde- 
 pendence which the law denied her. The rebellion of the 
 American Colonies gave him the opportunity he wanted in 
 order to realize his ambition. The terrible Paul Jones was 
 drifting about the seas; descents upon Ireland were dreaded; 
 if such descents had been made the island was practically 
 defenseless. An alarmed Mayor of Belfast, appealing to 
 the Government for military aid, was informed that no 
 more serious and more formidable assistance could be ren- 
 dered to the chief city of the North than might be given by 
 half a troop of dismounted cavalry and half a troop of in- 
 valids. If the French would consent to be scared by such 
 a muster, well and good; if not Belfast, and for the matter 
 of that all Ireland, must look to itself. Thereupon Ireland, 
 very promptly and decisively, did look to itself. A fever of 
 military enthusiasm swept over the country; North and 
 South and East and West men caught up arms, nominally 
 to resist the French, really, though they knew it not, to 
 effect one of the greatest constitutional revolutions in his- 
 tory. Before a startled Government could realize what was 
 occurring sixty thousand men were under arms. For the 
 first time since the surrender of Limerick there was an armed 
 force in Ireland able and willing to support a National cause. 
 In the twinkling of an eye all talk of organization to resist 
 foreign invasion was silenced; in its place the voice of the 
 
HENR V GRA TTAN. 89 
 
 nation was heard loudly calling for the redress of its domes- 
 tic grievances. Their leader was Charlemont; Grattan and 
 Flood were their principal colonels. The Volunteers formed 
 themselves into an organized convention for the purpose of 
 agitating the National wrongs. Grattan was not, indeed, a 
 member of this convention, but he was heart and soul in 
 sympathy with it. With statesman-like sagacity he saw that 
 with the existence of the Volunteers had come the hour to 
 heal the hurts of the Irish Parliament, and he seized upon 
 the opportunity. He had an army at his back; the English 
 Government was still striving with Mr. Washington and 
 his rebels; it was out-manoeuvred and had to give way. All 
 that Grattan asked for was granted; the hateful Sixth Act 
 of George the First was repealed, and Grattan was able to 
 address a free people and to wish the regenerated Parlia- 
 ment a perpetual existence. 
 
 Grattan' s first dream had been to obtain a free Parlia- 
 ment; his second was to make that Parliament worthy of its 
 own freedom by recognizing the right to liberty of the 
 Catholics of Ireland. Catholic Emancipation was now the 
 object of Grattan's ambition. The horrors of the penal 
 code were no longer, indeed, enforced in all their naked 
 brutality against the majority of the people of Ireland. In 
 the words of Mr. Lecky, "the code perished at last by its 
 own atrocity." Its malignant ingenuity in the end defeated 
 itself; to carry out with perfection and persistence the full 
 clauses of that code would have required the strength of a 
 whole community as perverted as the original framers of the 
 laws. Happily for human nature no such corrupt com- 
 munity was to be found. The Irish Protestants sickened of 
 the provisions of the penal code. Through the strength of 
 public opinion, most of its provisions fell into disuse, and 
 only lingered in nominal existence on the pages of the statute 
 book. Even from the statute book the clauses of the penal 
 
90 HOURS WITH GREA T IRISHMEN. 
 
 code were one by one being slowly effaced. In 1768 a bill 
 to modify the provisions of the penal code was passed in 
 the Irish House of Commons and defeated in the English 
 House. Relief bills of various kinds were passed in 1774, 
 1778, 1782 and 1792, The effect of these measures was to 
 restore to the Irish Catholics a large number of those rights 
 and privileges of citizenship of which they had been so 
 ruthlessly deprived. Most — but not all, nor the most im- 
 portant. The right to vote for representatives in Parlia- 
 ment, the right to enter Parliament, and the right to ad- 
 vancement in law or in arms, were still sternly denied to 
 them. 
 
 Grattan made himself the mouth-piece of a movement or- 
 ganized by the Irish Catholics in 1793, and having for its 
 object the removal of these final disabilities. One of them 
 Grattan succeeded in abolishing. In 1793 thanks to his 
 efforts and his eloquence, the Catholics were admitted to 
 the elective franchise. But in his second effort to allow 
 Catholics to be elected to Parliament, Grattan failed. That 
 failure and the recall of Lord Fitzwilliam precipitated the 
 Rebellion of Ninety-Eight. Despairing of tne condition of 
 his country, unable to sympathize either with the Party of 
 Rebellion or the Party of Repression, Grattan retired from 
 political life. When the Rebellion was over, when its chiefs 
 were all dead or dispersed, and when the hands of the victors 
 were laid nefariously upon the Irish Constitution, Grattan 
 once more made his appearance in pohtical life. History 
 does not offer a more tragic or a more affecting scene than 
 that in which Grattan, risen from a sick bed and his emaci- 
 ated form habited in the almost sacred uniform of the 
 Volunteers, made his last appeal to liberty in the Parlia- 
 ment of which he was in so great a degree the creator. 
 
 After the passing of the act of Union, Grattan once again 
 sought in private life repose for an enfeebled body and for 
 
HENR V GRA TTAN. 91 
 
 a mind distracted by the sufferings of his country. He 
 was not, however, suffered to remain very long in seclusion. 
 The assurance that he could still render his country service 
 was enough to induce him to re-enter public life. In 1805 
 he entered the English Parliament as the representative of 
 a small English constituency, and in the following year he 
 was elected member for Dublin. The rest of his life was 
 devoted to serving with unwearying patience and devotion 
 the cause of Catholic Emancipation, and in that service he 
 breathed his last. 
 
HENRY FLOOD. 
 
 When Grattan lay upon his death-bed after his last heroic 
 attempt to plead the cause of the Catholics at Westminster, 
 some of his latest words were uttered in generous praise of 
 the man who had been his closest friend and fiercest enemy; 
 who had been for long his rival in oratory and in the affec- 
 tions of the Irish people; who was almost his peer in genius 
 — Henry Flood. Grattan had outlived Flood by the length 
 of nearly a generation of men; unlike to many statesmen, 
 he had outlived, also, the passions and animosities of his 
 hot manhood, and could afford, in his ultimate hour, to 
 speak with decorous admiration of the man whom he had 
 once confronted pistol in hand, whom he had more than 
 once believed it to be his duty to denounce with all the 
 vehemence and all the vigor of which he was capable. 
 
 Henry Flood was born near Kilkenny in the year 1732, 
 an uneventful year which his birth makes eventful. Like 
 Grattan, he shone for a season in the walls of Trinity, but 
 he chose to complete his education by the Isis instead of 
 by the Liffey, and coming to England he passed some time 
 in that scholastic region where " the warm green-muffled 
 Cumnor hills" behold the towers of Oxford and Bagley 
 Wood, and Hincksey Ridge, and distant Wychwood, and 
 *'the forest ground called Thessaly." While Flood was at 
 Trinity, a wealthy young man, of good family and influen- 
 tial connections, with a future opening easily and attractively 
 out before him, there was a young sizar on the books of 
 the college of whom he probably knew nothing and of whom 
 the world was destined to hear much. There could hardly 
 
HENRY FLOOD. 93 
 
 be two careers more widely differentiated by destiny than 
 that of the son of the Chief Justice of the King's Bench in 
 Ireland, rich, well-favored, surrounded by friends and ad- 
 mirers, and the poor, wild, reckless, good-humored lad from 
 the pleasant plain of Longford, who was always penniless and 
 always merry and always idle — and whose face, so grimly 
 sealed with smallpox, was always bright with humor and 
 tender with pathos. While Henry Flood was enriching his 
 mind and ennobling his style in the classic shades of Oxford 
 or the learned retirement of the Temple, Oliver Goldsmith 
 was enjoying that " thrifty shilling " revel which was so dis- 
 astrously interrupted, or dreaming of American emigration, 
 or listening with an author's pride in his heart and an 
 author's very scant remuneration in his pocket to his own 
 songs sung by itinerant ballad-mongers at the College gates. 
 Fortune was all smiles and roses for the one, all frowns for 
 the other. Their lots were unlike in all particulars; but the 
 goal of both was the same, and both attained it, for both 
 alike had, if nothing else in common, the common privilege 
 of genius. The rich young gentleman and the poor young 
 sizar had no connection within the confines of Trinity; but 
 they were destined alike to attain in widely differing ways 
 to fame and honor and an abiding place in the memory of 
 their country. Destiny has reversed their two positions, 
 and the poor sizar is more famous than the colleague who 
 seemed so high above him. 
 
 In 1759 while Goldsmith was struggling in London, writ- 
 ing "The Life of Voltaire" and bringing out the Bee in 
 miserable lodgings, Flood entered Parliament as member 
 for Kilkenny. He was then but twenty-seven years of age, 
 singularly good-looking, well trained in mind and body for 
 the political life on which he was launched. His Oxford 
 hours had been devoted chiefly to the study of oratory, 
 varied by the somewhat ineffectual pursuit of poetry. Two 
 
94 HOURS WITH GREAT IRISHMEN. 
 
 years after his election he married Lady Frances Maria 
 Beresford, a wealthy match, which secured to him absolute 
 independence to follow out his political career. 
 
 The Parliament which Flood entered was one of the most 
 eccentrically-composed, most circumscribed, most corrupt 
 legislative assemblies that the ingenuity of man has ever 
 devised. To begin w4th: No Roman Catholic could sit in 
 Parliament. No Roman Catholic could even record his vote 
 for a Protestant member. The Roman Catholics were as 
 absolutely unrepresented as if they did not exist; and yet 
 they made up the vast majority of the population which the 
 Irish Parliament tried to govern or misgovern, and by an 
 amazing fiction was supposed to represent. " The borough 
 system," says Mr. Lecky, "which had been chiefly the 
 work of the Stuarts — no less than forty boroughs having 
 been created by James I. alone — had been developed to 
 such an extent that out of the 300 members who composed 
 the Parliament" — Mr. Lecky is, of course, speaking of the 
 Lower House — " 216 were returned for boroughs or manors. 
 Of these borough members 200 were elected by 100 in- 
 dividuals and nearly 50 by 10. According to a secret re- 
 port drawn up by the Irish Government fOt Pitt in 1874, 
 Lord Shannon at that time returned no less than 16 mem- 
 bers, the Ponsonby family 14, Lord Hillsborough 9, and 
 the Duke of Lienster 7." That borough system was the 
 successful means of corrupting both Houses. James I. had 
 been earnestly remonstrated with for calling forty boroughs 
 into existence at one blow, and we have it on the authority 
 of Hely Hutchison that the King replied: "I have made 
 40 boroughs. Suppose I had made 400 — the more the 
 merrier." A pleasant, statesmanlike, truly Stuart way of 
 looking at all things, which was destined to prove fatal to 
 the Stuarts and to nobler hearts and heads than theirs. Bor- 
 ough owners who returned supple lieges to the Irish Parlia- 
 
HENR V FLOOD. 95 
 
 ment generally found their reward in a peerage. Thus with 
 a simplicity of corruption the two Houses were undermined 
 at once, for it is said that some half a hundred peers nomi- 
 nated no less than one hundred and twenty-three members 
 of the Lower House. It was in this rotten assembly that 
 Flood now found himself; it was this same assembly, that, 
 thanks in a great degree, to his genius and his labors, was 
 destined to rise for a time out of its slough, and shine for a 
 while resplendent in the eyes of all men. The Irish Parha- 
 ment was like one of those buried cities dear to Irish legend 
 which lie beneath the waters of some legend-haunted lake. 
 The dark waters of corruption covered it; there came a 
 moment when those waters fell away and revealed an ancient 
 institution, defaced, indeed, but still honorable and impos- 
 ing; then the engulfing waves closed over it again, and it 
 vanished — but not forever. 
 
 The first person against whom Hercules Flood flung him- 
 self in his effort with the Augean Stable of the Legion Club 
 was that strange ecclesiastic, famous among the infamous. 
 Primate Stone. The grandson of a jailer, he might have 
 deserved admiration for his rise if he had not carried with 
 him into the high places of his Church a spirit stained by 
 most of the crimes over which his ancestor was appointed 
 warder. In an age of corrupt politics he was conspicuous 
 as a corrupt politician; in a profligate age he was eminent 
 for profligacy. In the basest days of the Roman Empire 
 he would have been remarkable for the variety of his sins. 
 The grace of his person, which caused him to be styled in 
 savage mockery as '* the beauty of hoUness," coupled with 
 his ingenuity in pandering to the passions of his friends, 
 would have made him a welcome satellite at the court of a 
 late Eoman emperor. 
 
 Flood soon found himself at the head of what may be 
 called the Opposition in the Irish Parliament. It hardly 
 
96 HOURS WITH GREAT IRISHMEN, 
 
 existed as a serious Opposition until Flood's genius and 
 capacity for leadership welded it together into something 
 like a homogeneous whole. Before Flood's time the Op- 
 position, such as it was, was made up chiefly of Jacobite 
 adherents, still dreaming in a dim kind of purposeless way 
 dreams of a possible Stuart restoration which the lessons of 
 1 7 15 and 1745 had not quite cured them of, and of a small 
 number of disinterested and patriotic men who struggled 
 as best they might against the overwhelming injustice and 
 corruption which they faced. These men Flood rallied. 
 These men, proudly accepting the title which their enemies 
 scornfully gave them of the *' Patriots," followed Flood 
 zealously, and some of the oldest and basest privileges of 
 the Parliament began to reel under the sturdy blows of the 
 newly inspired Opposition. Flood's best ally in his efforts 
 was the man whose addresses a few years before had been 
 burned by the common hangman, who had been obliged to 
 fly for safety into England, whom Johnson had hailed as 
 "the confessor of liberty," and who now by Flood's side in 
 Parliament is about to render the cause of Irish liberty 
 sterling service by the publication of the Freema7i' s Journal^ 
 Samuel Lucas. 
 
 Some ten years of persistent but unsuccessful struggling 
 against the evils of the Irish Parliament resulted at last 
 under the vice-royalty of Lord Townshend in a distinct tri- 
 umph for the Patriotic party. Up to that time the Irish 
 Parliament, unless specially dissolved by the sovereign, 
 lasted for the whole reign, and George II. 's Parliament was 
 in existence for no less than three and thirty years — more 
 than a generation of men. In 1768, however, the duration 
 of Parliament was limited to eight years, and the enthusiasm 
 which the measure provoked lent a temporary lustre to Lord 
 Townshend's Administration. Lord Townshend — he was 
 the brother of that Townshend who made the celebrated 
 
HENRY FLOOD. 97 
 
 " champagne " speech — had an important mission to fulfil, 
 and a measure of popularity was of great importance to aid 
 him in fulfilling it. The Irish nobility, with all their faults 
 — and they had many and grievous — formed what was in a 
 measure an independent Irish party. They might be hungry 
 of gain, avaricious of place and profit, corrupt, but they in 
 a measure held together and maintained the independence 
 of the Irish Parliament. That independence Lord Town- 
 shend was commissioned to break up and destroy, but his 
 efforts only broke up his own administration and destroyed 
 his short popularity. " Baratariana " literally blew him out 
 of the island. Flood's ready pen counted for much in the 
 merits of " Baratariana." His style was so much admired 
 that his name has been included amongst the many candi- 
 dates for the honor of having written the " Letters of 
 Junius. " It is certain that Flood did not write the " Letters 
 of Junius," but he rendered his country a far greater service 
 in writing the " Letters of Snydercombe " in the " Barata- 
 riana Papers," which pulverized Lord Townshend. 
 
 In the construction of *' Baratariana" Flood had two col- 
 leagues; one. Sir Hercules Langrishe, a man of much merit, 
 whose name is not deeply written in history; the other, the 
 greatest Irish statesman of his age, Henry Grattan. Grattan 
 and Flood were at the "Baratariana" epoch the closest 
 friends. In spite of the disparity between their ages, for 
 Flood was some eighteen years older than Grattan, they had 
 formed a warm attachment, based upon the similarity of 
 their tastes, the kinship of their genius, their common love 
 for their country. But what might have been one of the 
 most famous friendships in the world became shortly after 
 the " Baratariana" epoch one of the most famous enmities 
 in the world. Of the quarrel and its cause I have already 
 spoken. 
 
 The rise of the Volunteers and the repeal of the Sixth 
 4 
 
98 HOURS WITH GREAT IRISHMEN. 
 
 Act of George I. had given triumph into Grattan's hands. 
 But at the moment, when the desires of the patriot party- 
 had been apparently fulfilled, the popularity of Grattan, by 
 a curious example of the law of historical reaction, began 
 to wane, and that of Flood, which had clouded over ever 
 since his acceptance of office from Lord Harcourt's hands, 
 began to wax anew. The difference of opinion between the 
 two great leaders is eminently characteristic of their respec- 
 tive natures. Grattan maintained that by the repeal of the 
 Declaratory Act, England had sufficiently and practically- 
 abandoned her supremacy over the Irish Parliament. Flood 
 maintained that the mere repeal of the Declaratory- Act was 
 not enough without a formal renunciation of the principle 
 upon which that Declaratory Act had been based. Here 
 Grattan showed a certain generous confidence in his op- 
 ponents which Flood's shrewder sense taught him was mis- 
 placed. Grattan, too, was convinced of the imperative 
 necessity of immediately dissolving and dispersing the 
 volunteers. Their work, he contended, had been happily 
 accomplished; their further existence would be a standing 
 Praetorian menace to the independence of Parliament and 
 the liberties of the people. Flood, on the other hand, urged 
 that Ireland had not yet accomplished much, that her inde- 
 pendent parliament was in sore need of reform, and that a 
 nation in arms was in the only position in which it could 
 reasonably hope to accomplish that reform in the face of so 
 many and so powerful antagonists. Here again Grattan's 
 was the more generous, Flood's the shrewder view of the 
 situation. Reviewing the opinions of the two men, it is 
 difficult to avoid the impression that it would have been 
 happier for Ireland if Flood had carried his point, while it 
 is scarcely less difficult not to feel greater admiration for 
 the loftier theories of Grattan. If the world had been all 
 Grattans, then Grattan's pure and high-minded principles 
 
HENR Y FLOOD, 99 
 
 would have been best for the welfare of the country. But 
 as the world contained only one Grattan, it is ten thousand 
 pities that the advice of Flood was not followed and that the 
 Volunteers were not kept in existence, at least until some 
 of the most crying needs of reform were satisfied. It is one 
 of those cases in which, while the event proved Flood to 
 have been in the right, we could wish for the honor of 
 humanity that time should have justified Grattan. Mr. 
 Lecky thoroughly supports Flood. " Had he succeeded," 
 he says, *' he would have placed the independence of Ireland 
 on the broad basis of the people's will; he would have for- 
 feited and completed the glorious work that he had himself 
 begun, and he would have averted a series of calamities 
 which have not even yet spent their force. We should then 
 never have known the long night of corruption that overcast 
 the splendor of Irish liberty. The blood of 1798 might 
 never have flowed. The Legislative Union would never 
 have been consummated, or if there had been a union, it 
 would have been effected by the will of the people, and not 
 by the treachery of their representatives, and it would have 
 been remembered only with gratitude or with content! " 
 Let me observe in passing how far a cry it is from the Mr. 
 Lecky who wrote this passage and who has so strong a re- 
 spect for the " Will of the People," to the Mr. Lecky who 
 is the unreasoning and excited champion of Loyal and 
 Patriotic Union platforms. 
 
 After the failure of his Reform Bill and the disbandment 
 of the Volunteers, Flood retired from the Irish Parliament 
 in despair, and, crossing the sea, sought and found a seat 
 in the EngUsh Parliament. But, as Grattan said, ** he was 
 an oak of the forest, too great and too old to be transplanted 
 at fifty." The prematurely aged man, with his countenance 
 disfigured by disease, and his temperament embittered by 
 long years of unpopularity, misunderstanding and strife, 
 
100 HOURS WITH GREAT IRISHMEN. 
 
 was a very different being from the handsome, easy- 
 tempered, happy-minded young man who, a quarter of a 
 century before, had entered the Irish Parhament under 
 such favorable auspices. His first speech in the English 
 House of Commons was, unhappily, made in an Indian 
 debate upon a theme of which he knew little, and though 
 the House soon crowded to hear the renowned orator, the 
 effect was disappointing, and Flood's discomfiture was ren- 
 dered more painful by a fierce and contemptuous attack 
 which was made upon him by another member the moment 
 he sat down. After that Flood spoke seldom in Parliament, 
 and after a while he retired from political life altogether a 
 disappointed, broken man. He died at his estate at Farm- 
 ley, near Kilkenny, on the 2d of December, 1791. He may 
 be considered happy in escaping even by this too early death 
 from the horrors of Ninety-eight and the degradation of the 
 Union, horrors and degradation which his shrewdness fore- 
 saw, and which his policy would have avoided 
 
EDMUND BURKE. 
 
 When Oliver Goldsmith was a sizar at Trinity, and Henry 
 Flood was a student at Oxford, a young man named Ed- 
 mund Burke was pursuing knowledge in many directions 
 within the walls of the Dublin University. It is conceiva- 
 ble that collegiate authority would have looked with a more 
 hopeful eye upon a youth prompter to pursue the beaten 
 track of academic culture, less eager to obey his swift and 
 shifting impulses, less consistently inconsistent in the courses 
 of his study. It is almost certain that collegiate authority 
 would have shaken its head in solemn and scornful denega- 
 tion if it had been assured by any voice of audacious pro- 
 phecy that Burke, of Arran-quay, would prove to be the 
 greatest man who ever trod the Trinity quadangles, and 
 that in the fullness of time a grateful country would erect 
 his effigy in enduring bronze in the face of the venerable 
 walls which had sheltered his youthful genius. That col- 
 legiate authority should not be impeccable need not sur- 
 prise us. We can imagine what it would have thought of 
 the ballad-making boy from Ballymahon, the Lazarus of its 
 Dives-generosity of learning, whose statue, too, should one 
 day adorn its precincts, and we can estimate its opinion of 
 one of the two great contemporaries by its disdainful in- 
 difference of the other. Wise academic authority is scarcely 
 to be blamed. A college council is not a synod of prophets. 
 It can but judge according to its lights, and can hardly be 
 censured, if it may be pitied, for failing to discern the token 
 of true genius in the assiduous, if irresponsible, student 
 named Burke, and the idle, verse-making sizar named Gold- 
 smith, 
 
102 HOURS WITH GREA T IRISHMEN, 
 
 The house is still shown on Arran-quay where Burke was 
 born. The date of that birth is and must, presumably, re- 
 main uncertain. It varies according to different authorities 
 as to the day from the ist to the 12th of January, and as to 
 the year from 1728 to 1729. When he was nearly twelve 
 years old he was sent to school at Ballitore, some thirty 
 miles from Dublin. For his schoolmaster, Abraham 
 Shackleton, a Quaker from Yorkshire, the boy conceived an 
 admiration and attachment such as the pupil too seldom 
 feels, or is allowed to feel, for the pedagogue. A full 
 generation later, when the simple, high-minded Quaker 
 schoolmaster died, and the boy who loved him had become 
 a famous statesman, Burke expresses the most feeling grati- 
 tude to and admiration for his old preceptor. The affec- 
 tion which Burke felt for Abraham Shackleton he felt also 
 for his son Richard. Throughout Burke's youth Richard 
 Shackleton was his closest friend and confidant, and the in- 
 timacy proved more enduring than the friendship of the 
 schoolroom and the confederacy of collegiate days always 
 prove. 
 
 The actual human daily life of Burke from its earliest 
 hours in Arran-quay to those latest hours at Beaconsfield, 
 when the tranquil soul of the dying statesman was soothed 
 by the thoughts of Addison on immortality, cannot be called 
 eventful; the life itself is one of the greatest events in human 
 history. The boy, fired by a noble ambition, is somewhat 
 at feud with his father, a worthy, tetchy man, whose sober 
 brain has never bewildered itself with the thought that he 
 has brought into the world an intellectual giant, and who 
 only regards his son as a purposeless, eccentric young man, 
 whose fonvard ways are calculated to grizzle the paternal 
 hairs with needless anxiety. In London the youth loves 
 law platonically, and literature passionately. He praises 
 the one, but he serves the other, with uncertainty and ten- 
 
EDMUND BURKE. 103 
 
 tatively at first. He parodies Bolingbroke, to begin with. 
 Speculations upon reason and taste lead him later to the 
 production of the famous " Essay on the Sublime and the 
 Beautiful," which had the effect, first, of placating an angry 
 parent, and secondly, of winning the admiration of Dr. 
 Johnson, who even found it necessary to argue in defence 
 of the anonymous volume with the young Irish gentleman 
 who ventured to deprecate its merits, and in whom stout 
 Samuel did not dream that he beheld the author whom he 
 was pleased in his Leonine fashion to champion. The 
 young man's health breaks down. A wise and kindly 
 physician heals his bodily ailments; the physician's fair and 
 good daughter teaches him to love and be loved; and in 
 1757 Burke faces the world again, a married man, poor and 
 hopeful. Then comes *' Annual Register " editorship appli^ 
 cation, happily unsuccessful, for consulship at Madrid, 
 from which the world might have gained some marvellous 
 reports on the condition of Spain in the eighteenth century 
 and lost a literature; secretaryship to William Gerard Ham- 
 ilton; secretaryship to Rockingham; and finally return to 
 Parliament as member for John Hampden's borough of 
 Wendover. His career as a statesman illuminates the 
 eighteenth century with a peculiar and especial lustre. As 
 the brightest light that man, the child of Prometheus, can 
 manufacture — whitest limelight, or the flashing diamonds 
 of electric fire — only show black against the disc of the sun, 
 so all the talent, genius, greatness of the eighteenth century 
 dim and darken when contrasted with the incomparable 
 splendor of Burke's talents, genius, greatness. The rest 
 of the tale is familiar. Thirty years of public life, con- 
 spicuous in the eyes of all men, a generation passed only 
 in earnest service of rectitude, justice, liberty, of public 
 virtue and private morality, a career without a stain, a 
 record whose very errors cannot be condemned as faults, 
 
104 HOURS WITH GREAT IRISHMEN. 
 
 because they spring from an unvarying purity of purpose 
 and an unalterable nobility of ideal. We may say of the 
 blemishes that honest criticism must recognize in Burke — 
 we are not thinking now of the false and foolish slanders 
 which malignity coined and which perverse hostility made 
 current — we may say of his blemishes what the Triumvir 
 Lepidus, who has said wiser things for a foolish man than 
 any other child of fancy, says of his colleague, the wild 
 Anthony: 
 
 *' His faults in him seem as the spots in heaven 
 More fiery by night's blackness." 
 
 **I hope," said Mr. Gladstone, in the course of the 
 speech in which he introduced the Home Rule Bill, " I hope 
 that we shall hear a great deal about Mr. Burke in this 
 debate," and Mr. John Morley, sitting by the Prime 
 Minister, nodded enthusiastic approval. The wish of the 
 Prime Minister is likely to be granted. We are happily 
 sure to hear much of Mr. Burke both in the debates within 
 the walls of Westminster and in the daily discussion outside 
 those walls, and the more we hear of -Mr. Burke the better 
 it will be for all such debates and discussions. Friends 
 and foes alike are turning eagerly to his speeches, to his 
 pamphlets, to his essays. His writings are an arsenal to 
 which all men turn in the hope of finding some weapon that 
 will strengthen their hands, some shield that will assuredly 
 turn the point and blunt the edge of the adversary. Burke's 
 volumes are for the moment converted into a species of 
 sortes virgtliance which every man consults at random in the 
 hope of finding some sentence, some apothegm, some 
 argument especially suited to his case. Our enemies ran- 
 sack his volumes in the fond hope of discovering some pas- 
 sage which may be distorted into an appearance of prophetic 
 condemnation of the statesman, who, animated by the spirit 
 
EDMUND BURKE. 105 
 
 of justice and the love for liberty, is listening to the voice 
 and meeting the wishes of the Irish people. Our friends 
 seek, and do not seek in vain, support, comfort, and en- 
 couragement in their honorable task of succoring an op- 
 pressed nationality, in the words of him who truly uttered 
 nothing base. 
 
 It is easy to understand why the words of the Prime 
 Minister should have afforded special satisfaction to Mr. 
 Morley. To Edmund Burke, Mr. Morley has offered 
 something as nearly approaching to unqualified admiration 
 as it is possible for his intensely critical nature to give. 
 He has studied Burke with the care, the patience, and the 
 enthusiasm which men seldom bestow on any author who 
 has not the distinction of being embalmed in a dead lan- 
 guage; he has written books upon him once and again; he 
 has to a very large extent moulded the course of his public 
 life as a journalist and as a politician in accordance with 
 Burke's thoughts and teachings. It is gratifying and it is 
 curiously appropriate to think that the only English states- 
 man who in any real sense could be said to deserve the 
 title of *' Irish " secretary should have fed his mind and 
 fostered his intellect so largely with the wisdom, the genius, 
 the polity, and the philosophy of the greatest Irishman who 
 ever devoted his life and his abilities to the public service 
 of a political life. Mr. Morley has so much identified 
 himself with the study and knowledge of Edmund Burke 
 in these days that friends of his have been known laugh- 
 ingly to declare that Mr. Morley regards Burke as his own 
 peculiar and private property, upon which property let tres- 
 passers beware to tread. If Mr. Morley did harbor such a 
 thought he might almost be excused for it, for he has done 
 much to make the existing generation honor Burke as Burke 
 deserved to be honored, and he might well feel something 
 
106 HOURS WITH GREAT IRISHMEN. 
 
 like personal pride in endorsing the Premier's emphatic 
 wish that we should hear much of Mr. Burke. 
 
 No author more profoundly influenced the thought of his 
 time, no author is likely to exercise a more enduring in- 
 fluence upon succeeding generations, than Edmund Burke. 
 It has been contended, and not without excellent show of 
 reason, that as an orator Burke is not merely in the first 
 rank, but that he is himself the first, that he stands alone 
 without a rival, without a peer, and that none of the boasted 
 masterpieces of antiquity can even be said to contest his 
 unquestionable supremacy. Such enthusiastic advocacy 
 may, perhaps, be admitted to belong to the fervor of par- 
 tisanship; at least, it is in no sense necessary to Burke's 
 fame that the fame of others should be in any wise degraded. 
 It is suflicient praise to say that Burke is one of the greatest 
 orators the world has ever held; to argue that he is superior 
 to Demosthenes on the one hand, or to Cicero on the other, 
 is to maintain an argument very much on a par with that 
 which it amused Burke himself to maintain when he con- 
 tended for the supremacy of the ^neid over the Iliad. It 
 is quite enough to say, that it may be said almost without 
 fear of contradiction, that Burke is probably the greatest 
 orator who ever spoke in the English language. Certainly 
 I can at this moment think of no nobler passage of human 
 and mundane eloquence than that in which Burke concluded 
 his speech at the Guildhall in Bristol in the year 1780, and 
 which I make no more apology for quoting now than I 
 should for asking a man to admire a splendid sunset on the 
 ground that he had often seen the sun to sleep before. It 
 is the close of a long speech in which Burke has traversed 
 all the political field; he has expressed his gratitude to the 
 electors for having " set me in a place where I could lend 
 the slightest help to great and laudable designs." He 
 would be glad to lend that help still in that way if it be 
 
EDMUND BURKE, 107 
 
 their will. '* If I have taken my part with the best of men 
 in the best of their actions I can shut the book; I might 
 wish to read a page or two more, but this is enough for my 
 measure — I have not lived in vain," Then comes the 
 concluding passage, perhaps the loftiest apologia pro vita 
 sua ever made by a public man in the face of his fellow- 
 men. A hundred years have come and gone since those 
 words were spoken, but they ring in our ears to-day as clearly 
 as if we too had stood in that hushed crowd forgetting the 
 odd delivery and the ungainly actions of the speaker in rapt 
 admiration of the spoken words. 
 
 " And now, gentlemen, on this serious day, when I come 
 as it were to make up my account with you, let me take to 
 myself some degree of honest pride on the nature of the 
 charges that are against me. I do not stand here before 
 you accused of venality, nor of neglect of duty. It has not 
 been said that, in the long period of my service, I have in 
 a single instance sacrificed the slightest of your interests 
 to my ambition or to my fortune. It is not alleged that to 
 gratify any anger or revenge of my own or of my party, I 
 have had a share in wronging or oppressing any description 
 of men, Of any one man in any description. No ! The 
 charges against me are all of kind — that I have pushed the 
 principles of general justice and benevolence too far; farther 
 than a cautious policy would warrant; and farther than the 
 opinions of many would go along with me. In every accident 
 which may happen through life — in pain, in sorrow, in de- 
 pression and distress — I will call to mind this accusation 
 and be comforted." 
 
 Such an accusation was worthy of the man; such a recep- 
 tion of the accusation reflects a glory, not merely upon tl^e 
 man who uttered it, but upon all the age to which he be- 
 longed. An ingenious and fanciful philosopher of our time 
 has quaintly urged, as an encouragement to upright action, 
 
'^^ 
 
 108 HOURS WITH GREAT IRISHMEN. 
 
 that every single good deed raises the average of human 
 virtue all over the world, and thereby benefits not merely 
 those immediately concerned, but all the millions upon mil- 
 lions who tread our earth and breathe our air. In the same 
 way, such a speech, such a pure and lofty expression of 
 public faith, lends a new dignity, not to one man, one 
 country, or one epoch, but to the whole history, to the race 
 and to all generations of men. The key-note to all Burke's 
 life is to be found in those high, courageous words. A 
 sweet English poet has said of a very different man that 
 " he nothing common did or mean," and the words in their 
 loftiest interpretation may be applied to Edmund Burke. 
 He ** nothing common did or mean " in all the days of his 
 life; and the lessons he has left behind him are well cal- 
 culated to make men like him,with ambitions moulded to his 
 serene ideals, of whom, too, it might— indeed, must — be 
 said, if they follow his teachings, that they " nothing com- 
 mon did or mean " upon the pathway of their lives. 
 
RICHARD STEELE. 
 
 Who that has ever read Thackeray's " Esmond "forgets a 
 certain scene in quite the early part of the romance which 
 introduces, with all the light freedom of fiction, the bearer 
 of one of the greatest names of the last century ? My lord 
 of Castlewood has ridden off into outer darkness; this lady, 
 with her solemn elderly finery, unsuccessfully masked by 
 her hastily-assumed night- rail, has wrangled in vain with 
 paper-chasing Captain Westbury; little Harry Esmond, the 
 page, is being angrily interrogated by Lawyer Corbet as to 
 the meaning of certain words traced on the half-charred 
 manuscript in Mr. Holt's brazier. The words are Latin; 
 Harry interprets them; they are portion of a sermon. 
 
 " The lawyer said: * This boy is deeper than he seems; 
 who knows that he is not laughing at us ? ' 
 
 "'Let's have in Dick the scholar,' said Captain West- 
 bury, laughing, and he called to a trooper out of the window: 
 * Ho, Dick ! come in here and construe.' 
 
 '* A thick-set soldier, with a square, good-humored face, 
 came in at the summons, saluting his officer. 
 
 *' ' Tell us what this is, Dick ? ' says the lawyer. 
 
 " * My name is Steele, sir,' says the soldier. ' I may be 
 Dick for my friends, but I don't name gentlemen of your 
 cloth among them.' 
 
 '''Well, then, Steele.' 
 
 " ' Mr. Steele, sir, if you please. When you address a 
 gentleman of His Majesty's Horse Guards be pleased not to 
 be so familiar.* 
 
 " ' I didn't know, sir,' said the lawyer. 
 
110 HOURS WITH GREAT IRISHMEN. 
 
 " ' How should you ? I take it you are not accustomed to 
 meet with gentlemen,' said the trooper. 
 
 " ' Hold thy prate, and read that bit of paper,' says West 
 bury. 
 
 " ' 'Tis Latin,' says Dick, glancing at it, and again salut- 
 ing his officer, ' and from a sermon of Mr. Cudworth's,' and 
 he translated the words pretty much as Henry Esmond had 
 rendered them. 
 
 "'What a young scholar you are,' says the captain to 
 the boy. 
 
 '* * Depend on't, he knows more than he tells,' says the 
 lawyer. ' I think we will pack him off in the coach with 
 old Jezebel.' 
 
 " ' For construing a bit of Latin,' said the captain, very 
 good humoredly. 
 
 " ' I would as lief go there as anywhere,' Harry Esmond 
 said, simply, ' for there is nobody to care for me.'" 
 
 There must have been something in the child's voice or 
 in this description of his solitude — for the captain looked 
 at him very good naturedly, and the trooper called Steele 
 put his hand kindly on the lad's head and said some words 
 in the Latin tongue. 
 
 ** * What does he say ? ' says the lawyer. 
 
 " * Faith, ask Dick yourself,' cried Captain Westbury 
 
 " * I said I was not ignorant of misfortune myself, and 
 had learned to succor the miserable, and that's not your 
 trade, Mr. Sheepskin,' said the trooper. 
 
 " ' You had better leave Dick the Scholar alone, Mr. 
 Corbet,' the captain said. And Harry Esmond, always 
 touched by a kind face and kind word, felt very grateful 
 to this good-natured champion." 
 
 It would be difficult to make Dick Steele's acquaintance 
 under happier auspices. The little scene, alas, never took 
 place, but by the kindly art of the novelist it is as real to 
 
RICHARD STEELE, 111 
 
 us as if it were the soberest scrap of history ever inscribed. 
 We see the great grey towers of Castlewood, the courtyard 
 with the fountain in the centre, and the troopers grouped 
 about it, their accoutrements all shining in the morning 
 sunlight. The cool, dark room, where the captain and the 
 lawyer, the man of the sword and the man of the robe, are 
 interrogating little Harry Esmond, and the open window 
 through which Dick the Scholar lounges, obedient to his 
 captain's call, and stands, a stalw.art figure in scarlet and 
 gold lace and gleaming steel, his kindly face smiling on the 
 lad, and the soft words sounding strangely from the lips of 
 a common trooper, as he translates them out of the Latin. 
 It never happened; but it might have happened, we may 
 even say it ought to have happened. It is as true to history 
 as if it had indeed occurred, for it is absolutely true to 
 nature, to the nature of one of the gentlest, sweetest, 
 simplest of men, Richard Steele. 
 
 What would English literature — especially English litera- 
 ture in the eighteenth century — be without its Irish authors ? 
 Run over the list of the greatest names of a century strangely 
 fruitful in great names and you vvill find that the majority 
 of them are the names of Irishmen. Swift, Berkeley, Gold- 
 smith, Burke, Sterne, Sheridan — these are some of those 
 whose names leap to the lips the soonest. Think of Eng- 
 lish literature without *' Gulliver's Travels," without the 
 "Battle of the Books," without the "Tale of a Tub." 
 Think of English literature without the " Essay on the 
 Sublime and the Beautiful," without the "Letters on the 
 French Revolution," without the " Thoughts on the Present 
 Discontents." What would English literature be without the 
 "Vicar of Wakefield," " The Citizen of the World," and 
 " She Stoops to Conquer? " What in spite of all their ter- 
 rible defects would she be without " Tristram Shandy " and 
 "The Sentimental Journey?" What without The Rivals, 
 
■"^ 
 
 112 HOURS WITH GREAT IRISHMEN. 
 
 The ScJwolfor Scandal and The Critic 2 The fair fields of 
 English literature in the last century would seem dry and 
 barren, shorn of their chiefest splendor, if the rare exotic 
 plants were to be excluded from its growth and garner. 
 One name I have purposely left out of the list 1 have just 
 enumerated, and that the name of the subject of the present 
 sketch. I have reserved it purposely that by isolation I 
 might lend a special force to the question I am now about 
 to put — what would English literature, the boasted literature 
 of the Augustan days of Anne, be without the genius and 
 the gentleness, the humor and the pity of Richard Steele ? 
 
 To such a question the answer is simple, inevitable. The 
 literature of the reign of Anne would be poor, indeed, if it 
 did not include within its fold one of the sweetest, purest, 
 most humorous essayists that ever lived. I, for my part, 
 much prefer Steele to Addison. Between two such men 
 choice is indeed difficult; any final and definite decision of 
 the superiority of one over the other simply impossible. 
 The canons of taste have not yet been established, the 
 touchstone has not yet been tempered of a criticism which 
 shall authoritatively dare to assert that Steele was the 
 superior of Addison or Addison the superior of Steele. 
 Seldom has the world seen two men of such rare parts, of 
 such fine culture, of such true and tender humor, of such 
 high-souled purity, working together in common cause for 
 the entertainment and ennoblement of their fellowmen. Be- 
 tween this *' nobler pair of brothers " choice can be but a 
 matter of individual taste; but for my own part I am glad 
 with all my heart that my choice can go out freely and fully 
 to my countrymen — to Richard Steele of Dublin rather than 
 to Joseph Addison of Millston, in Wiltshire. It was the 
 genius of Steele which gave to the English essay its most 
 enduring form, and which made certain series of weekly 
 papers into such a set of classics as, perhaps, no other Ian- 
 
RICHARD STEELE. 113 
 
 guage nor no other age can boast the possession of. The 
 Tatler^ the Spectator^ the Guardian, — these are enchanted 
 names in EngHsh Hterature; their volumes are among the 
 most precious possessions of the English language. What 
 Steele said himself of a fair lady in an exquisite and famous 
 phrase, the authorship of which was quite recently and quite 
 unsuccessfully contended for on behalf of Congreve: " To 
 love them is a liberal education." There are certain books 
 or sets of books on the world's shelves the repeated study 
 of which is a source of greater knowledge than a wider 
 range could guarantee. The Tailer and the Spectator 
 must be placed in that list of royal books. You may read 
 them again and again and always learn something new from 
 them, and the learning will be always good, the knowledge 
 healthy, the lessons honorable. There is nothing base, 
 common, evil In their pages. The faults of the eighteenth 
 century, and those faults were many, have not stained these 
 pages; their moral soundness is not blackened and corroded 
 by the cynicism, by the savage brutality which degrades 
 and disgraced the writings of other men of that age who 
 were undoubtedly men of genius. It is difficult for Irish- 
 men to be proud of the plays of Farquhar, although happily 
 they contrast strikingly with the comedies of Wycherley and 
 Congreve; and there are passages, long pages, of the writ- 
 ings of Swift which cannot be thought of without an angry 
 blush and a sick heart. But in the golden pages of Steele, 
 and of those who were ranged under Steele's leadership, 
 there is no such sin to be ashamed of. The Tatler, the 
 Spectato}' and the Guardian are sometimes, though even that 
 is seldom, somewhat free-spoken for our day, but it must 
 be remembered that they, to their honor, were behind, not 
 in advance of, the license of their age in this respect. 
 
 Steele's prose is spotless enough; the lessons of his writ- 
 ings serene, simple, stainless; his efforts to reform the stage 
 
114 HOURS WITH GREAT IRISHMEN. 
 
 of his day have been not untruly declared to be more like 
 sermons than like comedies. There is no harm hidden in 
 all the bright, kind humor of '^ Isaac Bickerstaff;" there is 
 nothing but good to be gained from the companionship of 
 **Sir Roger de Coverley." That simple, high-minded 
 country gentleman deserves his place in fiction by the side 
 of that other knight who sought to redress the world on the 
 dusty plains of La Mancha. I am afraid, however, that 
 Steele's own life does not afford so bright an example as the 
 heroes and he^^roines of his delightful pages provide for our 
 improvement. Drink and debt were the vices of the age, 
 vices the more fatal because they were so eminently fashion- 
 able, and because no one with the slightest pretensions to 
 being considered modish abstained from indulgence in them, 
 or, if the best and rarest abstained, dreamed of express- 
 ing disapproval of more libertine minds. Poor Steele was 
 always more or less ambitious to be a man of tone; he was 
 as a natural consequence always more or less in debt; 
 sobriety was not the most startling characteristic of his 
 private and domestic virtues. Not, indeed, that he revelled 
 more desperately and riotously than many others of his time, 
 or even as desperately and riotously as some. But he loved 
 good-fellowship and he loved good wine, and both were to 
 be had in plenty in the London of the early years of the 
 eighteenth century, and Richard Steele devoted himself to 
 both with more devotion than was prudent or wholesome 
 for a man with his way to make. But prudence was never 
 a trait of Dick Steele's impulsive nature. He was not 
 prudent when he was a merry, restless, troublesome boy at 
 Charterhouse — that same Charterhouse which contemporary 
 vandalism is now dreaming of destroying, and around whose 
 threatened walls the ghost of Steele and many other appeal- 
 ing and illustrious spectres may be imagined to flit in re- 
 proaching protest against sacrilege He was not what the 
 
RICHARD STEELE. 115 
 
 world would call prudent when he chose to cast his lot for 
 a time with the full privates of his gracious Majesty's Life 
 Guards, and so met, or might have met. Master Henry- 
 Esmond. He was not prudent when he quarrelled with, the 
 House of Commons, and that august body solemnly expelled 
 him for his pamphleteering pains. He was not prudent when 
 he borrowed that thousand pounds from his dear old friend, 
 hero, and mentor, Joseph Addison, and lost in conse- 
 quence of the further Imprudence of not paying it back a 
 considerable share of that exemplary, less tempestuous gen- 
 tleman's regard; he was not prudent in failing to make the 
 most, as wiser and more worldly folk would have done, 
 and, indeed, did do, of the Saturnian age when the elector 
 of Hanover became king of England, and the German Jove 
 coined himself in golden favors of all kinds for those who 
 had been true to him and the principle which the monarch 
 from Herrenhausen represented. He was not prudent in 
 his married life — he was married twice; was not prudent in 
 the management of good fortune when it came in his way, 
 till at last fortune got tired of smiling on him; he was not 
 prudent in anything. Too much of his life was passed in 
 the tavern and the sponging-house; too much of his time 
 was given to wine and wild company. But his works remain 
 unsullied, none of the rank atmosphere which sometimes 
 surrounded Steele the man, poisons the pages of Steele the 
 writer, or makes it hard for us to breathe easily in his fellow- 
 ship. A savage critic of his day, slanderous, foul-mouthed, 
 venomous — the tribe of Dennis is not extinct yet — railed 
 and raved against Steele for being an Irishman. What in 
 the surly eyes and cankered mind of Dennis was his chief 
 sin we may be pardoned for regarding as his saving grace. 
 It was his Irish birth and his Irish blood which made him 
 so gentle, so humane, so simple even in his faults and fol- 
 lies ! it was his Irish birth and blood which keep his pages 
 
116 HOURS WITH GREA T IRISHMEN. 
 
 pure and make the lessons that he wrote, if not the lessons 
 that he lived, examples, patterns, shining records of moral- 
 ity, of virtue, of clean, good conduct. 
 
 I began these lines with a quotation from Thackeray; I 
 will bring them to their conclusion in like manner. Thack- 
 eray was seldom gentle and rarely just to Ireland, but he 
 could appreciate some Irish virtues. "No Irishman," 
 he says once," ever gave but with a kind word and with a 
 kind heart." — He could sympathize with some Irish sorrows, 
 and he dearly loved Dick Steele. There is something ex- 
 oeedingly tender and pathetic in the words in which he takes 
 farewell of Steele. "Alas for poor Dick Steele." For 
 nobody else, of course. "There is no manor woman in 
 our time who makes fine projects and gives them up from 
 idleness or want of means. When duty calls upon us, we 
 no doubt are always at home and are ready to pay the grim 
 tax-gatherer. When we are stricken with remorse, and 
 promise reform, we keep our promise, and are never angry 
 or idle or extravagant any more. There are no chambers 
 in our hearts destined for family friends and affections and 
 now occupied by some sin's emissary and bailiff in posses- 
 sion. There are no little sins, shabby peccadilloes, im- 
 portunate remembrances, or disappointed holders of our 
 promise to reform hovering at our steps or knocking at our 
 door. Of course not. We are living in the 19th century, 
 and poor Dick Steele stumbled and got up again, and got 
 into jail and out again, and sinned and repented and loved 
 and suffered and lived and died scores of years ago. Peace 
 be with him. Let us think gently of one who was so gentle; 
 let us speak kindly of one whose own breast exuberated with 
 human kindness." 
 
RICHARD BRINSLEY SHERIDAN. 
 
 The youth that loves no schooling, that regards Greek 
 verbs with disfavor, that looks upon Caesar's Gallic Wars as 
 a highly concentrated misfortune, and who is inclined to 
 say with the hero of the venerable nursery rhyme that 
 
 " The rule of three perplexes me 
 And fractions drive me mad," 
 
 may find matter for infinite consolation in the fact that the 
 wittiest Irishman, indeed it might fairly be said the wittiest 
 man of his time, was looked upon in his childhood as '*a 
 dull, unpromising boy." '*At Harrow," says Moore, 
 *' Richard was remarkable only as a very idle, careless, but 
 at the same time engaging boy." Think of it; the most 
 famous dramatist since Shakespeare; the brightest wit of 
 an age which especially piqued itself upon being considered 
 witty; the most brilliant orator of an age which regarded 
 oratory as one of the greatest of the arts and whose roll is 
 studded with the names of illustrious orators, the most un- 
 rivalled humorist of a century which in all parts of the world 
 distinguished itself by its love of humor, being looked upon 
 in his nonage as a dull, unpromising boy! The dull, un- 
 promising boy was known to his parents and the friends who 
 shook their heads over him as Richard Brinsley Sheridan. 
 
 I fear, however, that it cannot be accepted as an axiom 
 that a serene indifference to study and a scornful contempt 
 for the patient paths of knowledge are necessarily and in- 
 evitably proofs of the possession of genius. The world 
 would blaze with a greater galaxy of splendid names if such 
 
118 HO URS WITH GREA T IRISHMEN. 
 
 were the case, and the lowest form at school be a very synod 
 of mute, inglorious Miltons. But it may be a comfortable 
 anodyne to many weary minds, grappling vainly with most 
 unlovely tasks, to think that great men were not always 
 remarkably gifted boys, that the leader in college is not 
 always the leader in life, and that the author of the " School 
 for Scandal " and the orator of the Begum speech was con- 
 sidered by those who had, if not the best, at least the 
 nearest means of judging his capacity as a dull, unpromis- 
 ing boy. 
 
 Idle, careless Dick Sheridan came from the scholastic 
 shadows of Harrow School and the sunlit hours of Harrow 
 playgrounds to London. London did not make him much 
 more industrious or much more careful than he had been 
 at Harrow-on-the-Hill. It was far pleasanter to translate 
 the honeyed Greek of Theocritus with its babble of Syracu- 
 sian shepherds, its nymphs and waters and Sicilian sea, than 
 to follow the beaten track of ordinary education; it was 
 vastly more entertaining to render the impassioned prose 
 of Aristenetus in impassioned English, especially in the 
 sweet companionship and collaboration of a friend and 
 heart's brother, than to yawn over Euclid and grumble over 
 Cocker. 
 
 This translation of Aristenetus is almost, but not quite, 
 forgotten. The boyish task of careless Sheridan and heart's 
 brother Halhed still enjoys a sort of existence in the volumes 
 of the classical library of the ingenious Mr. Bohn, those 
 volumes which Emerson praised so highly and which more 
 than one generation of schoolboys have blessed as cribs. 
 They are, however, utterly valueless, and had best be left 
 by all lovers of Sheridan in the Limbo of youthful follies. 
 From the turning of Greek prose into English verse, care- 
 less Sheridan and heart's brother Halhed now turned to 
 another occupation in which, as in the other, they were both 
 
RICH A RD BRINSLE V SHERIDA N. 119 
 
 of one mind, and for the last time. They both fell in love, 
 and both with the same woman. All contemporary accounts 
 agree in regarding the musical daughter of Musician Linley 
 as one of the most beautiful women of her age. Those who 
 know, either in its own native canvas or through engravings, 
 the portrait which the greatest painter of his time painted 
 of Sheridan's wife as St. Cecilia, will readily understand the 
 extraordinary, almost universal homage which society and 
 art, wit and wealth and genius paid to Miss Linley. Un- 
 like the girl in Sheridan's own poem, who is assured by her 
 adorer that she will meet with friends in all the aged, and 
 lovers in the young, Miss Linley found old as well as young 
 competing for her affection and the honor of her hand. 
 Richard Sheridan and heart's brother Halhed were still 
 almost boys when they beheld and adored her, and Charles 
 Sheridan, Richard's elder brother, was still a young man. 
 But Miss Linley had old lovers, too, men long past the 
 middle pathway of their life, who besought her to marry 
 them with all the impetuosity of youth. One of them, 
 whom she wisely rejected on the ground that wealth could 
 not atone for the disparity in years, carried off his disap- 
 pointment gracefully enough by immediately settling a sum 
 of three thousand pounds upon her. 
 
 There is something extraordinarily romantic about the 
 whole course of Richard Brinsley Sheridan^s attachment to 
 Miss Linley. In the first place, it is remarkable that for a 
 long time he contrived to keep the fact of his attachment 
 entirely a secret from his elder brother, Charles, and from 
 his unhappy friend, Halhed, both of whom were wildly in 
 love with Miss Linley, and neither of whom appear to have 
 had the faintest suspicion that they had a rival — th^e one 
 in so close a kinsman, and the other in his own familiar 
 friend. It must be admitted regretfully that Richard 
 Sheridan does not appear to have acted in the furtherance 
 
120 HOURS WITH GREA T IRISHMEN, 
 
 of his own courtship with that upright fidelity to friendship 
 which might have been expected from his gallant, impetuous 
 nature. Not merely did he keep his love-secret safely shut 
 away from his brother and from his friend, but he seems to 
 have allowed Halhed to look upon him as his confidant and 
 ally in pressing Halhed's suit upon Miss Linley. Halhed 
 reproached him sadly, but not bitterly, in a poetical epistle, 
 the value of which is more personal than poetical, when he 
 discovered the real mind of his friend. Herewith Halhed 
 vanishes from the page of our history. He sailed for India, 
 the golden land of so many wrecked hopes and disappointed 
 ambitions; he became in the fullness of time a member 
 of Parliament; he long outlived his first love and his suc- 
 cessful rival; he died in 1830; and is dimly remembered as 
 the author of a grammar of the Bengal language, and of a 
 work on Gentoo laws, translated from the Persian." Such 
 was the curious conclusion of a man's career who had be- 
 gun by being Sheridan's friend and Miss Linley's lover. 
 
 Sheridan's courtship progressed more and more roman- 
 tically. There is the dangerous rivalry of Matthews, the 
 married rake; Miss Linley's flight to France with Sheridan 
 to escape from Matthews' persecution; the secret marriage 
 near Calais; the libelous attack on Sheridan inserted in the 
 Bath CJu'onicle by the revengeful and disappointed Matthews ; 
 the subsequent public apology extorted by Sheridan at the 
 sword's point; Matthews' further and baser mendacity; the 
 second duel, in which the combatants seem to have fought 
 with desperate ferocity, and in which Sheridan, badly 
 wounded, refused to ask his life at the hand of his antag- 
 onist, and was only rescued by the seconds. Then follows 
 a long period of separation, dark and despairing hours for 
 Sheridan, only brightened by occasional meetings of the 
 most eccentric kind, when the wild young poet, quaintly 
 masked in the complicated capes of a hackney coachman. 
 
RICHARD BRINSLEY SHERIDAN. 121 
 
 has the fascinating, tormenting privilege of driving his be- 
 loved from Covent Garden Theatre, where her voice and 
 beauty were nightly charming all London. At last the ob- 
 duracy of a flinty-hearted parent — I am convinced that 
 Sheridan must have styled old Linley flinty-hearted — was 
 overcome, and on the 13th of April, 1773, the most brilliant 
 man and most beautiful woman of their day were for the 
 second time and more formally married, and a series of 
 episodes more romantic than fiction came to an end. 
 
 The romance, it is agreeable to think, did not conclude 
 with the marriage ceremony. It was not an age which set 
 any great store by conjugal affection and devotion, but 
 Sheridan was sufficiently in advance of his age to offer his 
 wife as romantic an attachment after her marriage as he 
 had shown in the days of duelling and disguising which had 
 preceded it. He wrote verses to her, and she to him, long 
 after they had settled down to serene domesticity, which 
 breathe the most passionate expressions of mutual love. I 
 have mentioned before in another paper that element rather 
 of tragedy than of romance which legend — for I can only 
 consider it to be legend — has endeavored to intrude upon 
 the married life of Richard Sheridan and Elizabeth Linley. 
 
 It has been hinted dimly yet decisively that Lord Edward 
 Fitzgerald, the "gallant and seditious Geraldine," felt 
 more than a friend's admiration for the wife of his friend, 
 and that the feeling stronger than friendship was returned 
 by Mrs. Sheridan. According to this legend, Elizabeth 
 Sheridan's unhappy passion shortened by its attendant grief 
 her life; according to this legend Lord Edward Fitzgerald 
 only married the fair Pamela, daughter of wild Equality 
 Orleans, because of the strange and striking resemblance 
 she bore to the St. Cecilia of his dreams. The legend I 
 for one most confidently and distinctly disbelieve. 
 
 The young married Sheridan thought for a time of de- 
 
123 HOURS WITH GREAT IRISHMEN. 
 
 voting his genius to the service of old Father Antic, the 
 law, but like the king-making Warwick in the play, he soon 
 found himself "no wiser than a daw," in its "nice sharp 
 quillets." His thoughts and tastes were otherwise inclined, 
 and on the 27th of January, 1775, ^^t quite two years after 
 his marriage, " The Rivals" was produced at Covent Garden, 
 and a new chapter opened in the history of dramatic litera- 
 ture. It is curious to think that the clumsiness of the actor 
 to whom the part of Sir Lucius O'Trigger was entrusted 
 came very near to damning the most brilliant comedy that 
 had been seen on the English stage for nearytwo centuries. 
 The happy substitution of actor Clinch for actor Lee, how- 
 ever, saved the play and made Sheridan the most popular 
 author in London. Of course the genius of the comedy must 
 have won recognition in the end; it was not in the power of 
 any actor, however incompetent, to obscure the genius of 
 Sheridan; but it is easy to understand how terribly, on the 
 first night, a clumsy representation of Sir Lucius O'Trigger 
 would have marred the general effect of the play, and dis- 
 torted the skillful harmony of its proportions. How grate- 
 ful, however, Sheridan felt to Clinch for rescuing Sir Lucius 
 from Lee's clutches is shown by the fact that his next 
 production, the farce called " St. Patrick's Day, or the 
 Scheming Lieutenant " was expressly written to afford op- 
 portunity for Clinch's peculiar talents. In 1777 the " School 
 for Scandal " was produced and was succeeded by Sheridan's 
 last dramatic work, the " Critic." 
 
 In the meantime, Sheridan, prompted by the triumph of 
 " The Rivals," had become a theatrical manager by the 
 purchase of Garrick's share in Drury Lane Theatre. Theatri- 
 cal management absorbed all Sheridan's thoughts for a time, 
 and then, being already the most famous author alive, he 
 suddenly found opportunity for the display of wholly new 
 and unexpected talents, and became one of the most famous 
 
RICHARD BRINSLEY SHERIDAN. 123 
 
 politicians and tiie most famous orators alive. There had, 
 indeed, always been a certain political bent in Sheridan's 
 mind. He had tried his hand at many political pamphlets, 
 fragments of which were found among his papers by Moore, 
 and his mind had always taken the keenest interest in the 
 great questions which stirred the vivid political life of the 
 waning eighteenth century. The general election of 1780 
 gave him an opportunity of expressing this interest in the 
 public field, and he was returned to Parliament as member 
 for the borough of Stamford. It is difficult to find a par- 
 allel in all history for the extraordinary success which at- 
 tended Sheridan in his political as it had already attended 
 him in his dramatic career. We have only to adapt the 
 case to our own times to fully perceive the amazing nature 
 of the triumph. Let us imagine some successful theatrical 
 manager of the present day, Mr. Irving, say, or Mr. Wilson 
 Barret, being also conspicuous as the foremost dramatic 
 author of his time. Let us further imagine that this theatri- 
 cal manager, at a time when his management was most profit- 
 able, and his plays, the creation of his own genius, most 
 popular, suddenly turning to political life, entering Parlia- 
 ment, and making himself swiftly and surely pre-eminent 
 there as a statesman and an orator. Let us imagine Mr. 
 Henry Irving or Mr. Wilson Barrett suddenly displaying 
 qualities of statesmanship and of political leadership, which 
 would entitle them to rank with Mr. Gladstone and Mr. 
 Morley and Mr. Parnell, and competing as peers for orator- 
 ical honors with the Prime Minister, and we shall form some 
 idea of the really surprising naUire of Sheridan's success. 
 Of course the parallel is not quite perfect, for Mr. Henry 
 Irving and Mr. Wilson Barrett, like most modern theatrical 
 managers, are actors as well as managers, but it is sufficiently 
 near, considering the changed relationships of society since 
 
124 HOURS WITH GREA T IRISHMEN. 
 
 the last century, to illustrate my meaning and to point my 
 parallel. 
 
 Just. on the threshold of his political career Sheridan lost 
 the wife he loved so well. He married again, and there is a 
 little story told, half melancholy, half humorous, and wholly 
 pathetic in connection with this second marriage. Mrs. 
 Sheridan — she had been a Miss Ogle — young, clever and 
 ardently devoted to her husband — was found one day *' walk- 
 ing ap and down her drawing-room apparently in a frantic 
 state of mind, calling her husband a villain, because, as she 
 explained with some hesitation, she had just discovered that 
 the love-letters he had sent to her were the very same as 
 those which he had written to his first wife." It is to be 
 presumed that Sheridan thought them so good that they 
 might well serve a second turn, but this act of Hterary — 
 specially love-literary — parsimony was not happy. But 
 parsimony of his written work was Sheridan's peculiarity. 
 Verses addressed to his dear St. CeciUa make their appear- 
 ance, under altered conditions, again and again in his plays. 
 " It is singular enough," writes a critic, *' that the treasures 
 of wit which Sheridan was thought to possess in such profu- 
 sion should have been the only species of wealth which he 
 ever dreamed of economizing." 
 
 The want of economy of all other wealth makes the clos- 
 ing scenes of Sheridan's life profoundly tragic. They are 
 only too familiar; let us leave them this once shrouded; let 
 us not think upon Sheridan, old, sick, impoverished, and 
 abandoned, deserted by his friends and by his party, the 
 proverbially faithless Whigs. Let us think of him rather 
 in his hours of triumph, on the first night of some great 
 play, on the evening of some epoch-making speech. Byron, 
 if I remember rightly, said of him that he had written the 
 best comedy, the best farce, and the best comic opera, and 
 spoken the greatest speech of his time. The speech was 
 
RICHARD BRINSLE Y SHERIDAN. 125 
 
 the Begum speech, lost now for us, and lost irretrievably 
 and irreparably are all its fellow-speeches. The miserable 
 and mangled fragments which are called the speeches of 
 Sheridan do not represent the glowing orations which 
 charmed a Senate and delighted statesmen, and which, if 
 the author had been only a little more prodigal of his pains, 
 would have existed now to charm later generations with the 
 charm of Demosthenes, of Cicero, and of Burke. 
 
LAWRENCE STERNE. 
 
 The town of Clonmel is chiefly associated in the minds 
 of Irishmen to-day with the closing scenes in the national 
 tragedy of 1810. In Clonmel Courthouse, William Smith 
 O'Brien was sentenced to be hanged, drawn and quartered^ 
 in Clonmel Courthouse the echoes rang with Meagher's 
 passionate, eloquent declaration that he did not despair of 
 his country. But there is another association connected 
 with Clonmel, an association that has in it nothing revolu- 
 tionary or romantic, but it is of a purely literary nature. 
 In the town of Clonmel Laurence Sterne was born, one 
 hundred and seventy-three years ago. Whether Tipperary 
 or Waterford can claim the honor of including Laurence 
 Sterne among her sons I do not know, although the fact is, 
 I dare say, known, or at least knowable, to the curious. 
 For my own part I am not very proud of the fact that Sterne 
 was born on Irish earth, or of the inclusion of his works in 
 our literature. There is nothing noble in the man's life; 
 where it is not positively ignoble it is practically unnoble; 
 and as for his writings— well, I should not be inclined to 
 quarrel with England for proud possession of them. Even 
 if they were wholly free from taint and canker, even if their 
 sentiment were not a sham and their virtue an affectation, 
 they vvould not seem to be a prize worth striving for. Our 
 laurel wreath is green enough without adding thereto any 
 leaves from the " Sentimental Journey; " and as for " Tris- 
 tram Shandy," I am heartily of a mind with Horace Walpole 
 for once in finding it supremely dull. If, therefore, any 
 one were to maintain with regard to Sterne what has been 
 
LAWRENCE STERNE. 127 
 
 maintained witti regard to Swift, that he was not an Irish- 
 man, and that, therefore, his works are not parcel and por- 
 tion of Irish Hterature, I should not for my own part and 
 from my own point of view be eager to say such a critic nay. 
 The opinion, however, of the majority is, I suppose, against 
 me. The genius, the wit, the humor of Sterne has been 
 pxtolled by his contemporaries in language that might be 
 called unmeasured if it did not appear to be measured, 
 sedate and even qualified, when compared with the praises 
 that have been showered upon Sterne by his successors in 
 his literature. Few writers have been more persistently 
 read, few writers have enriched literature with a greater 
 stock of allusion, quotation and illustration; few writers 
 have been more fortunate in winning the homage, not only 
 of their own countrymen, but of the men of other countries, 
 and a welcome into the pantheon of other literatures. 
 English authors of the highest rank have exhausted their 
 vocabulary in adulation of Sterne; French writers have not 
 been content with merely praising him and making him 
 through translations free of their Republic of Letters, but 
 have paid him the higher compliment of imitating him; and 
 what is true of France is no less true of Germany. 
 
 One of the greatest of German writers — the writer whom I 
 individually prefer to all German writers save and except one 
 — Jean Paul Richter, declares more than once that he regards 
 Sterne as his master. The statement amazes me. Jean Paul 
 Richter, Jean Paul, the Only One (der Einzige) as he was 
 fondly called — they tell me he is out of date now in Germany, 
 and if so I am sorry for Germany — was immeasurably 
 greater than his master; was greater, too, I think, than his 
 pupil and imitator who wrote ^^ Sartor Resartusy All 
 that was sham, tinsel and tawdry in the writings of Yorick 
 was genuine, heart-felt and soul-inspiring in Jean Paul. 
 Yorick's sentiment was pinch-beck; Jean Paul's was pure 
 
128 HOURS WITH GREA T IRISHMEN, 
 
 gold. All that Richter ever wrote is animated with the 
 deepest religious feeling, the tenderest sympathy, the gen- 
 tlest and bravest pity. Yorick, in the black and white of 
 his sacred calling's gown and band, grins and leers like a 
 disguised satyr. His morality is a mummer's mask; his 
 pathos is pretence; the only thing truly Irish about him is 
 his humor, his ceaseless wit, the unfailing sparkle of his 
 fancy. 
 
 Seldom, perhaps, has an author experienced a stranger 
 bringing up than that which fell to the lot of Sterne. His 
 father, Roger Sterne, was one of those luckless persons who 
 seem to be the especial sport of a malicious destiny, in 
 whose hands- nothing prospers, from whose hands thievish 
 fortune filches all opportunities. Roger Sterne was a gen- 
 tleman of good family and narrow means, who had adopted 
 arms as his profession and had not prospered therein. He 
 had married a wife who was herself a sutler's widow, and 
 who blessed Ensign Sterne with a swift and steady succes- 
 sion of offspring,- of whom Laurence was the second. It 
 was chance, acting through the impulses of the War Office, 
 which caused little Laurence to see the light on Irish soil, 
 but though he was born in the melodiously named Valley 
 of Honey, there was Uttle of honeyed sweetness, but much 
 bitterness as of gall and coloquintida, in his early boyhood. 
 Poverty and the eccentric evolutions of a marching regiment 
 contributed to make Laurence's a most unenviable child- 
 hood. The record, as we can read it in his own account, is 
 disastrous and dreary enough. The regiment to which Roger 
 Sterne belonged was perpetually on the move; the births 
 and deaths of Mrs. Sterne's children succeeded each other 
 with painful rapidity; again and again was little Laurence in 
 imminent peril of shipwreck on the stormiest seas; all that 
 was worse and most disagreeable in the life of camp fol- 
 lowers he experienced in his earliest years. Some account 
 
LA WRENCE STERNE. 129 
 
 must necessarily be taken of this by those who review 
 Sterne's writings. A child brought up under such condi- 
 tions is not likely to have a very keen appreciation of the 
 finer phases of life, and must inevitably have a precocious 
 and most unfortunate familiarity with the dreamy side of 
 existence. What is commonly called knowledge of the 
 world, as seeing life generally, means seeing its darkest 
 phases, and the future divine was not improved by the edu- 
 cation of the camp. 
 
 The misfortune that had attended so persistently upon 
 the career of Roger Sterne culminated at last, most tragi- 
 cally, yet at the same time most ludicrously, as if destiny 
 had determined to the end to make the luckless ensign her 
 sport. At Gibraltar a quarrel with another officer "about 
 a goose " resulted in a duel. Roger Sterne was run through 
 the body. He never recovered from the wound, and though 
 in this harsh world he drew his breath in pain a little longer, 
 he died in Jamaica of fever, which found his enfeebled frame 
 a ready victim. One of the few pleasing characteristics 
 in Laurence Sterne's nature is his affectionate memory of 
 his father; one of the most pleasing passages of all his 
 writings is that in which he describes him: "My father 
 was a little, smart man, active to the last degree in all ex- 
 ercises, most patient of fatigue and disappointment, of which 
 it had pleased God to give him full measure. He was in 
 his temper somewhat rapid and hasty" — hence, no doubt, 
 the speaking of hot words and the spilling of hot blood over 
 that ill-omened goose — "but of a kindly, sweet disposition, 
 void of all design, and so innocent in his intentions that he 
 suspected no one, so that you might have cheated him ten 
 times a day if nine had not been sufficient for your pur- 
 pose." The actions of the famous son do not smell so sweet 
 or blossom so brightly in the dust as those of the obscure, 
 unlucky father. 
 5 
 
130 HOURS WITH GREAT IRISHMEN, 
 
 Through Halifax school and Cambridge sizarship Lau- 
 rence Sterne passes, through the patronage of his pluralist 
 uncle, Jacques Sterne, into holy orders and the living of 
 Sutton-on-the-Forest, and so into twenty years of almost 
 complete obscurity. We know that he married, that he 
 preached, played the fiddle, fished, hunted and read, and 
 that is about all we know. For twenty full years the world 
 was almost absolutely ignorant of and absolutely indifferent 
 to the existence of Laurence Sterne. Then quite suddenly, 
 in 1759, the lazy, lounging, most eccentric, and ill-chosen 
 clergyman irritated York and enraptured London by the 
 publication of the first two volumes of " Tristram Shandy." 
 The record of literature and of history more bustling than 
 that of literature is starred with curious examples of men 
 who leap into sudden fame after a life of obscurity. Tough 
 soldier Cervantes fights and starves and struggles his way 
 through fifty years of life, and then ** smiles Spain's chivalry 
 away" with his immortal book. Dumouriez lives fifty rest- 
 less, nameless years unknown, and wins one year ** seen of 
 all countries and centuries." Parson Sterne, of Sutton and 
 York, is seven-and-forty years of age when he steps, with- 
 out any previous warning, into the highest popularity of his 
 time, and into an enduring place in literature for ever. 
 There is a kind of consolation in this. The obscurest soul 
 that ever neared its grand climacteric in outer darkness may 
 feed itself with the thought that it, too, may even yet in 
 the evening of existence rise up and overthrow the Austrian 
 or pen the volume that shall rival " Don Quixote" and eclipse 
 Yorick. 
 
 The author of " Tristram Shandy" came at once to town, 
 and was received with more than Roman triumph. Wealth, 
 wit, genius, nobility thronged his door, sought his friendship, 
 proffered favors. Sterne revelled in this new life. London 
 was to him a cup of the most intoxicating quality, and he 
 
LA WRENCE STERNE. 131 
 
 drank and drank again of its sparkling fountain without 
 ever quenching his thirst for popularity, for flattery, for 
 success. Flattery, popularity, success, all three he had in 
 plenty for eight resplendent years. Volume after volume 
 of "Tristram Shandy " wooed and won public applause. 
 He traveled abroad, and found the same adulation in the 
 great capitals of Europe that he had revelled in in London. 
 When the popularity of " Shandy " appeared to be waning, 
 and the fame of its author to be dwindling, he whipped it 
 up again with the " Sentimental Journey." Then he died 
 one of the most tragic deaths recorded in the necrology of 
 genius. He died in the London he loved so well and he 
 died alone. The wish he had expressed of expiring at an 
 inn untroubled by the presence of mourning friends was 
 grimly gratified. In lonely lodgings, beneath the specula- 
 tive gaze of a memoir-writing foot-man and the care of 
 hired hands, Sterne gasped out the words " Now it is come," 
 and so died. He v/as buried almost unattended, and his 
 body was stolen from its new-made grave by resurrectionists 
 and recognized, when half-dissected on an anatomist's table, 
 by a horrified friend. So the story goes, not absolutely 
 authentic, but certainly not absolutely unauthentic, the 
 melancholy conclusion of an ill-spent life and a splendid, 
 ill-used intellect. 
 
 No critic can be too severe on the leprous taint which 
 befouls all Sterne's writings, and which makes them in their 
 entirety repulsive for men and impossible for women. The 
 recognized license of his age does not excuse him, for he 
 overpassed its license. But even if Sterne's writings were 
 far less deeply stained than they are, they would be open 
 to grave reproach. Quite apart from the unreality, the 
 affectation of their sentimentality, the selfish, ignoble spirit 
 of their author peers out of page after page like the wry 
 face of a satyr through the summer leaves. '* Why should 
 
132 HOURS WITH GREA T IRISHMEN. 
 
 we not speak ill of the dead ? " he asks, deriding the tender 
 humanity of the old Latin phrase; " why should we not think 
 or speak ill of our neighbor?" he asks, in one of the 
 strangest of the strangest collection of sermons ever uttered 
 by human lips under the semblance of religious teaching. 
 The points are small, but they are characteristic of the man. 
 It was in his nature to question all these soft amenities 
 which make men loveable and life enduring. It was no less 
 in his nature to be one of the most unworthy husbands that 
 hapless woman has even been mated with. For his con- 
 duetto his wife his memory has been scourged by Thackeray 
 and by his latest biographer, Mr. H. D. Trail, himself one 
 of the ablest of contemporary writers. It cannot be too 
 severely scourged. He took her youth, he took her money, 
 and he tired of her and was untrue to her, and spoke against 
 her in the dastardly letters he wrote to his friends and in 
 which he has gibbeted himself to all time as a hideous warn- 
 ing, a sort of sentimental scarecrow. '* As to the nature of 
 Sterne's love affairs, '^ says Mr. Trail, " I have come, though 
 not without hesitation, to the conclusion that they were 
 most, if not all of them, what is called, somewhat absurdly, 
 platonic. * * * But as I am not one of those who hold 
 that the conventionally ' innocent * is the equivalent of the 
 morally harmless in this matter, I cannot regard the ques- 
 tion as worth any very minute investigation. I am not sure 
 that the habitual male flirt, who neglects his wife to sit con- 
 tinually languishing at the feet of some other woman, gives 
 much less pain and scandal to others or does much less mis- 
 chief to himself and the objects of his adoration than the 
 thorough-going profligate." 
 
 Sterne was undoubtedly a great man, and he has been 
 claimed as an Irishman, and so he cannot be overlooked; 
 and any student of Irish history must take him into account 
 and weigh him as well as he may and judge him. A man 
 
LAWRENCE STERNE. 133 
 
 and a writer of such fame cannot be ignored because of his 
 baseness; and with all his baseness he has done some work 
 which must be considered excellent as literary w^ork. But 
 I wish with all my heart that the Irishman who studies his 
 country's literature was not forced to come across the name 
 of Laurence Sterne. I wish that the presiding influences 
 of Mars and Lucina had caused Sterne to see the light in 
 Gibraltar or Jamaica or any part of the world except Ire- 
 land. I would give with a light heart all that is good in 
 *' Tristram Shandy " or the Yorick Sermons, or the " Senti- 
 mental Journey," to be clean and quit of what is bad and 
 base in them. I would gladly banish from the Elysian fields, 
 which fancy peoples with the ghosts of Irish genius, the 
 Simian shadow of Sterne. His life and his genius alike are 
 things to wonder at, to weep for, and to avoid. 
 
THOMAS DAVIS. 
 
 If ever a man or the sons of men have been made a nui- 
 sance to his fellows, that man is Fletcher of Saltoun; if ever 
 a quotation has been hackneyed and dismally done to death 
 it is Fletcher of Saltoun's saying in which he expresses his 
 indifference as to who makes his people's laws so long as 
 he, Fletcher of Saltoun, is permitted to make their ballads. 
 Yet this axiom, one of those common coins of literature 
 which has been so long in circulation that \t is worn smooth 
 and flat and well-nigh lost its image and superscription, con- 
 tains a profound truth. The ballad-makers of the world have 
 had more influence upon their countries than the law-makers; 
 they have generally been the heralds, the guides, the in- 
 stigators of the law-makers. The destinies of half the great 
 kingdoms of the earth have been directed by some singer 
 of songs. Ballads are the best allies of all great political 
 movements. The Stuart cause, for example, was kept alive 
 through long generations of hopeless effort by the genius, 
 the passion and the devotion of the ballad-makers who 
 wore the white cockade and who appealed so simply and 
 yet so eloquently to their hearers' loyalty to *' the king over 
 the water." A poet of our day now dead, who bore an Irish 
 name, and who was inspired by some of the fire of Irish 
 genius, has written some verses in which he pays enthusiastic 
 tribute to the power of poetry in all ages and among all men. 
 The poets have done everything he declares: 
 
 " We in the ages lying 
 
 In the buried past of the earth 
 Built Nineveh with our sighing." 
 
THOMAS DAVIS. 135 
 
 And so on. It is the, perhaps, pardonable weakness of 
 poets to consider that the guild to which they belong has 
 effected much in the world's history, and it cannot be said 
 that they always exaggerate the influence of the brotherhood. 
 The world would be a great deal worse than it is if it were 
 not for the labors of some of them. 
 
 Certainly no poet has ever more distinctly influenced 
 the course of his country's destinies, certainly no poet has 
 ever more profoundly informed a great poUtical movement 
 with his own genius, than Thomas Davis. At a time when 
 his country seemed almost in the dust, and at a time when 
 literature was almost extinct, when patriotism was starving 
 for lack of inspiration, when knowledge was denied, when 
 National hopes were fainting, Thomas Davis came before 
 his countrymen as the breather of a new courage, the founder 
 of a new and noble literature, the herald of a wider knowl- 
 edge and the uplifter and regenerator of the fainting aspira- 
 tions of his fellow-men. The whole history of Ireland for 
 the last half century would have been written strangely 
 otherwise if the genius and the pure ambition of Davis had 
 not been vouchsafed to the Irish race. Too many of the 
 names that fill the highest places in Ireland's annals are 
 those of men whose life's work has been cut short on the 
 threshold of manhood. Thomas Davis is a sad instance of 
 this. The dawn of his genius had scarcely warmed his 
 country with its bright glows of roseate promise when he 
 had passed into the darkness, leaving the hearts of his 
 countrymen yearning for the sound of the voice of which 
 they were but then learning the value. Davis was born at 
 Mallow in 1814. His early years gave few indications of the 
 genius which was destined later to raise him to the foremost 
 rank of his contemporaries. He was quiet, shy, and self- 
 contained; but his passionate love for Ireland was deeply 
 rooted in his nature, and grew with him year by year until 
 
136 HOURS WITH GREA T IRISHMEN. 
 
 at last, at the age of twenty- seven, the young student threw 
 off his old, retiring habits of study and reflection, and pass- 
 ing from the shade of dreaming to that of acting, he ap- 
 peared before the world as a poet and politician, with a suc- 
 cess which surprised no one, probably, so greatly as himself. 
 The Nation newspaper, founded in 1842 by Gavan Duffy, 
 Davis and Dillon, was the first medium through which the 
 Irish reading population became acquainted with Davis's 
 poems. The acquaintance ripened rapidly into warmest 
 friendship, and soon to love ! A year after the Nation had 
 started into life there were few Irish homes whose inmates 
 did not watch eagerly for every new song from his pen — a 
 pen which one could almost fancy he had dipped in his 
 heart's blood, so do the passionate words of appeal for 
 freedom and courage burn on the paper and vibrate un- 
 ceasingly in the hands of Irishmen. As a politician Davis's 
 influence, though subtler and less conspicuous, was none 
 the less surely felt. Few statesmen have commanded so 
 completely the confidence of their friends and the respect 
 of their enemies. The severest trial to Davis during his 
 political career was the painful separation of his party from 
 O'Connell, whom he reverenced and esteemed. In 1845, 
 at a period when his counsel and support was most needed 
 by his party, Davis was, unhappily, attacked by fever and 
 died, leaving a terribly vacant place among Ireland's de- 
 fenders, which none of his contemporaries were (iapable of 
 filling. In his youth he had studied the Irish language, 
 and always advocated its instruction among Irish people; 
 he regarded it as a great National possession, especially to 
 be treasured at a time when so few relics were left to the 
 people to remind them of their early freedom. 
 
 Had Davis never written one of the stirring ballads so 
 dear to patriotism, he would still have earned for himself 
 fame as a love poet. Perhaps, had he lived to an old age 
 
THOMA S DA VIS. 137 
 
 in some peaceful corner of the earth, undisturbed by the 
 fierce husthng of party strife, nor chafed by the constant 
 sight of unavenged wrongs, he might still have left a name 
 among the first poets of the world; but heaven, which en- 
 dowed him with his genius, bestowed on him a heart filled 
 with the keenest sympathy for his suffering country. He 
 spent his share of the sacred fire perhaps with prodigality, 
 but he did the work which seemed best to his conscience; 
 and short as was his appointed time, the fruits of his labor 
 will blossom year after year, so long as the Irish race con- 
 tinues, and hearts as true as his live to follow in his steps. 
 
 Nothing is more deeply associated with Davis's name 
 than the foundation of the Nation newspaper. That morn- 
 ing walk of Davis and Dillon and Duffy in the Phoenix 
 Park, that morning talk " under a noble elm, within view 
 of the Park gate leading to the city," was the beginning of 
 a new order of things in Ireland. The actual proposition 
 of a weekly newspaper seems to have come from Duffy, 
 but the name was given by Davis*, and though the editor- 
 ship was assigned to Duffy, "as the most experienced in 
 journalism," Davis, Sir Charles himself declares, " was our 
 true leader." Sir Charles Gavan Duffy's own description 
 of Davis justifies and, indeed, commands quotation, for it 
 seems to bring the man himself before us, as only the de- 
 scription of a contemporary can ever hope to do. Sir 
 Charles Gavan Duffy is like the man in Landor's poem whom 
 " God has lived with and has loved," and he has enriched 
 the literature of his country by the portraits he has drawn 
 of the high companionship in which his youth was passed. 
 
 " Davis was a man of middle stature, strongly but not 
 coarsely built, with a complexion to which habitual exercise, 
 for he was a great walker, and habitual temperance gave a 
 healthy glow. A broad brow and strong jaw stamped his 
 face with a character of power, but except when it was 
 
138 HOURS WITH GREAT IRISHMEN. 
 
 lighted by thought or feeling it was plain and even rugged. 
 His carriage was not good; a peculiar habit of leaning 
 towards you in familiar conversation, arising from the 
 eagerness of his nature, gave him the appearance of a 
 stoop, and he dressed and walked as carelessly as a student 
 is apt to do. But his glance was frank and direct as a sun- 
 beam, he had a cordial and winning laugh, the prevailing 
 expression of his face was open and genial, and his voice 
 had tones of sympathy which went straight to the heart." 
 
 " He was at that time," says Mr. Madden, speaking of a 
 period a couple of years earlier than the establishment of 
 the Nation^ " as delightful a young man as it was possible 
 to meet with in any country. He was much more joyous 
 when he became immersed in practical politics. His good 
 spirits did not seem, however, so much the consequence of 
 youth and health as of his moral nature. His cheerful- 
 ness was less the result of temperament than that of his 
 sanguine philosophy and of his wholesome, happy views of 
 life. The sources of enjoyment were abundant to a man 
 of his large faculties, highly cultivated, possessing withal 
 a body which supplied him with vigor and energy." 
 
 Such is the likeness, clearly and distinctly painted, of 
 the man who awoke in Ireland a new life, and whose pre- 
 mature death was one of the greatest of the many catastro- 
 phies that afflicted her history. Davis's life, brief though 
 it was, materially altered the course of Ireland's history. 
 It would be in vain to attempt to estimate how far, had his 
 life been longer, he might have influenced and altered the 
 course of that particular portion of her history of which he 
 was the central and the serenest figure. " This calamity 
 makes the world look black," wrote John Dillon, when he 
 heard of Davis's death. The world was indeed black, for 
 long enough, to Ireland afterwards. 
 
 AVe have all our partialities in the study of our favorite 
 
THOMA S DA VIS. 139 
 
 poets. The poem of Davis's which is more dear to me per- 
 sonally is that on the grave of Wolfe Tone: 
 
 In Bodenstown churchyard there is a green grave, 
 And wildly along it the winter winds rave; 
 Small shelter I ween are the ruined walls there 
 When the storm sweeps down on the plains of Kildare." 
 
 The first time I ever stood by Tone's grave was on a day 
 such as seemed to chime in most fitly with the poet's words. 
 It was a chill, gray day, with driving rain, which soaked the 
 rank grass of the little churchyard and drowned the fallen 
 autumnal leaves and washed the slab with its wild tears. 
 The scene, the time, the very tempest seemed in melan- 
 choly harmony with Davis's song. Ireland was passing 
 then through one of her darkest hours, and that lonely 
 grave, that ruined place of death, the wet earth and weeping 
 skies, and the desolate autumn wind which piped through 
 the dripping trees, the plaintive dirge-like music of Davis's 
 verse, all these seemed emblematic of Ireland's suifering, 
 of her wrongs, her isolation. The last time I stood by the 
 grave the scene was strangely different. It was autumn, 
 indeed, but a soft air, as of earlier spring, reigned over the 
 Kildare meadows. The sun shone brightly on the grass- 
 grown mounds that rise and fall like the waves of a little 
 sea about the ancient walls, whose crumbling outline gained 
 a strange splendor in that golden light. The grave itself 
 was dry and clear, its inscriptions distinct. Some reverent 
 hands had suspended little relics on the railings that protect 
 it. Above stretched a summer sky; below the green earth 
 seemed rather to be instinct with the quickening pulses of a 
 new year than to bear on its fair face the fading lineaments 
 of autumn. The aspect of the place was propitious, 
 benignly ominous. Ireland had escaped from her sojourn 
 in the Valley of the Shadow of Death ; her future was widen- 
 
140 
 
 HOURS WITH GREA T IRISHMEN. 
 
 ing out before her fair with hope and bright with promise; 
 it was the dawn of a new era which I seemed to witness as 
 I stood beside Tone's grave on that divine day when 
 autumn wore the guise of spring, and when the wind which 
 rivalled summer's seem to bear as its burden those brighter 
 lines: 
 
 '* Sweet, sweet, 'tis to find that such faith can remain 
 To the cause and the man so long vanquished and slain." 
 
 Davis's own grave does not quite realize the exquisite pict- 
 ure which he had painted for all time of his own ideal rest- 
 ing place. His country could hardly be expected to obey 
 his desire that no stone should mark his resting place, but 
 his epitaph is indeed writ o;i his country's mind, 
 
 " He served his country and loved his kind," 
 
 and better epitaph no Irishman, no man, could desire to 
 have. 
 
THOMAS FRANCIS MEAGHER. 
 
 The ceremonial which took place in Waterford last Sun- 
 day was significant in the extreme — significant of much 
 which hitherto the majority of Englishmen have been un- 
 able to understand or appreciate. Englishmen as a whole 
 have regarded each successive effort of the Irish people — 
 now by constitutional means, now by more desperate meas- 
 ures — to obtain some redress for their intolerable wrongs, 
 not as successive phases and developments of the one distinct 
 National purpose, but as so many separate, incoherent, un- 
 attached and unnatural outbursts of unprincipled and un- 
 reasonable disaffection. It would be superfluous for any 
 Irishman to remind Irishmen of the extraordinary political 
 folly of such a mistake, but it is only quite lately that any 
 large bulk of Englishmen have appeared to recognize 
 frankly the fact that the progressive generations of Irish 
 protest are linked together in a sequence as united as that 
 of the most enduring dynasty of monarchs that history 
 affords any example of. This is the secret of that devo- 
 tion, so bewildering to Englishmen who have tried to rule 
 Ireland, which the Irish people bear to the heroes and 
 martyrs of the various struggles for their country's right to 
 be free. The men of Forty-eight, the men of Ninety-eight, 
 the men of Eighty-two are as dear to the Irishmen of to-day 
 as they were when the Nation*s first number animated 
 '* Young Ireland," when Wolfe Tone organized the " United 
 Irishmen," and when the Volunteers rallied at Dungannon 
 to make the dream of Grattan and of Flood a living and 
 abiding reality. 
 
143 HOURS WITH GREAT IRISHMEN. 
 
 The affection, however, which the Irish people feel for 
 the memories of the men of Forty-eight may well be pecu- 
 liarly warm and deep. Forty-eight is not so far removed 
 from the youngest of the existing generation of Irishmen 
 but that he may feel himself, as it were, bound thereto by 
 bonds of almost personal association. Some of the men 
 who made that time still live and look upon the earth. 
 The last Parliament, the Parliament in which for the first time 
 the doctrines of Home Rule were adopted by an English 
 Prime Minister, contained among its members one who had 
 played a not insignificant part in the history of *' Young 
 Ireland." The brilliant historian, too, of that stirring 
 epoch was himself one of its leaders and the colleague of 
 Dillon and of Davis in the foundation of the Nation. 
 Others have not long been taken from the world. It is not 
 so long since John Mitchell came back from his long exile to 
 receive the reverent homage of a New Ireland, and to sleep 
 at last within hearing of those breezes which he loved best 
 in all the world — the breezes that sang through the beaches 
 and sycamores of old Rostrevor, It is twenty years since 
 John Dillon, grave, stately, handsomest of men, died just 
 on the eve of the realization of his dream of an alliance be- 
 tween Irish Nationalism and English Liberalism, died and 
 was eulogized by the same statesman who now can find no 
 fairer enjoyment for his fading eloquence than virulent in- 
 vective against the party and the cause with which the son 
 of John Dillon is associated. 
 
 Small wonder if the men of Forty-eight are dear to the 
 Irishmen of Eighty-six. The fathers of this generation 
 were the friends, the allies, the followers of O'Brien, and 
 Meagher, and Dillon, and Mitchell, and the rest. To the 
 young men of to-day their names are almost as the names 
 of friends; they seem, in the experiences of those near and 
 dear to them, to live over for themselves these fervent years, 
 
THOMA S FRA NCIS ME A GHER. 143 
 
 to look upon its leaders face to face, to stretch out their 
 hands in answer to the impassioned appeal of Mitchell, or 
 to listen with beating heart while the eloquence of Meagher, 
 inspired almost to prophecy by the presence of death, stirs 
 the silence of Clonmel Courthouse. The other heroes of 
 Irish history are so far removed that they appear almost to be 
 invested with superhuman attributes, to be endowed with 
 those higher and serener faculties which the fancy of an 
 earlier age attributed to the demigods. But the men of 
 Forty-eight are of our own flesh and blood; we have held the 
 hands and listened to the speech of some of them; our sires 
 were their companions, their champions and their friends. 
 There enters, therefore, a personal element into all tributes 
 to their work and their memory which must be absent from 
 the most reverent homage to the men of an earlier, if even 
 of a greater age. 
 
 In one of the most conspicuous spots in Dublin stands a 
 statue erected to the memory of 'William Smith O'Brien, 
 the high-souled, chivalrous gentleman who was recognized 
 as the leader of the agitation of 1848. That statue is, I be- 
 lieve, the only one that has been raised in Ireland to the 
 memory of any of the men of the Young Ireland movement. 
 Ireland, unhappily for herself, has had something else to 
 think of than the raising of monuments to her illustrious dead. 
 It is one of the remarkable proofs of her patient, unwearying 
 patriotism that she has been able to do so much, and that 
 in the worst times of her poverty and oppression she has 
 had the energy and self-sacrificing generosity to keep alive 
 in the midst of her own immediate struggles the memory of 
 many who were the heroes of earlier efforts. I have often 
 thought that the presence in Dublin streets of that statue to 
 Smith O'Brien, so close to the bridge which once bore the 
 name of an English Lord Lieutenant, and which now bears 
 the name of an Irish patriot, and within twenty minutes* 
 
144 HOURS WITH GREAT IRISHMEN. 
 
 walk of the Castle itself, ought to offer to any intelligent 
 foreigner one of the most remarkable proofs he could de- 
 sire of the vitality of Ireland's patriotism, and of the justice 
 of a cause which could foster and inspire such vitality. But 
 at this present time the statue of one Young Irelander is 
 not enough for Ireland, and I sincerely hope and very de- 
 voutly believe that the hope which my friend, Mr. Leamy, 
 M. P., expressed so' eloquently last Sunday may speedily 
 be realized, and that in a very short time the streets of 
 Waterford may boast a statue to Thomas Francis Meagher. 
 Thomas Francis Meagher was born in Waterford, in the 
 city which has just been paying so profoundly impressive 
 a tribute to his memory, on the 23rd of August, 1823. He 
 was educated at Clongowes and at Stonyhurst. A Hfe of 
 Meagher, published many years ago, and now long since 
 out of print, gives some amusing accounts of his early days 
 at the shrine of learning which was once the family seat of 
 the Browns, of Kildare. • The author of the life appears to 
 have been a school-fellow of Meagher's, and to speak of 
 him from personal experience. " Thomas Francis Meagher, 
 as I remember him," he says, "was a diligent student, 
 much beloved by his companions, and a favorite with his 
 superiors. To conciliate, to win the regards of the latter, 
 was never with him an object of ambition; on the contrary, 
 I have known him in a football match to let fly deliberately 
 at a master's shins rather than at the ball. On one occa- 
 sion, on account of some breach of discipline, the prefect 
 locked him up in his room during play-time, and Meagher, 
 not to be outdone in generosity, passed the time very 
 agreeably in sharpening said prefect's razors upon the 
 granite window-sill." Meagher did not, however, waste 
 the whole of his time in sharpening razors, plundering 
 orchards, or carving his name on the trunks of the fine old 
 Congowes trees. " Though fond of play — and he played 
 
THOMAS FRANCIS MEAGHER, 145 
 
 with a will — lie was not," says his biographer, " an idler in 
 any sense. If sometimes he neglected his school-books, 
 the reason would be found to lie in too close application to 
 his music-books." It was the debating society at Clon- 
 gowes which first awoke in him a distinct taste for oratory. 
 After he left Stonyhurst the young Meagher went for a 
 journey up the Rhine and in Belgium, where he studied 
 with great care the flourishing Flemish cities which in their 
 serene self-centred prosperity afforded such a melancholy 
 contrast to the condition of the cities and towns of his native 
 country. 
 
 Meagher's first connection with public life begins with 
 the date of Davis's death. At the time when all Ireland 
 was thrilled with pain over the loss of her poet, Meagher 
 wrote to Duffy, who was editing the Nation^ expressing his 
 profound sympathy, and asking to be permitted to co-operate 
 in raising a monument to Davis's memory. "He was at 
 that time," writes Sir Charles Gavan Duffy, "a youth of 
 two-and-twenty, who had scarcely heard his own voice except 
 in a college debating society, and had not written a line for 
 the public beyond one feeble copy of verses in the Nation. 
 But there was a mesmerism in his language which touched 
 me. I speedily made his personal acquaintance, and soon 
 had the happiness of counting him among my friends." As 
 usual, Sir Charles Gavan Duffy's description of a colleague 
 impresses the reader with a profound sense of realistic por- 
 traiture. *' Meagher," he says, " was middle-sized and 
 well-made. The lines of his face were so round as to give 
 it the character of languor and innocence, till it was lighted 
 up with enthusiasm, when it became impassioned and im- 
 pressive. His voice was not rich nor flexible, but the 
 genuine feeling with which he was m.oved rendered it an 
 instrument fit to express a wide range of emotion and pas- 
 sion with astonishing power. In private he was a fast 
 
146 HOURS WITH GREAT IRISHMEN. 
 
 friend and a man of steady honor, but though he had a 
 buoyant and enjoying disposition he was not eminent for 
 social any more than for colloquial endowments. His rare 
 and splendid gifts were seen only in the tribune. To the 
 common eye, indeed, the new recruit was a dandified 
 youngster, with a languid air and mincing accent obviously 
 derived from an English education; but this was a vulgar 
 error; nature had made him a great orator and training had 
 made him an accomplished gentleman." 
 
 The "new recruit" soon proved himself to be of the 
 utmost service to the cause he had espoused. Sir Charles 
 tells us that he was never of much value in the counsels 
 of the party, and that he was not, even when at the height 
 of his reputation, a leader in its cabinet. But the magic 
 of his eloquence was the best ally that the Young Ireland 
 cause possessed. At that time the fervid, impassioned, 
 glowingly poetic oratory of the star-crossed Girondists, and 
 especially of Vergniaud, were the inspiration and the admira- 
 tion of the youthful orators of the Young Ireland move- 
 ment. Meagher, like many others, modelled himself at 
 first very largely upon Vergniaud. He even, we are told, 
 in latter times studied the showy, glittering, and, if super- 
 ficial, curiously attractive oratory of that strange being who 
 strove to be at once a great poet, a great novelist, and a 
 great politician, and who is now almost forgotten, Lamar- 
 tine. But the genius of Meagher soon compelled him to 
 outstrip and to surpass his models and his masters. The 
 brightest effort of the Gironde is not equal to the eloquence 
 of the Young Irishman who at an age little beyond that of 
 boyhood was to so seriously compete for the palm of oratory 
 with Grattan, and Curran, and Burke. Unfortunately for 
 Meagher his voice, like that of his three great countrymen, 
 was not in his favor. " It was like listening to the mys- 
 tical, sonorous music of the *' Revolt of Islam," recited in 
 
THOMAS FRANCIS MEAGHER, 
 
 147 
 
 Shelley's shrill treble, to hear Meagher pour out passion, 
 and pathos, and humor in tones which possessed no note 
 in perfection but intensity." But the intensity was enough 
 to drive those enchanted words home to the very hearts of 
 their hearers. Those enchanted words still live. The 
 volume that contains them is one of the most priceless pos- 
 sessions that oratory has given to the world. It is, indeed, 
 difificult to speak of Meagher's speeches with words of ad- 
 miration sufficiently measured to prevent them passing into 
 the language of hyperbole. To read those speeches is to 
 understand even more than Greece or Rome can make us 
 understand the magic of inspired eloquence, of what a re- 
 cent American writer, Mr. T. B. Aldrich, calls the ** glori- 
 ous gift of speaking golden words with a golden tongue." 
 
 Meagher was soon setting the hearts of vast audiences on 
 fire with his impassioned periods. If Thomas Davis was 
 the poet of Young Ireland, Meagher was Young Ireland's 
 orator. A writer, a historian who of late days has shown 
 but Uttle sympathy with Ireland, is roused with a gleam of 
 positive enthusiasm by Thomas Francis Meagher, " a young 
 man," says Mr. Lecky, "whose eloquence was beyond 
 comparison superior to that of any other rising speaker in 
 the country, and who, had he been placed in circumstances 
 favorable to the development of his talent, might, perhaps, 
 at length have taken his place among the great orators of 
 Ireland." Meagher early endeared himself to the impetu- 
 ous and gifted young men with whom he had allied by a 
 brilliant speech against O'Connell's doctrine of passive re- 
 sistance, which is the most famous of all his utterances. 
 '*I am not one of those tame moralists," the young man 
 exclaimed, *' who say that liberty is not worth one drop of 
 blood. . . . Against this miserable maxim the noble 
 virtue that has saved and sanctified humanity appears in 
 judgment. From the blue waters of- the Bay of Salamis; 
 
148 HOURS WITH GREA T IRISHMEN, 
 
 from the valley over which the sun stood still and lit the 
 Israelites to victory; from the cathedral in which the sword 
 of Poland has been sheathed in the shroud of Kosciusko; 
 from the Convent of St. Isidore, where the fiery hand that 
 rent the ensign of St. George upon the plains of Ulster has 
 mouldered into dust; from the sands of the desert, where 
 the wild genius of the Algerine so long has scared the eagle 
 of the Pyrenees; from the ducal palace in this kingdom, 
 where the memory of the gallant and seditious Geraldine 
 enhances more than royal favor the splendor of his race; 
 from the solitary grave within this mute city which a dying 
 bequest has left without an epitaph— oh! from every spot 
 where heroism has had a sacrifice or a triumph, a voice 
 breaks in upon the cringing crowd that cherishes this 
 maxim, crying, * Away with it— away with it.'" This is 
 undoubtedly the finest passage to be found in all Meagher's 
 utterances; that which comes next to it is the speech spoken 
 in graver and more tragic tones, when the hopes of Young 
 Ireland were in the dust, and when Meagher, standing in 
 the Courthouse of Clonmel, looked calmly in the face of, 
 as he believed, impending imminent death. This swan- 
 song of his political oratory, this speech from the dock, was 
 worthy of his rhetorical genius— ''I am not here to crave 
 with faltering lip the life I have consecrated to the inde- 
 pendence of my country. * * * I offer to my country, 
 as some proof of the sincerity with which I have thought 
 and spoken and struggled for her, the life of a young heart. 
 * * * The history of Ireland explains my crime and 
 justifies it. Even here, where the shadows of death sur- 
 round me, and from which I see my early grave opening 
 for me in no consecrated soil, the hope which beckoned me 
 forth on that perilous sea whereon I have been wrecked, 
 animates, consoles, enraptures me. No, I don't despair 
 of my poor country, her peace, her liberty, her glory!" 
 
THOMA S FRA NCIS ME A GHER. 149 
 
 Meagher was transported, he escaped from transporta- 
 tion, made his way to America, entered the Federal army, 
 and distinguished himself during the civil war as a true and 
 gallant soldier. The green flag, which it had been the 
 dream of his youth to fight for in Irish fields and upon Irish 
 hillsides, fluttered often enough over his head when, in the 
 garb of a Federal officer, he led his men time and again 
 against the Confederate intrenchments. His end was, 
 satirically, cruelly inappropriate to such a life. The man 
 who had been sentenced to death as an Irish rebel, who had 
 braved death over and over again for a foreign service, and 
 in a foreign place, was destined to die ingloriously the vic- 
 tim of an unhappy accident. " He fell from the deck of a 
 steamer one night; it was dark, and there was a strong cur- 
 rent running; help came too late. A false step, a dark 
 night and the muddy waters of the Missouri closed the 
 career that had opened with so much promise of bright- 
 ness." So writes one who knew Meagher in the flesh. 
 We, such of us as only know him by tradition, may grieve 
 indeed for that untimely death, but we can only rejoice that 
 heaven in its justice granted to a good cause so much genius, 
 so much courage, and such unrivalled eloquence. 
 
CHARLES LEVER. 
 
 Lever occupies something of the same place in relation 
 to Ireland that Scott occupies to Scotland; but Ireland, un- 
 fortunately, has not the same reasons for being grateful to 
 Lever that Scotland has for being grateful to Scott. In 
 one sense the curse of Swift was upon Lever; he was ** a 
 man of genius and an Irishman," but, though his genius 
 made him famous all the world over, and though he created 
 an Ireland for fiction as Scott created a Scotland for fiction, 
 the result of the two men's labors is very different. The 
 Scotland of Sir Walter Scott is a faithful picture of the 
 Scotland of his time. The " Waverly Novels," where they 
 treat of Scotland, are as serviceable as so many blue-books 
 to the historical student. Even where they are most humor- 
 ous they never fail to be most truthful, and their picture of 
 Scottish virtues is as faithful and as honorable as the pictures 
 of Scotch failings are severe in their masterly satire. The 
 Scotland of Scott is no Cloud-Cuckoo-Town, no Utopia, no 
 ** Land East of the Sun, West of the Moon" in which the 
 delighted traveler wanders and wonders and knows that he 
 treads the dissolving mazes of fairyland. The same cannot, 
 unhappily, be said of Lever. The Scotland of Scott is em- 
 phatically Scotland, the Ireland of Lever is emphatically 
 not Ireland. 
 
 Indeed, from a National point of view. Irishmen may be 
 said to owe Lever a grudge for his method of presenting his 
 country and his countrymen. It can hardly be doubted 
 that many of the absolutely and even ludicrously false im- 
 pressions which Englishmen have formed of Ireland and of 
 
CHA RLE S LE VER. 151 
 
 Irishmen are due pretty directly to the teaching afforded 
 by Lever's novels. Except in the rarest cases, the serious 
 sides of Irish Hfe and character, the characteristic national 
 good which generations and centuries of oppression had 
 generated, is ignored by Lever. Of the Irish gentleman, 
 from the point of view of the " Free Companions," he can 
 afford example enough and to spare. Riotous Trinity 
 students living in a mad world of endless practical jokes, 
 gallant dragoons who ride and make love, and fight duels, 
 and sabre the enemies of England, and drink whiskey 
 punch with the energy and the appetite and unconquerable 
 digestions of the brood of giants, are merry men enough to 
 meet with in literature, and the humanities who, with a long 
 interval between, do in some measure approach to their 
 titanic good spirits are pleasant folk indeed. But these 
 Gargantuan good fellows, drawn with a reckless freedom 
 of hand which makes Dugald Dalgetty seem but a starve- 
 ling, are not quite the typical Irishmen that it has pleased 
 so many strangers to consider them. Even in the wildest 
 wickedest days of Hell-Fire Clubbism there were Irish gen- 
 tlemen whose lives did not consist solely in riding Mod- 
 deriddero and rolling down civic stairs on to the plump 
 forms of recumbent aldermen, and in pointing out the advan- 
 tages of a sherry decanter aimed low as an instrument of 
 repartee. I do not mean to maintain that Lever has never 
 drawn Irish gentlemen otherwise than thus employed, but 
 I do mean to say that such is the impression of the tastes, 
 manners and customs of Irish gentlemen which he has made 
 upon the minds of many who, in the severe irony of des- 
 tiny, have been called upon to play their part in administer- 
 ing the affairs of Ireland to her. 
 
 What is true of Lever's Irish gentlemen is equally true 
 of Lever's Irish peasants. They are far too much stage 
 peasants; they are more closely related to the Myles-na- 
 
152 HOURS WITH GREA T IRISHMEN. 
 
 Copaleen of the stage than to the Myles-na-Copaleen of 
 Gerald Griffin's story. Mickey Free deserves his place in 
 literature with Sam Weller and Sam Slick, with Ritchie, 
 Moniplies, and Scapin, but he has been too generally ac- 
 cepted by the inexperienced English reader as the type of 
 a whole race. Something of the perverseness with which 
 Irish things have been regarded in England is due to Lever. 
 He was a brilliant writer, he was in his way a great novelist, 
 and, therefore, a great Irishman. But the Irishman who 
 enjoys Lever's novels enjoys them, as it were, from a 
 cosmopolitan point of view. He laughs at them, or is 
 touched by them, as in his youth he laughed over the nursery 
 rhyme, or was touched by the fairy tale. But he cannot 
 recognize that they are in any sense true presentments of 
 his country, or that regarded in that aspect his country has 
 any deep reason to be grateful to Lever. 
 
 Looking upon Lever, however, merely as the romancist 
 pure and simple^ reading him with the same unimpassioned 
 impartiality which we give to Scott or Dickens, or the 
 ''Arabian Nights," we may fairly recognize his marvellous 
 ability, his inimitable humor, his rare power of creating cer- 
 tain characters and of making "the idle puppets of his 
 dreams " seem for the hour to be living, breathing entities. 
 Lever's place in the literature of his age has been thus de- 
 fined by a not unfriendly critic of the '^ rattling romance of 
 Irish electioneering, love-making and fighting which set 
 people reading Charles O'Malley, and Jack Hinton, even 
 when * Pickwick ' was still a novelty." " Charles Lever had 
 wonderful animal spirit, and a broad, bright humor. He 
 was quite genuine in his way. He afterwards changed his 
 style completely and with much success; and will be found 
 in the latter part of the period holding just the same rela- 
 tive place as in the earlier, just behind the foremost men, 
 but in manner so different that he might be a new writer. 
 
CHA RLES LE VER. 1 5 3 
 
 who had never read a line of the roystering adventures of 
 light dragoons which were popular when Charles Lever first 
 gave them to the world." Perhaps the most remarkable 
 thing in the whole of Lever's long and successful literary 
 career was this way in which he changed his style so com- 
 pletely. It is difficult to imagine that " That Boy of Nor- 
 cott's " is by the author of '* Tom Burke of Ours," and 
 that the " Daltons " is the creation of the same mind that 
 envolved "Harry Lorrequer." One of the secrets of 
 Lever's enduring success was his amazing versatility. 
 
 Once again we are brought face to face with the surprising 
 variety of Lever's genius. He has made the most notable, 
 indeed I may say the only, addition in our time to the 
 picturesque in literature. ''Con Cregan " is the adopted 
 child of " Gil Bias," and he is no less the successor through 
 a long line of eccentric ancestors of that famous rogue, 
 Lazarillo de Tormes, who in the course of his career was a 
 blind beggar's guide, a cure's varlet, a water seller, a public 
 crier, a marine monster, and a table groom, and who died 
 at last a hermit. Many a book has been written in the Gusto 
 Picaresco or Rogues' manner since the day of Mendoza. 
 Gusman D'Alfarache, Marcus de Obregon, the twin limp- 
 ing devils of Velez and Le Sage, the Garduna de Saville 
 and many another fill the list, but Lever's book may hold 
 its own with the best of them. Before " Gil Bias," indeed, 
 his illustrious model, "Con Cregan," must indeed veil his 
 crown, but of the book as compared with all its rivals we 
 may say, as Gines de Pasamonte said of his own memoirs, 
 " so good is it that a fig for ' Lazarillo de Tormes,' and all 
 of that kind that have been written, or shall be written, 
 compared with it; all I will say about it is that it deals with 
 facts, and facts so neat and diverting that no lies could 
 match them." 
 
 Seldom, indeed, has a better book of adventure been put 
 
154 HOURS WITH GREAT IRISHMEN. 
 
 together. From first page to last the astounding episodes 
 which throng the life of "Con Cregan " are delightful 
 reading. Footman, horse stealer, wanderer, audacious, 
 unscrupulous, ambitious *' Con Cregan" is the well-nigh 
 inimitable type of the adventurer, the '' Wandering Star " of 
 civilization, who, with many of the attributes of the ruffian 
 and most of the qualities of the rogue, does still keep him- 
 self somehow clear of the guild of scoundreldom, and does 
 somehow manage to win the affections of those who fall on 
 his drifting, erratic course. It is impossible to be angry 
 with "Con Cregan," in spite of his shifts and dodges and 
 deceptions; it is impossible not to be pleased when he suc- 
 ceeded at last to wealth and rest and happiness. There 
 is nothing perverting in the book, nothing that could do 
 harm. "Con Cregan" is not a lofty type of humanity, 
 but there is nothing degrading, nothing vile about him ; we 
 can shake hands with him cordially at parting and find our 
 palm clean. He is not Don Puixote indeed; he is not ani- 
 mated by any lofty purpose of redressing all wrongs and 
 regenerating the world; he seems to ask with the poet of 
 the " earthly paradise" — 
 
 "Why should I strive to set the crooked straight." 
 
 But we do not feel that we have been in base company 
 while we have sojourned with him any more than we need 
 feel ashamed of being seen slipping out of the Spectators 
 Club in the company of AVill Honeycomb. One of the most 
 eloquent moralists of our time, it is true, has denounced 
 ' *Don Quixote." To Mr. Ruskin it is an objectionable 
 book, though what he can find to object to in one of the 
 noblest figures ever traced by the pen of fiction passes my 
 comprehension. On the other hand, we find Lamb, "the 
 frolic and gentle," one of the purest and sweetest souls 
 that haunt the Elysian fields of literature, raising his voice 
 
CHARLES LEVER, 155 
 
 in a kind of desperate defence of the heartless monsters of 
 Restoration comedy. Yet what he says, of his fantastic 
 charity, in their defence, might well be cited in the cause of 
 Con Cregan, and for the matter of that of Gil Bias himself. 
 **I confess for myself," says Elia, "that — with no great 
 delinquencies to answer for — I am glad for a season to take 
 an airing beyond the diocese of the strict conscience — not 
 to live always in the precincts of the law-courts — but now 
 and then for a dreamwhile or so, to imagine a world with 
 no meddling restrictions, to get into recesses where the 
 hunter cannot follow me — 
 
 -Secret shades 
 
 Of woody Ida's inmost grove 
 
 While yet there was no fear of Jove." 
 
 The defence will not pass muster with the rascals of 
 Wycherley and the blackguard rout of Congreve. But 
 with Con Cregan as with Gil Bias, and for that matter Dick 
 Swiveller, we can blink a little at their peccadilloes, for we 
 feel that they are at heart good fellows, and that they will 
 end decently enough, whether it be beneath the shades of 
 Lirias or in that smoking box at Hampstead, " the envy of 
 the civilized world." The public taste for the novel of ad- 
 venture seems to be reviving of late, a healthy sign of the 
 literary mood of the day. Well, it would be difficult to 
 find anywhere within the range of recent literature a better 
 book of the kind, brighter, readier, or more entertaining 
 than "Con Cregan." 
 
 Oddly akin to *' Con Cregan," and yet oddly dissimilar, 
 is that mirthful story, that fool's Odyssey of the " Day's Ride 
 and a Life's Romance." Mediaeval epic poets, when they 
 got tired of twisting their eternal, long-winded panegyrics of 
 Charlemagne, and Roland, and Oliver, and Turpin, the 
 Archbishop and the twelve peers, sometimes kicked off their 
 
156 HOURS WITH GREAT IRISHMEN. 
 
 solemn vesture, and with arms akimbo, leering lips, and 
 laurel wreath set rakishly awry, composed comic poems, 
 broadly burlesque epics, in which the great king and his 
 heroic companions cut pitiful figures enough, and become 
 a drunken, thievish, gluttonous, vulgar crew of coarse com- 
 panions. It is the revolt of the comic muse against her 
 solemn sister, it is the protest of the mirthful force against 
 the tragic trappings of the Homeric guild. Reverence has 
 been revered so long that at last the buffoon rebel Comedy 
 asserts herself, and splits her side at the pageant of heroes. 
 Laughter," according to Poe in most of his most fanciful 
 moods, was inscribed on the last altar left standing of the 
 ruined Pantheon of an older world. When we have had our 
 champions, and worshipped them and listened to their 
 stately tread and the rattle of their golden armor, Comedy, 
 half Puck and half Thersites, comes on the stage, too, and 
 makes game of them. Comic cartoons of the loveliest of 
 antique legends are to be found on Pompeian walls and the 
 flanks of Grecian wine jars. Leonardi da Vinci caricatures 
 Dante; Pulci parodies Ariosto; Scarron pens a comic 
 ^neid, the Trouveres deride Charles the Great; so, too, 
 Lever, having idealized adventure in " Con Cregan," makes 
 it ludicrous in the " Day's Ride." 
 
 ** Count no man happy until he has ceased to live," says 
 the Greek proverb, which has been quoted so many hundred 
 thousand times since the Hellenic philosopher dashed the 
 spirits of the Oriental monarch by first uttering it. This 
 very proverb is taken curiously and even ominously enough 
 as the first sentence of the last paragraph of an article on 
 Charles Lever, which appeared in " Blackwood"s Magazine" 
 many years ago. The article is a friendly one— the writer 
 anonymous, and to me unknown, is in a sympathetic mood. 
 He is inclined to drop a literary tear over those lost heroes 
 of Lever's youth, the O'Malleys and Hintons and Burkes 
 
CHARLES LE VER. 157 
 
 and Lorrequers, who " look down upon us from the distance 
 of an age no' longer ours." *' We have no hope ever again 
 to meet them cantering in the Phoenix Park or swaggering 
 down Sackville street or dancing at Dublin Castle. They 
 are all ' gone proiapsoi to the Stygian shore. ' Like Achilles 
 and Ajax, and all the fortes ante Agamemnonemy they rest in 
 an elysium of which the beatitude appears to us shadowy 
 and unreal. But they have quaffed their last bumper and 
 shot their last shot, 
 
 ' They lie beside their nectar and their bolts are hurled/ 
 
 And although their glittering hosts yet hover about the fad- 
 ing splendor of the ' good old times ' as the Scandinavian 
 warriors are said by the Swedish poet to hover in the light 
 of sunset over the horizon of the Baltic, yet we can no more 
 recall them to tangible existence than we can renew the race 
 of the Anakim." 
 
 The writer of this rhapsody over the lost demigods 
 of the Lever mythology who are now not more a part 
 of the past than that *' Sackville street" of which he 
 speaks, concludes his study, as I have said, with the Solonic 
 proverb, upon which he reflects thus — " Sum up the attri- 
 butes of no genius till it has ceased to act or to write. The 
 last work of an author may sometimes be the first which 
 gives a just idea of his mind as a whole." In a measure, 
 this remark is not unprophetic. We would not be able to 
 fully appreciate not merely Lever's work but Lever's nature 
 if his teeming brain and busy hand had paused while yet 
 ** Lord Kilgobbin " was among the things to be, or had ceased 
 in that task midway, as the hand of Thackeray ceased over 
 ** Denis Duval," and the pulses of Dickens ceased to beat 
 before ever the "Mystery of Edwin Drood " was solved. 
 *' Lord Kilgobbin," as it stands, is one more sermon of so 
 many upon the old, old text of the words of the preacher. 
 
158 HOURS WITH GREAT IRISHMEN. 
 
 Lever's end was melancholy; I heard for the first time the 
 other day a hint that it was tragic. There are few more 
 pathetic words in the wide range of literature than those 
 with which Lever brings to a close the preface to his last, 
 and in some respects, one of his most brilliant novels, 
 " Lord Kilgobbin." The words in which he speaks of his 
 dead wife, and earnestly, most unfalteringly, expresses the 
 hope that this may be the last book he will ever write. 
 There was a tragic element in Lever's death I only heard 
 suggested once and lately by one whose words deserves 
 consideration. No more of that. Sad enough, in any case, 
 are the heart-broken sentences which close the literary career 
 of the man whose unfailing resources of humor, of wit, of 
 bright, sparkling laughter did so much to enhance *'the 
 gaiety of nations." It is the old, old story — so old, and 
 eternally new in its piteousness. Harlequin gleams and 
 glitters on the stage and flashes here and there, the incar- 
 nation of a mad merriment, the riotous ruler of a topsy- 
 turvy creation ; but he must weep behind its mask and bleed 
 beneath the spangled jerkin, and love and mourn and die 
 like the saddest and most solemn. To have laughed all one's 
 life, and made the whole world laugh with one, only inten- 
 sifies with a more poignant pathos the loneliness of the 
 deserted hearth, the desolate agony of the breaking heart. 
 
JOHN MITCHEL. 
 
 A Brief and Rather Incorrect Sketch of the Noblest 
 OF All the Irish Rebels. 
 
 Once, and once only, I saw John Mitch el. I was a small 
 boy in New York; the occasion was some crowded meeting 
 in, if I remember rightly, the Cooper Institute; the interest 
 for me, I know, centred in the stooped, gray-haired man 
 who sat upon the platform, and whom I knew to be John 
 Mitchel. It is something to have looked even once upon 
 the lineaments of a great man, something to reflect that 
 once for a moment two lives touched, and that the eyes of 
 the child beheld the face of the hero, the exile, the man of 
 genius who had loved Ireland so well and whom Ireland 
 will love and honor forever. Of all the men of that wild 
 movement of 1848 Mitchel saw his way most clearly; he 
 was the peer of all of them in energy, in determination and 
 in patriotism; he was superior to all of them, save only 
 Meagher, in his masterly command of language, in the 
 passion and eloquence and beauty which his genius could 
 kindle from the mechanism of human speech. Ireland had 
 never produced a man who possessed a greater mastery of 
 prose, who could better manipulate the harmonies of well- 
 ordered words, and wing home his thoughts and teachings 
 to the hearts of his readers with a more magnificent or more 
 convincing style. The eloquence of Meagher was the 
 eloquence of the platform; his speeches were made to be 
 delivered, and those who read them seem to hear resound- 
 ing in their ears as they read the eloquence of the orator. 
 
160 HOURS WITH GREAT IRISHMEN. 
 
 Mitchel's eloquence is the eloquence of the consummate 
 man of letters, and yet we are told on the authority of Sir 
 Charles Gavan Duffy that " In the beginning he wrote 
 clumsily and even feebly." These seem to a generation 
 steeped in the " Jail Journal " amazing adjectives to employ 
 towards Mitchel. We may assume that they were in some 
 measure deserved, for although Sir Charles Gavan Duffy 
 has no great affection for Mitchel he endeavors to be an 
 impartial historian. But if they could have ever been ap- 
 plied and deservedly to one of the most remarkable writers 
 of his age, what encouragement they offer to honest en- 
 deavor struggling against disappointment. No man need 
 despair at being criticized as clumsy or feeble in his prose 
 style if he remembers that Mitchel at thirty was accused 
 of the same defects. 
 
 There are few passages in literature that are, in their way, 
 more beautiful than '^Mitchel's Journal." "All my life 
 long," says Mitchel, ** I have delighted in rivers, rivulets, 
 rills, fierce torrents tearing their rocky beds, gliding, dimpled 
 brooks kissing a daisied marge. The tinkle or murmur or 
 deep resounding roll, or raving roar of running water is, of 
 all sounds my ears even hear now, the most homely. Noth- 
 ing else in this land" — he is speaking of the land of his 
 exile — "looks or sounds like home. The birds have a 
 foreign tongue, the very trees whispering to the wind 
 whisper in accents unknown to me. ***** They 
 can never, never, never, let breeze pipe or zephyr breathe 
 as it will, never can they whisper, quiver, sigh or sing as 
 do the beeches and sycamores of old Rostrevor." A little 
 farther on he reflects with wonderful fancy upon this ancient 
 river of the new world — his Tasmanian Shannon which re- 
 calls in its name the dearer river of his home. " In its 
 crystalline gush my heart and brain are bathed, and I hear 
 in its plaintive chime, all the blended voices of history, of 
 
JOHN MITCHEL. 161 
 
 prophecy, and poesy from the beginning. Not cooler or 
 fresher was the Thracian Hebrus; not purer was Aban and 
 Pharpar; not more ancient and venerable is Father Nilus. 
 Before the quiet flow of the Egyptian river was yet disturbed 
 by the jabber of the priests of Meroe; before the dynasty 
 was yet bred that quaffed the sacred wave of Choaspes — - 
 the drink of none but kings; ere its lordly namesake river 
 in Erin of Streams reflected yet upon its bosom a pillar 
 tower, or heard the chimes from its Seven Churches, this 
 river was rushing through its lonely glen to the Southern 
 Sea — was singing its mystic song to these primeval woods. 
 -^ ^ * I delight in poets who delight in rivers, and for 
 this I do love that sweet singer through whose inner ear 
 and brain the gush of his native Aufidius for ever streamed 
 and flashed. How some perennial brooks of crystal glim- 
 mered forever through all his day dreams; how he yearned 
 to marry his own immortality with the eternally murmuring 
 hymn of that bright Elandusian fount. Wisely, too, and 
 learnedly, did Clarence Mangan discourse with the rivers, 
 attune his notes to their wonderful music." 
 
 This is really exquisite, perfectly finished, highly wrought 
 prose, as consummately skillful as anything that the English 
 language has produced. It might well rank with Meagher's 
 farewell utterance in Clonmel Court-house, and with Shiel's 
 savagely satiric apostrophe to the memory of the anti- 
 Catholic Duke of York, as one of the three stars in the 
 Orion's belt of Irish prose literature. Yet Mitchel is prac- 
 tically unknown in England, except in a vague way as a 
 ferocious rebel who was exiled and who broke prison, and 
 who tried in later years to introduce his felonship into the 
 sanctuary of St. Stephen's. From the presses of publishers 
 volumes of extracts of English prose, beauties of the Eng- 
 lish language, half hours with best authors, and all such 
 gear, pour incessantly, all of them enriched in some of their 
 6 
 
162 HOURS WITH GREA T IRISHMEN. 
 
 brightest pages by the genius of Irish intellect. Burke and 
 Goldsmith, Sheridan and Swift yield their glories to the 
 gleaner; but of the man who was the peer of the proudest of 
 these in the mastery and magic of his language, you will 
 not find a passage, not a paragraph, not a sentence, no, not 
 a jot or tittle of all the magnificent eloquence which makes 
 the " Jail Journal" one of the abiding glories of Irish and 
 of English literature. It is to be hoped that with the better 
 understanding now new born and swiftly thriving between 
 the two countries, an understanding which, paradoxical 
 though it may appear, is in no small measure due to 
 Mitchel ! — there may come a truer appreciation in England 
 of our Irish literature and of the men of genius who made 
 it what it is, and among the best of whom is this same John 
 Mitchel. 
 
 When O'Connell's vast agitation fell to pieces after the 
 suppression of the meeting of Clontarf, and the subsequent 
 imprisonment of O'Connell showed that the Liberator did 
 not mean ever to appeal to the physical force he had talked 
 about, Mitchel and O'Brien became the leaders of different 
 sections of the Young* Ireland party, as the men of the 
 Nation were now called. Thomas Davis, the sweet chief 
 singer of the movement, died suddenly before the move- 
 ment which he had done so much for had taken direct revo- 
 lutionary shape. Mitchel came on the Nation in his place, 
 and advocated revolution and republicanism. He followed 
 the traditions of Emmet and the men of '98; he was in favor 
 of independence. His doctrines attracted the more ardent 
 of the Young Irelanders, and what was known as a war 
 party was formed. There were now three sections of Irish 
 agitation. There were the Repealers, who were opposed 
 to all physical force; there were the moderate Young Ire- 
 landers, only recognizing physical force when all else had 
 failed; and there were now this new party who saw in revo- 
 
JOHN MITCHEL. 163 
 
 lution the only remedy for Ireland. Small wonder if men 
 like Mitchel believed in the possibility of the thing. There 
 had been encouragement abroad. Vast meetings, organized 
 and directed by men Uke Seward and Horace Greeley, had 
 threatened England with *' the assured loss of Canada by 
 American arms," if she suppressed the repeal agitation by 
 force, and at one time Horace Greeley was one of a direc- 
 tory in New York for sending officers and arms to Ireland. 
 In France the Republican party had been loud in their ex- 
 pressions of sympathy for the Irish, and Ledru Rollin had 
 declared that France was ready to lend her strength to the 
 support of an oppressed nation. No wonder the leaders of 
 the National party were encouraged in the belief that their 
 cause was pleasing to the fates; no wonder if Mitchel, weary 
 of delay, believed that in action, distinct, desperate action, 
 lay the only hope for the movement which had drifted from 
 repeal into Young Irelandism, and from Young Irelandism 
 into Mitcheldom, with all its fierce, vehement, fiery energy. 
 Mitchel's scheme has been bitterly blamed. *' At least," 
 says one who- shared in the agitations of the time, " it may 
 be called the only scheme which had the slightest chance 
 of success; we do not say of success in establishing the in- 
 dependence of Ireland, which Mitchel sought for, but in 
 meeting a genuine rebellion afoot. Mitchel was the one 
 formidable man among the rebels of '48. He was the one 
 man who distinctly knew what he wanted, and was prepared 
 to run any risk to get it. He was cast in the very mould 
 of the genuine revolutionist, and under different circum- 
 stances might have played a formidable part. He came 
 from the northern part of the Island, and was a Protestant 
 Dissenter. It is a fact worthy of note that all the really 
 formidable rebels Ireland has produced in modern times, 
 from Wolfe Tone to Mitchel, have been Protestants. 
 Mitchel was a man of great literary talent; indeed, a man 
 
164 HOURS WITH GREAT IRISHMEN, 
 
 of something like genius. He wrote a clear, bold, incisive 
 prose, keen in its scorn and satire, going directly to the 
 heart of its purpose. As mere prose some of it is worth 
 reading even to-day for its cutting force and pitiless irony. 
 Mitchel issued in his paper week after week a challenge to 
 the government to prosecute him. He poured out the most 
 fiery sedition, and used every incentive that words could 
 supply to rouse a hot-headed people to arms or some im- 
 patient government to some act of severe repression. 
 Mitchel was quite ready to make a sacrifice of himself if it 
 were necessary. It is possible enough that he had per- 
 suaded himself into the belief that a rising in Ireland against 
 the government might be successful." 
 
 Mitchel boldly defied the Castle, and practically chal- 
 lenged it to arrest him. He thought he had the country 
 with him, and so he had in one sense, but when he 
 attempted revolution without any 'of the means of revolu- 
 tion at his command he made a political blunder. He dared 
 the Castle to arrest him and the Castle answered the dare. 
 
 Mitchel was arrested, tried and transported to Bermuda. 
 That was the turning-point of the revolution. The Mitch- 
 elites wished to rise in rescue. They urged, and rightly 
 urged, that if revolution was meant at all, then was the 
 time. But the less extreme men held back. An autumnal 
 rising had been decided upon, and they were unwilling to 
 anticipate the struggle. They carried their point. Mitchel 
 was sentenced to seventeen * years' transportation. When 
 the verdict was delivered he declared that, like the Roman, 
 Scaevola, he could promise hundreds who would follow his 
 example, and as he spoke he pointed to John Martin, 
 Meagher, and others of his associates who were thronging 
 
 * Mr. McCarthy is in error. Mitchel was sentenced to a term of four- 
 teen years, exile beyond the seas. 
 
JOHN MITCHEL. ■ 165 
 
 the galleries of the court. A wild cry came up from all 
 his friends, '* Promise for me, Mitchel ! — promise for me ! " 
 There is not a more impressive, a more dramatically tragic 
 scene in the whole of history. With that cry of a nation's 
 promise ringing in his ears, he was hurried from the court, 
 heavily ironed and encircled by a little army of dragoons, 
 to the war-sloop, "Shearwater," that had been waiting for 
 the verdict and the man. As the war-sloop steamed out 
 of Dublin harbor, the hopes of the Young Irelanders went 
 with her, vain and evanescent, from that hour forth, as the 
 smoke that floated in the steamer's wake. Mitchel had 
 himself discountenanced, to his undying honor, any attempt 
 at rescue.* There is a pathetic little story which records his 
 looking out of the prison van that drove from the court, 
 and seeing a great crov/d and asking where they were going, 
 and being told that they were going to a flower show. There 
 were plenty of men in the movement who would have 
 gladly risked everything to try and rescue Mitchel. But 
 nothing could have been done without unanimity, and the 
 too great caution of the leaders prevented the effort at the 
 only moment when it could have had the faintest hope of 
 success. From that hour the movement was doomed. 
 
 Mitchel escaped from prison under circumstances which 
 raised a controversy into which I shall not enter. He 
 settled down in America as a journalist. He lived for a 
 while in Paris, and a fellow-countryman, who is at once a 
 bright and a witty writer, John Augustus O'Shea, has left 
 in one of his books a most interesting account of his ac- 
 quaintance with Mitchel during those Parisian days. Dur- 
 ing his American life, when the civil war, the great Ameri- 
 can Iliad, broke out, Mitchel found himself on the opposite 
 
 * Another error. John Mitchel utterly, and, as he himself has said, 
 " perhaps too bitterly," declined to discountenance a rescue. He wished 
 the attempt to be made. 
 
166 HOURS WITH GREA T IRISHMEN. 
 
 side in politics from his comrade, Meagher. Meagher 
 wore the blue uniform of a Federal officer; Mitchel's two 
 sons met their death gallantly while wearing the grey cloth 
 of the Confederate service. Years and years later Mitchel 
 came back to the land of his birth. He was elected to 
 Parliament for Tipperary, his election was disqualified after 
 a fierce, angry debate in the House of Commons; he was re- 
 elected only to die nine days later; he lies buried in his 
 birthplace, Newry,* not too far from those beeches and 
 sycamores of old Rostrevor. 
 
 Sir Charles Gavan Duffy, who has given pen portraits of 
 all his colleagues, thus depicts Mitchel: "He was rather 
 above the middle size, well-made, and with a face which 
 was thoughtful and comely, though pensive blue eyes and 
 masses of soft, brown hair, a stray ringlet of which he had 
 the habit of twining round his finger while he spoke, gave 
 it perhaps too feminine a cast." Another friend of 
 Mitchel's has spoken to me of his wavy hair drawn across 
 his forehead; of his eyes, very bright, and often half closed 
 in an almost languishing fashion, and of his soft, semi- 
 caressing, attractive manner. He was at all times of a 
 curious, impetuous humor. 
 
 Shortly before he brought out his own newspaper he was 
 standing in the printing-room of a well-known newspaper in 
 the South of Ireland, talking to its editor, an able and sin- 
 cere Irishman who played a conspicuous part in Parliament, 
 and who is now dead. The editor was objecting to the name 
 of Mitchel's paper, which he thought might be likely to 
 rouse dissension or disapproval. " My dear fellow," 
 Mitchel answered swiftly, " I would call my paper ' The 
 Thug ' if I thought that by so doing I could arouse more 
 general attention to Irish wrongs." On another occasion 
 
 *A third error. John Mitchel was born in the county of Derry, 
 within a few miles of the city of that name. 
 
JOHN MITCH EL- 167 
 
 he met in society at some public dinner or such matter a 
 well-known English writer and politician, David Urquhart. 
 Mr. Urquhart was a gifted, opinionated, vehement man who 
 had lived much in the East, and was an impassioned Russo- 
 phobist. He, of course, got into an argument with Mitchel, 
 and began pointing out to him that Mitchel's schemes could 
 not and ought not to come to anything because of the com- 
 plications with Russia which might ensue. Mitchel listened 
 to him for a while with decent patience, but at last he could 
 stand it no longer, and when Urquhart came to a pause 
 in one of his lengthy tirades, Mitchel said, sharply and de- 
 cisively — '* I don't care in the least about Russia, and I 
 don't care in the least about you." This ended the argu- 
 ment then. Let it serve to end my paper now. 
 
SOME THOUGHTS ON THE EIGHTH OF APRIL. 
 
 Neither the history of the reign nor the history of the 
 century afford any parallel to the scenes which I witnessed 
 in the House of Commons last Thursday. The records of 
 contemporary events afford many examples of great and 
 stirring moments in the chronicle of the Commons' Cham- 
 ber at Westminster. The introduction of great measures 
 of social, political reform, the debates which have been big 
 with the fates of Ministers and which have resulted in the 
 overthrow of administrations that seemed yesterday to be 
 deeply rooted in popular favor, the explanations consequent 
 upon momentous resignations, all these varied means of 
 arousing intense political excitement, have each in their 
 turn thronged the panelled room with members and lined 
 the walls with the breathless spectators of epoch-making 
 episodes. But the rise of no measure and the fall of no 
 Minister have ever stirred St. Stephens's to such fever fire 
 of excitement as that which animated it all through the 
 long hours of last Thursday's life. Neither the introduc- 
 tion of the first Reform bill with all the fervid emotions of 
 the consequent debates-, nor the excitements of such Par- 
 liamentary catastrophes as the dismissal of Lord Palmerston 
 in 1852 and the defeats of Mr. Gladstone in 1866 and 1885, 
 can be fairly said to offer even a distant parallel to the 
 passions, the enthusiasm, the fear and hope and fury and 
 exultation which swept the surface and stirred the depths 
 of the greatest legislative assemblage of modern times. 
 
 It has been my good fortune to take part in some of the 
 most thrilling incidents that have marked the stormy course 
 
THOUGHTS ON THE EIGHTH OF APRIL. 169 
 
 of Parliamentary history for the last six years. From the 
 galleries of the House of Commons I have watched the stars 
 while the battle for Irish rights has raged below me; from 
 those high places I have seen night fade into dawn and 
 dawn become noon, and the day's strength wane into even- 
 ing, and through night to dawn again, following the fortunes 
 of the handful of Irish members who were making so brave 
 a front against the hostile House that raved against them 
 and roared around them, and strove again and again to con- 
 quer, to crush, to silence them. I have seen the represent- 
 atives of the Irish nation again and again expelled from the 
 Chamber for their persistence in defending the rights and 
 pressing the claims of their countrymen. I have shared in the 
 tumultuous emotions of the two fateful hours in which suc- 
 cessive Ministries fell on the cause of coercion before the 
 votes of an united Irish party. All these scenes and in- 
 cidents are graven upon my memory, but no one of them, 
 not the fiercest and stormiest^ could for a moment compare 
 with the keen, almost agonizing excitement and the vast 
 historical dignity of the scene which the House of Commons 
 presented at four o'clock on the afternoon of Thursday last, 
 the ever memorable 8th of April. 
 
 One great fact rises distinctly starlike, out of all the con- 
 fusion and passion and heart-burning and heart-upliftmg 
 of that memorable day, the fact that a great English Minis- 
 ter, the foremost and most famous statesman of his age, 
 has recognized, speaking to an attentive Senate, to an atten- 
 tive nation, to an attentive world, the right of the Irish 
 people to self-governmxent. That great historic fact is at 
 once the triumph and the justification of an oppressed but 
 unconquered nationality. Whatever may be thought of 
 the particular measure which Mr. Gladstone has introduced, 
 whatever maybe its ultimate fate in the House of Commons 
 or in the House of Peers, whatever modifications, improve- 
 
170 HOURS WITH GREA T IRISHMEN. 
 
 ments, extensions it may be found capable of sustaining are 
 all but details, vastly important in themselves, but for the 
 moment unimportant in contrast with the stupendous, the 
 monumental importance of the recognition by the fore- 
 most of English statesmen of that right of Ireland, to make 
 her own laws for her own people, which for so many cen- 
 turies has been so persistently, so bloodily, denied to her. 
 There are certain hours in the lives of great men which are 
 in themselves epochs, hours when a single speech is more 
 momentous, more far-reaching, than half a dozen revolu- 
 tions. Such was the hour which but a week ago reversed 
 the verdict of seven centuries; such was the speech in 
 which Mr, Gladstone apologized for the folly of eighty-six 
 years of false and fatal union, and frankly recognized, late 
 in the day, indeed, but not too late, that Ireland contained 
 a people " rightly struggling to be free." 
 
 The great Prime Minister had the advantage of address- 
 ing the greatest speech of his life to the largest audience 
 that was ever gathered together within the precincts of the 
 popular assembly. But crowded though the chamber was, 
 and crowded, too, with perhaps, the most remarkable 
 throng of men that has ever been gathered together within 
 the walls of Westminster, it was for me more closely 
 crowded and with a yet more eminent congregation. My 
 mind's eye, gifted for the moment by my fancy with the 
 powers of second sight, peopled it with further presences. 
 An observer in one of the choking spaces set apart for 
 strangers, looking down upon those packed benches, upon 
 that floor where, for the first time within the memory of man, 
 seats had been placed for members upon the blocked gang- 
 ways, upon the thickly-clustering groups behind the Speaker's 
 chair and below the bar, upon the overflowing passages, and 
 groaning galleries, might well have imagined that so full a 
 
THOUGHTS ON THE EIGHTH OF APRIL. 171 
 
 House could scarcely be made fuller even by the addition 
 of a solitary individual. 
 
 In sober fact, it would have been hard indeed to find 
 room for another human being in the dense assemblage, or 
 for the over-taxed and enervating atmosphere to afford him 
 a life-sustaining supply of oxygen, if room had been found 
 for the sole of his foot. It was not, however, with living, 
 breathing entities, but with the bodyless creation of fancy, 
 that my mind increased the assemblage within that swarm- 
 ing Senate House. As my gaze wandered over that vast sea 
 of human faces they seemed to change to faces scarcely less 
 famihar, though they have long been strange to sunlight 
 and starlight, and in a moment I had summoned a new and 
 more Imperial Parliament, a Parliament not of the quick 
 but of the dead. My conception making this new " call of 
 the House" evoked from the long avenues of the past a 
 world of stately shadows. The Irish benches crowded with 
 my enthusiastic colleagues rallying in exultation around the 
 chosen leader of their country and their cause faded — so it 
 seemed to my reverie — from my sight, and in their room a 
 legion of mighty and mournful phantoms presented them- 
 selves to me. Phantoms of many epochs and of many ages 
 rose in a great cloud together, and my vision following the 
 lines of their dim ranks caught here and there with the 
 feverish rapidity of a dream, well-known and venerated 
 countenances dear beyond all phrase to Irish memories. 
 
 The white-haired, blind, old man, whose stalwart frame 
 was bowed by sorrow, and whose sightless gaze had in it 
 such a wistful pathos, was not he the exiled Earl whose 
 grave in Roman earth is now the shrine of so many pil- 
 grimages ? Near him, his soldier's face writhed with pain 
 or poison, came the great kinsman of his House, Owen Roe. 
 Sarsfield, with the blood of Landen on his breast and hand; 
 Talbot of Tyrconnell's weary, haughty face; Roger Moore, 
 
172 HOURS WITH GREA T IRISHMEN. 
 
 handsome, chivalrous, devoted; "William Molyneux, with the 
 " Case of Ireland " in his grasp; the small, fervid figure of 
 the Dean of St. Patrick's with " fierce indignation" blazing 
 in his wild, dark eyes; Lucas, with his volume clasped in his 
 embrace; the gallant bearing of Charlemont; Grattan, in 
 the uniform of the volunteers; Flood, restless and repent- 
 ant; Curran, swaying with stormy eloquence — these and 
 many others floated before me in proud succession. 
 
 With them were yet livelier and loftier presences, Edward 
 Fitzgerald, his comely body gashed with more scars than 
 Caesar's, and by baser hands; Tone, with that grim wound 
 in his throat; Bagenal Har^^ey and Father John; the 
 Brothers Sheares in death as in life undivided; and Emmet, 
 with the livid circle round his young neck. On they came, 
 the long line of martyrs who had died to defeat the fatal 
 principles which the Act of Union formulated, and who 
 seemed now to rise from their graves at the sound of the 
 knell of that principle. 
 
 Nor were the phantoms ot my fancy confined alone to 
 our side of the House, nor to the Irish benches. Across 
 the floor, even on the seat where the Ministers of the hour 
 were grouped together, I seemed to discern the benign 
 shadows of the illustrious dead. Chesterfield and Fitz- 
 william stood there side by side. The genius of Charles 
 James Fox seemed to hover like an inspiring influence 
 about the bowed form of the Prime Minister, and the like- 
 ness of Burke leaned over to prompt his brilliant biogra- 
 pher and foHower with his silver voice, and to encourage 
 him with his golden counsel. Methought, too, that a few 
 more ominous and forbidding shapes were huddled together 
 in angry companionship upon the Opposition side of the 
 House, lurking furtively in the dark spaces behind the 
 Speaker's chair. Cornwallis and Castlereagh, and Pitt, 
 Stafford, and Essex, and Perrot, and Bagnal, Cromwell and 
 
THOUGHTS ON THE EIGHTH OF APRIL. 173 
 
 William of Nassau, with such baser spectres as Sir, and 
 Swan, and Higgins, emerged momentarily from the dark- 
 ness and vanished again with the fitful confusion of a dream. 
 All this ghostly army, multiplying in bewildering rapidity, 
 swayed and floated silently forward, their pale faces shining 
 with wild emotions of hope and exultation and hate. Then 
 a great cry rose up, a fierce, tumultuous yell of triumph 
 and salutation; the grey ghosts seemed to shudder at the 
 sound, and swiftly vanished as the clamor rose to their 
 place of shades. St. Stephens was itself again, and the 
 assembled, living, breathing multitude were — the majority 
 of them — cheering themselves hoarse in welcome of Mr. 
 Gladstone, who had just risen to his feet. As I listened to 
 the orator, and heard the impassioned words in which an 
 English Minister, for the first time in the face of all the 
 world, recognized the rights of the Irish people, I felt that 
 indeed the mighty dead might well be content with that 
 day's business, and might, indeed, if it were permitted to 
 them, quit their resting-places to share in the triumph of a 
 day which marks an epoch in Irish history — an epoch which 
 seem.s as if it were destined to end the old evil order of re- 
 pression and revolution and open the new order of freedom 
 and of hope. 
 
THE THIRTY TYRANTS. 
 
 Exactly a year ago, in this same summer month of June, 
 and, by one of those fantastic fatalities which sometimes 
 attend upon great events, upon the self-same day of the 
 week, I found myself one of an Irish party at St. Stephens's 
 shouting themselves hoarse in triumph over the fall of Mr. 
 Gladstone's administration. Last night, or rather this 
 morning — for it is not many hours ago since I left West- 
 minster in the slowly whitening dawn — I was again a unit 
 in a greater Irish party which lent this time all the thunders 
 of its homage to the same statesman, once more facing de- 
 feat. History will perceive no inconsistency in the action 
 of the Irish representatives. A year ago they triumphed 
 over the downfall of Mr. Gladstone. To-day they are his 
 liegemen in defeat, and will yet be his allies in victory. 
 They exulted over a defeated Premier when that Premier 
 was, and for the last time, identified with the old hateful 
 policy of coercion, the policy which persisted in regarding 
 the delegates of the Irish people not as the chosen mouth- 
 pieces of their country's wrongs, but as factionists to be 
 silenced at all hazards, by fair means if possible, but in any 
 case and any way to be silenced. Within the year Mr. 
 Gladstone has shown himself to be blest with that greatest 
 of all statesmanlike capacities, the capacity to learn. He 
 has frankly and freely admitted that he misinterpreted the 
 desires and underrated the unanimity of the Irish people, 
 and his genius has lifted him to the crest of that great wave 
 of Nationalism which last year swept the Irish constituencies 
 from shore to shore, and sent eighty-four men across the 
 
THE THIRTY TYRANTS, 1*^5 
 
 Irish sea to ask Home Rule for Ireland. The verdict of 
 history will applaud the "inconsistency" of Ireland and 
 the " inconsistency" of Mr. Gladstone. 
 
 What will the verdict of history be upon the men who last 
 night broke away, not merely from the ties of party, but 
 from the very principles of the great Liberal Party to which 
 they nominally belonged, and who did all that lay in their 
 power to humiliate their great statesman, and to fasten 
 tighter still upon Ireland the loosening bondage of ascend- 
 ancy ? Thirty votes! the number of the majority is ominous 
 and appropriate. For thirty pieces of silver Judas sold his 
 Master. For thirty votes the new political Judas betrays 
 his leader and his cause. Or let us take another example. 
 Let us think of those thrice ten who tortured Athens, and 
 let us hail those thrice ten who to-day would torture Ireland 
 with the well-earned title of the Thirty Tyrants. The Tory 
 Party acted in accordance with their eldest traditions and 
 their fondest faith when they trooped into the " No " lobby 
 on last night. Coercion is the God of their idolatry, and 
 if they once denied him, not merely under cover of secret 
 conclave and veiled intrigue, but in the open light of day, 
 they have bitterly repented of their brief apostacy and 
 have returned with joyful hearts to the familiar altars. So 
 they at last acted in complete obedience to their convictions. 
 Can the same be said of the seceding Liberals, of the 
 hangers-on of Lord Hartington, the adherents of Mr. Cham- 
 berlain, and the " stalwarts " of Mr. Caine ? The men who 
 last night destroyed the Home Rule Bill did so in direct de- 
 fiance of their own principles, in direct denial in many cases 
 of their own wishes. Many of them were pledged, as far 
 as they could be pledged, to the principle of Home Rule, 
 and yet they did their best to make Home Rule impossible. 
 Happily, they will not, they cannot succeed. They can de- 
 lay the progress of civilization and of freedom as a nail may 
 
176 HOURS WITH GREAT IRISHMEN. j 
 
 delay the movements of some mighty piece of machinery,' 
 but the paltry obstacle is soon set aside, the machine workfi 
 freely, civilization proceeds upon its course, and mankind 
 at large forgets that such a thing as a nail or a " stalwart " 
 ever existed. 
 
 It was a curious study in living history to be in the House 
 of Commons last night and survey some of the men, of 
 whom Mr. Gladstone might say, in the tragic words of 
 Anthony, that they have 
 
 " Packed cards with Csesar and false-played my glory 
 Unto an enemy's triumph." 
 
 It was a curious and instructive sight to see the Whigs 
 and ''stalwarts" sitting in sullen silence while their chief, 
 the leader who had led them again and again to victory, 
 was being insulted by the jeers, the laughter and the inter- 
 ruptions of the Tory party. They were silent. It is to be 
 hoped that they were ashamed of the allies they had given 
 themselves over to, allies who could afford to taunt a states- 
 man doomed to defeat by his own followers. It was a curious 
 sight to see Lord Hartington and Mr. Chamberlain, osten- 
 tatious in the display of their "Unholy Alliance," lean 
 across the intervening gangway and laugh and whisper to- 
 gether while the Prime Minister was speaking. Curious, 
 because it carried the mind back to days not very far distant, 
 days when Mr. Gladstone had for the time laid down his 
 leadership, and when Lord Hartington was the head or 
 figure-head of the Liberal army, and when Mr. Chamber- 
 lain in a scornful speech of fierce rebellion against his rule 
 — Mr. Chamberlain was then a Radical — spoke of Lord 
 Hartington contem-ptuously as the " late leader of the Lib- 
 eral party." Mr. Chamberlain has reinstated Lord Harting- 
 ton in the lofty position from which he then dethroned him; 
 it remains to be seen how long that " truce of God " will 
 
THE THIRTY TYRANTS. 177 
 
 last; he has for the moment cashiered his master, it remains 
 to be seen whether he has not, in the words of Shakespeare's 
 " Rosalind," " overthrown- more than his enemies." 
 
 More curious perhaps even to the philosophic mind than 
 the contrast of the past with the present Chamberlain, was 
 the contrast of the past with the present Bright. Parliamen- 
 tarians, and politicians who are not Parliamentarians, need 
 not have very long memories to recollect a certain famous 
 " cave " of nineteen years ago which also had the tempo- 
 rary triumph of overthrowing Mr. Gladstone. The mem- 
 bers of that "cave" are known to satiric history as the 
 "tea-room party," and they became the victims of the 
 scornful invective of Mr. Bright at a time when Mr. Bright' s 
 invective was still a serious weapon. Mr. Bright was indig- 
 nantly eager to be informed what could be done in Parlia- 
 mentary life if every man was to pursue his own little game. 
 '*A costermonger and his donkey," Mr. Bright said, 
 " would take a week to travel from here to London" — (he 
 was addressing a meeting in Birmingham) — "and yet by 
 running athwart the London and Northwestern line, they 
 might bring to total- destruction a great express train." 
 The Costermonger and his Donkey are at work again — I 
 leave the leaders of the " Cave " to divide between them- 
 selves the doubtful honor of the two titles at their old busi- 
 ness of wrecking trains, and behold this time we have Mr. 
 Bright perched upon the barrow — a tragi-comic bier enough 
 for a great political reputation. Mr. Bright added some 
 words to his ingenious parable of 1867, which members of 
 the "stalwart" party would do well to paste inside their 
 hats. "Thus," he went on, "very small men, who during 
 their whole political lives have not advanced the question 
 of reform by one hair's breadth, or by one moment in time, 
 can at a critical hour like this throw themselves athwart the 
 objects of a great party, and mar, it may be, a great measure 
 
178 HOURS WITH GREAT IRISHMEN, 
 
 that ought to affect the interests of the country beneficially? 
 for all time." I have one more quotation to make from 
 Mr. Bright before I have done with him. He made a 
 speech in Dublin in 1866, in the days when he still professed 
 to be the friend of Ireland, in which he said: " If I have in 
 past times felt an unquenchable sympathy with the suffer- 
 ings of your people, you may rely upon it that if there be 
 an Irish member to speak for Ireland he will find me heartily 
 at his side." Mr. Bright once scored a strong point against 
 certain of his enemies by comparing them to the False 
 Prophets in Scripture story whose "tongues were glibbed 
 with lies." What shall be said of Mr. Bright as a prophet 
 now ? Twenty years ago he volunteered to stand by the 
 side of a single Irish member; last night he was face to face 
 with eighty-five Irish members, and he voted against Ireland 
 and against freedom. 
 
 Enough of this "cave" and its composition. I fancy 
 that some of the inmates of that "cave" are in about as 
 pleasant a position as Sinbad the sailor was in when he 
 found himself in his cave. I fancy that many of these 
 Adullamites felt in their hearts much the same desire that 
 Sinbad felt with regard to his Cave, either that they had 
 never got into it, or, having got in, they might happily win 
 their way out again. I fancy, too, that the political lives 
 of many of them will be sacrificed as the lives of the com- 
 panions of Sinbad were sacrificed in order that Sinbad 
 may escape, and that the floor of the " Cave " will be'' whit- 
 ened with the bones of ruined reputation. The "genial 
 ruffianism " which Mr. Labouchere playfully discovers in 
 Mr. Caine may have its attractions to the speculative mind 
 of the member for Northhampton, but familiarity therewith 
 may be purchased by luckless "stalwarts" at too dear a 
 price. 
 
 The fate of this particular measure does not greatly con- 
 
THE THIRTY TYRANTS. 1'79 
 
 cerd us. It has fallen a victim to the cabal of a faction, to 
 the alarm of that well-nigh extinct political curiosity, the 
 "Old Whig," and to the intrigues of embittered and am- 
 bitious selfishness. Though fear and faction, and that 
 fierce desire to become a Personage which has made the 
 honorable member for Burnley the Lepidus of the discon- 
 tented Triumvirate, though these and all the other allies 
 that could be rallied have succeeded in upsetting the meas- 
 ure, neither the Irish Party, nor Ireland, nor the millions 
 of Ireland's friends in England, are in the least dismayed. 
 The principle of Home Rule for Ireland was established for- 
 ever on the eighth of last April. Were the cabal against the 
 Bill ten times more numerous, were its leaders ten times 
 more able and influential, it could not prevail against the 
 great, the inevitable principle of Home Rule for Ireland. 
 The principle of progress, the principle of liberty and jus- 
 tice, once laid down in the House of Commons by a great 
 Liberal Minister, can never more be gone back upon, 
 abandoned, or lost. The sun stood still, indeed, upon 
 Ajalon for the Jewish captain, but no such miraculous in- 
 terference with the courses of nature will be vouched for 
 the " Cave " inside the House of Commons and the Loyal 
 and Patriotic Union outside it. So surely as the days will 
 move in their appointed measure, indifferent alike to the 
 indignation of the noble marquis or the screams of Mr. 
 Lecky, so surely will the principle of Home Rule for Ire- 
 land proceed upon its triumphant course, gaining power and 
 volume and dignity, till it end at College Green. 
 
NOTE BY THE PUBLISHERS. 
 
 Mr. McCarthy's " Outline of Irish History" is really a 
 glance over the annals of Ireland from a conservative stand- 
 point. It prepares the way for a more extensive reading 
 of what is, after all, the history of the most popular strug- 
 gle for liberty of all time. The Irish flag has never been 
 lowered. Raised in the beginning centuries ago for na- 
 tional defense and national independence, it has been handed 
 down from generation to generation unfailingly. At times 
 the struggle has taken different shapes, but the main charac- 
 ter has ever remained the same. Under the banner of Irish 
 nationality have been fought the battles of equality, of civil 
 and religious liberty, the wars of " the masses against the 
 classes," and to Ireland, fettered and bound as she is, and 
 as anomalous as it may seem, is in no small degree due the 
 onward march of democracy both in Europe and elsewhere. 
 In future numbers of our Library we shall give the chapters 
 of Irish history in all their interesting detail. How closely 
 connected with the story of human progress that history is, 
 will yet be the theme of many a commentator when success 
 crowns all the glorious effort that has been made in behalf 
 of Irish nationality. In the meantime we hold that no ade- 
 quate idea of what humanity has had to contend with in its 
 progress towards higher civilization can be had without a 
 study of Irish history. 
 
AN OUTLINE OF IRISH HISTORY, 
 
 From the Earliest Times to the 
 Present Day. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 THE LEGENDS. 
 
 As we peer doubtfully into the dim past of Irish his- 
 tory Vv^e seem to stand like Odysseus at the yawning 
 mouth of Hades. The thin. shades troop about us, and 
 flit hither and thither fitfully in shadowy confusion. 
 Stately kings sweep by in their painted chariots. Yel- 
 low-haired heroes rush to battle shaking their spears 
 and shouting their war-songs, while the thick gold tor- 
 ques rattle on arm and throat, and their many-colored 
 cloaks stream on the wind. They sweep by and are 
 lost to sight, and their places are taken by others in a 
 shifting, splendid, confused pageant of monarchs and 
 warriors, and beautiful women for whose love the hereos 
 are glad to die and the kings to peril their crowns ; 
 and among them all move the majestic, white-robed 
 bards, striking their golden harps and telling the tales 
 of the days of old, and handing down the names of 
 heroes forever. What may we hope to distinguish of 
 this weltering world of regal figures, whirled by before 
 our eyes as on that infernal wind which seared the eyes 
 of Dante ? The traveller in Egypt goes down into the 
 tombs of the kings at ancient Thebes. By the flaring 
 flicker of a candle he discerns dimly on the walls about 
 him endless processions of painted figures — the images 
 of Jtings and beggars, of soldiers and slaves, of the teem- 
 ing life of ages — portrayed in glowing colors all around. 
 It is but for a moment, while his candle is slowly burn- 
 ing down, that he seems to stand in the thronged cen- 
 
182 AN OUTLINE OF IRISH HISTORY. 
 
 turies of Egyptian dynasties with all their named and 
 nameless figures ; and then he passes out again into 
 the upper air and level sunlight of the Theban valley, 
 as one who has dreamed a chaotic dream. 
 
 Groping in the forgotten yesterday of Irish legend is 
 like this groping in an Egyptian tomb. We are in a 
 great sepulchral chamber — a hall of the dead, whose 
 walls are pictured with endless figures, huddled to- 
 gether in bewildering fantastic medley. What can we 
 make out, holding up our thin taper and gazing doubt- 
 fully at the storied walls ? Yon fair woman, with the 
 crowd of girls about her, is the Lady Ceasair, who came 
 to Ireland before the deluge, with fifty women and three 
 men, Bith, Ladra, and Fintain. The waters swept away 
 this curiously proportioned colony, and their place was 
 taken "in the sixtieth year of the age of Abraham" by 
 the parricide Partholan, of the stock of Japhet. For 
 three hundred years his descendants ruled, until a pesti- 
 lence destroyed them all. The Nemedhians, under Ne- 
 medh, loomed up from the shores of the Black Sea and 
 swarmed over Ireland. They were harassed by plagues 
 and by incessant battlings w4th the Fomorians, a race 
 of savage sea-kings, descendants of Cham, who had 
 settled in the Western Isles. In the end the Fomorians 
 triumphed ; they drove out the remnant of Nemedhians 
 whom plague and sword had spared. This remnant 
 fled, some to the north of Europe to become the ances- 
 tors of the Firbolgs, some to Greece to give a parent- 
 age to the Tuatha de Danann, and some to Britain, 
 which took its name from the Nemedhian leader, Bri- 
 otan-Maol. 
 
 After a time, the first of the Nemedhian refugees, the 
 Firbolgs, came back to Ireland, to be soon dispossessed 
 by another invasion of Nemedhian descendants, the 
 Tuatha de Danann, who came from Greece, and who 
 were deeply skilled in all wizardries. Their sorceries 
 stood them in good stead, for the Firbolgs made a fierce 
 resistance. A desperate battle was fought, in which 
 the Firbolg king was slain. His grave is still shown 
 on the Sligo strand, and it is fabled that the tide w^l 
 never cover it. Nuada, the king of the Tuatha de 
 Danann, lost his right hand in this fight, and seems to 
 have gone near losing his kingship in consequence, as 
 
AN OUTLINE OF IRISH HISTORY, 183 
 
 his warlike people would have refused to recognize a 
 mutilated monarch. But there were cunning artificers 
 among the Greeks. One of these fashioned a silver 
 hand for the king, who was known as Nuada of the 
 Silver Hand ever after. The first of " The Three Sor- 
 rowful Tales of Erin " belongs to the reign of this Sov- 
 ereign with the Argent fist — the tale of the fate of the 
 children of Turenn. The three sons of Turenn, Brian, 
 Ur, and Urcar, killed Kian, father of Luga of the Long 
 Arms, and one of the three sons of Canta, with whom 
 the three sons of Turenn were at feud. Six times the 
 sons of Turenn buried the body of their victim, and six 
 times the earth cast it up again, but on the seventh 
 burial the body remained in the grave. As the sons of 
 Turenn rode from the spot a faint voice came from the 
 ground, warning them that the blood they had spilled 
 would follow them to the fulfilment of their doom. 
 Luga of the long Arms, seeking for his father, came to 
 the grave, and there the stones of the earth took voice 
 and told him that his father lay beneath. Luga un- 
 earthed the body, and vowed vengeance on the sons of 
 Turenn over it. He then hastened to Tara, to the 
 court of Nuada of the Silver Hand, and denounced the 
 sons of Turenn. In those days the friends of any mur- 
 dered person might either receive a fine, called " eric," 
 in compensation, or might seek the death of the mur- 
 derer. Luga called for the ''eric." He demanded 
 three apples, the skin of a pig, a spear, two steeds and 
 a chariot, seven pigs, a hound-whelp, a cooking-spit, 
 and three shouts on a hill. To this '' eric " the sons of 
 Turenn agreed readily enough before all the court. 
 Then Luga explained himself more fully. The three 
 apples were to be plucked from the garden of His- 
 berna, in the east of the world. They were the color 
 of burnished gold, and of the taste of honey, and cured 
 wounds and all manner of sickness, and had many 
 other wonderful qualities. The garden of Hisberna 
 was carefully guarded, and none were allowed to take 
 its precious fruit. The pig-skin belonged to the King 
 of Greece, and possessed the power of healing whoso- 
 ever touched it. The spear was a venomed weapon 
 with a blazing head, belonging to the King of Persia. 
 The two steeds and chariot belonged to the King of 
 
184 AN OUTLINE OF IRISH HISTORY. 
 
 Sicily. The seven pigs were the delight of Asal, King 
 of the Golden Pillars, for they could be killed and 
 eaten one day, and become alive and well the next. 
 The hound-whelp belonged to the King of Iroda, and 
 every wild beast of the forest fell powerless before it. 
 The cooking-spit belonged to the warlike women of the 
 island of Fincara, who never yet gave a cooking-spit to 
 any one who did not overcome them in battle. The hill 
 on which the three shouts had to be given was the hill 
 of Midkena, in the north of Lochlann, the country of 
 the Danes, which w^as always guarded by Midkena and 
 his sons, who never allowed any one to shout on it. 
 
 The sons of Turenn were much daunted by this ter- 
 rible " eric," but they were bound to fulfil it. They 
 set sail in an enchanted canoe, the ]Vave Sweeper^ to 
 the garden of Hisberna, and succeeded, by turning 
 themselves into hawks, in carrying off the apples They 
 then visited Greece in the guise of learned poets from 
 Erin, and after a desperate fight overcame the King of 
 Greece and his champions, and carried off the pig-skin. 
 Leaving the shores of Greece " and all its blue streams," 
 they sailed to Persia, where they had to fight another 
 battle with the king before they could carry off the 
 blazing weapon in triumph. They then voyaged to 
 Sicily, overcame its monarch, and drove off the famous 
 chariot and horses. Next came the turn of Asal, King 
 of the Golden Pillars, but their fame had gone before 
 them, and Asal gave up his seven pigs without a con- 
 test. He even accompanied them to Iroda, and aided 
 them to obtain the hound-whelp. 
 
 Meanwhile the fame of the successes of the sons of 
 Turenn had come to Erin, and Luga of the Long Arms 
 cast a Druidical spell over them, so that they quite for- 
 got the cooking-spit and the three shouts on a hill, and 
 came back to Erin thinking that they had fulfilled 
 their ''eric." But when Luga saw their spoils, he re- 
 minded them of the unfulfilled part of the compact, and 
 the heroes had to set out again with heavy hearts, for 
 they knew that Luga desired their death. When Brian 
 got to the island of Fincara, which lies beneath the 
 sea, his beauty so pleased the warlike women that they 
 gave him a cooking-spit without any trouble. Now all 
 that was left to the heroes to do was to shout the three 
 
AN OUTLINE OF IRISH HISTORY. 185 
 
 shouts on Midkena's hill. They sailed out into the 
 north till they came to it, and there they fought des- 
 perately with Midkena and his sons, and overcame and 
 killed them. But they were wounded themselves nigh 
 unto death, and with the greatest difficuly they raised 
 three feeble shouts on Midkena's hill. Then, wounded 
 as they were, they sailed back to Erin, and implored 
 Luga to let them taste of the apples of Hisberna, that 
 they might recover. But Luga taunted them with their 
 murder of his father, and would be content with noth- 
 ing short of their death ; so they died, and the blood 
 of Kian was avenged. 
 
 While Nuada's silver hand was making, his place as 
 king was taken by a regent named Bres. But when the 
 silver hand was finished, Bres had to resign, to his great 
 wrath ; and he left the country and roused up a huge host 
 of Fomorians under Balor of the Mighty Blows, and in- 
 vaded Ireland, and was totally defeated. Balor of the 
 Mighty Blows slew the poor silver-handed monarch, 
 and was slain in his turn by Luga Long- Arms. Then 
 Luga became king himself, and reigned long and happi- 
 ly, and many Tuatha de Danann reigned after him. But 
 their time came at last to be overthrown by a fifth set 
 of invaders — the Milesians, the sons of Milidh. The 
 Milesians were an eastern race, whom hoar tradition 
 had set seeking a destined island ; and they pursued the 
 star of their destiny, the fine-eyed UU-Erin, to the Irish 
 shore. But they had no small trouble to win their 
 way ; the Tuatha de Danann kept them off as long as 
 they could by spells and incantations, which wrapped 
 the Milesian fleet in thick folds of impenetrable mist, 
 and shook it with storms, and tossed the ships together 
 on writhing waves. In that fierce tempest of dark en- 
 chantments many of the sons of Milidh perished ; but 
 they effected a landing at last, and carried all before 
 them, and drove the De Danann into the fastnesses of 
 the hills ; and the Milesian leaders, Heber and Heremon, 
 divided the island between them. They quarrelled 
 about the division soon after, and Heremon killed He- 
 ber and took the whole island to himself — a Milesian 
 version of Romulus. To this period belongs the second 
 sorrowful tale of Erin — the tale of the fate of the chil- 
 dren of Lir, 
 
186 AN OUTLINE OF IRISH HISTORY. 
 
 After the battle of Tailltenn, in which the Milesians 
 won Ireland, the defeated Tuatha de Danann of the five 
 provinces met together and chose Bove Derg king over 
 them all. Lir, of Shee Finnalia, alone refused to ac- 
 knowledge the new monarch, and retired to his own 
 country. Some of the chieftains called for vengeance 
 on Lir, but Bove Derg resolved to win his allegiance 
 by friendship. He offered him the choice of his three 
 foster-daughters — Eve, Eva, and Alva — in marriage. 
 Lir relented, recognized the authority of Bove Derg, 
 and married Eve, who bore him one daughter, Finola, 
 and three sons, Aed, Ficia, and Conn. Eve died. Lir was 
 for a time inconsolable, but on the advice of Bove Derg 
 he married the second foster-daughter, Eva. The new 
 step-mother, after the fashion of fairytales, grew jealous 
 of Lir's love for his children, and, like the woman in 
 the German folk-story, turned them into swans. Mere 
 metamorphosis did not content her ; she laid this 
 further doom on the children of Lir — that they must 
 pass three hundred years on the smooth Lake Darvan, 
 three hundred years on the wild Sea of Moyle, and yet 
 three hundred more on the Western Sea. Nor was the 
 spell to be loosened until the sound of a Christian bell 
 was first heard in Erin. The only mitigation of their 
 sufferings w^as the privilege of retaining their human 
 voices. The wricked step-mother was punished by Bove 
 Derg by being turned into a demon of the air ; but the 
 children of Lir had to dree their weird for the nine ap- 
 pointed centuries until the coming of Christianity, when 
 they were disenchanted by St. Kemoc. In their human 
 form they were very, old ; the saint baptized them, and 
 they died and went to heaven. 
 
 What shall be said of the hundred and eighteen 
 kings of the Milesian race ? Which of those crowned 
 figures is Tighearnmas, who first taught the Irish the 
 worship of idols, and who distinguished his people 
 into different ranks by the different hues of their gar- 
 ments ? Or the wise Ollav Fodhla ? Or that Cim- 
 baoth, of whom the good chronicler Tighernach, Abbot 
 of Clonmacnoise, wrote that all the Irish records be- 
 fore him were uncertain ? — a respectable antiquity 
 enough, if we might but take this Chimbaoth and his 
 deeds for granted ; for Pythagoras had just been 
 
AN OUTLINE OF IRISH HISTORY. 187 
 
 crowned in the sixteenth Olympiad, and Numa Pom- 
 pilius was still listening to the sweet counsels of the 
 nymph Egeria in the cave celebrated by Juvenal, when 
 Cimbaoth reigned. 
 
 Cimbaoth built the palace of Emania. Ugaine 
 Mor laid all Ireland under solemn oath, fearful as the 
 ancient pledge by Styx ; for he bound them by the 
 visible and invisible elements to respect the rule of his 
 race. But the oath was like thin air, and bound no 
 one. Ugaine's son Lore, and Lore's son Oileel Ainey, 
 were slain by Lore's younger brother Corvac. But 
 Corvac did not slay the grandson Lara ; for the boy 
 feigned idiocy, and the cruel king spared him — to his 
 own doom ; for the boy was brought up by a faithful 
 harper, and in the fulness of time married a king's 
 fair daughter, and passed over to France, and brought 
 thence an army of stout Gaulish spearmen, and came 
 back to his own, and slew Corvac, and founded a 
 mighty line. One of his most famous descendants was 
 Yeoha, surnamed the " Sigher " for the sorrows he en- 
 dured. For he married a fairy bride, whom he loved 
 tenderly ; but after a time there came a stranger from 
 the land of the fairies, and bore her back to the fairy 
 world, and with her went all the joy of Yehoa's life. 
 Then his three sons rose in shameful rebellion against 
 him, and were all slain, and their heads were laid at 
 their father's feet. Good cause for sighing had Yeoha. 
 But he was not all unhappy. His fairy bride had 
 borne him a fairy daughter, the beautiful and gifted 
 Meave, famous in Irish chronicles, and destined to 
 fame through all the world as Queen Mab. Meave was 
 a fierce, warlike woman, a very Semiramis of early 
 Irish story. She married three husbands, and quar- 
 relled with them all. In her reign occurred a battle 
 between two bulls, which is recounted by the bards 
 with all Homeric gravity. Meave lived a hundred 
 years, and waged war with a great hero, Cucullin, and 
 at last the fierce queen died and passed away. To her 
 time belongs the third of the sorrowful tales of Erin — 
 the story of Deirdri, the beautiful daughter of the bard 
 Felemi, doomed at her birth to bring woe to Ulster. 
 
 Conor Mac Nessa, the King of Ulster, adopted her, 
 kept her secluded, like Danae, in a guarded place — not 
 
188 AN OUTLINE OF IRISH HISTORY. 
 
 SO well guarded but that she was once seen by Naesi, son 
 of Usna. Naesi fell in love with her, and she with him. 
 He carried her off with the aid of his two brothers, 
 Anli and Ardan. Conor offered to pardon them if they 
 came back to Emania, and in the end they did agree to 
 return, escorted by a legion of soldiers under Fiachy, a 
 gallant young noble. As they approached Emania, 
 Deirdri, whose heart forebode evil, declared that she 
 saw a blood-red cloud hanging in the distant sky. Her 
 fears were well founded. When they drew near the 
 king's capital, another noble, Durthacht, with another 
 escort, came from Conor, and called upon Fiachy to 
 yield him his charge. Fiachy suspected the treachery, 
 refused to yield up the sons of Usna and the beautiful 
 Deirdri, put them into a palace, and guarded it with 
 his troops. It Avas his duty, he said, to show that the 
 sons of Usna had not trusted in vain to the king's word 
 or his good faith. Then Durthacht began the assault. 
 The sons of Usna wished to surrender themselves, but 
 Fiachy would not allow this — would not even permit 
 them to take any share in the defence ; it was his duty, 
 and his alone. Then the sons of Usna and Deirdri with- 
 drew into the palace, and Deirdri and Naesi played 
 chess, and Anli and Ardan looked on Vv^hile the battle 
 raged outside. This battle deserves a place in story 
 with the fierce strife in the halls of Attila which ends 
 the ''Niebelungen Lied." All through the bloody 
 struggle the sons of Usna seemed intent alone upon 
 the game they were playing, and as defence after de- 
 fence of the palace was taken they remained unmoved, 
 till at last Fiachy was killed, and the enemy rushed in 
 and slew the sons of Usna at the board, and carried off 
 Deirdri to Conor. But the king had no joy of her, 
 for she killed herself soon after. 
 
 Meave's descendants ruled till the reign of Fiacha 
 Finnolaidh, when there occurred a revolt of some tribes 
 called the Attacotti, under a leader nicknamed '' Cat- 
 Head." They slew the king, and placed Cat-Head on 
 his throne. After his death the rightful heirs came back, 
 and the earth showed its approval by bountiful pro- 
 duce : fruitful meadows, fishful rivers, and many-headed 
 woods proclaimed the joy of the Irish earth at the re- 
 turn of its true lords. But the Attacotti rose again 
 
AN OUTLINE OF IRISH HISTORY. 189 
 
 and killed a rightful king, and a curse came upon the 
 earth, and it was fruitless and cornless and fishless, till 
 once again a king of the old race, Tuathal, seized the 
 throne from the usurpers, and pledged the people by- 
 sun and moon and elements to leave the sceptre un- 
 troubled to his posterity. Tuathal then took a piece 
 of land from each of the four provinces, and formed the 
 kingdom of Meath to be the dwelling of the Ard-Righ ; 
 and he built there four painted palaces, one for the king 
 of each province. 
 
 Conn of the Hundred Fights, beloved of the bards, 
 is the next famous king. After Conn's death the land 
 passed to a usurper, Mac Con, for a time only, to re- 
 turn to the most famous of the early kings, Cormac 
 Mac Art, in whose reign the Feni flourished. The Feni 
 are strange and shadowy figures, Ossianic ghosts, mov- 
 ing in dusky vales, and along hill-sides clothed with 
 echoing woods and seamed with the many-colored sides 
 of roaring streams ; or by the angry sea, where the 
 screaming sea-bird wings his flight tow^ards the dark 
 rolling heavens, where the awful faces of other times 
 look out from the clouds, and the dread deities keep 
 their cloudy halls, and the nightly fires burn. It is a 
 land of mists and rains, through w^hich the figures of 
 the heroes loom gigantic. They are the kings of shag- 
 gy boars, the dwellers on battle's wing. They joy in 
 the chase, with their gray, rough-eared dogs about 
 them. They rush against each other in war like the 
 murmur of many waters, clashing their iron shields and 
 shouting their surly songs ; they remember the deeds 
 of the days of old, and deathswander like shadows over 
 their fiery souls. Shadowy Death floats over the hosts, 
 and rejoices at the frequent victims. When a hero falls, 
 his soul goes forth to his fathers in their stormy isle, 
 where they pursue boars of mist along the skirts of 
 winds. Women, w^hite-bosomed and beautiful, move 
 like the music of songs through these antique tales, 
 loving and beloved by heroes and kings of heroes. 
 
 Many of the stories have for their hero Finn, the son 
 of Coul, the Fingal of the Scottish Ossian. Around 
 him are his Feni, who stand in the same relation to him 
 that the twelve peers do to Charlemagne, or the 
 Knights of the Round Table to Arthur. Oisin, the 
 
190 AN OUTLINE OF IRISH HISTORY. 
 
 sweet singer ; Oscar, his glorious son, the Roland of 
 tlie Feni ; Dermat, of whom it might be said, as of 
 Malory's Launcelot, that he was "the truest lover of a 
 sinful man that ever loved woman ; " Bering, the be- 
 loved of Finn, and Kylta, the leader of the Clan Ronan ; 
 Conan, the comic glutton, of craven spirit and bitter 
 tongue, a more grotesque Thersites ; Fergus Finnvel, 
 the warrior poet, reminding one of the Fiddler Knight 
 in the ''Niebelungen Lied ;" Ligna, the swift-footed ; 
 Gaul, the leader of the Clan Morna, whose enmity to 
 the Clan Baskin made the battle of Gawra the Ronces- 
 valles of the Feni. These are all heroes, going through 
 all dangers, ever ready to do and to suffer bravely, bat- 
 tling with all the powers of darkness, loyal to each 
 other, tender and courteous with women, gallant and 
 goodly men, models of an early chivalry. Nor are 
 Finn's famous dogs to be forgotten — Brann and Sko- 
 lan, the companions of all his huntings and all his dan- 
 gers. 
 
 Finn himself is a marvellous figure. In his youth, 
 he, like Theseus, destroyed all sorts of fearful mon- 
 sters. He had also the privilege on occasion of know- 
 ing the future. His hair was gray through enchant- 
 ment long before old age had clawed him in its clutch. 
 Two fair sisters had loved him, and one of them said 
 to the other that she could never love a man with gray 
 hair. Then the other sister, despairing of winning 
 Finn herself, lured him into an enchanted pool, which 
 turned him into a withered old man. The angry Feni 
 forced her to restore to their leader his youth, but his 
 hair remained gray always. 
 
 The people of Lochlann, in the north of Europe, in- 
 vaded Ireland with a mighty fleet, but were wholly 
 routed by the Feni under Finn, in a battle in which 
 Oscar, the son of Oisin, greatly distinguished himself. 
 The enemy were routed with great slaughter, their king 
 was slain, and his young son, Midac, was taken prisoner. 
 Finn brought up Midac in the ranks of the Feni, and 
 treated him like a comrade ; but Midac w^as always med- 
 itating revenge. At last, after fourteen years, Midac 
 induced Sinsar of Greece and the Three Kings of the 
 Torrent to come secretly to Ireland with a mighty host, 
 and they waited in a palace in an island of the Shannon, 
 
AN OUTLINE OF IRISH HISTORY. 191 
 
 below where Limerick now is. Then Midac lured Finn, 
 and many of the bravest of the Feni, who were on a 
 hunting excursion, into a dwelling of his, the palace 
 of the Quicken Trees, as the mountain-ashes were 
 called. The palace was enchanted, and once in it the 
 heroes found themselves unable to get out, or even to 
 move. So they set themselves to sing, in slow union, 
 the Dord-Fian, the war-song of their race, while waiting 
 death. But the party of Feni whom Finn had left be- 
 hind him when he went to the Palace of the Quicken 
 Trees began to grow anxious, and Ficna, Finn's son, 
 and Innsa, his foster-brother, set out to look for them. 
 When the pair came near the Palace of the Quicken 
 Trees they heard the strains of the Dord-Fian ; so they 
 came close, and Finn heard them, and calling out, told 
 them how he and his companions were trapped and 
 waiting death, and that nothing could free them from 
 enchantment but the blood of the Three Kings of the 
 Torrent. Luckily for Finn, the only way to get to the 
 Palace of the Quicken Trees from the palace of the isl- 
 and, where Minac and the foreigners were, lay over a 
 narrow ford, where one man might well keep a thou- 
 sand at stand. This ford Ficna and Innsa defended 
 against desperate odds for long enough. Innsa was 
 first slain, and Ficna is engaged in a desperate struggle 
 with Midac when Dermat appears on the scene. The 
 Feni who were at the hill were growing impatient for 
 the return of Ficna and Innsa, so Oisin sent Dermat 
 and Fatha to look for them. As they approached the 
 Palace of the Quicken Trees they heard the noise of 
 fighting at the ford. Then they ran like the wind to the 
 hill-brow over the river, and looking across in the dim 
 moon-light, saw the whole ford heaped with the bodies 
 of the slain, and Ficna and Midac fighting to the death. 
 Dermat hurled his spear and pierced Midac, who struck 
 Ficna dead, and fell dead himself. Then Dermat and 
 Fatha defended the ford against reinforcements of for- 
 eigners, and Dermat soon killed the Three Kings of the 
 Torrent, and undid the spell that held Finn and his 
 friends. Then all the Feni came together, and the for- 
 eigners were routed with great slaughter ; the King of 
 Greece and his son were both slain, and the remnant 
 
192 AN OUTLINE OF IRISH HISTORY. 
 
 of the enemy fled to their ships in confusion and sailed 
 away. 
 
 The friendship of Dermat and Finn was unfortunate- 
 ly broken for a woman's sake. Finn sought the daugh- 
 ter of Cormac Mac Art, the beautiful Grania, in mar- 
 riage, but the beautiful Grania had long loved the fair- 
 faced Dermat, in secret. When she saw herself about 
 to be wedded to Finn, no longer a young man, she 
 told her love to Dermat, and besought him to carry her 
 away from Finn. At first, Dermat, loyal to his king, 
 refused, though he was, indeed, deeply in love with 
 the beautiful Grania ; but Grania placed him under 
 *'gesa," a kind of mysterious command which heroes 
 were supposed never to disobey, to marry her and carry 
 her off. Dermat, in despair, consulted with his bravest 
 comrades, with Kylta, and Oscar, and Dering, and Oisin 
 himself, and all agreed that Finn would never forgive 
 him, but that he was bound to go with Grania and take 
 the risk. So go he did, and fled with her far from the 
 court of King Cormac. But great, indeed, w^as the 
 wrath of Finn, and for long after he pursued Dermat 
 and Grania from place to place, always seeking to have 
 Dermat killed, and always failing, owing to the skill of 
 Dermat. All the sympathy of the Feni went with Der- 
 mat, and not with Finn. Very beautifully the old story 
 celebrates the love of Dermat and Grania, and the gal- 
 lant deeds Dermat did for her sake. At last, weary 
 of the pursuit, Finn consented to pardon Dermat, but 
 in his heart he always cherished hatred against him, and 
 when Dermat was wounded to death by a boar, Finn 
 refused him the drink of water w^hich, from his hand, 
 would prove a cure. So Dermat died, to the great 
 sorrow and anger of all the Feni. The story is one of 
 the mort beautiful, as it is the saddest, of the old Irish 
 legends. 
 
 Oisin, the last of the Feni, is said to have outlived 
 all his companions by many centuries, and to have told 
 of them and their deeds to St. Patrick. He had mar- 
 ried a beautiful girl, who came to wed him from a 
 country across the sea, called Tirnanoge, and there he 
 dwelt, as he thought, for three, but as it proved, for 
 three hundred, years. At the end of that time there 
 came on him a great longing to see Erin again, and 
 
AN OUTLINE OF IRISH HISTORY. 193 
 
 nfter much entreaty his fair wife allowed him to return, 
 on the one condition that he never dismounted from a 
 white steed which she gave him. When he got to Ire- 
 land he found that the Feni had long passed away, and 
 that only the distant fame of them lingered in men's 
 minds. Of course he dismounts from the horse — how 
 many fairy tales would have ended happily if their 
 heroes had only done as they were told ! — and the horse 
 straightway flies away, and then the curse of his old 
 age comes upon Oisin, who falls to the ground an old, 
 withered, blind man, doomed never again to go back 
 to Tirnanoge and his fair wife and his immortal youth. 
 St. Patrick was now in Ireland, and often spoke with 
 Oisin, who never tired of telling of the heroes of his 
 youth, and wondering that death could ever have laid 
 hands upon their bright beauty. Bitterly he com- 
 plained of the sound of the Christian bell, and the 
 hymns of the Christian clerics, w^hich had enchanted 
 and destroyed the Feni. " There is no joy in your 
 strait cells," Oisin Avails. ''There are no women 
 among you, no cheerful music ; " and he laments for 
 the joys of his youth, the songs of the blackbirds, the 
 sound of the wind, the cry of the hounds let loose, the 
 wash of water against the sides of ships, and the clash 
 of arms, and the sweet voices of his youth's compeers. 
 
 CHAPTER IL 
 
 CHRISTIANITY. 
 
 The authorities for all this wonderful fanciful legend, 
 for all this pompous record of visionary kings and 
 heroes, are to be found in the ancient Irish manuscripts, 
 in the Ossianic songs, in the annals of Tighernach, of 
 Ulster, of Inis Mac Nerinn, of Innisfallen, and of 
 Boyle, in the " Chronicum Scotorum," the books of 
 Leinster and of Ballymote, the Yellow Book of Lecain, 
 and the famous Annals of the Four Masters, which 
 Michael O'Clerigh, the poor friar of the Order of St. 
 
194 AN OUTLINE OF IRISH HISTORY. 
 
 Francis, compiled for the glory of God and the honor 
 of Ireland. They are interpreted and made accessible 
 to us by scholars and writers like O'Curry, and Fer- 
 guson, and Mr. P. W. Joyce, and Mr. Standish O'Grady. 
 These and others have translated enough to show that 
 the Irish manuscripts enclose a store of romantic 
 records and heroic tales that will bear comparison well 
 with the legends and the folk-lore of any other coun- 
 try. There is yet much to do in the way of translating 
 and popularizing these old Irish legends, and it may 
 well be hoped and believed that Irish scholarship will 
 prove itself equal to the task. But these antique tales 
 are not history. We cannot even say whether they 
 have an historical basis. It matters very little. They 
 are beautiful legends, in any case, and, like the tale of 
 the Trojan War, and the records of the Seven Kings of 
 Rome, they may be believed or not, according to the 
 spirit of their student. It is more probable than not 
 that they have a foundation of truth. Recent discov- 
 eries in the Troad have given an historical position to 
 the siege of Troy ; and the Irish chronicles have no 
 worse claim to respect, as historic documents, than the 
 rhapsodies of the Homeric singer. But modern histo- 
 rians prefer to leave the Tuatha de Danann and the 
 Milesians undisturbed in their shadowy kingdom, and 
 content themselves with suggesting that Ireland was 
 at first inhabited by a Turanian race, and that there 
 were Celtic and Teutonic immigrations. 
 
 The social organization of pre-Christian Ireland 
 shows many remarkable signs of civilization, especi- 
 ally in its treatment of women, who were invested with 
 a respect and dignity not common in the early history 
 of races. In the legends, women receive always from 
 men a tender and gracious submission that rivals the 
 chivalry of the Arthurian romances ; and there is every 
 reason to believe that this was not confined to legend. 
 The married woman was regarded as the equal of her 
 husband no less than if she had lived in Rome, and re- 
 peated on her wedding-day the famous formula, " Ubi 
 tu Caius ego Caia." The religion seems to have been 
 a form of sun-worship, regulated by Druids, and not, 
 it is said — though this is strongly contested — unaccom- 
 panied with human sacrifices. The people were di- 
 
AN OUTLINE OF IRISH HISTORY. 195 
 
 vided into septs, composed of families bearing the 
 name of their founder. The headman of each family 
 served the chief of the sept, and each septal king in 
 his turn recognized the authority of the Ard-Righ, or 
 chief king. All chieftainships, and the offices of Druid 
 and of Brehon, or lawgiver, were elective. During the 
 life of each chief, his successor, called the " Tanist," 
 was chosen from the same family. Land was held by 
 each sept in common, without any feudal condition, 
 and primogeniture was unknown. Legitimate or ille- 
 gitimate sons were partners with their father, and after 
 his death took equal shares of his holding. The Brehon 
 criminal laws punished almost every offence by more 
 or less heavy fines. Agriculture was in its infancy. 
 Wealth lay in cattle, pigs, sheep, and horses. Ore and 
 slaves were exported to the Mediterranean countries 
 from the earliest times. The people dwelt in wattled 
 houses, and their palaces were probably only of painted 
 wood built on dyked and palisaded hills ; but they could 
 build strong fortresses and great sepulchral chambers, 
 and raise vast cromlechs over their warrior dead. 
 Whether the round towers which are still the wonder 
 of many parts of Ireland were built by them or by the 
 early Christians, and for what purpose, is still a sub- 
 ject of fierce controversy among archaeologists. Dio- 
 dorus Siculus would seem to refer to them in a passage 
 in which he speaks of an island of the size of Sicily, in 
 the ocean over against Gaul, to the north, whose peo- 
 ple were said to have a great affection for the Greeks 
 from old times, and to build curious temples of round 
 form. Whether they built the round towers or no, the 
 early Irish were skilled in the working of gold orna- 
 ments, and in the manufacture of primitive weapons. 
 They seem to have known the art of writing early, 
 and to have had a strange alphabet of their own, called 
 Ogham, from a shadowy King Oghma, who was sup- 
 posed to have invented it. It was written by cutting 
 notches in wood and stone, and there has been no small 
 discussion over the reading of it. 
 
 Authentic history begins with St. Patrick. Patrick 
 had been carried as a slave from Gaul to Erin in his 
 youth. He escaped to Rome and rose high in the 
 Christian Church. But his heart was stirred with pity 
 
196 AN OUTLINE OF IRISH HISTORY. 
 
 for his land of bondage, and about 432 he returned to 
 Ireland, inspired by the hope of converting the coun- 
 try. He was not the first. Palladius had tried to con- 
 vert pagan lerne already, but where Palladius failed, 
 Patrick succeeded ; and the complete conversion of 
 Ireland is one of the most splendid triumpl]^ of the 
 early Church. Wherever the saint went, conviction 
 and conversion followed. He had dreamed a strange 
 dream while in Rome, in which an angel appeared to 
 him, bearing a scroll, with the superscription, "The 
 voice of the Irish." The voice of the Irish had called 
 him, and the ears of the Irish w^ere ready to accept his 
 teaching : king after king, chieftain after chieftain, 
 abandoned the worship of their ancient gods to become 
 the servants of Christ. For more than sixty years 
 Patrick wrestled with the old gods in Ireland and over- 
 threw them. He had found Ireland pagan, but when 
 he died and gave 
 
 " His body to that pleasant country's earth, 
 And his pure soul unto his captain Christ, 
 Under whose coloi-s he had fought so long," 
 
 the spirit of Christianity was over the island, and the 
 powder of the old gods was gone forever. He was 
 buried in Saul, in the County of Down, but his spirit 
 lived in the souls of his followers. Long after Patrick 
 had been laid to rest, his disciples carried the cross of 
 Christ to the gaunt Scottish highlands, the lonely Ger- 
 man pine-forests, the savage Gaulish settlements, to 
 Britain, and the wild islands of the northern seas. The 
 Irish monks wandered into the waste places of Ireland, 
 and noble monasteries — the homes of religion and of 
 learning — sprang up wherever they set their feet. The 
 fathers of the Irish Church were listened to with rever- 
 ence in the court of Charlemagne and in the Roman 
 basilicas ; and foreign ecclesiastics eagerly visited the 
 homes of these men — the monasteries famous for their 
 learning, their libraries, and their secure peace. 
 
 The island of the Sun-god had become the island of 
 Saints. To Ireland belong St. Columban, the re- 
 former of the Gauls ; St. Columbkill, the '' Dove of 
 the Cell," whose name has made lona holy ground ; 
 
AN OUTLINE OF IRISH HISTORY. 197 
 
 St. Foelan ; St. Killian, the apostle of Franconia ; St. 
 Aidan ; St. Gall, the converter of Helvetia ; and St. 
 Boniface. One hundred and fifty-five Irish saints are 
 venerated in the churches of Germany, forty-five in 
 Gaul, thirty in Belgium, thirteen in Italy, and eight in 
 Scandinavia. For a long time all Christendom looked 
 upon Ireland as the favorite home of religion and of 
 wisdom. Montalembert, in his great history of " The 
 Monks of the West," has given a glowing account of the 
 civilization and the culture of the Irish monasteries. 
 There the arts were practised — music, architecture, and 
 the working of metals. There the languages of Greece 
 and Rome were studied with the passionate zeal which 
 afterwards distinguished the Humanistic scholars of the 
 revival of learning. The Irish monastic scholars carried 
 their love for Greek so far that they even wrote the 
 Latin of the Church books in the beloved Hellenic 
 characters — and as we read we are reminded again of 
 the old tradition of Greek descent — while, curiously 
 enough, one of the oldest manuscripts of Horace in ex- 
 istence, that in the library of Berne, is written in Celtic 
 characters, with notes and commentaries in the Irish 
 language. It is worthy of remark that Montalembert 
 says, that of all nations the Anglo-Saxons derived most 
 profit from the teaching of the Irish schools, and that 
 Alfred of England received his education in an Irish 
 university. 
 
 With the lapse of time, however, and the disorders 
 that came over the country during the struggles with 
 the Danes, the organization of the Church suffered se- 
 verely. In the twelfth century the irregularities that 
 had crept into the Irish Church were brought before 
 the notice of the Roman court. A synod, held at Kells, 
 A.D. 1 152, under the papal legate Paparo, formally in- 
 corporated the Irish Church into the ecclesiastical sys- 
 tem of Rome. The metropolitan sees of Armagh, Cashel, 
 Dublin, and Tuam were created, with their suffragan 
 sees, under the primacy of the Archbishop of Armagh. 
 
 Towards the end of the eighth century the Danes 
 made their first descent upon Ireland, and for a time 
 established themselves in the country, expending their 
 fiercest fury upon the Church of the West, and driving 
 ihe Irish scholars to carry their culture and their phi- 
 
198 AN OUTLINE OF IRISH HISTORY, 
 
 losophy to the great cities of the European continent. 
 The Irish chiefs, divided among themselves, were un- 
 able to oppose a common front to the enemy, and for 
 more than a century the sea-kings held Ireland in sub- 
 jection. At length a man arose who was more than a 
 match for the sea-kings. Brian Boroihme, brother of 
 the King of Munster, raised an army against the Danes 
 in 968, thoroughly defeated them, and reduced them to 
 the condition of quiet dwellers in the seaport towns. 
 But the master-spirit that the troublous time had con- 
 jured up was not content to remain the conqueror of 
 the Danes alone. He was determined to become the 
 sovereign of all Ireland. It was sheer usurpation, and 
 many of the Irish chiefs opposed Brian ; but he soon 
 overcame their resistance, and in looi he was acknowl- 
 edged as King of all Ireland. He made a just and wise 
 king, and for twelve years reigned in triumph and in 
 peace. Then the Danes in Ireland began to pluck up 
 heart again. They sent for help to their kinsmen over 
 sea, and the Vikings came across the Swan's Bath with 
 a mighty fleet, and made war upon Brian. Brian was 
 an old man now, but as fierce and brave and skilful as 
 ever. He raised up all his power to meet the Danes, 
 and completely defeated them after a bloody struggle, 
 at Clontarf, on Good Friday, 1014. Their bravest chiefs 
 were slain, and their spirits sent to the Hall of Odin to 
 drink ale with the goddesses of death, while all the 
 hawks of heaven mourned for them. But the victori- 
 ous Irish had to bewail their king, who, owing to the 
 negligence of his guards, was killed in his tent towards 
 the end of the fight by the Danish leader. This great 
 defeat of the Danes put an end to any further dreams 
 of a Danish invasion of Ireland, though it did not by 
 any means destroy the influence that the Danes had al- 
 ready acquired in the island. They still held their own 
 in the great seaport towns, and carried on fierce feuds 
 with the native tribes, and in the slow processes of time 
 became absorbed into and united with them. The death 
 of Brian had a disastrous effect upon the condition of 
 Ireland. The provinces that he had subjugated reas- 
 serted their independence ; but his usurpation had 
 shattered the supremacy of the old royal race, and the 
 history of Ireland until the middle of the twelfth cen- 
 
AN OUTLINE OF IRISH HISTORY. 199 
 
 tury is merely a melancholy succession of civil wars and 
 struggles for the crown, upon which it would be alike 
 painful and profitless to dwell. 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 THE NORMAN CONQUEST. 
 
 Ireland was now divided into four confederations oi 
 tribes. The O'Neils held Ulidia, which is now called 
 Ulster ; the O'Connors Conacia, or Connaught ; the 
 O'Briens and the McCarthys Mononia, or Munster ; 
 and the Macmurroughs Lagenia, or Leinster — all under 
 the paramount but often-disputed rule of a branch of 
 the Ulster O'Neils. The royal demense of Meath, the 
 appanage of the Ulster family, which included West- 
 meath, Longford, and a part of King's County, w^as 
 sometimes counted a fifth kingdom. 
 
 In the wild north, O'Neil, O'Donnel, O'Kane, 
 O'Hara, O'Sheel, O'Carrol, were mighty names. On 
 the northernmost peninsula, where the Atlantic runs 
 into Lough Foyle and Lough Swilly, O'Dogherty 
 reigned supreme. In Connaught, O'Rourke, O'Reilly, 
 O'Kelly, O'Flaherty, O'Malley, O'Dowd, were lords. 
 In Meath and Leinster, MacGeogeghan, O'Farrell, O'- 
 Connor, O'Moore, O'Brennan, Macmurrough ruled. 
 In Munster, by the western shore, MacCarthy More 
 held sway. MacCarthy Reagh swayed the south, by 
 the pleasant waters of Cork Bay. O' Sullivan Beare 
 was lord of the fair promontory between Bantry Bay 
 and Kenmare River. O'Mahony reigned by roaring 
 Water Bay. O'Donoghue was chieftain by the haunted 
 Killarney Lakes. MacMahon ruled north of the Shan- 
 non. O'Loglin looked on Galw^ay Bay. 
 
 All Ireland, with the exception of a few seaport 
 towns where the Danes had settled, was in the hands 
 of Irish chiefs of old descent and famous lineage. 
 They quarrelled among themselves as readily and as 
 fiercely as if they had been the heads of so many 
 
200 AN- OUTLINE OF IRISH HISTORY. 
 
 Greek States. The Danes had been their Persians; 
 their Romans were now to come. 
 
 The whole story of Irish subjugation and its seven 
 centuries of successive struggles begins with the carry- 
 ing-off of Devorgilla, wife of Tiernan O'Rorke, of 
 Brefny, by a dissolute, brutal giant some sixty years 
 old — Dermot Macmurrough, King of Leinster. We 
 have a curious picture of him preserved in the writings 
 of Giraldus Cambrensis, who knew him, and who was 
 the first historian of the Irish invasion. " Dermot was 
 a man of tall stature and great body ; a valiant and 
 bold warrior in his nation. By constant halloaing and 
 crying out his voice ha,d become hoarse. He chose to 
 be feared rather than loved ; oppressed his nobility 
 greatly, but greatly supported and advanced the poor 
 and weak. To his own kindred he was rough and 
 grievous, and hateful to strangers ; he would be 
 against all men, and all men were against him." Such 
 was the man who found the fair wife of the Lord of 
 Brefny a willing victim. Alexander the Great was 
 pleased to fancy that in ravaging the countries of the 
 Great King he was still avenging the ancient quarrel 
 for the rape of Helen. But Helen was not more fa- 
 tal to Greeks and Easterns than Devorgilla, Erin's 
 Helen, proved to the neighboring islands that lie along 
 the Irish Sea. Through ages of bloodshed and slaugh- 
 ter her country has indeed bled for her shame. There 
 is a grim ironic mockery in the thought that two 
 nations have been set for centuries in the bitterest 
 hatred by the loves of a lustful savage and an unfaith^ 
 ful wife. One might well paraphrase the words of 
 Shakespeare's Diomed in "Troilus and Cressida," and 
 say that " for every false drop in her bawdy veins an 
 English life hath sunk ; for every scruple of her con- 
 taminated carrion weight an Irishman been slain.'* 
 The Lord of Brefny made war upon his betrayer ; Rory 
 O'Connor, the last king of Ireland, espoused O'Rorke's 
 cause, and Dermot fled the country. He hastened to 
 Aquitaine, where Henry II. was then staying, and did 
 him homage. Pope Adrian IV., known to England as 
 Nicholas Breakspere, the only Englishman who ever 
 sat in the seat of St. Peter, had given Henry II. a bull 
 of authority over Ireland some years before, authority 
 
AN OUTLmE OF IRISH HISTORY, 201 
 
 which Henry had not yet seen fit to exercise. Der- 
 mot's quarrel was Henry's opportunity. He allowed 
 the treacherous fugitive to shark up a list of lawless 
 resolutes from among the Norman barons in Wales, 
 headed by Richard de Clare, Earl Pembroke, called 
 "Strongbow." Ireland was invaded, Wexford seized, 
 Waterford taken and sacked, and Eva, Dermot's daugh- 
 ter, married to Strongbow, as a further bond between 
 the lord of Leinster and the Norman adventurer. The 
 superiority of the Norman arms and armor impressed 
 the Irish chiefs and soldiery as the iron of Charle- 
 magne's legions impressed the Huns. The Normans 
 made a brave show, lapped in steel, w^ith their pointed 
 helms and shields, their surcoats gleaming with the or 
 and argent, gules and azure of their heraldic bearings, 
 their powerful weapons, and their huge war-horses. 
 Beneath their floating pennons came their well-trained, 
 well-armed soldiers, skilled to shoot v/ith long-bow and 
 cross-bow, well supplied with all the implements fit for 
 the taking of cities that Roman ingenuity had devised 
 and Norman craft perfected. The Irish galloglasses 
 and kerns opposed to them, if not wholly unfamiliar 
 with the use of mail, seldom, indeed, used it, and 
 fought their fiercest, protected alone by the shirts of 
 saffron-dye in which they delighted, while their weap- 
 ons were in every respect inferior to those of the in- 
 vaders. Naturally, the Normans w^ere at first triumph- 
 ant everywhere. They swarmed over the country, 
 pushing their strange names and strange ways into the 
 homes of the time-honored septs. De Burgo in Con- 
 naught, FitzMaurice and FitzGerald in Kerry, in the 
 land of the MacCarthy More ; De Cogan, FitzStephen, 
 and De la Poer along the southern coast ; De Lacy in 
 the north ; all the cloud of De Grandisons, and De 
 Montmorencies, and De Courcies, and Mandevilles, 
 and FitzEustaces, who settled along the eastern coasts, 
 and pushed their way inland — these were to be the new 
 masters of men whose hearts were given in allegiance 
 to the lords of the O and of the Mac. 
 
 But though the first flush of victory rested with the 
 Normans, their liold over the country was for some 
 time uncertain. Dermot, whose alliance was of great 
 importance to the invaders, died suddenly a loathsome 
 
202 AN OUTLINE OF IRISH HISTORY. 
 
 death. Henry seemed little inclined to lend his 
 strength to the bold barons, whose successes made him 
 jealous for his own authority over the island. He even 
 ordered Strongbow to leave Ireland, a command that 
 it was difficult to obey, for the Irish had plucked up 
 heart of grace to turn upon their invaders, and were 
 harassing them very effectually. They were rein- 
 forced, too, by their old enemies the Danes, whose 
 seaport settlements the Normans had seized upon with 
 scant courtesy, and between the two the adventurers 
 were in a bad way. Strongbow took the opportunity 
 of a momentary triumph of the Norman arms to return 
 to England and make his peace with his jealous mon- 
 arch. Henry pardoned him his delayed submission, 
 and immediately secured the Norman grasp on Ireland 
 by leading a large army across the Irish Sea on a 
 " Veni, vidi, vici " visit, as Sir John Davies called it, 
 writing of it some centuries later. 
 
 The armament overawed many of the Irish chieftains, 
 who seem to have thought resistance to the master of 
 such legions vain, and most of the Munster chieftains 
 came in and swore allegiance. Rory O'Connoj held 
 out against the king ; so did the Ulster chiefs ; but 
 Henry, content with what he gained, for the time let 
 them alone, and proceeded to organize his new terri- 
 tory. He divided it into counties, and set up the royal 
 law courts of Bench, Pleas, and Exchequer in Dublin, 
 to afford the Norman settlers the privileges of English 
 law. The natives were allowed to keep to their old 
 Brehon laws, which dated from the earliest times, and 
 were as unlike the English processes of jurisprudence 
 as the Irish land system was unlike the feudal system 
 now introduced. 
 
 Henry's stay in Ireland was abruptly cut short by a 
 summons to appear before the papal legates in Nor- 
 mandy who were inquiring into the murder of Becket. 
 He left the island never to come back to it again. But 
 he had done much to Normanize the country by mak- 
 ing large and wholly illegal grants of septal territory to 
 his followers, leaving it to them to win and keep these 
 gifts as best they could. With the sword the barons 
 advanced their claims, and with the sword the Irish 
 chieftains met them. 
 
AN OUTLINE OF IRISH HISTORY. 203 
 
 The story of Ireland from the first to the second 
 Richard is one monotonous record of constant warfare 
 between the Irish and the Normans, and of incessant 
 strife between the rival Irish houses. The barons built 
 great castles, and lived in them a life of rough self-reli- 
 ance, very like that of the robber lords of the Rhine 
 provinces in later centuries. Many of these domains 
 were counties palatinate, that is to say, their lords had 
 the privilege of making their own laws with very little 
 regard to the jurisdiction of the crown, and with abso- 
 lute power of life and death. They ruled the tenants 
 accordingly, with a queer mixture of Brehon and Nor- 
 man law, after their own fashion. In the Norman 
 towns, which were gradually established in the country 
 under the protection of some one or other of the great 
 barons, the language for a long time was only Norman- 
 French, and the customs as well. It was as if some 
 town of pleasant Normandy had been taken bodily up 
 and transported to Ireland, with its well-wardered ram- 
 parts, on which the citizens' wives and daughters walked 
 of quiet evenings in times of peace, its busy, crowded 
 streets, thronged with citizens of all trades and crafts, 
 marching sometimes gayly in their guilds, and ready at 
 all times to drop awl or hammer, net or knife, and rush 
 to arms to attack or to repel the Irish enemy. For out- 
 side the ramparts of these Norman towns on Irish earth, 
 outside the last bastion of the baron's stronghold, lay 
 the Irish, a separate and a hostile nation, ever attacked, 
 and ever ready to attack. The return of the swallow 
 was not surer in summer than the renewed outbreak of 
 strife between Norman baron and Irish chief when once 
 the winter had faded into spring. The baron took to 
 the road like a last-century highwayman : he swooped 
 down upon the fields of the Irish ; he seized upon the 
 stores that they had placed in their churches and church- 
 yards, as was their custom before they took to building 
 castles themselves. The Irish retaliated whenever and 
 wherever they could. For long there was no sort of 
 alliance between them. Only those who belonged to 
 the " five bloods " of the O'Neils of Ulster, the O'Con- 
 nors of Connaught, the O'Briens of Thomond, the 
 O'Melachlins of Meath, and the Macmurroughs of Lein- 
 ster, could have audience in an English court. The kill- 
 
204 AN OUTLINE OF IRIS If HISTORY. 
 
 ing of an Irishman or the violation of an Irishwoman 
 by an English colonist was no crime. 
 
 Yet, with the slow advance of time the Norman set- 
 tlers began to succumb to Irish influences. The hos- 
 tilities lessened, the hatreds waned. The Norman bar- 
 ons began to find peace better than war, and love fairer 
 than feud. They took to themselves wives from among 
 the daughters of the Irish chiefs. By degrees they 
 abandoned their knightly trappings, their Norman 
 names, and their foreign speech, to adopt instead the 
 Irish dress, names, language, and law. A Burke be- 
 came a M' William, a FitzMaurice became a M'Morice,. 
 and a Bermingham became a M ' Yoris. The transformed 
 barons aspired to be independent Irish chieftains like 
 their new allies ; in time they came to be known as 
 "more Irish than the Irish themselves." 
 
 The English government witnessed with jealous anger 
 this curious process of assimilation, and strove at inter- 
 vals to stay its course. A statute passed in 1295 pro- 
 hibited in vain the adoption of the Irish garb by Nor- 
 man settlers. The English had not the power to enforce 
 such restrictive law^s ; they had not even the strength to 
 protect such of the settlers as were willing to abide by 
 their own Norman ways and words. These were forced 
 in self-defence into association and alliance with the 
 Irish chiefs, who were gradually regaining their control 
 over the country. 
 
 After the English defeat at Bannockburn, the Irish 
 chiefs at once rose in revolt against England. Edward 
 Bruce, brother of the victorious Scottish king, came 
 OA^er to Ireland in 1315, and was heartily welcomed, 
 not by the native Irish alone, but by many of the 
 Anglo-Irish nobles. Edward Bruce was crowmed as 
 king at Dundalk, and for a short time the insurrection 
 carried all before it, and the Anglo-Irish lords who had 
 not joined the rebellion were put to great straits to de- 
 fend themselves. The English government made a 
 desperate effort, raised a large army under Sir John de 
 Bermingham, which completely defeated the allied 
 Scotch, Irish, and Anglo-Irish forces in a battle near 
 Dundalk, in which Edward Bruce himself was killed. 
 But the victory was dearly bought. The loyal Anglo- 
 Irish had learned to their cost that they could not 
 
AN OUTLINE OF IRISH HISTORY. 205 
 
 count for safety on the protection of the home govern- 
 ment, and that security was more easily attained by 
 amalgamation with the Irish. The Irishizing process 
 went on more vigorously than ever. The conversion 
 of Norman barons into Irish chiefs with Irish names 
 waxed day by day. The condition of the English set- 
 tlers who remained unchanged in the midst of such 
 changes became desperate indeed. 
 
 Something had to be done. In 1356 it was pro- 
 claimed that no one born in Ireland should hold any 
 of the king's towns or castles. This proved ineffectual, 
 and sterner measures were resorted to eleven years 
 later, at the Parliament held in Kilkenny, in 1367. The 
 Norman Parliament in Ireland was originally a council 
 of the barons, prelates, and the " faithful ;" but it had 
 grown with time into greater importance. The Upper 
 House consisted of lay peers, abbots, priors, and 
 bishops ; the Lower House of the knights of the shires 
 and burgesses. Many of the lay peers claimed and 
 received exemption from attendance, and the abbots, 
 priors, and bishops generally sent their proctors in 
 their places, till the practice grew up of summoning 
 two proctors from each diocese, who sat with the 
 knights and burgesses in the Lower House, and claimed 
 to be members of the legislature. Most of the shires 
 were in the hands of the Irish, and returned no mem- 
 bers. Burgesses were summoned from a few towns, 
 many not being elected by the freemen of the city, but 
 receiving the royal writ personally, by name. It met 
 at irregular intervals, sometimes at Dublin, sometimes 
 at Kilkenny, and sometimes at Drogheda, at the sum- 
 mons of the king's lieutenant, or his deputy. 
 
 The Parliameilt of Kilkenny inflicted heavy penalties 
 on all English who adopted Irish names, speech, or 
 customs. The Norman who dared to marry an Irish 
 wife was to be half-hanged, shamefully mutilated, dis- 
 embowelled alive, and forfeit his estate. The fostering 
 of Norman with Irish children, and the maintenance of 
 Irish bards, were alike sternly prohibited. But at the 
 time the English Government had not the power to 
 enforce these statutes, which only served to further 
 exasperate the Irish and the Anglo-Irish. 
 
 Richard II. was in Ireland with a large army, deter- 
 
306 AN OUTLINE OF IRISH HISTORY. 
 
 mined to reduce the country to obedience, when the 
 news of Bolingbroke's landing at Ravenspurgh called 
 him back to his death. The struggles of the Houses 
 of the White and the Red Rose occupied Ireland as 
 well as England. Anglo-Irish lords crossed the sea to 
 fight for York and Lancaster by the side of the King- 
 maker or Clifford of Cumberland. In Ireland the two 
 greatest houses took opposite sides. The Butlers of 
 East Munster, the Lords of Ormonde, who swayed 
 Tipperary and Kilkenny, plucked a sanguine rose with 
 young Somerset ; while the Geraldines of both the 
 Desmond and Kildare branches loved no colors, and 
 cropped a pale and angry rose with Plantagenet. 
 
 The story of the House of Geraldine is one of the 
 most romantic in all Irish history. The Geraldines 
 were descended from the two brothers, Maurice and 
 William Fitzgerald, who came to Ireland at the heels 
 of Strongbow. Through varying fortunes — at one 
 time the whole house was nearly exterminated by 
 MacCarthy More — they had risen to a proud position 
 of rule in Ireland. They owned all the broad lands 
 from Maynooth to Lixnaw ; their followers swarmed 
 everywhere, bearing a '*G"on their breast in token 
 that they owed their hearts to the Geraldines. 
 
 Moore has made famous the story of Thomas, the 
 sixth earl, who, '*by the Fial's wave benighted, no star 
 in the sky," was lighted by love to the door of a re- 
 tainer's cottage. The poet fancies that as the chieftain 
 crossed the threshold, some ominous voice whispered 
 that there was ruin before him. If he loved he was 
 lost. Love and ruin did, indeed, await the Geraldine 
 across the threshold. The retainer had a beautiful 
 daughter, and "love came and brought sorrow too 
 soon in his train " for Thomas of Kildare. He married 
 the peasant girl, and was outlawed by his stately fam- 
 ily, and went to France with his humble love, and 
 died, a poor but a happy man, at Rouen, many years 
 later. 
 
 After Bosworth battle had placed Henry VII. on the 
 throne of Richard of Gloucester, the new king was too 
 busy with his new kingdom to give much thought to 
 Ireland. The English colony was in a bad way there. 
 It was reduced to the County of Dublin and parts of 
 
AN OUTLINE OF IRISH HISTORY. 207 
 
 Meath, Louth, and Kildare. The greater part of the 
 island was entirely in the hands of Irish chieftains, who 
 exacted tribute from the English, and scornfully set at 
 naught the continued and meaningless renewals of the 
 statutes of Kilkenny. Henry at first left Ireland alone. 
 He was ever content to leave the Geraldine control of 
 the country unquestioned, although the Geraldines had 
 been so defiantly Yorkist, and though not a few follow- 
 ers of the house had painted their own white roses red 
 with their own blood on many an English field. They 
 were Yorkists still. When Lambert Simnel came over 
 to Ireland, pretending to be the son of false, fleeting, 
 perjured Clarence, the Geraldines rallied round him 
 with warm support and sympathy. When this image 
 of a king was swept from the throne to the kitchen, 
 Perkin Warbeck took his place, claimed to be the 
 Duke of York whom Gloucester had murdered in the 
 tower, and he, too, found Geraldine aid and mainte- 
 nance. Henry had now learned something of the 
 strength of Irish disaffection in the hands of the Irish 
 chiefs, and prepared to crush it out more subtly than by 
 the sword. We have seen what the Irish Parliament was 
 like : a poor thing enough in itself, but at worst con- 
 taining the principles of a representative system. This 
 system Henry resolved to destroy. Three centuries had 
 passed since the Norman banners had first floated over 
 the Irish fields, and in all that time no attempt had been 
 made to force the English laws upon the Irish septs, or 
 to interfere w^ith the self-government of the Norman 
 settlers. Now, in 1494, Henry sent over Sir Edward 
 Poynings, as Lord Deputy, with an army at his back, 
 to change altogether the relationship between the two 
 islands. Poynings summoned a Parliament at Drog- 
 heda, at which the famous measure known as Poyn- 
 ing's Act was passed. This act established that all 
 English laws should operate in Ireland, and that the 
 consent of the Privy Council of England was necessary 
 for all acts of the Irish Parliament. These measures 
 at once deprived Ireland of all claim to independent 
 government. Henceforward she was to be the helpless 
 dependent of the conquering country. But the loss of 
 liberty did not destroy the Irish desire for freedom ; it 
 rather gave it an additional incentive to action. 
 
208 AN OUTLINE OF IRISH HISTORY. 
 
 Ireland being thus soldered close to England, Henry- 
 was content to leave the government of the country in 
 the hands of its most powerful man. " All Ireland," 
 men said, ''was not a match for the Earl of Kildare." 
 "Then let the Earl of Kildare govern all Ireland," said 
 Henry VII., and gave the rule of Ireland into his 
 hands. He had been the most potent spirit in Ireland 
 under the old system ; to confirm his power under the 
 new seemed to the astute Henry the surest means of 
 securing his allegiance and the quiet dependence of 
 Ireland. 
 
 His successor, the eighth Henry, looked on the Ger- 
 aldine power with grave jealousy. The control of the 
 island was practically in the hands of the Earls of Kil- 
 dare and their follow^ers, and was drifting day by day 
 further from the control and supremacy of England. 
 What use were statutes of Kilkenny and Poyning's 
 Acts if the country was under the command of an An- 
 glo-Irish house who defied the authotity of England ? 
 His jealousy of the Geraldines was fostered by Wol- 
 sey, who Vv^as considerably under the influence of the 
 House of Ormonde, the bitter enemies of the Geral- 
 dines. Gerald, the ninth earl, son of Henry VII.'s 
 deputy, was summoned to England. He was at once 
 thrown into the Tower, and false news of his execution 
 was sent to Dublin. His son, Lord Thomas Fitzger- 
 ald, "Silken Thomas," as he was commonly called by 
 his people, from the splendor of his dress, displayed 
 no silken spirit. He raised at once a desperate revolt 
 against the king, but his forces were shattered by the 
 English artillery, brought thus into Irish warfare for 
 the first time. He and his five uncles were compelled 
 to surrender. They were sent to London, to the 
 Tower, where the Earl of Kildare had died of a broken 
 heart, and they were all hanged at Tyburn. Only one 
 of their kin, a boy of twelve, a son of the Earl of Kil- 
 dare by his second wife, escaped from the slaughter of 
 his race to Rome, to found again the fortunes of his 
 house. "The dying Gracchus," said Mirabeau, "flung 
 dust to heaven, and from that dust sprang Marius." 
 From the blood of the Geraldines arose the great 
 house of Desmond and Tyrone, which at one time 
 seemed likely to establish the independence of Ireland. 
 
AN OUTLINE OF IRISH HISTORY. 209 
 
 Henry's next act was to confiscate the Church lands 
 in Ireland as he had done in England. How this was 
 done we may learn in the melancholy words of the 
 Four Masters: "They broke down the monasteries, 
 and sold their roofs and bells from Arran of the 
 Saints to the Iccian Sea. . . . They burned the 
 images, shrines, and relics, . . . the staff of Jesus, 
 which had been in the hand of St. Patrick." A Par- 
 liament was summoned at Dublin, at which for the first 
 time some Irish chieftains were to be seen sitting by 
 the English lords at the national assembly. These 
 chiefs agreed to hold their land of the king by English 
 law, to come to the king's court for justice, to attend 
 Parliament, to send their sons to be educated at the 
 English court, and to renounce the authority of the 
 Pope. The Parliament conferred on Henry and his 
 successors the title of King instead of Lord Para- 
 mount of Ireland. 
 
 Under Edward, the chiefs who dwelt in Leix, Offaly, 
 Fercal, and Ely, in the central plain of Ireland, of 
 whom the O'Moores and O'Connors were chief, showed 
 signs of revolt. They were formidable and warlike, 
 and Henry VIII. had thought it well worth his while to 
 keep them quiet by subsidy. With the news of his 
 death they may have thought that an opportunity of 
 some kind had come ; but whether they intended rebel- 
 lion or not, the government acted on the assumption 
 that they did, and crushed them before they had time 
 to move, captured their chiefs, laid waste their settle- 
 ments, and finally confiscated their lands, and planted 
 them with English settlers. The dispossessed Irish 
 drove the settlers out after nine years of ceaseless war- 
 fare. Then the government put forth its strength, shot 
 down the obnoxious natives wherever they could get at 
 them, hunted them as outlaws, and at last practically 
 exterminated them. Mary was by this time on the 
 throne. A part of Offaly, Fercal, and Ely was con- 
 verted into King's County ; Leix, another portion of 
 Offal, and Upper Ossory, became Queen's County. In 
 the settlement of these two counties we may see the 
 beginnings of those plantation schemes, which were to 
 be carried on, on so large a scale, by the succeeding 
 English rulers, whether Tudor, Stuart, or Puritan, 
 
210 AN OUTLINE OF IRISH HISTORY. 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 ELIZABETH, 
 
 The Reformation begun under Henry VHI. was car- 
 ried out with pitiless determination under Edward VI., 
 and was met by the Catholics with unflinching opposi- 
 tion. Under Mary there was a period of respite, but 
 the strife was renewed with greater fierceness in the 
 succeeding reign. As authentic Irish history begins 
 with St. Patrick, so with Elizabeth modern Irish history 
 may be said to begin. The principles of the Reforma- 
 cion had only served to deepen the hostility, already 
 deep enough, between the Irish chiefs and the English 
 crown. It had also served to unite the Catholic Anglo- 
 Irish with the Catholic native Irish as they had never 
 been united before. The English Act of Uniformity 
 had not yet been registered by a Parliamenf.* Eliza- 
 beth, in January, 1560, summoned a carefully chosen 
 and obedient Parliament, which repealed the Catholic 
 Acts passed by Mary, and passed the Act of Uniform- 
 ity, which made the new liturgy compulsory. Many 
 of the bishops accepted the situation ; those who refus- 
 ed, and were within Elizabeth's power, were deprived ; 
 those outside the Pale and its power trusted in their 
 isolation and defied the new measures. The seizures 
 of Henry and Edward had impoverished the Irish 
 Church, but the spirit of the Church was unbroken. 
 On hillsides and by hedges the mendicant friars still 
 preached the faith of their fathers in their fathers' na- 
 tive tongue, and wherever they went they found a peo- 
 ple eager to hear and to honor them, resolute to oppose 
 the changes that came in the name of Henry, of Ed- 
 ward, and of Elizabeth from across the sea. 
 
 At her accession, Elizabeth was too much occupied 
 with foreign complications to pay much heed to Ireland. 
 Trouble first began in a conflict between the feudal 
 laws and the old Irish law of Tanistr}^ Con O'Neil, 
 Earl of Tyrone, had taken his title from Henry VIII., 
 subject to the English law of succession ; but when 
 
AN OUTLINE OF IRISH HISTORY. 211 
 
 Con died, the clan O'Neil, disregarding the English 
 principle of hereditary succession, chose Shane O'Neil, 
 an illegitimate son of Con, and the hero of his sept, to 
 be The O'Neil. Shane O'Neil at once put himself for- 
 ward as the champion of Irish liberty, the supporter of 
 the Irish right to rule themselves in their own way and 
 pay no heed to England. Under the pretence of gov- 
 erning the country, Elizabeth overran it with a soldiery 
 who, as even Mr. Froude acknowledges, lived almost 
 universally on plunder, and were litlle better than 
 bandits. The time was an appropriate one for a cham- 
 pion of Irish rights. Shane O'Neil boldly stood out 
 as sovereign of .Ulster, and pitted himself against Eliz- 
 abeth. She tried to have him removed by assassination. 
 When this failed she tried to temporize. Shane was in- 
 vited to England, where the courtly gentlemen who 
 hovered about Elizabeth stared OA^er their spreading 
 ruffs in wonder at Shane the Proud and his wild fol- 
 lowers in their saffron-stained shirts and rough cloaks, 
 with great battle-axes in their hands. They sharpened 
 their wits upon his haughty bearing, his scornful 
 speech, and his strange garb. But his size and strength 
 made great impression on the queen, and for the mo- 
 ment an amicable arrangement seemed to be arrived at. 
 For many years there had been a steady immigration 
 of Scots from Argyleshire into Antrim, who had often 
 served Shane O'Neil as mercenaries. These Scotch 
 settlers seem to have;, been regarded with dislike by the 
 crown ; at all events, it was part of the compact with 
 Shane that he should reduce them, and reduce them he 
 did, with no light or sparing hand. But the fierce 
 King of Ulster was by far too powerful to please Eliz- 
 abeth long. Her agents induced other tribes to rise 
 against him. Shane fought bravely against his fate, 
 but he was defeated, put to flight, and murdered by his 
 enemies, the Scots of Antrim, in whose strongholds he 
 madly sought refuge. His head w^as struck off, and 
 sent to adorn the walls of Dublin Castle. His lands 
 were declared forfeit, and his vassals vassals of the 
 crown. English soldiers of fortune were given grants 
 from Shane's escheated territory, but when they at- 
 tempted to settle they were killed by the O'Neils. 
 Others came in their place, under Walter Devereux, 
 
'312 AN OUTLINE OF IRISH HISTORY. 
 
 Earl of Essex, and did their best to simplify the pro- 
 cess of colonization by exterminating the O'Neils, men, 
 women, and children, wherever they could be got at. 
 After two years of struggle Essex was compelled to 
 abandon his settlement. But other colonizers were 
 not disheartened. Some West of England gentlemen 
 under Peter Carew, seized on Cork, Limerick, and 
 Kerry, and sought to hold them by extirpating the ob- 
 noxious natives. 
 
 Against these English inroads the great Geraldine 
 League was formed. In the reign of Mary, that boy of 
 twelve whom Henry VIII. had not been able to include 
 in the general doom of his house, had been allowed to 
 return to Ireland, and to resume his ancestral honors. 
 Once more the Geraldines were a great and powerful 
 family in Ireland. But their strength had again awakened 
 the alarm of the English government. The Earl of Des- 
 mond and his brother had been summoned to England 
 and cast into the Tower. Their cousin, James Fitz- 
 maurice of Desmond, now began to unite the Geral- 
 dines against Carew and his companions, and fought 
 them and those sent to help them for two years. They 
 were, of course, defeated ; not, however, so badly but 
 that Elizabeth was willing not only to receive their 
 submission, but to release Desmond and his brother 
 from the Tower and send them back to Ireland. James 
 Fitzmaurice Fitzgerald went into voluntary exile, wan- 
 dering from capital to capital of the Catholic conti- 
 nental powers, seeking aid and assistance for his cher- 
 ished Geraldine League. The Geraldines and their 
 companion chiefs got encouragement in Rome and 
 pledges from Spain, and they rose again under the Earl 
 of Desmond and Sir James Fitzmaurice Fitzgerald. At 
 first they had some successes. They had many wrongs 
 to avenge. Sir Nicholas Maltby had just crushed out, 
 with the most pitiless cruelty, a rising of the Bourkes 
 of Connaught. Sir Francis Cosby, the queen's repre- 
 sentative in Leix and Offaly, had conceived and exe- 
 cuted the idea of preventing any further possible rising 
 of the chiefs in those districts by summoning them and 
 their kinsmen to a great banquet in the fort of Mullagh- 
 mast, and there massacring them all. Out of four hun- 
 dred guests only one man, a Lalor, escaped from that 
 
AN OUTLINE OF IRISH HISTORY. 213 
 
 feast of blood. Of the clan O'Moore no less than one 
 hundred and eighty chief men were slaughtered. One 
 of the Moores had not come to that fatal banquet. 
 Ruari Oge O'Moore, better known as ''Rory O'Moore," 
 devoted himself to avenging his murdered kinsmen, 
 and the cry of "Remember MuUaghmast ! " sounded 
 dismally in the ears of the settlers of King's and 
 Queen's Counties for many a long year after, whenever 
 Rory O'Moore made one of his swoops upon them with 
 that shout for his battle-cry. With such memories in 
 their minds, the tribes rose in all directions to the Des- 
 mond call. Early in the rising Fitzmaurice was killed 
 in a scuffle. This was a heavy blow to the rebels ; so 
 was a defeat of the Geraldines by Sir Nicholas Maltby 
 at Monaster. Elizabeth sent over more troops to Ire- 
 land under the new Lord Deputy, Sir William Pelham, 
 who had with him as ally Ormonde, the head of the 
 house of Butler, hereditary foes of the Geraldines, 
 and easily induced to act against them. Pelham and 
 Ormonde cut their way over Munster, reducing the 
 province by unexampled ferocity. Ormonde boasted 
 that he had put to death nearly six thousand disaffected 
 persons. Just at this moment some of the chiefs of the 
 Pale rose, and rose too late. They gained one victory 
 over Lord Grey de Wilton in the pass of Glenmalure, 
 where the troops were completely routed by the chief 
 of Glenmalure, Feach MacHugh, whom the English 
 called " the Firebrand of the Mountains." Grey im- 
 mediately abandoned the Pale to the insurgents, and 
 tui-ned to Smerwick, where some eight hundred Spanish 
 and Italian soldiers had just landed, too late to be of 
 any service to the rebellion, and had occupied the dis- 
 mantled fort. It was at once blockaded by sea and 
 by land. In Grey's army Sir Walter Raleigh and Ed- 
 mund Spenser both held commands. Smerwick sur- 
 rendered at discretion, and the prisoners were killed by 
 Raleigh and his men in cold blood. Flushed by this 
 success. Grey returned to the Pale and carried all be- 
 fore him. The Geraldines were disheartened, and were 
 defeated wherever they made a stand. Lord Kildare 
 was arrested on suspicion of treason, and sent to Lon- 
 don to die in the Tower. Martial law was proclaimed 
 in Dublin, and every one, gentle or simple, suspected 
 
314 AN OUTLINE OF IRISH HISTORY. 
 
 of disaffection was promptly hanged. Munster was 
 pacified by an unstinted use of sword and gallows. 
 The Desmond held out for a time, but he was caught 
 at last and killed in the Slievemish Mountains, and his 
 head sent to London to adorn the Tower. Munster 
 was so vigorously laid waste that Mr. Froude declares 
 that "the lowing of a cow or the sound of a plough- 
 boy's whistle was not to be heard from Valentia to the 
 Rock of Cashel." 
 
 Holinshed declares the traveller would not meet any 
 man, woman, or child, saving in towns or cities, and 
 would not see any beast ; and Spenser gives a melancho- 
 ly picture of the misery of the inhabitants, '' as that any 
 stony heart would rue the same. " They were driven by 
 misery to eat dead bodies scraped out of the grave ; and 
 Sir William Pelham proudly tells the queen how he 
 has reduced the inhabitants to prefer being slaughtered 
 to dying of starvation. Being thus pacified, Munster 
 was now divided into seigniories of from four thousand 
 to twelve thousand acres, to be held in fee of the crown 
 at a quit-rent of from 2d. to 3^. per acre, by such ad- 
 venturers as cared to struggle with the dispossessed 
 Irish. 
 
 The next step was to confiscate the estates of the re- 
 bellious chieftains. Sir John Perrot succeeded Lord 
 Grey as Deputy. He summoned a Parliament at w^hich 
 many of the Irish chiefs, persuaded, no doubt, by the 
 strength of England's recent arguments, attended in 
 English dress. The Parliament was perfectly manage- 
 able. It attainted any one whom the Lord Deputy 
 wished attainted. The estates of Desmond and some 
 hundred and forty of his followers came to the crown. 
 The land was then distributed at the cheapest rate in 
 large tracts to English nobles and gentlemen adventur- 
 rers, who were pledged to colonize it with English la- 
 borers and tradesmen. But of these laborers and 
 tradesmen not many came over, and those who did 
 soon returned, tired of struggling for their foothold 
 w^ith the dispossesssed Irish. In default of other ten- 
 ants, the new owners of the soil were practically forced 
 to take on the natives as tenants-at-will, and thus the 
 desired change of population was not effected. 
 
 Perrot was a stern but not a merciless man, with a 
 
AN OUTLINE OF IRISH HISTORY. 215 
 
 fierce temper, which made him many enemies among 
 his own colleagues. He disliked the policy of Bingham 
 in Connaught, and challenged him. He had a differ- 
 ence of opinion with Sir Henry Bagnal, and thought 
 he had settled it when he had knocked Bagnal down. 
 Nor was he more popular with the Irish. He treach- 
 erously captured Hugh Roe, or Red Hugh O'Donnel, 
 son of Hugh O'Donnel, of Tyrconnel, and kept him in 
 Dublin Castle as a hostage for his father's good beha- 
 vior, and thus made young Red Hugh a bitter and 
 dangerous enemy to the crown. In the end Perrot 
 was recalled, and Sir William Fitzwilliam sent in his 
 stead. 
 
 After six years of an exasperating rule, Fitzwilliam 
 gave place in 1594 to Sir William Russell, who found 
 the country hopelessly disorganized. Red Hugh had 
 escaped from Dublin Castle to his sept in Donegal, and 
 his father had resigned the chieftainship to him. The 
 dragoonings of Sir Richard Bingham had driven Con- 
 naught to desperation. The northern tribes were 
 disturbed ; some were in rebellion. Ulster, which had 
 kept quiet all through the Desmond rebellion, was 
 stirrred by the spirit of sedition, and its great chief, 
 Hugh O'Neil of Tyrone, was thought to be discontent- 
 ed and dangerous. 
 
 Hugh O'Neil, the grandson of that Con O'Neil 
 whom Henry VIII. had made Earl of Tyrone, had 
 been brought up at the English court and confirmed 
 in the lordship of Tyrone by the English government. 
 In the brilliant court of Elizabeth the young Irish 
 chief was distinguished for his gifts of mind and body. 
 When he came of age he was allowed to return to Ire- 
 land to his earldom. Once within his own country he 
 assumed his ancestral title of The O'Neil, and revived 
 all the customs of independent Irish chieftains. For 
 long enough he took no part in any plots or movements 
 against the crown ; but many things, the ties of friend- 
 ship and of love, combined to drive him into rebellion. 
 He had been deeply angered by the imprisonment of his 
 kinsman, Red Hugh ; and when Red Hugh escaped, 
 burning with a sense of his wrongs and a desire for 
 revenge, he brought all his influence to bear upon 
 O'Neil to draw him into a confederation against the gov- 
 
216 AN OUTLINE OF IRISH HISTORY. 
 
 ernment. Another and more romantic cause helped 
 to drive Tyrone into revolt. After the death of his 
 first wife he had fallen in love with the beautiful sister 
 of Sir Henry Bagnal, the Lord Marshal, and the lady 
 had returned his love. In defiance of the fierce oppo- 
 sition of her brother, she eloped with the Irish chief, 
 and made Bagnal the remorseless enemy of Tyrone. 
 
 Bagnal used all his influence to discredit Tyrone in 
 the eyes of the English government, and he succeeded. 
 Urged by Red Hugh and the rebellious chiefs on the 
 one side, and by the enmity of Bagnal and the growing 
 distrust of the English government on the other, 
 Tyrone in the end consented to give the powerful sup- 
 port of his name and his arms to a skilfully planned 
 confederation of the tribes. On all sides the Irish 
 chiefs entered into the insurrection. O'Neil was cer- 
 tainly the most formidable Irish leader the English had 
 yet encountered. He was a brilliant general and a 
 skilled politician, and even Mr. Froude admits that 
 "his career is unstained with personal crimes." He 
 defeated an English army under Bagnal at the Black- 
 water, after a fierce battle, inflamed by more than mere 
 national animosity. Each leader was animated by a 
 bitter hatred of his opponent, which lends something 
 of an Homeric character to the struggle by the Black- 
 water. But Tyrone was fortunate in war as in love. 
 Bagnal's forces were completely defeated, and Bagnal 
 himself killed. Fortune seemed to smile on Tyrone's 
 arms. Victory followed victory. In a little while all 
 Ireland, with the exception of Dublin and a few garri- 
 son towns, was in the hands of the rebels. Essex, and 
 the largest army ever sent to Ireland, crossed the Chan- 
 nel to cope with him ; but Essex made no serious 
 move, and after an interview with Tyrone, in which he 
 promised more than he could perform, he returned to 
 England to his death. His place was taken by Lord 
 Mountjoy, who, for all his love of angling and of Eliza- 
 bethan "play-books," was a stronger man. Tyrone met 
 him ; was defeated. From that hour the rebellion was 
 over. A Spanish army that had come to aid the rebels 
 hurriedly re-embarked ; many of the chiefs began to 
 surrender ; wild Red Hugh O'Donnel, flying to Spain 
 to rouse allies, was poisoned and died. The sufferings 
 
AN OUTLINE OF IRISH HISTORY. 217 
 
 of the Irish were terrible. Moryson, Mountjoy's secre- 
 tary, a great traveller for his time, a Ulysses of ten 
 years' wanderings, tells much the same stories of the 
 after-consequences of this revolution which were told 
 by Spenser of the former. The carcasses of people lay 
 in ditches, their dead mouths open, green with the 
 docks and nettles on which they had endeavored to 
 support life. Young children were trapped and eaten 
 by the starving women who were hiding in the woods 
 on the Newry. He and Sir Arthur Chichester wit- 
 nessed the horrible spectacle of three young children 
 devouring the entrails of their dead mother. 
 
 At last Tyrone was compelled to com.e to terms. 
 He surrendered his estates, renounced all claim to the 
 title of The O'Neil, abjured alliance with all foreign 
 powers, and promised to introduce English laws and 
 customs into Tyrone. In return he received a free 
 pardon and a re-grant of his title and lands by letters 
 patent. Rory O'Donnel, Red Hugh's brother, also 
 submitted, and was allow^ed to retain the title of Earl 
 of Tyrconnel. Elizabeth was already dead, and the 
 son of Mary Stuart was King of England when these 
 terms were made ; but they were not destined to do 
 much good. 
 
 Tyrone was brought to London to meet King James. 
 He stayed at Wanstead as Mountjoy's guest, where, 
 four-and-twenty years before, he had been present at 
 Leicester's entertainment of Queen Elizabeth. Those 
 four-and-twenty years had brought many changes : 
 they had carried away many gallant gentlemen and 
 wise statesmen and brave soldiers ; they had changed 
 Tyrone from the brilliant young man dreaming after 
 liberty into the '' new man " of Elizabeth's successor. 
 
 Tyrone returned to Ireland, but not to peace. King 
 James was determined to reform the country after his 
 own fashion, and in King James's mind reform meant 
 supporting the Protestant religion everywhere, enforc- 
 ing all laws against the Catholics, crushing out what- 
 ever remains of the old Brehon laws still lingered in 
 the country, and definitely establishing the English 
 law, which only the English settlers liked, in its stead. 
 Sir George Carew had been Deputy, and had come 
 back to England with a store of money, and Chichester 
 
218 AN OUTLINE OF IRISH HISTORY. 
 
 was in his place making himself hateful to the Irish by 
 his ingenious methods of wresting their land from its 
 rightful owners, and by his pitiless intolerance of the 
 Catholic religion. The Irish Catholics had hoped for 
 toleration from James — James, indeed, promised them 
 on his accession the privilege of exercising their re- 
 ligion in private ; but he soon revoked his promise, 
 and the state of the Irish Catholics was worse than be- 
 fore. Tyrconnel himself was called upon to conform 
 to the English faith. Lest these and kindred exaspera- 
 tions might arouse once more the dangerous wrath of 
 the chiefs, Chichester enforced a rigorous disarmament 
 of the kernes. It is hardly to be wondered at if the re- 
 forming spirit of James did not greatly commend itself 
 to two such national leaders as Tyrone and Tyrconnel ; 
 it would not be very surprising if they had thoughts of 
 striving against it. Whether they had such thoughts 
 or not, they w^ere accused of entertaining them. They 
 were seen to be dangerous enemies to the king's pol- 
 icy, whom it would be convenient to have out of the 
 way, and they were proclaimed as traitors. They seem 
 to have been convinced of the impossibility of resist- 
 ance just then ; they saw that it was death to remain, 
 and they fled into exile. '' It is certain," say the Four 
 Masters, " that the sea never carried, and the winds 
 never wafted, from the Irish shores individuals more 
 illustrious or noble in genealogy, or more renowned 
 for deeds of valor, prowess, and high achievements." 
 Tyrone with his wife, Tyrconnel with his sister and 
 friends and followers, ninety-nine in all, set sail in one 
 small vessel on the 14th of September, 1607, and tossed 
 for twenty-one days upon the raging waves of the sea. 
 We hear of O'Neil trailing his golden crucifix at the 
 vessel's wake to bring about a calm ; of two storm- 
 worn merlins who took shelter in the rigging and w^ere 
 kindly cared for by the Irish ladies. On the 4th of 
 October they landed at Quilleboeuf, on the coast of 
 France, and made their way to Rouen, receiving kind 
 treatment at all hands. James demanded their sur- 
 render, but Henri Quatre refused to comply, though 
 he advised the exiles to go into Flanders. 
 
 Into Flanders they went, their ladies giving the 
 Marshal of Normandy those two storm-worn merlins 
 
AN OUTLINE OF IRISH HISTORY, 219 
 
 they had cherished, as a token of their gratitude for 
 his kindness. From Flanders, in time, they made their 
 way to Rome, and there they lived in exile, and died 
 long years after. Tyrconnel died first, in 1608, and the 
 Four Masters weep over his early eclipse. Clad in the 
 simple robe of a Franciscan friar, he was buried in 
 the Franciscan church of St. Pietro in Montorio, where 
 the Janiculum overlooks the glory of Rome, the yel- 
 low Tiber, and the Alban Hills, the deathless Coliseum 
 and the stretching Campagna. Raphael had painted 
 the Transfiguration for the grand altar ; the hand of 
 Sebastiano del Piombo had colored its walls with the 
 scourging of the Redeemer. Close at hand tradition 
 marks the spot where Peter was crucified. In such a 
 spot, made sacred by all that art and religion could 
 lend of sanctity, the spirit of Tyrconnel rested in peace 
 at last. His companion in arms and in misfortune sur- 
 vived him some eight years. We have a melancholy 
 picture of old Tyrone wandering about in Rome, and 
 wishing in vain to be back in his own land and able to 
 strike a good blow for her. He died at last, on July 
 20, 16 1 6, in the seventy-sixth year of his age, a brave, 
 sad, blind old man. He was buried in the little church 
 on the Janiculum, by the side of Tyrconnel. 
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 
 THE CROMWELLIAN SETTLEMENT. 
 
 After the flight of the earls, Ireland was entirely in 
 James's hands. The very few who opposed his author- 
 ity were sternly and summarily dealt with. His writ 
 ran in every part of the island ; there was a sheriff for 
 every shire ; the old Irish law was everywhere super- 
 seded ; there was nothing to interfere with James's 
 schemes for confiscating Irish lands and planting Irish 
 provinces. The English had already made strong set- 
 tlements in Leinster, Connaught, and Munster. Ulster 
 had hitherto been practically untouched, but now at 
 
220 AN OUTLINE OF IRISH HISTORY. 
 
 last it too was to come under the control of the crowa 
 The alleged treason of the two earls served as an ex- 
 cuse for confiscating the counties of Donegal, Derry, 
 Tyrone, Fermanagh, Cavan, and Armagh. A sort of 
 commission sat at Limavaddy to parcel out the lands 
 of men who had committed no other offence than that 
 of serving under the exiled chieftains. Ulster was 
 planted with a thoroughly Protestant and anti-Irish 
 colony of English and Scotch adventurers, and the 
 Irish were driven away from the fertile lands like Red 
 Indians, to contracted and miserable reserv^ations, 
 while the fighting men were shipped off to sw^ell the 
 armies of Gustavus Adolphus. Twelve City of Lon- 
 don companies bought great tracts of land in Derry at 
 very cheap rates. Six of these companies — the Mer- 
 cers, Salters, Skinners, Ironmongers, Fishmongers, and 
 Drapers — still retain much of the property thus 
 acquired. The disinheriting process w^as carried on 
 not by force alone, but by fraud. Men called "dis- 
 coA'erers " made it their business to spy out flaws in 
 titles of land, in order that they might be confiscated 
 by the crown. 
 
 Conspicuous among the English adventurers, a very 
 mirror of the merits of his kind, is Richard Boyle, who 
 afterwards became the first Earl of Cork. He w^as a 
 man of very low beginnings. He has been happily de- 
 scribed as a forger, a horse-thief, and a conniver at 
 murder, w4io made Providence his inheritance and 
 prospered by it. Boyle landed in Dublin on Midsum- 
 mer Eve, June 23, 1588, with some twenty-seven pounds 
 in his pocket, a couple of suits of clothes, a diamond 
 ring and a gold bracelet, and, of course, his rapier and 
 dagger. After seven years' stay, the adventurer w^as 
 lucky enough, aided, perhaps, by the diamond ring and 
 the gold bracelet, to win the heart and hand of a lady 
 of Limerick with five hundred pounds a year. This 
 was the beginning of his fortunes. From that hour 
 lands and money accumulated about him. As long as 
 he got it he little cared how it came. No man was 
 more ready to lay his hands upon any property of the 
 Church, or otherw^ise, that he could securely close 
 them over. He swindled Sir Walter Raleigh, then in 
 prison and near his death, out of his Irish land, for a 
 
AN OUTLINE OF IRISH HISTORY. 231 
 
 sum shamelessly below its value, and throve upon the 
 swindle. He is a fair type of the men with whom James 
 planted Ulster and Leinster, and with whom he would 
 have planted Connaught, but that he died before he 
 was able to carry that scheme into effect. But Charles 
 inherited the scheme. Ingenious court lawyers investi- 
 gated and invalidated the titles of the Connaught land- 
 lords, and Charles soon found himself the owner of all 
 Connaught, in the same sense that a burglar is the 
 owner of the watches, the plate, and jewels that are the 
 results of a successful " plant." But land w^as not 
 enough for Charles ; he wanted money. He w^as always 
 wanting money, and he found a means of raising it in 
 Ireland by promising grants of civil and religious lib- 
 erty to the Catholics in exchange for so much down. 
 The money was soon forthcoming, but the promised 
 liberties never came. Charles's great ally in the man- 
 agement of Ireland was Thomas Wentworth, to whom 
 the government of the country was given. Strafford 
 devoted the great abilities, of which Lord Digby truly 
 said " that God had given him the use and the devil 
 the application," to supporting Charles's fraudulent 
 schemes for extorting money, until his malign influence 
 w^as removed by the summons to England which ended 
 in his death. But when the revolution began in Eng- 
 land, which ended with the fall of the king's head, 
 many of the Irish thought their time had come. 
 
 In 1 641 the remnant of native Irish in Ulster rose, 
 under Sir Phelim O'Neil, against the oppression of the 
 Scotch settlers. This rising of 1641 has been "written 
 about often enough by English historians, as if it were 
 an act of unparalleled wickedness and ferocity. It is 
 written of with horror and hatred as the " massacre of 
 1 641." Mr. Froude, in especial, has lent all the weight 
 of his name and his eloquence to this theory of a gi- 
 gantic and well-organized massacre ; but Mr. Froude's 
 statements are too curiously in advance of his evi- 
 dence, and his evidence too untrustw^orthy to claim 
 much historical importance. The business of 1641 was 
 bad enough without Mr. Froude doing his best to 
 make it worse. In one part of Ireland a certain body 
 of men for a short time rose in successful insurrection, 
 and they killed their oppressors as their oppressors had 
 
222 AN OUTLINE OF IRISH HISTORY. 
 
 always killed their kin, wherever they could get at them. 
 Undoubtedly there were a great many people" killed. 
 That, of course, no one attempts, no one desires, to 
 justify ; but it must be remembered that it was no 
 worse than any one of the many massacres of the Irish 
 by the English, which had taken place again and again, 
 any time within the memory of the men then living, to 
 go no further back. Far be it from me, far be it from 
 any one, to defend the cruelties that accompanied the 
 rising of 1641 ; but it is only fair to remember that 
 most nations that have been treated cruelly are cruel in 
 their revenge when they get it, and the followers of Sir 
 Phelim O'Neil believed they had as bitter wrongs to 
 avenge as men can have. They had been taught 
 lessons of massacre by their masters, and this was their 
 first essay. The massacre of Mullaghmast, Essex's 
 treacherous massacre of the clan O'Neil, the dragoon- 
 ing of Connaught by Bingham, the desolation of 
 Munster, all these atrocities are slurred over in order 
 to lend an uncontrasted horror to Irish crimes. Mr. 
 Prendergast and Mr. John Mitchel have both written to 
 show the terrible exaggerations that have attended 
 upon all representations of the rising of 1641. These 
 are Irish historians ; but an English historian, Mr. 
 Goldwin Smith, is fairer than Mr. Froude. To him the 
 early part of the rising presents a '' picture of the ven- 
 geance which a people, brutalized by oppression, wreaks 
 in the moment of its brief triumph on its oppressor." 
 He considers it " to have been unpremeditated, and 
 opposed to the policy of the leaders ; " and when the 
 struggle had begun, " the English and Scotch settlers 
 perhaps exceeded the Irish in atrocity, especially when 
 we consider their comparative civilization. The Irish 
 population of Island Magee, though innocent of the re- 
 bellion, were massacred, man, woman, and child, by 
 the Scotch garrison of Carrickfergus." 
 
 The historian Borlase, kinsman to the chief-justice 
 of that name, rejoicing over the exploit of the soldiers 
 against the rebels, mentions as one item how Sir W. 
 Cole's regiment "starved and famished of the vulgar 
 sort, whose goods were seized on by this regiment, 
 7,000." No cruelties on the one side can ever justify 
 retaliation on the other, but to mention them will at 
 
AN OUTLINE OF IRISH HISTORY. 223 
 
 least serve to dispel the idea which Mr. Froude would 
 willingly foster, that at a sudden point in the history 
 of a blameless and bloodless rule, some wicked Irish 
 rose up and slew some of their just and merciful mas- 
 ters. The masters were neither just nor merciful, 
 bloodless nor blameless. It was hardly to be expected 
 that a people, treated as they had been, would act very 
 mercifully when their turn came. Yet in many cases 
 they did act mercifully. The followers of Sir Phelim 
 spared some lives they might have taken ; pitied some 
 who were in their power. There has been monstrous 
 exaggeration about the stories of wholesale massacre. 
 Most of the evidence given before the commission sent 
 to inquire into the thing is given on hearsay, and it is 
 on this evidence that the accounts of the massacre de- 
 pend. Old women who were ill in bed, and saw noth- 
 ing of the struggle, gave as evidence the statements of 
 friends, who told them that in many places thousands 
 of persons were massacred. Others, again, were as- 
 sured of such slaughterings of hundreds and thousands 
 of persons in different parts of the country by the 
 rebels themselves, who display throughout the evi- 
 dence a most remarkable taste for self-accusation. 
 Equally valuable and veracious evidence testifies that 
 the ghosts of the murdered were seen stalking abroad 
 — that in the river near Portadown, where the worst of 
 the killing was said to have been, the body of a man 
 stood erect for three days in the middle of the water, 
 and that corpses floated against the stream several 
 days after they had been drowned, in order to meet 
 one of their murderers w^ho was crossing the bridge ! 
 
 However it began. Sir Phelim O'Neil's rising soon 
 flamed up into a general rebellion. One of the most 
 prominent of its leaders was Roger Moore, the last of 
 a stately, ruined family, one of whose ancestors had 
 died in the Tower under Edward VI. He was a brave 
 and honorable gentleman, whose handsome face and 
 graceful bearing commended him closely to the men 
 from whom he sought help, whom his eloquence was 
 well calculated to persuade, and his statesman-like 
 prudence and foresight to encourage. His daring and 
 gallantry endeared him to his followers, who were al- 
 ways ready to fight their best for the war-cry of '' For 
 
224 /^^ OUTLINE OF IRISH HISTORY. 
 
 God, our Lady, and Roger Moore." At his instance 
 Colonel Owen O'Neil — better known as Owen Roe — 
 came over from Spain to consolidate and command the 
 insurrection. He was a nephew of the great Tyrone, 
 who had died in Rome ; he was a brave and gallant 
 gentleman, of high and honorable position in the 
 Spanish army ; he was the natural leader of the Irish 
 people. Success, at first, was strewm before his feet. 
 A National Convention met at Kilkenny in October, 
 1642, to establish the independence of Ireland. It took 
 upon itself all the powers of a provisional government : 
 appointed the officers of its army ; organized provincial 
 councils ; issued proclamations ; ordered its own seal 
 to be cut ; established a mint for coining its own 
 money, and in every way showed itself ready to carry 
 out the work of national administration. Frequent 
 help came from abroad. In O'Neil's hands the army 
 acquired new strength, and the struggle w^as carried on 
 with marked humanity. The insurrection seemed in a 
 fair way to become a successful revolution. There were 
 altogether four parties in Ireland, three of whom it 
 was to the king's advantage to conciliate. The fourth 
 and least important was that of the Puritans and the 
 English Parliament, headed by the Lords-justices Par- 
 sons and Borlase, whom Mr. Goldwin Smith describes 
 as a pair of scoundrels who had done their best to 
 foment the rebellion for their owm advantage, and 
 Generals Munroe and Coote the cruel. The three 
 other parties were — first, the native Irish, under Owen 
 Roe, guided by the Papal Nuncio Rinuccini, who had 
 come over from Rome to lend his support and counsels 
 to the movement ; second, the Anglo-Irish, chiefly com- 
 posed of Catholic nobles, who supported the king, but 
 stood out for their own rights and religion ; and, thirdly, 
 the king's party, with his Lord-deputy, Lord Ormonde, 
 at its head. Lord Ormonde was a Protestant, entirely 
 devoted to his king, and compelled to play a very diffi- 
 cult game in trying to keep together the rebellious 
 Irish who were willing to support Charles, and yet at 
 the same time avoid giving offence to Charles's Eng- 
 lish followers, v/ho wished for no terms with the Irish. 
 Like most of the Irish leaders of his time, Ormonde 
 had had a strangely checkered career. He was the grand- 
 
AN OUTLINE OF IRISH HISTORY. 225 
 
 son of the eleventh Earl of Ormonde, whose estates had 
 been unjustly filched from him by his son-in-law, Sir 
 Richard Preston, who had obtained the favor of James, 
 and with it the patent of the earldom of Desmond. 
 Young James Butler seemed thus quite cut off from 
 his inheritance, but he was lucky enough to meet and 
 win the affections of PrestK)n's daughter, his cousin. He 
 married her, and so in time came into not only the title 
 of Earl of Ormonde, but into the possession of the good 
 broad lands of the family. Ormonde had managed his 
 own affairs skilfully enough, but he was not the man 
 to fill a position of great and responsible statesmanship. 
 His mediocre abilities and temporizing spirit were quite 
 unsuited to the desperate circumstances in which he 
 was placed. Charles himself, harassed by English rev- 
 olutionists at home, made many and any pledges to the 
 Irish revolutionists, in the hope of winning them to his 
 side. He never had the chance of breaking these 
 pledges. The execution at Whitehall left Cromwell 
 free to deal with Ireland. He entered Ireland with 
 8,000 foot and 4,000 horse, and marched from victory to 
 victory. Everything w^as in his favor : his own military 
 genius, the laurels of Worcester and Nasseby, the dis- 
 organization of the Irish parties ; and the contentions 
 that had sprung up among them, especially the removal 
 of the only man really capable of doing anything against 
 the Lord-general in the field. Owen Roe O'Neil died 
 suddenly, it was said, of course, by poison, though 
 there seems little reason to believe this, and with his 
 death all chance of the independence dreamed of by 
 the Kilkenny Convention was over for that time. Ro- 
 ger Moore, the gallant and heroic, was already dead ; 
 killed, it was said, by bitter disappointment at the 
 gradual failure of the cause he had so much at heart. 
 Sir Phelim O'Neil was captured soon after. However 
 he had lived, he died like a brave man ; he was offered 
 a pardon if he would only say that he took up arms by 
 the king's command, but he preferred to die. One 
 after another the Irish leaders surrendered or were 
 defeated. The king's party was practically nowhere. 
 Ormonde had fled to France for his life. After Crom- 
 well had captured Drogheda and put all its people to 
 the sword, after he had conquered Wexford and slaugh- 
 
220 AN OUTLINE OF IRISH HISTORY. 
 
 tered no less pitilessly its inhabitants, the revolution 
 was at an end. Ireland was at Cromwell's mercy, and, 
 like all his predecessors, he resolved to make a new 
 settlement. 
 
 The government of Ireland was now vested in a dep- 
 uty Commander-in-chief and four commissioners, with 
 a High Court of Justice, which dealt out death, exile, 
 and slavery in liberal measure. The Parliament had 
 soothed the claims of its army by giving its officers 
 and men debentures for Irish land ; and similar de- 
 bentures were held by a vast number of adventurers, 
 who had speculated thus in Irish land, while the strug- 
 gle was going on, to the amount of some 2,500,000 
 acres. These claims had now to be settled ; but the 
 adventurers w^ere not willing to settle until all possible 
 danger was removed. There were disbanded soldiers 
 in Ireland who might interfere with the peaceful settle- 
 ments of Cromwellian w^ould-be landlords ; and these 
 must be got rid of before any serious plantation could 
 be effected. Word was sent throughout Europe that 
 nations friendly to the Commonwealth would not beat 
 their drums in vain in the market-places of Irish garri- 
 son towns. The valor of Irish soldiers was well enough 
 known abroad. It had been praised by William the 
 Silent and Henri Ouatre ; and the redeemer of Holland 
 and the victor of Ivry were good judges of tall soldiers. 
 So the drums of Spain, Poland, and France were set 
 rattling all over Ireland, and to their tuck the disbanded 
 soldiery marched away to the number of 44,000, be- 
 tween 165 1 and 1654, to die beneath foreign banners 
 on foreign fields. Women and girls who were in the 
 way of the adventurers could be got rid of no less prof- 
 itably to West Indian planters weary of maroon and 
 negro women. Into such shameful slavery thousands 
 of unhappy Irishwomen were sent, and it was only 
 when, the Irish supply being exhausted, the dealers in 
 human flesh began to seize upon English women to 
 swell their lists, that the practice was prohibited. Sir 
 William Petty states that 6,000 boys and girls were 
 sent to the West Indies ; and the total number trans- 
 ported there and to Virginia was estimated at 10,000. 
 Henry Cromwell not only approved of the exportation 
 by force of some thousand ''Irish wenches " for the 
 
AN OUTLmE OF IRISH HISTORY. 327 
 
 consolation of the soldiers in the newly acquired col- 
 ony of Jamaica, but of his own motion suggested the 
 shipment, also, of from 1,500 to 2,000 boys of from 
 twelve to fourteen years of age. '' We could well spare 
 them," he says, '' and who knows but it might be a 
 means to make them English — I mean Christians ? " 
 
 Now came the turn of the adventurers. The govern- 
 ment reserved for itself all the towns, Church land, 
 and tithes, and the counties Kildare, Dublin, Carlow, 
 and Cork, to satisfy friends and favorites who were not 
 army men. The portion of each adventurer in Ulster, 
 Leinster, or Munster was decided by lot, at a lottery 
 held in Grocers' Hall, London, in July, 1653. To make 
 the condition of the adventurers comfortable, each of 
 the planted counties was divided in half, and the ad- 
 venturers were quartered, for their greater encourage- 
 ment and protection, in alternate baronies with soldier 
 settlers. The rest of Ireland, except Connaught, was 
 apportioned to satisfy the arrears of officers and sol- 
 diers. To keep the new settlers free from all Irish in- 
 fluences, Connaught was appointed as a reservation for 
 the Irish, and all English holding lands in Connaught 
 were allowed to exchange them for estates of equal 
 value in other parts of Ireland. The Irish were then 
 driven and cooped into Connaught. They were not 
 allowed to appear within two miles of the river or four 
 miles of the sea, and a rigorous passport system was 
 established, to evade which was death without form of 
 trial. Irish noblemen, who were pardoned for being 
 Irish, were compelled to wear a distinctive mark upon 
 their dress, under pain of death ; and persons of infe- 
 rior rank bore a black spot on the right cheek, under 
 pain of branding or the gallows. It is curious to re- 
 flect that all these precautions were not able to secure 
 the Ironsides from the dreaded Irish influence, and 
 that forty years later many of the children of Crom- 
 well's troopers could not speak a word of English. 
 
 The plantation of the unhappy Irish in Connaught 
 was slowly and sternly accomplished. Land-owners had 
 the choice of becoming the tenants-at-will of the new 
 settlers, or of dying on the road-side. The commis- 
 sioners were much harassed in the execution of their 
 task by the unreasonable clamor of the dispossessed 
 
228 AN OUTLINE OF IRISH HISTORY. 
 
 Irish, who objected to being reserved in Connaught, 
 
 and who complained that the w^hole of the province was 
 waste from famine. There were parts of Connaught 
 where it was truly said that there was not wood enough 
 to hang, water enough to drown, or earth enough to 
 bury a man. The commissioners, anxious, no doubt, 
 that the Irish should know the worst at once, had sent 
 the earliest transplanted to this inhospitable place, and 
 their dismay communicated itself to the as yet untrans- 
 planted. The hunted and harassed Irish nobles would 
 not transplant themselves. It needed some punishments 
 by death to quicken the general desire to seek the ap- 
 pointed haven w^est of the Shannon. But death not 
 proving convenient, as executions would have had to 
 be ordered wholesale, it was decided to ship off the res- 
 tive Irish, who w^ould not go to Connaught, to the West 
 Indies. But the unhappy wretches who got to Con- 
 naught were not at the end of their misery. The officers 
 employed to settle them in their new homes had to be 
 bribed by money or by portion of the reserved land to 
 carry out the law, and the greedy officers were easily 
 able to force the unhappy transplanters to sell the rest 
 of their reduced lots at miserably small rates. The 
 transplanted, rich and poor, w^ere wretchedly lodged in 
 smoky cabins or under the open air, and lay down and 
 measured out their graves in common confusion and 
 misery, peer wath peasant, starved to death. 
 
 The towns were cleared as well. The inhabitants of 
 Limerick, Galway, Waterford, and Wexford were 
 ejected with scant compensation and scanter ceremony, 
 to make room for English merchants from Liverpool 
 and Gloucester. The dispossessed Irish merchants 
 fled across the seas to carry their skill and thrift to 
 other lands, and in the new hands the commercial pros- 
 perity of the towns dwindled away. Galway, that had 
 been a flourishing seaport, never recovered her reset- 
 tlement. The Irish who were dispossessed, and who 
 would not transplant or go into exile, took to the 
 woods and mountains, the clefts of the rocks and the 
 caves of the earth, and lived a life of wild brigandage, 
 like the Greek Klephts dispossessed by the Turk. The 
 government put a price upon the heads alike of these 
 Tories, of priests, and of wolves. 
 
AN OUTLINE OF IRISH HISTORY. 229 
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 THE RESTORATION. — WILLIAM OF ORANGE, 
 
 When Cromwell and the Cromwellian rule had 
 passed away and the Stuart king came over to "enjoy 
 his own again," most of the dispossessed Irish gentle- 
 men, whose loyalty to his cause and creed had cost 
 them their estates, and driven them to exile abroad, 
 or w^orse than exile in the Connaught reservations, 
 thought not unreasonably that they might be allowed 
 to " enjoy their own again," too, as well as their merry 
 monarch. They were grievously disappointed. The 
 Cromwellian landholders were quite prepared to secure 
 their estates by loyal recognition of the new rule, and 
 their adhesion was far more serviceable to the second 
 Charles than the allegiance of the ruined Irish gentle- 
 men. 
 
 Men like Broghill were not prepared to let the lands 
 they had got during the Cromwellian settlement slip 
 between their fingers. Broghill, the infamous Brog- 
 hill, as he has been justly called, was a worthy son of 
 the adventurer Richard Boyle, who has passed into his- 
 tory as the ''great Earl of Cork." Boyle was a great 
 robber, but Broghill was a greater, and a traitor as 
 well. He had served every ruling government in turn, 
 and had always contrived to make his subservience 
 profitable to himself. He got into the good graces of 
 Cromwell by the signal services he rendered to his 
 cause in Ireland, but he was not prepared to sacrifice 
 the rewards of these services, the fair acres he had laid 
 hold of, to any sentimental adherence to the Crom- 
 wellian principle. His treachery secured the Restora- 
 tion as far as Ireland was concerned ; he played Monk's 
 part upon the Irish stage. The breath once out of 
 Cromw^ell's body, he prepared to intrigue for the return 
 of Charles. He found an able assistant in Coote, the 
 cruel president of Connaught. Charles rewarded the 
 faithful Broghill w^ith the confirmation in all his estates, 
 and the title of Earl of Orrery. Coote was confirmed 
 
230 AN OUTLINE OF IRISH HISTORY. 
 
 in his estates and made Earl of Mountrath, This worthy 
 pair of brothers were made Lords-justices of Ireland, and 
 in their hands the settlement of the land question was 
 practically left. It is easy to see that it was to the in- 
 terest of neither that there should be a general redis- 
 tribution of land. They arranged an ingenious scheme 
 by which only those who proved themselves " innocent " 
 of a certain series of offences should be reinstated. No 
 man was to be held "innocent" who had not belonged 
 to the royal party before 1643, or who had been en- 
 gaged in the confederacy before 1648, or who had ad- 
 hered to the party of the papal nuncio. Lest this might 
 not sufficiently limit the list of the " innocent," it was 
 decided that no one deriving his title from such offend- 
 ers, and no one who played a merely passive part, liv- 
 ing, that is to say, on his estate, and leaning neither to 
 the one side nor the other, should be allowed to regain 
 the lands he had lost. This system was so well worked 
 that except in the rarest cases the plundered Irish were 
 unable to get back an acre of land from the new men. 
 Ormonde and a few others were restored at once to their 
 estates and honors without any difficulty, and the rest 
 were left as they were. 
 
 Ormonde was made Lord-Lieutenant, and once again 
 showed that he was not strong enough for his stormy 
 times. He opposed, but could not prevent, the efforts 
 of the English Cabal to prohibit the importation of 
 Irish cattle as a nuisance. The Cabal found no dif- 
 ficulty in carrying their point ; their only difficulty was 
 whether they should describe the obnoxious importa- 
 tion as a "detriment" or a '* nuisance," a difficulty 
 which Clarendon satirically proposed to meet by sug- 
 gesting that it might as fittingly be called *' adultery." 
 When the cattle trade was put down, Ormonde (he was 
 now duke of that name) did his best to advance the 
 Irish woollen and linen trades, but these efforts ren- 
 dered him hateful to the Cabal, and he was removed 
 from office. For long enough he lingered in disgrace, 
 attending at Charles's court in London, and quietly en- 
 during the insults that Charles and his favorites put 
 upon him, and the dangers of assassination to which 
 his enemies exposed him. At length he was restored 
 to the Irish Lord-lieutenantship, and the record of his 
 
AN OUTLINE OF IRISH HISTORY. 231 
 
 last administration is chiefly a record of measures 
 against the Roman Catholics. Charles, indeed, was 
 anxious to allow the Catholics as much toleration as 
 possible, but the fury of the Titus Gates Plot found its 
 echo across the Irish Sea. Ormonde's nature w^as not 
 one which lent itself to excesses of any kind, but he 
 was strongly anti-Catholic, and to him is due the dis- 
 honor of sending Plunket, the Archbishop of Armagh, 
 to his trial and death in England, a " murder " which, 
 as Mr. Goldwin Smith says, "has left a deep stain on 
 the ermine of English justice." 
 
 With James's accession the treatment of the Catho- 
 lics changed considerably. Ormonde was recalled to 
 end his days in peaceful retirement, and his place was 
 taken by a new and remarkable figure, the bearer of 
 an historic name. This new man was James Talbot, 
 Earl of Tyrconnel. He was, while a boy, in Drogheda 
 during the Cromwellian sack, and the memory of that 
 fearful hour was always with him. He had followed 
 the Stuarts into exile ; he was the first Roman Catho- 
 lic Governor of Ireland appointed since the introduc- 
 tior of the Protestant religion. He did his best to 
 undo the severe anti-Catholic legislation which marked 
 Ormonde's last administration. That he, a Catholic 
 and an Irishman, should wish to see justice and reli- 
 gious liberty allowed to his countrymen and the com- 
 panions of his faith, has made his name too often the 
 object of the obloquy and the scorn of historians who 
 are unwilling to see liberty, either political or religious, 
 enjoyed by any but themselves and their own peole or 
 party. The war between James and William of Orange 
 found the Catholics in Ireland entirely on the Stuart 
 side, though more for the sake of Talbot of Tyrconnel 
 than of the English monarch. Talbot might have said 
 of himself, like Shakespeare's English Talbot, that he 
 w^as ''but shadow of himself," and that ''his substance, 
 sinews, arms, and strength " lay in the Irish Catholics 
 who rallied round him as they had before rallied round 
 an earlier wearer of the name of Tyrconnel. For a 
 time it seemed as if this Irish support might shoulder 
 James into his throne again, and the king made many 
 concessions to encourage such allegiance. Poynings's 
 Act was formally repealed, and a measure passed re- 
 
23^ AN OUTLINE OF IRISH HISTORY. 
 
 Storing the dispossessed Irish to their property. A 
 large army came over from France to Ireland to fight 
 for the Stuart, under command of one of the bravest 
 and vainest soldiers that ever fought a field, St. Ruth. 
 But the battle of the Boyne ruined alike the Stuart 
 cause and the hopes of its Irish adherents. Ginckel, 
 William's ablest general, took Athlone, defeated the 
 French and Irish at Aughrim, where the glorious and 
 vainglorious St. Ruth was slain, and invested Limerick. 
 In Limerick Tyrconnel died, and at Limerick the last 
 struggle was made. The city was held by Patrick Sars- 
 field, a brave Catholic gentleman and gifted soldier. 
 He defended Limerick so well against hopeless odds 
 that he was able to wring from his enemies a treaty 
 providing that the Roman Catholics of Ireland should 
 enjoy the privilege of religious freedom, and giving 
 King James's followers the right of their estates. 
 When t4ie treaty was signed, Sarsfield surrendered the 
 city and marched out with all the honors of war. Out- 
 side the city the flags of England and France were set 
 up, and the defenders of Limerick were offered their 
 choice of service under either standard. Ginckel had 
 the mortification of seeing the flower of the army rally 
 beneath the lilies -of Gaul, only a few regiments rang- 
 ing themselves beneath the English standard. 
 
 These Irish soldiers did splendid service in the land 
 to which they gave their swords. Their names became 
 famous in France, in Spain, in Austria, and in Russia, 
 and on many a field from Fontenpy to Ramilies and 
 Laufeldt the Irish brigades fought out for an alien cause, 
 and beneath a foreign flag, the old quarrel of their race. 
 Sarsfield himself died bravely at Landen, three years 
 after the surrender of Limerick. It is said that the 
 dying man looked at his hand, red with his own blood, 
 and said, " Would God that this were shed for Ireland." 
 All that he had done for his country had been done in 
 vain. The treaty that he had secured by his gallant 
 defence of Limerick, the treaty that had been con- 
 firmed and even amplified by William himself, was 
 broken and set aside. Mr. Froude seems to think that 
 the Irish ought to have been aware that the English 
 could not be expected to keep faith with them over 
 such a treaty. To such sorry justification for such a 
 
AN OUTLINE OF IRISH HISTORY. 233 
 
 breach of faith there is nothing to say. The treason 
 shows worse when it is remembered that after the 
 treaty was signed an army of reinforcements arrived in 
 the Shannon. Had these come some days earlier, the 
 siege of Limerick must inevitably have been raised. 
 Even as it was, Ginckel greatly feared that Sarsfield 
 might seize the opportunity to renew the war. But 
 Sarsfield honorably abided by his word. The treaty 
 was violated ; all the forfeited lands were reconfiscated 
 and sold by auction as before, for the benefit of the 
 state, to English corporations and Dublin merchants. 
 
 At William's death the Catholics were the owners of 
 less than one-seventh of the w^hole area of Ireland. 
 William determined to make Ireland Protestant by 
 penal laws. Under these laws Catholics could not sit 
 in the Irish Parliament, or vote members to it. They 
 were excluded from the army and navy, the corpora- 
 tions, the magistracy, the bar, the bench, the grand 
 juries, and the vestries. They could not be sheriffs or 
 soldiers, gamekeepers or constables. They were for- 
 bidden to own any arms, and any two justices or sheriffs 
 might at any time issue a search warrant for arms. The 
 discovery of any kind of weapon rendered its Catholic 
 owner liable to fines, imprisonment, whipping, or the 
 pillory. They could not own a horse worth more than 
 five pounds, and any Protestant tendering that sum 
 could compel his Catholic neighbor to sell his steed 
 No education whatever was allowed to Catholics. A 
 Catholic could not go to the university ; he might not 
 be the guardian of a child ; he might not keep a school, 
 or send his children to be educated abroad, or teach 
 himself. No Catholic might buy land, or inherit, or 
 receive it as a gift from Protestants, or hold life annui- 
 ties or leases for more than thirty-one years, or any 
 lease on such terms as that the profits of the land ex- 
 ceeded one-third the value of the land. If a Catholic 
 purchased an estate, the first Protestant who informed 
 against him became its proprietor. The eldest son of 
 a Catholic, upon apostatizing, became heir at law to 
 the whole estate of his father, and reduced his father 
 to the position of a mere life tenant. 
 
 A wife who apostatized was immediately freed from 
 her husband's control, and assigned a certain propor- 
 
234 AN OUTLINE OF IRISH HISTORY. 
 
 tion of her husband's property. Any child, however 
 young, who professed to be a Protestant, was at once 
 taken from his father's care, and a certain proportion 
 of his father's property assigned to him. In fact, the 
 CathoHcs were exchided, in their own country, from 
 every profession, from every government office from 
 the highest to the lowest, and from almost every duty 
 or privilege of a citizen. It was laid down from the 
 bench by Lord-chancellor Bowes and Chief-justice 
 Robinson that " the law does not suppose any such 
 person to exist as an Irish Roman Catholic," and pro- 
 claimed from the pulpit by Dopping, Bishop of Meath, 
 that Protestants were not bound to keep faith with Pa- 
 pists. We are reminded, as we read, of Judge Taney's 
 famous decision in the American Dred Scott case, that 
 a black man had no rights which a white man was bound 
 to respect. Happily, humanity and civilization are in 
 the end too much for the Doppings and Taneys. It is 
 hard for a more enlightened age to believe that such 
 laws as these were ever passed, or, being passed, were 
 ever practised. It was well said that the penal code 
 could not have been practised in hell, or it would 
 have over turned the kingdom of Beelzebub. But these 
 laws, by which the child was taught to behave himself 
 proudly against the ancient, and the base against the 
 honorable, were rigorously enforced in Ireland. The 
 records of the House of Lords are full of the vain ap- 
 peals of Catholic gentlemen against their dispossession 
 by some claimant, perhaps an unworthy member of their 
 family, perhaps a bitter enemy, and perhaps a hither- 
 to unknown " discoverer," who had put on the guise of 
 ostentatious Protestantism as a cloak for plunder. In 
 often-quoted, often-to-be-quoted words, Burke, in later 
 years, denounced the penal code for its "vicious per- 
 fection." " For," said he, " I must do it justice : it was 
 a complete system, full of coherence and consistency, 
 well digested and well composed in all its parts. It 
 was a machine of wise and elaborate contrivance, and 
 as well fitted for the oppression, impoverishment, and 
 degradation of a people, and the debasement in them 
 of human nature itself, as ever proceeded from the 
 perverted ingenuity of man." 
 
 Jt is encouraging to think that even under such laws 
 
Al/ OUTLINE OF IRISH HISTORY. 235 
 
 the spirit of the people was not wholly annihilated. 
 The country clung to its proscribed faith ; the ministers 
 of that faith braved shame and persecution and death 
 in their unswerving allegiance to their scattered flocks. 
 They fought bravely against the oppression which 
 would have enforced ignorance and all its attendant 
 evils upon an unhappy people. When no Catholic 
 might open a school, the priests established what was 
 known as hedge schools. By the roadside and on the hill- 
 side, in ditches and behind hedges, the children of the 
 people cowered about their pastors, fearfully and eagerly 
 striving to attain that knowledge which the harsh laws 
 denied them. In one other instance the penal laws 
 failed. They could take away the Catholic's land, his 
 horse, his life ; they could hang his priests and burn 
 his place of worship ; they could refuse him all educa- 
 tion ; they could deny him all rights before the law ex- 
 cept the right to be robbed and hanged ; but they could 
 not compel him to change his faith, and they could not 
 succeed in making every Protestant in Ireland a willing 
 creature of the new code. By the code, any marriage 
 between a Catholic and a Protestant was, by the fact 
 of the husband and wife being of opposite faiths, null 
 and void, without any process of law whatever. A man 
 might leave his wife, or a woman her husband, after 
 twenty years of marriage, in such a case, and bring a 
 legal bastardy on all their offspring. But, for the sake 
 of human honor, it is consolatory to remember that the 
 instances in which this ever occurred were very rare. 
 The law might sanction the basest treachery, but it is 
 not able to make its subjects treacherous. 
 
 The evils of the penal code w^ere further supple- 
 mented by the statutory destruction of Irish trade. 
 Under Charles I., Strafford had done his best to ruin 
 the Irish woollen manufacturers in order to benefit the 
 English clothiers. Under Charles II., the importation 
 of Irish cattle or sheep or swine was prohibited. In 
 1663 Ireland was left out of the act for the encourage- 
 ment of trade, so that all the carrying trade in Irish- 
 built ships with any part of his majesty's dominions 
 was prevented. But it was left to William to do the 
 worst. In 1696 all direct trade from Ireland with the 
 British colonies was forbidden, and a revival of the 
 
236 AN OUTLINE OF IRISH HISTORY. 
 
 woollen trade was crushed out by an act which pro- 
 hibited the export of Irish wool or woollen goods from 
 any Irish port except Cork, Drogheda, Dublin, Kin- 
 sale, Waterford, and Youghal, to any port in the world 
 except Milford, Chester, Liverpool, and certain ports 
 in the British Channel, under a penaly of ;^5oo and 
 the forfeiture of both ship and cargo. 
 
 CHAPTER VIL 
 
 THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 
 
 It has been happily said that Ireland has no history 
 during the greater part of the eighteenth century. 
 What Burke called " the ferocious legislation of Queen 
 Anne " had done its work of humiliation to the full. 
 For a hundred years the country was crushed into 
 quiescent misery. Against the tyranny which made 
 war at once upon their creed, their intellect, and their 
 trade, the Irish had no strength to struggle ; neither in 
 1 7 15, nor in 1745, did the Irish Catholics raise a hand 
 for the Pretenders. The evidence of Arthur Young 
 shows how terribly the condition of the peasantry had 
 sunk when he is able to state that " Landlords of con- 
 sequence have assured me that many of their cotters 
 would think themselves honored by having their wives 
 and daughters sent for to the bed of their masters ; a 
 mark of slavery which proves the oppression under 
 which such people must live." To add to the wretched- 
 ness of the people, a terrible famine ravaged the coun- 
 try in 1 741, the horrors of which almost rival, in ghast- 
 liness, those of the famine of 1847. Great numbers 
 died ; great numbers fled from the seemingly accursed 
 country to recruit the armies of the Continent, and 
 found death less dreadful on many well-fought fields 
 than in the shape of plague or famine in their own 
 land. Such elements of degradation and despair natur- 
 ally begot all sorts of secret societies among the peas- 
 antry from north to south. White-boys, Oak-boys, and 
 
AN OUTLINE OF IRISH HISTORY. 'i'^ 
 
 Hearts of Steel banded against the land tyranny, and 
 held together for long enough in spite of the strenuous 
 efforts of the government to put them down. If the 
 military force, said Lord Chesterfield, '' liad killed half 
 as many landlords as it had White-boys, it would have 
 contributed more effectually to restore quiet ; for the 
 poor people in Ireland are worse used than negroes by 
 their masters, and deputies of deputies." 
 
 Bad as the condition of Ireland was, the English in 
 Ireland proposed to make it worse by depriving it of 
 what poor remains of legislative independence it still 
 possessed. So early as 1 703, a petition in favor of union 
 with England, and the abolition of the Irish Parliament, 
 was presented to Queen Anne ; its prayer was rejected 
 for the time, but the idea was working in the minds of 
 those — and they w^ere many — who wished to see Ireland 
 stripped of all pretence at independence afforded by 
 the existence of a separate Parliament, even though 
 that Parliament were entirely Protestant. Seventeen 
 years later, in the sixth year of George I., a vigorous 
 blow was dealt at the independence of the Irish Parlia- 
 ment by an act which not only deprived the Irish House 
 of Lords of any appellate jurisdiction, but declared that 
 the English Parliament had the right to make laws to 
 bind the people of the kindom of Ireland. The " heads 
 of a bill " might indeed be brought in in either house. 
 If agreed to, they were carried to the Viceroy, who gave 
 them to his Privy Council to alter if they chose, and 
 send to England. They were subject to alteration by 
 the English Attorney-general, and, when approved by 
 the English Privy Council, sent back to Ireland, where 
 the Irish Houses could either accept or reject them 
 in toto, but had no power to change them. 
 
 The condition of the Irish Parliament all through 
 the eighteenth century is truly pitiable. Its existence 
 as a legislative body is a huge sham, a ghastly simula- 
 crum. It slowly drifted into the custom of sitting but 
 once in every two years, to vote the money bills for the 
 next two twelvemonths. The Irish exchequer derived 
 half its receipts from the Restoration grant of the ex- 
 cise and customs ; and the greater part of this money 
 was wasted upon royal mistresses, upon royal bastards, 
 and upon royal nominees. The Parliament was torn 
 
238 • AN- OUTLINE OF IRISH HISTORY. 
 
 by factions, which the English government ingeniously 
 played off against each other ; it was crowded with the 
 supple placemen of the government, who were well re- 
 warded for their obedient votes ; the bulk of the 
 House was made up of nominees of the Protestant 
 landlords. The Opposition could never turn out the 
 Administration, for the Administration was composed 
 of the irremovable and irresponsible Lords-justices of 
 the Privy Council and certain officers of state. The 
 Opposition, such as it was, was composed of Jacobites, 
 who dreamed of a Stuart restoration, and of a few men 
 animated by a patriotic belief in their country's rights. 
 These men were imbued with the principles which had 
 been set forth in the end of the seventeenth century 
 by William Molyneux, the friend of Locke, who, in his 
 " Case of Ireland," was the first to formulate Ireland's 
 constitutional claim to independent existence. His 
 book was burned by the English Parliament, but the 
 doctrines it set forth wxre not to be so destroyed. 
 During the reigns of the first two Georges, the Patriot 
 Party had the support of the gloomy genius and the 
 fierce indignation of the man w^hose name is coupled 
 with that of Molyneux in the opening sentences of 
 Grattan's famous speech on the triumph of Irish inde- 
 pendence. Swift, weary of English parties, full of 
 melancholy memories of St. John and Harley and the 
 scattered Tory chiefs, had come back to Ireland to try 
 his fighting soul in the troublous confusion of Irish 
 politics. It has been asserted over and over again that 
 Swift had very little real love for the country of his 
 birth. Whether he loved Ireland or not is little to the 
 purpose, for he did her very sterling service. He was 
 the first to exhort Ireland to use her own manufactures, 
 and he was unsuccessfully prosecuted by the State for 
 the pamphlet in which he gave this advice. When 
 Wood received the authority of the English Parliament 
 to deluge Ireland with copper money of his own mak- 
 ing it was Swift's " Drapier's Letters " which made 
 Wood and his friends the laughing-stock of the world, 
 and averted the evil. In Swift's '' Modest Proposal " 
 we have the most valuable evidence of the misery of 
 the country. He suggests, with savage earnestness, 
 that the children of the Irish peasant should be reared 
 
AN OUTLINE OF IRISH HISTORY. 239 
 
 for food ; and urges that the best of these should be 
 reserved for the landlords, who, as they had already 
 devoured the substance of the people, had the best 
 right to devour the flesh of their children. 
 
 Even as the most conspicuous supporter of the Irish 
 interest during the first half of the century was the 
 Dean of St. Patrick's, the two most remarkable sup- 
 porters of the English ''interest" in Ireland in the 
 eighteenth century were both Churchmen, the Primate 
 Boulter and the Primate Stone. Compared to Stone, 
 Boulter appears an honest and honorable man. He 
 was only shallow, arrogant, and capricious, quite in- 
 capable of the slightest sympathy with any people or 
 party but his own — a man of some statesmanship, 
 which was entirely at the service of the government, 
 and which never allowed him to make any considera- 
 tion for the wants, the wishes or the sufferings of the 
 Irish people. Perhaps the best that can be said of him 
 is, that while belonging to the English Church he did 
 not wholly neglect its teachings and its duties, or live a 
 life in direct defiance of its commands, which is saying 
 a good deal for such a man in such a time. So much 
 cannot be said of his successor in the headship of the 
 Irish ecclesiastical system. Primate Stone. The grand- 
 son of a jailer, he might have deserved admiration for 
 his rise if he had not carried with him into the high 
 places of the Church a spirit stained by most of the 
 crimes over which his ancestor was appointed warder. 
 In an age of corrupt politics, he was conspicuous as a 
 corrupt politician ; in a profligate epoch, he was emi- 
 nent for profligacy. In the basest days of the Roman 
 Empire he would have been remarkable for the variety 
 of his sins ; and the grace of his person, which caused 
 him to be styled in savage mockery the '' Beauty of 
 Holiness," coupled with his ingenuity in pandering to 
 the passions of his friends, would have made him a 
 serious rival to Petronius at the court of Nero. 
 
 The year that Swift died, 1745, was the first year of 
 the viceroyalty of Lord Chesterfield, one of the few 
 bright spots in the dark account of Ireland in the eigh- 
 teenth century. If all viceroys had been as calm, as 
 reasonable, and as considerate as the author of the 
 famous " Letters" showed himself to be in his dealings 
 
240 AN OUTLINE OF IRISH HISTORY. 
 
 with the people over whom he was placed, the history 
 of the succeeding century and a half might have been 
 very different. But when Chesterfield's viceroyalty 
 passed away, the temperate policy he pursued passed 
 away as well, and has seldom been resumed by the 
 long succession of viceroys who have governed and 
 misgoverned the country since. 
 
 In the meanwhile, a new spirit was gradually coming 
 over the country. Lucas, the first Irishman, in the 
 words of the younger Grattan, " who, after Swift, dared 
 to write freedom," had founded Xh^ Freejtiafi's Journal, 
 a journal which ventured in dangerous times to ad- 
 vocate the cause of the Irish people, and to defy the 
 anger of the English '' interest." In the first number, 
 which appeared on Saturday-, September lo, 1763, and 
 which bore an engraving of Hibernia with a wreath in 
 her right hand and a rod in her left, Lucas boldly ad- 
 vocated the duty and dignity of a free press, and de- 
 nounced under the guise Of " Turkish Tyranny," " The 
 Tyranny of French Despotism," and " The Ten Tyrants 
 of Rome," the ministries and the creature whom his 
 unsparing eloquence assailed. The Patriot Party, too, 
 was rapidly increasing its following and its influence 
 in the country. The patriotic party in Parliament had 
 found a brilliant leader in Henry Flood, a gifted poli- 
 tician, who thought himself a poet, and who was cer- 
 tainly an orator. Flood was the son of the Irish Chief- 
 justice of the King's Bench. He had been educated at 
 Trinity College and at Oxford, and much of his youth 
 was devoted to the study of oratory and the pursuit of 
 poetry. He wrote an ode to Fame, which was perhaps 
 as unlucky in reaching its address as that poem to 
 Posterity of which poor Jean Baptiste Rousseau was so 
 proud. But his oratory was a genuine gift, which he 
 carefully cultivated. We hear of his learning speeches 
 of Cicero by heart, and writing out long passages of 
 Demosthenes and ^^schines. His character was kindly, 
 sweet-tempered, and truthful. He Avas ambitious be- 
 cause he was a man of genius, but his ambition was for 
 his country rather than for himself, and he served her 
 wath a daring spirit, which only the profound states- 
 manlike qualities of his intellect prevented from be- 
 coming reckless. In 1759, then in his twenty-seventh 
 
AN OUTLINE OF IRISH HISTORY. 241 
 
 year, a married man with a large fortune, he entered 
 public life, never to leave it till the end of his career. 
 He came into Parliament as member for Kilkenny, and 
 almost immediately became a prominent member of 
 the Opposition. His m.aiden speech was a vigorous 
 attack upon the corrupt and profligate Primate Stone. 
 In the hands of Flood, ably seconded by Charles 
 Lucas, the Opposition began to take shape, and to be- 
 come a serious political power. Under his brilliant 
 and skilful chieftainship, the '' Patriots," as the party 
 who followed him were called in scorn by their ene- 
 mies, and in admiration by their allies, made repeated 
 assaults upon the hated pension list. After they had 
 been defeated again and again, Flood found a more 
 successful means of harassing the Administration by 
 turning the attention of his party to parliamentary re- 
 form. The time was well chosen. The English gov- 
 ernment was beginning to be troubled by its own 
 greedy placemen, who were always ready to go with 
 light hearts into the Opposition lobby if they could not 
 squeeze all they wanted out of the government. By 
 taking advantage of the discontent of placemen, the 
 Patriots were able to induce the House to declare that 
 they alone had the right to initiate a money bill, and 
 to refuse to accept a money bill brought in by the 
 English or Irish Privy Council. It is bitterly to be 
 regretted that Flood allowed himself to be led away 
 from the Patriot Party, and to accept a government 
 sinecure. There is no need to doubt that when Flood 
 accepted the office of vice-treasurer he believed that he 
 was acting on the whole in the interests of the cause 
 he represented. He had just made a great political 
 triumph. He had driven out of office a most obnox- 
 ious and unpopular lord-lieutenant, Lord Townsend, 
 and Townsend's place had been taken by Lord Har- 
 court, a reasonable and able man, who seemed likely 
 to be in sympathy with Flood's views as to the inde- 
 pendence of Parliament. Flood may well be assumed 
 to have reasoned that a place under government would 
 offer him greater opportunities for urging his cause. 
 But, whatever his reasons, the step was fatally ill-ad- 
 vised ; he lost the confidence of the country, and ruined 
 his position as leader. But this was the less to be re- 
 
242 AN OUTLINE OF IRISH HISTORY. 
 
 gretted that it gave his place as leader of the Patriot 
 Party to a greater orator and a nobler man — to Henry 
 Grattan. 
 
 Grattan was born in 1750, in Dublin. His years of 
 early manhood were passed in London, studying for 
 the bar. Like Flood, he believed himself destined to 
 be a poet ; but when, in 1775, he was nominated to 
 represent Charlemont in the Irish Parliament by the 
 owner of the borough, Lord Charlemont, he discovered 
 where his real genius lay. He and Flood had been 
 close friends and political allies until Flood's acceptance 
 of the vice-treasurership. This seemed to Grattan the 
 basest political apostasy. The alliance between the 
 two orators was definitely broke off; the friendship 
 was finally severed in the fierce discussion that took 
 place between them in the House of Commons some 
 years later, when Flood tauntingly described Grattan 
 as a *' mendicant patriot," and Grattan painted Flood 
 as a traitor in one of the most crushing and pitiless 
 pieces of invective that have ever belonged to oratory. 
 Such a quarrel between such men was the more to be 
 regretted because each had the same end in view, and 
 each had special qualifications for furthering that end 
 which were not possessed by the other. 
 
 Grattan Avas now leader of the Patriots. It was his 
 ambition to secure legislative independence for the 
 Irish Parliament. The war with the American colo- 
 nies gave him the opportunity of realizing his ambi- 
 tion. A large force of Volunteers had been organized 
 in Ireland to defend the island from the attacks of the 
 terrible Paul Jones, and the Volunteers and their lead- 
 ers were all in sympathy with the Patriot Party. For 
 the first time since the surrender of Limerick there was 
 an armed force in Ireland able and willing to sustain 
 the national cause. There were 60,000 men under 
 arms, under the leadership of the gifted and patriotic 
 Lord Charlemont. Among their leaders were Flood 
 himself and Henry Grattan. The Volunteers formed 
 themselves into an organized convention for the pur- 
 pose ot agitating the national grievances. Grattan was 
 not, indeed, a member of this convention, but he saw 
 that with the existence of the Volunteers had come the 
 hour to declare the independence of the Irish Parliament, 
 
AN OUTLINE OF IRISH HISTORY. 243 
 
 and he seized upon the opportunity. He had an army 
 at his back ; the English government was still striving 
 with "Mr. Washington" and his rebels, and it had to 
 give way. All that Grattan asked for was granted ; 
 the hateful Act of the 6th George I. was repealed, and 
 Grattan was able to address a free people and wish 
 Ireland as a nation a perpetual existence. 
 
 But now that the desires of the Patriot Party had 
 been apparently fulfilled, by a curious example of the 
 law of historical reaction the popularity of Grattan 
 began to wane, and that of Flood to wax anew. The 
 English hold over the Irish Parliament had been based 
 first upon Poynings's Act, and then upon a Declaratory 
 Act asserting the dependence of the Irish Parliament. 
 It was this Declaratory Act that Grattan, aided by the 
 Volunteers, had caused to be repealed, and he and his 
 party contended that by this repeal England resigned 
 her right over the Irish Parliament. Flood and his 
 friends maintained that the repeal of the Declaratory 
 Act was not enough, and they would not rest until they 
 had obtained a fuller and more formal Renunciation 
 Act. There were other differences between Flood and 
 Grattan. Grattan was all in favor of the disbandment 
 and dispersal of the Volunteers. Flood was for still 
 keeping them in armed existence. Grattan had urged 
 that their work had been done, and that their presence 
 was a praetorian menace to the newly acquired liberties. 
 Flood believed that their co-operation was still needful 
 for the further securing of Irish liberty. Yet it is curi- 
 ous to remember that Grattan was the advocate of 
 Catholic Emancipation, and that Flood was strenuously 
 opposed to it. Grattan carried his point, and the Vol- 
 unteers disbanded and dispersed, very much to the dis- 
 appointment of Flood and the indignation of one of the 
 most curious political figures of the time, and one of 
 the most remarkable of the many remarkable ecclesias- 
 tics who played a part in this period of Irish history. 
 This was the Earl of Bristol and Bishop of Derry, 
 a son of the Lord Hervey whom Pope strove to 
 make eternally infamous by his nickname of Sporus, 
 and who had left such living pictures of the court 
 of the second George in the brilliant malignancy 
 of his unrivalled memoirs. The bishop was a cul- 
 
244 AN OUTLINE OF IRISH HISTORY. 
 
 tured, desperate dandy, a combination of the typi- 
 cal French abbe of the last century with the conven- 
 tional soldier of fortune. He loved gorgeous dresses ; 
 he loved to be prominent in all things. The Volun- 
 teers delighted his wild imagination. He fancied him- 
 self the leader of a great rebellion, and he babbled to 
 every one of his scheme with ostentatious folly. But 
 though he could command popularity among the Vol- 
 unteers, he could not command the Volunteers them- 
 selves. They remained under the guidance of Charle- 
 mont and Flood^ and when Flood failed in carrying the 
 Volunteer Reform Bill for enlarging the franchise, the 
 Volunteers peaceably dissolved. The bishop drifted 
 out of Dublin, drifted into Naples, lived a wild life 
 there for many years, became a lover of Lady Hamil- 
 ton's, and died in Rome in 1803. 
 
 While it lasted the free Irish Parliament was worthy 
 of its creator. It gave the Catholics the elective fran- 
 chise of which they had been so long deprived ; up to 
 this time no Catholic had been able to record a vote in 
 favor of the men who w^ere laboring for the liberty of 
 their country. There is no doubt that it w^ould in time 
 have allowed Catholics to enter Parliament. But the 
 efforts of Grattan after Catholic Emancipation failed, 
 and their failure strengthened the hands of the United 
 Irishmen. 
 
 The name ** United Irishmen " designated a number 
 of men all over the country, who had formed them- 
 selves into clubs for the purpose of promoting a union 
 of friendship between Irishmen of every religious per- 
 suasion, and of forwarding a full, fair, and adequate 
 representation of all the people in Parliament. It was 
 in the beginning a perfectly loyal body, with a Protes- 
 tant gentleman, Mr. Hamilton Rowan, for its president. 
 James Napper Tandy, a Protestant Dublin trader, was 
 secretary. The men who created it were well pleased 
 with the success of Grattan's efforts at the indepen- 
 dence of the Irish Parliament, but they were deeply 
 discontented at the subsequent disbandment of the 
 Volunteers and Grattan's comparative inaction. The 
 simple repeal of the 6th George I. did not answer their 
 aspirations for liberty, which were encouraged and ex- 
 cited by the outbreak of the French Revolution. They 
 
AN OUTLINE OF IRISH HISTORY. 245 
 
 found a leader in Theobald Wolfe Tone, a young bar- 
 rister, brave, adventurous, and eloquent. Allied with 
 him was Lord Edward Fitzgerald, the chivalrous, the 
 heroic, who had lived long in France and travelled in 
 America, who was devoted to two loves, his country 
 and his beautiful wife Pamela, the daughter of Philippe 
 Egalite and Madame de Genlis. A third leader was 
 Arthur O'Connor, Lord Longueville's nephew, and 
 member for Philipstown. They were all young ; they 
 were all Protestants ; they were all dazzled by the suc- 
 cesses of the French Revolution, and believed that the 
 House of Hanover might be as easily overturned in 
 Ireland as the House of Capet had been in France. 
 Wolfe Tone went over to Paris and pleaded the cause 
 of Ireland with the heads of the French Directory. His 
 eloquence convinced them, and a formidable fleet was 
 sent over to Ireland under victorious Hoche. But the 
 winds which had destroyed the Armg^da dispersed the 
 French squadron, and no landing w^as effected. The 
 government was aroused and alarmed ; the plans of the 
 United Irishmen were betrayed ; martial law was pro- 
 claimed. Arthur O'Connor was at once arrested. 
 Edward Fitzgerald lay in hiding in Dublin for some 
 days in a house in Thomas Street, but his hiding-place 
 was betrayed. He defended himself desperately against 
 the soldiers who came to take him, was severely wound- 
 ed, and died of his wounds in prison. The room is 
 still shown in which the '^ gallant and seditious Geral- 
 dine " met his death ; it is very small, and the struggle 
 must have been doubly desperate in the narrow space. 
 It is a dismal little theatre for the tragedy that was 
 played in it. 
 
 Before the rebellion broke out, soldiers and yeomen, 
 who were generally Orangemen of the most bitter kind, 
 were sent to live at free quarters among the peasants in 
 every place where any possible disaffection was suspect- 
 ed, and the licentiousness and brutal cruelty of these 
 men did much to force hundreds of peasants into the 
 rising, and to prompt the fierce retaliation which after- 
 wards characterized some episodes of the rebellion. 
 The troops and yeomen flogged, picketed, and tortured 
 with pitch-caps the unhappy men, and violated the un- 
 happy women, who were at their mercy. The Irish 
 
246 AN' OUTLINE OF IRISH HISTORY, 
 
 historian would indeed be fortunate who could write 
 that on the Irish side the struggle was disgraced \)j no 
 such crimes. Unhappily this cannot be said. Here it 
 cannot be better than to speak in Mr. Lecky's words : 
 " Of the atrocities committed by the rebels during the 
 bloody month when the rebellion was at its height, it is 
 difficult to speak too strongly," but he goes on to say — 
 he is criticizing Mr. Froude — "an impartial historian 
 would not have forgotten that they were perpetrated by 
 undisciplined men, driven to madness by a long course 
 of savage cruelties, and in most cases without the knowl- 
 edge or approval of their leaders ; that from the begin- 
 ning of the struggle the yeomen rarely gave quarter to 
 the rebels ; that with the one horrible exception of Scul- 
 labogue the rebels in their treatment of women con- 
 trasted most favorably and most remarkably with the 
 troops, and that one of the earliest episodes of the 
 struggle was the butchery near Kildare of 350 insurgents 
 who had surrendered on the express promise that their 
 lives should be spared." 
 
 It should be borne in mind, in considering the re- 
 bellion of 1798, that the struggle is not to be consid- 
 ered as a struggle of creed against creed. Protestants 
 began and organized the movement, and it is estimated 
 by Madden that among the leaders of the United Irish- 
 men Catholics were only in the proportion of one to 
 four throughout the rebellion. On the other hand, a 
 large number of Catholics were strongly opposed to 
 the rebellion, and in many cases took active measures 
 against it. In Wexford, unhappily, the efforts of the 
 Orangemen succeeded in giving the struggle there much 
 of the character of a religious war, but this the revo- 
 lution, looked at as a whole, never was. It was a na- 
 tional movement, an uprising against intolerable griev- 
 ances, and it was sympathized with and supported by 
 Irishmen of all religious denominations, bound together 
 by common injuries and a common desire to redress 
 them. 
 
 The great insurrection which was to have shattered 
 the power of England was converted into a series of 
 untimely, abortive, local risings, of which the most suc- 
 cessful took place in Wexford. The rebels fought 
 bravely, but the cause was now hopeless. The Catho 
 
AN OUTLINE OF IRISH HISTORY. 247 
 
 lie clergy came fearlessly to the front ; many of the 
 little bands of rebels were led into action by priests of 
 the Church. Father John Murphy, Father Philip 
 Roche, and Father Michael Murphy were among the 
 bravest and ablest of the revolutionary leaders. Father 
 Michael Murphy was long believed by his men to be 
 invulnerable, but he was killed by a cannon-ball in the 
 fight by Arklow. Father Philip Roche also died on 
 the field. Father John Murphy, less happy, was cap- 
 tured and died on the gallows ; so died Bagenal Harvey, 
 of Barry Castle, and Anthony Perry, both Protestant 
 gentlemen of fortune who had been forced into the re- 
 bellion, the one by government suspicion, the other by 
 imprisonment, cruelty, and torture. The revolution 
 was crushed out with pitiless severity, until the deeds 
 of the English soldiers and yeomanry became hateful 
 in the eyes of the viceroy himself, Lord Cornwallis. 
 '' The conversation," he writes in a letter to General 
 Ross, " of the principal persons of the country all 
 tends to encourage the system of blood ; and the con- 
 versation, even at my table, where you will suppose I 
 do all I can to prevent it, always turns on hanging, 
 shooting, burning, etc., and if a priest has been put to 
 death the greatest joy is expressed by the whole com- 
 pany. So much for Ireland and my wretched situa- 
 tion." 
 
 Cornwallis acted mercifully. He proclaimed pardon 
 to all insurgents guilty of rebellion only who should 
 surrender their arms and take the oath of allegiance. 
 Of the state prisoners, the two brothers Sheares were 
 hanged ; McCann was hanged ; Oliver Bond died in 
 New^gate ; O'Connor, Thomas Addis Emmet and Mc- 
 Nevin were banished. 
 
 The insurrection was not quite over when a small 
 French force, under General Humbert, landed in Kil- 
 lala Bay and entered Longford. But Humbert was 
 surrounded- by the Engish under Cornwallis and Gen- 
 eral Lake at Ballinamuck, and surrendered at discre- 
 tion. The French were treated as prisoners of war, 
 but the insurgent peasantry were slaughtered without 
 quarter. 
 
 There was still one more scene in the drama of '98. 
 A French squadron, under General Hardi, sailed for 
 
248 AN OUTLINE OF IRISH HISTORY. 
 
 Ireland, but was attacked by an English squadron, and 
 hopelessly defeated. Wolfe Tone, who was on board 
 the principal vessel, the Hoche^ was captured with the 
 rest, and entertained with the French officers at Lord 
 Cavan's house at Lough Swilly. Here a treacherous 
 friend recognized him and addressed him by his name. 
 Tone was too proud to affect concealment. He was at 
 once sent in irons to Dublin, and tried by court-mar- 
 tial ; he asked in vain for a soldier's death ; he was con- 
 demned to be hanged, but he cut his throat in prison. 
 The wound was not mortal, and he would have been 
 hanged, had not Curran moved in the King's Bench 
 for a writ of habeas corpus, on the ground that a 
 court-martial had no jurisdiction while the Law Courts 
 were still sitting in Dublin. The writ was granted, 
 and Tone died a lingering death in prison. 
 
 Wolfe Tone was buried in Bodenstown, not far from 
 the little village of Sallins, some eighteen miles from 
 Dublin. Thomas Davis has devoted one of his finest 
 lyrics to the green grave in Bodenstown church- 
 yard, with the winter wind raving about it and the 
 storm sweeping down on the plains of Kildare. The 
 melancholy music of Davis's verse is well suited to the 
 desolate and deserted grass-grown graveyard and the 
 little lonely church, ruined and roofless, and thickly 
 grown with ivy, with the grave on the side away from 
 the road. When Davis wrote his poem there was no 
 stone upon the grave ; now it is railed in with iron 
 rails wrought at the top into the shape of shamrocks, 
 and marked by a winter -worn headstone, and a stone 
 siab^ with an inscription setting forth the name and 
 deeds of the man who lies beneath, and ending " God 
 save Ireland ! " 
 
 The leaders of constitutional agitation had taken no 
 part in the rebellion of the United Irishmen. Neither 
 Grattan nor Flood had belonged to the body, and 
 neither of them had any sympathy with its efforts. 
 They stood aside while the struggle was going on, and 
 the most prominent place in the public mind was taken 
 by a man not less gifted than either of them, John 
 Curran. Like Grattan and like Flood, Curran began 
 his career by trying to play on the double pipes of 
 poetry and oratory, and, like his great compeers, he 
 
AN OUTLINE OF IRISH HISTORY. 240 
 
 soon abandoned verse for prose. He rose from a very 
 humble origin, by the sheer force of his ability, to a 
 commanding position at the bar, and an honorable 
 position in Parliament, and his patriotism was never 
 stained by the slightest political subservience. Before 
 the rebellion of 1798 he had been conspicuous for his 
 courage in advocating the causes of men unpopular 
 with the government and the English " interest," and 
 afte-r the rebellion broke out he rendered himself hon- 
 orably eminent by the eloquence and the daring which 
 he offered in turn to the cause of all the leading politi- 
 cal prisoners. In his speech for Hamilton Rowan — a 
 defence for which he was threatened like a new Cicero, 
 but, unlike Cicero, remained undismayed — he made 
 that defence of the principle of universal emancipation 
 which has been so often, yet cannot be too often, 
 quoted : " I speak in the spirit of the British law, 
 which makes liberty commensurate with, and insepara- 
 ble from, the British soil which proclaims even to the 
 stranger and the sojourner, the moment he sets his 
 foot on British earth, that the ground on which he 
 treads is holy, and consecrated by the genius of uni- 
 versal emancipation. No matter in what language his 
 doom may have been pronounced ; no matter what 
 complexion incompatible with freedom an African or 
 an Indian sun may have burned upon him ; no matter 
 in what disastrous battle his liberty may have been 
 cloven down ; no matter with what solemnities he may 
 have been devoted upon the altar of slavery — the first 
 moment he touches the sacred soil of Britain the altar 
 and the god sink together in the dust ; his soul walks 
 abroad in its own majesty, his body swells beyond the 
 measure of his chains, that burst from around him, and 
 he stands redeemed, regenerated, and disenthralled by 
 the irresistible genius of universal emancipation." 
 
 Appeals to the " irresistible genius of universal 
 emancipation " were not likely to have much effect just 
 then. Martial and civil law Aned with each other in 
 severity towards the leaders of the United Irishmen. 
 But these, at least, had striven for the cause of emanci- 
 pation with arms in their hands. There was no such 
 excuse to justify the measures now taken by the gov- 
 ernment to insure that the "genius of universal eman- 
 
250 AN OUTLINE OF IRISH HISTORY. 
 
 cipation," however " commensurate with, and insep- 
 arable from," British soil, should have very little 
 recognition on Irish earth. 
 
 Having destroyed the revolution, the government 
 now determined to destroy the Parliament. The lib- 
 erty which Grattan had hoped might be perpetual en- 
 dured exactly eighteen years. Grattan had traced the 
 career of Ireland from injuries to arms, and from arms 
 to liberty. He was now to witness the reverse of the 
 process, to watch the progress from liberty to arms, 
 and from arms to injuries. The sword crushed out the 
 rebellion, gold destroyed the Parliament. The ruin of 
 the Irish Parliament is one of the most shameful stories 
 of corruption and treachery of which history holds wit- 
 ness. It was necessary to obtain a government ma- 
 jority in the Irish Parliament, and the majority was 
 manufactured by the most unblushing bribery. The 
 letters of Cornwallis confess the shame of a brave sol- 
 dier at the unworthy means he had to employ in obey- 
 ing the determination of the government to steal from 
 Ireland her newly obtained liberties. Place and office 
 were lavishly distributed. Peerages won the highest, 
 and secret service money the lowest, of those who were 
 to be bought. The English ministry had decided that 
 Ireland was to be joined to England in an indissoluble 
 union, and as Ireland was hostile to the scheme the 
 union was effected by force and by fraud. The Bill of 
 Union was introduced and passed by a well-paid ma- 
 jority of sixty, in 1800. The eloquence of Grattan was 
 raised to the last in immortal accents against the un- 
 holy pact. But the speech of angels would have been 
 addressed in vain to the base and venal majority. It 
 is something to remember that a hundred men could 
 be found even in that degraded assembly whom the 
 ministry could not corrupt, who struggled to the last 
 for the constitutional liberties of their country, and 
 who did not abandon her in her agony. 
 
 It would not be well to leave this part of the story 
 without a reference to the volumes which Mr. Froude 
 has devoted to the '^ English in Ireland in the Eigh- 
 teenth Century." There is perhaps no instance among 
 the writings of history in which commanding talents 
 have been put to a worse use. The deliberate and well- 
 
AN OUTLINE OF IRISH HISTORY. 251 
 
 calculated intention of rousing up all the old animos- 
 ities of race and religion, the carefully planned exag- 
 geration of everything that tells against Ireland, and 
 subordination or omission of all to be alleged in her favor, 
 are evidence of a purpose to injure which happily de- 
 feats itself. The grotesque malignity with which Mr. 
 Froude regards Ireland and everything Irish is so ab- 
 surdly overdone, that, as Mr. Lecky says, " his book has 
 no more claim to impartiality than an election squib." 
 "A writer of English history," the words are Mr. Lecky's 
 again, "who took the 'Newgate Calendar' as the most 
 faithful expression of English ideas, and English mur- 
 derers as the typical representatives of their nation, 
 would not be regarded with unqualified respect." Yet 
 this is literally what Mr. Froude has done in his deter- 
 mined effort to envenom old wounds and rekindle the 
 embers of old hatreds. 
 
 CHAPTER VIII. 
 
 EMMET. — O'CONNELL. 
 
 Though the Union was accomplished with the open- 
 ing of the century, the exchequers of the two countries 
 were not consolidated for a score of years longer, dur- 
 ing which Ireland suffered much, and England gained 
 much, by the new contract. England's superior com- 
 mand of capital rendered it impossible for Irish trade 
 and enterprise to compete successfully with her while 
 both were chained together under the same system, 
 and, as a natural consequence, Irish trade and enter- 
 prise dwindled, diminished, and practically disappeared. 
 The Union, like too many compacts that have ever 
 been made with the willing or unwilling Irish peo- 
 ple, was immediately followed by a breach of faith. 
 One of the most important factors in the securing of 
 the Union was the pledge entered into by Pitt, and 
 promulgated all over Ireland by print, that legislation 
 on Catholic Emancipation and the Tithe Question. 
 
9 5-2 AN OUTLINE OF IRISH HISTORY, 
 
 would be introduced at once. It is not to be ques 
 tioned that such a promise must have had great effect, 
 if not in winning actual support to the scheme of 
 Union, at least in preventing in many cases energetic 
 opposition to it. To many the question of Catholic 
 Emancipation was so immediately important, on many 
 the grievous burden of the Tithe Question pressed so 
 heavily, that they were almost ready to welcome any 
 measure which offered to grant the one and relieve the 
 other. But the pledge which Pitt had made Pitt could 
 not fulfil. The bigoted and incapable monarch, who 
 had opposed more reforms and brought more mis- 
 fortune upon his own country than any other of all 
 England's kings, stubbornly refused to give his con- 
 sent to any measure for the relief of the Roman Cath- 
 olics. Pitt immediately resigned, just eleven days 
 after the Union had become law. The obstinate folly 
 of the third George does not excuse the minister, who 
 had done his best to delude Ireland by arousing hopes 
 which he w^as not certain of gratifying, and making 
 pledges that he was unable to fulfil. 
 
 While the pledges to the Irish people were thus 
 broken, the principles which had obtained before the 
 Union remained unaltered. The system of corruption 
 which is perhaps inseparable from the government of a 
 viceroy and a Castle clique was in nowise diminished, 
 and all the important offices of the Irish executive 
 were filled solely by Englishmen. But the deceived 
 people could do nothing. The country was under mar- 
 tial law ; and the experiences of '98 had left behind 
 them a memorable lesson of what martial law meant. 
 There w^as no means, as there -would have been no use, 
 in bringing forward their claims to considertion in 
 any constitutional manner. But the strength of the na- 
 tional feeling of anger and despair may be estimated 
 by the fact that, in spite of the horrors of the recent 
 revolution, there were dangerous riots in several parts 
 of Ireland, and that one actual rising took place, a last 
 act of the rebellion of '98 surviving the Union. A 
 yOung, brave, and gifted man, Robert Emmet, the 
 youngest brother of Thomas Addis Emmet, planned 
 the seizure of Dublin Castle. The rising failed. Em- 
 met might have escaped, but he was in love with Sarah, 
 
AN OUTLINE OF IRISH HISTORY. 253 
 
 Curran's daughter, and he was captured while awaiting 
 an opportunity for an interview with her. Curran was 
 bitterly opposed to the love affair; he refused to defend 
 Emmet, and he has sometimes been accused in conse- 
 quence of being indirectly the cause of Emmet's death. 
 But we may safely assume that no counsel and no de- 
 fence could have saved Emmet then. The trial was 
 hurried through. Emmet was found guilty late at 
 night. -He w^as hanged the next morning, the 20th of 
 September, 1803, in Thomas Street, on the spot where 
 the gloomy church of St. Catherine looks down Bridge- 
 foot Street, where his principal stores of arms had been 
 found. Just before his death he wrote a letter to Rich- 
 ard, Curran's son, full of melancholy tenderness, re- 
 gret for his lost love, and resignation for his untimely 
 death : 
 
 " If there was any one in the world in whose breast 
 my death might be supposed not to stifle every spark 
 of resentment, it might be you ; I have deeply injured 
 you — I have injured the happiness of a sister that you 
 love, and w^ho was formed to give happiness to every 
 one about her, instead of having her own mind a prey 
 to affliction. Oh, Richard ! I have no excuse to offer, 
 but that I meant the reverse ; I intended as much hap- 
 piness for Sarah as the most ardent love could have 
 given her. I never did tell you how much I idolized 
 her ; it was not with a wild or unfounded passion, but 
 it was an attachment increasing every hour, from an 
 admiration of the purity of her mind and respect for 
 her talents. I did dwell in secret upon the prospect of 
 our union. I did hope that success, while it afforded 
 the opportunity of our union, might be the means of 
 confirming an attachment which misfortune had called 
 forth. I did not look to honors for myself — praise I 
 would have asked from the lips of no man — but I would 
 have wished to read in the glow of Sarah's countenance 
 that her husband was respected. My love ! Sarah ! it 
 was not thus that I thought to have requited your af- 
 fection. I had hoped to be a prop, round which your 
 affections might have clung, and which would never 
 have been shaken ; but a rude blast has snapped it, and 
 they have fallen over a grave." 
 
 The government acted against all the persons con- 
 
254 AN OUTLINE OF IRISH HISTORY. 
 
 cerned in Emmet's rising with a rigor such as only 
 panic could inspire. The fear of a French invasion 
 was incessantly before the eyes of the English govern- 
 ment, and for several years the Habeas Corpus Act was 
 suspended, and an Insurrection Act in full force. But 
 it took no steps whatever to allay the discontent which 
 alone could inspire and animate such insurrections. 
 Pitt returned to office in 1804 on the distinct under- 
 standing that he would no longer weary the king with 
 suggestions of relief for the Irish Catholics, and the 
 minister kept his word. The helplessness of the Irish 
 Catholics and the obvious indifference of the govern- 
 ment to their condition now fostered the formation of a 
 powerful anti-Catholic association, the Orange Society, 
 a body organized to support the crown so long as' it 
 supported Protestant ascendency in Ireland, and which 
 at one time, in later years in England, seems to have 
 gone near to shifting the succession of the crown alto- 
 gether. 
 
 For years the government of Ireland drifted along 
 on its old course of corruption and indifference. Pitt 
 died, and Fox took his place. But the genius of the 
 great statesman, " on whose burning tongue truth, 
 peace, and freedom hung," was quenched within the 
 year, and with it the only spirit of statesmanship which 
 understood and sympathized with the struggles of the 
 Irish people. These struggles were carried on in 
 straggling continuity, in the form of vain petitions for 
 redress from the Catholics of the better class, and of 
 frequent disturbances of a more or less desperate kind 
 on the part of the peasantry. In 1807 the tithe and 
 land difficulties created two bodies, known as Shana- 
 vests and Caravats, who seem to have agitated for a 
 time very fiercely before they disappeared under the 
 pressure of the law. But once again, after a decade 
 of despair, a new leader of the Irish people, a new 
 champion of the Catholic demands for freedom and the 
 rights of citizenship, came upon the scene. 
 
 Daniel O'Connell was the first Irish leader for many 
 years who was himself a Roman Catholic. In 1807 he 
 had made his first political appearance as a member of 
 the committee appointed to present the petitions set- 
 ting forth the Catholic claims to Parliament. In 1810 
 
AN OUTLINE OF IRISH HISTORY. 255 
 
 his name came moie prominently before the public, as a 
 speaker at a meeting called by the Protestant Corpo- 
 ration of Dublin to petition for the repeal of the 
 Union. He at once began to take a prominent part in 
 the Emancipation Movement, which grew in strength 
 and determination year by year. Catholic meetings 
 were held, and were dispersed by the government time 
 after time, but still the agitation went on. Its chief 
 supporters in Parliament were Henry Grattan, now an 
 old man, and Sir Henry Parnell. In" 1820 Grattan 
 died, but the cause to which he devoted his life was 
 rapidly striding towards success. O'Connell and 
 Richard Lalor Shell, an advocate as enthusiastic, an 
 orator only less powerful, than O'Connell himself, were 
 bringing the cause nearer to its goal. Three bills, em- 
 bracing emancipation, disfranchisement of the forty- 
 shilling householder freeholders, and the payment of 
 the Roman Catholic clergy, were introduced and ad- 
 vanced in the House of Commons ; but the House of 
 Lords, urged by the Duke of York's ''So help me 
 God " speech against the bills, was resolutely opposed 
 to them. The triumph was only postponed. The agi- 
 tators discovered that the act which prohibited Roman 
 Catholics from sitting in Parliament said nothing 
 against their being elected, and O'Connell prepared to 
 carry the war into Westminster. In 1828 he was re- 
 turned to the House of Commons for Clare County. 
 He refused to take the oath, which was expressly 
 framed to exclude Catholics from the House. His re- 
 fusal caused great agitation in both countries, and re- 
 sulted in the passing of the bill for Catholic Emanci- 
 pation in 1829, after which O'Connell took his seat. 
 To O'Connell what may be considered as the parlia- 
 mentary phase of the Irish Movement is due. He first 
 brought the forces of constitutional agitation in Eng- 
 land to bear upon the Irish question, and showed what 
 great results might be obtained thereby. 
 
 The act for the relief of his majesty's Roman Catho- 
 lic subjects abolished all oaths and declarations against 
 transubstantiation, the invocation of saints, and the 
 sacrifice of the mass ; it allowed all Roman Catholics, 
 except priests, to sit and vote in the House of Com- 
 mons, and made no such exception for the House of 
 
256 AN OUTLINE OF IRISH HISTORY. 
 
 Lords. A special form of oath was devised for Roman 
 Catholic members of Parliament, the chief provision 
 of which called upon them to maintain the Protestant 
 succession of the House of Hanover, and to make no 
 effort to weaken the Protestant religion. 
 
 Though O'Connell had been the means of calling 
 the act into existence, he was not yet able to take his 
 seat. The act had been passed since his election for 
 Clare ; its action was not retrospective. When he pre- 
 sented himself- to be sworn, the old oath, which it was 
 impossible for him to take, was presented to him. He 
 refused it, and was called upon to withdraw. After 
 some debate he was heard at the bar of the House. 
 There was a division, and his right to take the new oath 
 was negatived by 190 to ii 6. A new writ was issued for 
 Clare. O'Connell was, of course, re-elected without 
 opposition, and took his seat and the new oath on the 
 4th of February, 1830. But between O'Connell's first 
 and second election a change had been made in the 
 composition of the electors. By an act of Henry VHI., 
 which had been confirmed in 1795, freeholders to the 
 value of forty shillings over and above all charges were 
 entitled to vote, a system wiiich naturally created an 
 immense number of small land-owners, who were ex- 
 pected to vote in obedience to the landlords who cre- 
 ated them. O'Connell's election showed that the land- 
 lords could not always command the forty-shilling 
 voters. It was clear that they might be won over to 
 any popular movement, and it was decided to abolish 
 them ; which was accordingly done by an act passed on 
 the same day with the Catholic Emancipation Act. 
 The new act raised the county franchise to ten pounds, 
 and freeholders of ten pounds, but under twenty 
 pounds, were subjected to a complicated system of 
 registration, well calculated to bewilder the unhappy 
 tenant, and render his chance of voting more difficult. 
 But all these precautions did not prevent the trium- 
 phant return of O'Connell the second time he appealed 
 to the electors of Clare, nor did it ever prove of much 
 service in repressing the tenants from voting for the 
 leaders of popular movements. 
 
 The disenfranchisement produced intense discontent 
 throughout the country, and disorder followed close on 
 
AN OUTLINE OF IRISH HISTORY, 257 
 
 discontent. O'Connell now began to remind Ireland 
 of his promise that Catholic Emancipation was a means 
 towards an end, and that end the Repeal of the Union. 
 He started a society called the ''Friend of Ireland," 
 which the government at once put down He started 
 another, '' The Anti-Union Association." It was put 
 down too, and O'Connell was arrested for sedition, 
 tried, and found guilty. Judgment was deferred and 
 never pronounced, and O'Connell was released to carry 
 on his agitation more vigorously than ever. With 
 Ireland torn by disorders against which even the Insur- 
 rection Acts in force found it hard to cope, with the 
 country aflame with anger at the extinction of the 
 forty-shilling vote, the government judged it wise and 
 prudent to bring in a bill for Ireland in January, 1832, 
 effecting still further disfranchisement. The new bill 
 abolished the forty-shilling vote in boroughs as well as 
 in counties, and the lowest rate for boroughs and 
 counties was ten pounds. 
 
 But for the next few years all recollection of emanci- 
 pation on the one hand, and disenfranchisement on the 
 other, was to be swallowed up in a struggle which has 
 passed into history as the Irish Tithe War. The Eng- 
 lish Church was established in Ireland against the will 
 of the enormous majority of the Irish people, and they 
 were compelled to pay tithes to maintain the obnox- 
 ious establishment. Sydney Smith declared that there 
 was no abuse like this in Timbuctoo, and he estimated 
 that probably a million of lives had been sacrificed in 
 Ireland to the collection of tithes. They had to be 
 wrung from the reluctant people at the point of the 
 bayonet, and often enough by musket volleys. There 
 were, naturally, incessant riots. The clergymen of the 
 Established Church had to call in the services of an 
 army, and appeal to the strategies and menaces of min- 
 iature war to obtain their tithes from the harassed fol- 
 lowers of another faith. Such a state of things could 
 not last long. In the end a general strike against the 
 payment of tithes was organized, and then not all the 
 king's horses nor all the king's men could have en- 
 forced their payment. In 1833 the arrears of tithes ex- 
 ceeded a million and a quarter of money. There was 
 in Ireland an army almost as great as that which held 
 
258 AN OUTLINE OF IRISH HISTORY 
 
 India. In 1833 it had cost more than a million to 
 maintain this army, with ^300,000 more for the police 
 force, and the government had spent ^^26,000 to col- 
 lect ^12,000 of tithes. For many years successive 
 English ministers and statesmen made efforts to deal 
 with the Tithe Question ; but it was not until 1838, a 
 year after Queen Victoria came to the throne, that a 
 bill was passed by Lord John Russell, which converted 
 tithes into a rent charge, recoverable from the landlord 
 instead of from the tenant. The tenant had practically 
 still to pay the tithes in increased rent to his landlord, 
 but it was no longer levied from him directly as tithes, 
 and by the ministers of the Established Church ; that 
 was the only difference. It only exasperated the ex- 
 isting discontent. The agitation turned against rent, 
 now that the rent meant tithes as well. Secret socie- 
 ties increased. A landlord. Lord Norbury, was assassi- 
 nated, and the assassins were never discovered, though 
 the country was under severe Coercion Acts. 
 
 In the year 1845 there was fierce discussion in Eng- 
 land over the Maynooth grant. Some time before the 
 Union a government grant had been made to the Roman 
 Catholic college at Maynooth, where young men who 
 wished to become priests were educated. But the old 
 grant was insufficient, and Sir Robert Peel increased it 
 in the teeth of the most violent opposition, not merely 
 from his political opponents, but from many who were 
 on other matters his political partisans. Mr. Gladstone 
 resigned his place in the ministry rather than counte- 
 nance the increased Maynooth grant. For years and 
 years after, annual motions were made in the House of 
 Commons for the withdrawal of the grant, and wearily 
 debated, until the abolition of the State Church in Ire- 
 land abolished the grant, too, and ended the matter. 
 Peel also established the Queen's Colleges of Cork, 
 Belfast, and Galway, for purely secular teaching, which 
 came to be known in consequence as the Godless Col- 
 leges. These colleges pleased neither Catholics nor 
 Protestants. The Catholics argued that there were 
 universities which gave Protestants religious as well as 
 secular education, and that the Catholics should be 
 allowed something of the same kind. Still, the new 
 scheme, at least, allowed Catholics an opportunity of 
 
AN OUTLINE OF IRISH HISTORY. 259 
 
 obtaining a university education and winning university 
 degrees. Up- to that time no Irishman of the religion 
 of his race could win any of the honors that the univer- 
 sities of Ireland offered which were worth winning. He 
 might, indeed, enter their gates and sit at the feet of 
 their teachers, but so long as he was a Catholic he could 
 practically reap no rewards for his scholarship. 
 
 O'Connell's success in winning Catholic Emancipa- 
 tion inspired him with the desire to bring about the re- 
 peal of the Union, and it did not seem to him and his 
 followers that the difficulties in the way were any greater 
 than those which had showed so terrible when Catholic 
 Emancipation was first demanded, and which had been 
 triumphantly overcome. 
 
 There was a great deal against the agitation. To 
 begin with, the country was very poor. *' Every class 
 of the community," says Sir Charles Gavan Duffy, 
 " were poorer than the corresponding class in any coun- 
 try in Europe." The merchants, who had played a 
 prominent part in political life since the Union, were 
 now wearied and despairing of all agitation, and held 
 aloof ; the Protestant gentry were, for the most part, 
 devoted to the Union ; many of the Catholic gentry 
 disliked O'Connell himself and his rough, wild ways ; 
 many of O'Connell's old associates in the Catholic 
 Emancipation movement had withdrawn from him to 
 join the Whigs. In England the most active dislike of 
 O'Connell prevailed. The Pericles or the Socrates of 
 Aristophanes, the royalists drawn by Camille Desmou- 
 lins, were not grotesquer caricatures than the repre- 
 sentation of O'Connell by English opinion and the Eng- 
 lish press. 
 
 But, on the other hand, there was much for O'Con- 
 nell. It might be said of him as of Wordsworth's Tous- 
 saint rOuverture, that "his friends were exultations, 
 agonies, and love, and man's unconquerable mind." 
 The people were with him, the people to whose suffer- 
 ings he appealed, the people for whom he had secured 
 the Catholic Emancipation, and who regarded him as 
 almost invincible. He was a great orator, endowed 
 with a wonderful voice, which he could send in all its 
 strength and sweetness to the furthest limits of the 
 
260 AN OUTLINE OF IRISH HISTORY. 
 
 vastest crowd that ever came together to hear him 
 speak. Lord Lytton declared that he first learned 
 
 "what spells of infinite choice 
 To rouse or lull has the sweet human voice," 
 
 when he heard O'Connell speak, and that in watching 
 him governing with his genius and his eloquence one 
 of his great meetings, he learned 
 
 "to seize the. sudden clue 
 To the grand troublous life antique, to view 
 Under the rock stand of Demosthenes 
 Unstable Athens heave her stormy seas." 
 
 It was not unnatural that O'Connell should have 
 been carried away by his triumph and the homage his 
 country gave him everywhere into the belief that the 
 Repeal of the Union was to be as easily accomplished 
 by the strong man and the determined nation as the 
 emancipation of the Catholics. 
 
 During the years of disturbance and repression, 
 O'Connell had let the demand for Repeal lie compar- 
 atively quiet, but it was gradually gaining strength 
 and popularity throughout the country. It was sup- 
 ported at first by the Nation newspaper. In 1843 the 
 Repeal Association was founded ; O'Connell contrived 
 to enlist in its ranks Father Mathew, and the large 
 number of followers Father Mathew was daily winning 
 over to the cause of total abstinence. 
 
 ''The year 1843," said O'Connell, "is and shall be 
 the great Repeal year." The prediction was vain ; 
 forty years have gone by, and still the Union holds. 
 O'Connell had Ireland at his back ; he convened 
 gigantic meetings where every word of his wonderful 
 voice was treasured as the utterance of a prophet ; but 
 when the agitation had reached a height which seemed 
 dangerous to the government, and made them decide 
 to put it down, his power was over. He would sanction 
 no sort of physical force, no opposition other than con- 
 stitutional opposition to the government. The govern- 
 ment proclaimed his meetings and put him into prison ; 
 he was soon set free, but his reign was over. Fierce 
 spirits had risen in his place, men who scornfully re- 
 
AN OUTLINE OF IRISH HISTORY, 261 
 
 pudiated the abnegation of physical force. Broken in 
 heahh, O'Connell turned to Rome, and died on the 
 way, at Genoa, on May 15, 1847. Many recent political 
 writers have been at the pains to glorify O'Connell at 
 the expense of later leaders. It is instructive to re- 
 member that in O'Connell's lifetime, and for long 
 after, he was the object of political hatred and abuse 
 no less unsparing than any that has assailed his suc- 
 cessors in Irish popularity. 
 
 The condition of Ireland at the time of O'Connell's 
 death was truly desperate. From 1845 to 1847 a terri- 
 ble famine had been literally laying the country waste. 
 The chief, indeed, practically, the only food of the 
 Irish peasantry then, as now, was the potato, and a 
 failure of the potato crop meant starvation. *' But 
 what," says Carlyle in his " French Revolution," " if 
 history somewhere on this planet were to hear of a 
 nation, the third soul of whom had not for thirty weeks 
 each year as many third-rate potatoes as would sustain 
 him ? History, in that case, feels bound to consider 
 that starvation is starvation ; that starvation from age 
 to age presupposes much ; history ventures to assert 
 that the French Sansculotte of '93, who, roused from 
 long death-sleep, could rush at once to the frontiers, 
 and die fighting for an immortal hope and faith and 
 deliverance for him and his, was but the second mis- 
 erablest of men ! The Irish Sans-potato, had he not 
 senses then, nay, a soul ? In his frozen darkness it was 
 bitter for him to die famishing, bitter to see his chil- 
 dren famish." 
 
 In 1845, 1846, and in 1847 the potato crop had failed, 
 and for the time the country seemed almost given over 
 to hunger and to death. Thousands died miserably 
 from starvation ; thousands fled across the seas, seek- 
 ing refuge in America, to hand down to their children 
 and their children's children, born in the American 
 republic, a bitter recollection of the misery they had 
 endured, and the wrongs that had been inflicted upon 
 them. When the famine was at an end it was found 
 that Ireland had lost two millions of population. Be- 
 fore the famine she had eight millions, now she had 
 six. All through the famine the government had done 
 nothing ; private charity in England, in America, even 
 
262 AN OUTLINE OF IRISH HISTORY. 
 
 in Turkey, had done something, and done it nobly, to 
 stay the desolation and the dissolution that the famine 
 was causing. But the government, if it could not ap- 
 pease the famine, showed itself active in devising 
 Coercion Bills to put down any spirit of violence 
 which misery and starvation might haply have engen- 
 dered in the Irish people. 
 
 Such was the condition of the country when O'Con- 
 nell and the Repeal Movement died together, and when 
 the Young Ireland Movement, with its dream of armed 
 rebellion, came into existence. 
 
 CHAPTER IX. 
 
 YOUNG IRELAND. — FENIANISM. 
 
 The Nation newspaper was first published on the 
 13th of October, 1842 ; it was founded byGavan Duffy, 
 John Blake Dillon, and Thomas Davis. GaVan Duffy 
 was the editor, but he says himself, in his history of the 
 movement, that Davis was their true leader. They were 
 all young men ; Davis was twenty-eight, Dillon twenty- 
 seven, and Duffy twenty-six. Davis, says Sir Charles 
 Gavan Duffy, *' was a man of middle stature, strongly 
 but not coarsely built ; . . . a broad brow and 
 strong jaw stamped his face with a character of power ; 
 but except when it was lighted by thought or feeling, it 
 was plain and even rugged." In his boyhood he was 
 '' shy, retiring, unready, and self-absorbed," was even 
 described as a "dull child " by unappreciative kinsfolk. 
 At Trinity College he was a wide and steady reader, 
 who was chiefly noted by his fellow-students for his in- 
 difference to rhetorical display. He was auditor of the 
 Dublin Historical Society, had made some name for 
 himself by his contributions to a magazine called the 
 Citizen^ and was a member of the Repeal Association. 
 When Duffy made John Dillon's acquaintance, Dillon 
 was " tall, and strikingly handsome, with eyes like a 
 thoughtful woman's, and the clear olive complexion 
 
AN OUTLINE OF IRISH HISTORY. 263 
 
 and stately bearing of a Spanish nobleman." He had 
 been designed for the priesthood, but had decided to 
 adopt the bar. Like Davis, he loved intellectual pur- 
 suits, and was a man of wide and varied learning. 
 " Under a stately and somewhat reserved demeanor lay 
 latent the simplicity and joyfulness of a boy ; no one 
 was readier to laugh with frank cordiality, or to give 
 and take the pleasant banter which lends a relish to 
 the friendship of young men." Long years after, 
 Thackeray said of him to Gavan Duffy, that the mod- 
 esty and wholesome sweetness of John Dillon gave him 
 a foremost place among the half dozen men in the 
 United States whom he loved to remember. 
 
 The success of the Nation was extraordinary. Its 
 political teachings, its inspiring and vigorous songs 
 and ballads, the new lessons of courage and hope which 
 it taught, the wide knowledge of history possessed by 
 its writers — all combined to make it welcome to thou- 
 sands. The tradesmen in town and the country peas- 
 ants read it, and were animated by the story of their 
 old historic island into the belief that she had a future, 
 and that the future was close at hand, and that they 
 were to help to make it. It was denounced by the 
 Tory press as the organ of a hidden " French party." 
 From France itself came words of praise worth having, 
 from two Irish officers in the French service. One 
 was Arthur O'Connor, the Arthur O'Connor of '98 ; 
 tlie other was Miles Byrne, who had fought at Wexford. 
 O'Connell became alarmed at the growing popularity 
 of the Nation. At first it had strongly supported him : 
 he had even written a Repeal Catechism in its pages ; 
 but its young men had the courage to think for them- 
 selves, and to criticise even the deeds and words of the 
 Liberator. More and more young men clustered around 
 the writers of the Nation; brilliant young essayists, 
 politicians, poets. Gifted women wrote for the Nation^ 
 too— Lady Wilde, "Speranza," chief among them. 
 The songs published in a volume called *' The Spirit 
 of the Nation " became immediately very popular. 
 As the agitation grew, Peel's government became more 
 threatening. O'Connell, in most of his defiant declara- 
 tions, evidently thought that Peel did not dare to put 
 down the organization for Repeal, or he would never 
 
264 AN OUTLINE OF IRISH HISTORY. 
 
 have challenged him as he did ; for O'Connell nevei 
 really meant to resort to force at any time. But the 
 few young men who wrote for the Nation^ and the 
 many young men who read the Nation, were really pre- 
 pared to fight, if need be, for their liberties. Nor did 
 they want foreign sympathy to encourage them. In 
 the United States vast meetings, organized and di- 
 rected by men like Seward and Horace Greeley, 
 threatened England with "the assured loss of Canada 
 by American arms" if she suppressed the Repeal 
 agitation by force ; and later Horace Greeley was one 
 of a Directory in New York for sending officers and 
 arms to Ireland. In France, the Republican Party 
 were loud in their expressions of sympathy for the 
 Irish, and Ledru-Rollin had declared that France was 
 ready to lend her strength to the support of an op- 
 pressed nation. No wonder the leaders of the Na- 
 tional Party were encouraged in the belief that their 
 cause was pleasing to the Fates. 
 
 A new man now began to come forward as a promi- 
 nent figure in Irish politics, Mr. William Smith O'Brien, 
 Member of Parliament for Limerick County. He was 
 a country gentleman of stately descent, a direct de- 
 scendant of Brian Boroihme, a brother of Lord In- 
 chiquin. He was a high-minded and honorable gen- 
 tleman, with his country's cause deeply at heart. 
 Davis described him as the " most extravagant admirer 
 of the Nation I have ever met." Another prominent 
 man was John Mitchel, the son of an Ulster Unitarian 
 minister. When O'Connell's vast agitation fell to 
 pieces after the suppression of the meeting of Clontarf, 
 and the subsequent imprisonment of O'Connell showed 
 that the Liberator did not mean ever to appeal to the 
 physical force he had talked about, these two men be- 
 came the leaders of different sections of the Young 
 Ireland Party, as the men of the Nation were now called. 
 Thomas Davis, the sweet chief singer of the movement, 
 died suddenly before the movement which he had done 
 so much for had taken direct revolutionary shape. 
 Mitchel came on the Nation in his place, and advocated 
 revolution and republicanism. He followed the tradi- 
 tions of Emmet and the men of '98 ; he was in favor of 
 independence. His doctrines attracted the more ardent 
 
AN OUTLINE OF IRISH HISTORY. 265 
 
 of the Youn^ Irelanders, and what was known as a 
 War Party was formed. There were now three sec- 
 tions of Irish agitation. There were the Repealers, who 
 w^ere opposed to all physical force ; there w^ere the mod- 
 erate Young Irelanders, only recognizing physical force 
 when all else had failed in the last instance ; and there 
 were now this new party, who saw in revolution the 
 only remedy for Ireland. Smith O'Brien was bitterly 
 opposed to Mitchel's doctrines. Mitchel w^ithdrew from 
 the Nation and started a paper of his own, the United 
 Irishman^ in which he advocated them more fiercely 
 than ever. But though most of the Young Irelanders 
 were not so extreme as Mitchel, the great majority of 
 them talked, wrote, and thought revolution. In pas- 
 sionate poems and eloquent speeches they expressed 
 their hatred of tyranny and their stern resolve to free 
 their country by brave deeds rather than by arguments. 
 They had now a brilliant orator among them, Thomas 
 Francis Meagher, '' a young man," says Mr. Lechy, 
 ^' whose eloquence was beyond comparison superior to 
 that of any other rising speaker in the country, and 
 who, had he been placed in circumstances favorable 
 to the development of his talent, might perhaps, at 
 length, have taken his place among the great orators of 
 Ireland." Meagher had early endeared himself to the 
 impetuous and gifted young men with whom he was 
 allied, by a brilliant speech against O'Connell's doctrine 
 of passive resistance. ^' I am not one of those tame 
 moralists," the young man explained, "who say that 
 liberty is not worth one drop of blood. . . . Against 
 this miserable maxim the noble virtue that has saved 
 and sanctified humanity appears in judgment. From 
 the blue waters of the Bay of Salamis ; from the valley 
 over which the sun stood still and lit the Israelites to 
 victory ; from the cathedral in which the sword of Po- 
 land has been sheathed in the shroud of Kosciusko ; 
 from the Convent of St. Isidore, where the fiery hand 
 that rent the ensign of St. George upon the plains of 
 Ulster has mouldered into dust ; from the sands of the 
 desert, where the wild genius of the Algerine so long 
 has scared the eagle of the Pyrenees ; from the ducal 
 palace in this kingdom, where the memory of the 
 gallant and seditious Geraldine enhances more than 
 
2GG AN OUTLINE OF IRISH HISTORY. 
 
 royal favor the splendor of his race ; from the solitary- 
 grave within this mute city, which a dying bequest has 
 left without an epitaph — oh ! from every spot where 
 heroism has had a sacrifice or a triumph, a voice breaks 
 in upon the cringing crowd that cherishes this maxim, 
 crying, ' Away with it — away with it ! ' " 
 
 The year 1848, the year of unfulfilled revolutions, 
 when crowns were falling and kings flying about in all 
 directions, might well have seemed a year of happy 
 omen for a new Irish rebellion. But the Young Ire- 
 landers were not ready for rebellion when their plans 
 were made known to the government, and the govern- 
 ment struck at them before they could do anything. 
 Mitchel was arrested, tried, and transported to Ber- 
 muda. That was the turning-point of the revolution. 
 The Mitchelites wished to rise in rescue. They urged, 
 and rightly urged, that if revolution was meant at all, 
 then was the time. But the less extreme men held 
 back. An autumnal rising had been decided upon, and 
 they were unwilling to anticipate the struggle. They 
 carried their point. Mitchell was sentenced to fourteen 
 years' transportation. When the verdict was delivered 
 he declared that, like the Roman Sccevola, he could 
 promise hundreds who would follow his example, and 
 as he spoke he pointed to John Martin, Meagher, and 
 others of the associates who were thronging the galleries 
 of the court. A wild cry came up from all his friends, 
 " Promise for me, Mitchel — promise for me ! " With 
 that cry ringing in his ears he was hurried from the 
 court, heavily ironed and encircled by a little army of 
 dragoons, to the war-sloop Shearwater^ that had been 
 waiting for the verdict and the man. As the war-sloop 
 steamed out of Dublin harbor the hopes of the Young 
 Irelanders went with her, vain and evanescent, from that 
 hour forth, as the smoke that floated in the steamer's 
 wake. Mitchel had himself discountenanced, to his 
 undying honor, any attempt at rescue. There is a 
 pathetic little story which records his looking out of 
 the prison-van that drove him from the court, and see- 
 ing a great crowd and asking where they were going, 
 and being told that they were going to a flower-show. 
 
 There were plenty of men in the movement who 
 would have gladly risked everything to try and rescue 
 
AN OUTLINE OF IRISH HISTORY. ^GT 
 
 Mitchel. But nothing could have been done without 
 unanimity, and the too great caution of the leaders 
 prevented the effort at the only moment when it could 
 have had the faintest hope of success. From that hour 
 the movement was doomed. Men who had gone into 
 the revolution heart and soul might then have said of 
 Smith O'Brien, as Menas in *' Antony and Cleopatra" 
 says to Pompey, '* For this I'll never follow thy pall'd 
 fortunes more. Who seeks and will not take when 
 once 'tis offered, shall never find it more." The su- 
 preme moment of danger thus passed over, the gov- 
 ernment lost no time in crushing out all that was left 
 of the insurrection. Smith O'Brien, Meagher, and Dil- 
 lon went down into the country, and tried to raise an 
 armed rebellion. There was a small scuffle with the 
 police in a cabbage-garden at Ballingarry, in Tippe- 
 rary ; the rebels were dispersed, and the rebellion was 
 over. Smith O'Brien, Meagher, and others were ar- 
 rested and condemned to death. Meagher's speech 
 from the dock was worthy of his rhetorical genius. 
 *' I am not here to crave with faltering lip the life I 
 have consecrated to the independence of my country. 
 ... I offer to my country, as some proof of the sin- 
 cerity with which I have thought and spoken and 
 struggled for her, the life of a young heart. . . . The 
 history of Ireland explains my crime and justifies it. . 
 . . Even here, where the shadows of death surround 
 me, and from which I see my early grave opening for 
 me in no consecrated soil, the hope which beckoned 
 me forth on that perilous sea whereon I have been 
 wrecked, animates, consoles, enraptures me. No, I 
 don't despair of my poor old country, her peace, her 
 liberty, her glory!" 
 
 The death sentence was commuted to transportation 
 for life, and some years after Mitchel and Meagher 
 succeeded in escaping from Australia, and later on 
 Smith O'Brien was pardoned, and died in Wales in 
 1854. Mitchel was elected to the House of Commons 
 years after, but was not allowed to sit, and died while 
 the question was still pending. Meagher fought brave- 
 ly for the cause of the North in the American Civil 
 War, and died ingloriously, drowned in the muddy 
 waters of the Missouri. Gavan Duffy was tried three 
 
268 A^ OUTLINE OF IRISH HISTORY. 
 
 • times, but could not be convicted. He afterwards sat 
 for some time in Parliament, and then went into vol- 
 untary exile, to find fame and fortune in Victoria. For 
 sixteen years the country was politically quiet. A vain 
 attempt was made in 1849, after all the Young Ireland 
 leaders had fled or been sent into exile, to revive the 
 agitation and recreate the insurrection. A few abor- 
 tive local risings there were, and nothing more. Star- 
 vation and misery forced the people into steady and 
 incessant emigration. Eviction was in full swing, and 
 between eviction and emigration it is estimated that al- 
 most a million of people left Ireland between 1847 and 
 1857. "In a few years more," says the Twies exult- 
 ingly, " a Celtic Irishman will be as rare in Connemara 
 as is the Red Indian on the shores of Manhattan." 
 That the Times was not a true prophet was no fault of 
 the majority of the Irish landlords. Evictions took 
 place by the hundred, by the thousand, by the ten 
 thousand. Winter or summer, day or night, fair or 
 foul weather, the tenants were ejected. Sick or well, 
 bedridden or dying, the tenants, men, women, or chil- 
 dren, were turned out for the rents they had not paid, 
 for the rents which in those evil days of famine and 
 failure they could not pay. They might go to Amer- 
 ica if they could ; they might die on the roadstead if 
 so it pleased them. They were out of the hut, and the 
 hut was unroofed that they might not seek its shelter 
 again, and that was all the landlord cared about. The 
 expiring, evicted tenant might, said Mitchel, raise his 
 dying eyes to heaven and bless his God that he per- 
 ished under the finest constitution in the world. It is 
 hardly a matter of surprise, however much of regret 
 and reprobation, that the lives of the evicting landlords 
 should often be in peril, and often be taken. The Eng- 
 lish farmer, the English cottier, have happily no idea 
 of the horror of evictions in Ireland as they prevailed 
 in the years that followed the famine of 1847, as they 
 had always prevailed, as they prevail still. 
 
 Many of the landlords themselves were in no envi- 
 able condition. Mortgages and settlements of all 
 kinds, the results of their own or their ancestors' pro- 
 fuseness, hung on their estates, and made many a 
 stately showing rent-roll the merest simulacrum of ter- 
 
AAT OUTLINE OF IRISH HISTORY. 269 
 
 ritorial wealth. Even rack-rents could not enable 
 many of the landlords to keep their heads above water. 
 At length the English Government made an effort to 
 relieve their condition by passing the Encumbered Es- 
 tates Act, by means of Avhich a landlord or his cred- 
 itors might petition to have an estate sold in the court 
 established for that purpose under the act. In 1858, 
 by a supplementary Irish Landed Estates Act, the 
 powers of the court were increased to allow the sale of 
 properties that were not encumbered. 
 
 The tenant wanted legislation as well as the land- 
 lord, and in August, 1850, those who sympathized with 
 the tenant's cause began to agitate for legislation. A 
 conference was called by Dr. (afterwards Sir) John 
 Gray, the Protestant owner of the Freeman s Journal^ 
 by the Prebyterian barrister Mr. Greer, who later rep- 
 resented Derry in Parliament, and by Frederick Lucas, 
 the Catholic owner of the Tablet. A conference of 
 men of all classes and creeds was held in Dublin — a 
 conference, Mr. Bright then called it in the House of 
 Commons, *^of earnest men from all parts of Ireland," 
 and a tenant league was started. Everything was 
 against the league. The indifference of England, the 
 prostration of the country after the famine and the re- 
 bellion, the apathy, even the hostility, of the Irish Lib- 
 eral members, were all combined against it. Then 
 came the reorganization of the Catholic Church in 
 England, and Lord John Russell's " Durham Letter," 
 which for the time made any political alliance between 
 Catholic and Protestant impossible. But when, in 
 1852, the Whig ministry went out, and Lord Derby, 
 coming in with the Tories, dissolved Parliament, the 
 chance of the tenant leaguers came. Some fifty ten- 
 ant-right members were elected. Th^re was a Tenant- 
 right Party in the House of Commons, " the Irish Bri- 
 gade " it came to be called, but it did little good to the 
 cause of tenant-right. Its leader was the once famous 
 John Sadleir ; his lieutenants were his brother James, 
 Mr. William Keogh, and Mr. Edmond O'Flaherty ; 
 these men were all adventurers and most of them 
 swindlers. For a time they deceived the Irish people 
 by their professions and protestations. The Sadleirs 
 owned the Tipperary Bank, one of the most popular 
 
270 AN OUTLINE OF IRISH HISTORY. 
 
 banks in Ireland ; they had plenty of money, and spent 
 it lavishly ; they started a paper, the Telegraphy to keep 
 them before the public ; they were good speakers, and 
 they led good speakers ; they were demonstratively 
 Catholic, and for a time a good many people believed 
 in them, though they were, of course, distrusted by 
 most intelligent Irishmen. 
 
 In November Lord Derby went out of office and Whig 
 Lord Aberdeen came in, and the leaders of the noisy, 
 blatant, brass band took office under him. John Sad- 
 lier became a Lord of the Treasury ; Keogh was made 
 Irish Solicitor-general ; O'Flaherty Commissioner of 
 Income Tax. There was fierce indignation, but they 
 kept their places and their course for a time. Then 
 they broke up. John Sadlier had embezzled, swindled, 
 forged ; he ruined half Ireland with his fraudulent bank ; 
 he made use of his position under government to embez- 
 zle public money ; he committed suicide. His brother 
 was expelled from the House of Commons ; he lied the 
 country and was heardof.no more. O'Flaherty hur- 
 ried to Denmark, where there was no extradition treaty, 
 and then to New York. Keogh, the fourth of this fa- 
 mous quadrilateral, their ally, their intimate, their faith- 
 ful friend, contrived to keep himself clear of the crash. 
 He was immediately made a judge, and was conspicuous 
 for the rest of his life for his unfailing and unaltering 
 hostility to any and every Irish national party. 
 
 Once again there was a period of political apathy, as 
 far as constitutional agitation was concerned ; but the 
 '48 rebellion had left rebellious seed behind it. Even 
 as the United Irishmen had generated Repeal, and Re- 
 peal Young Ireland, so Young Ireland generated the 
 Phoenix Conspiracy, and the Phoenix Conspiracy soon 
 grew into the Fenian Brotherhood, a vast organiza- 
 tion, with members in all parts of the world, with 
 money at its disposal, and, more than money, with sol- 
 diers trained by the American Civil War. Irish-Amer- 
 icans steadily promulgated the cause in Ireland, and 
 prepared for the rising. The Fenians in America in- 
 vaded Canada on the 31st of May, 1866, occupied Fort 
 Erie, defeated the Canadian volunteers, and captured 
 some flags. But the United States interfered to en- 
 force the neutrality of its frontier, arrested most of the 
 
AN OUTLINE OF IRISH HISTORY. 271 
 
 leaders, and extinguished the invasion. The Fenians 
 in England planned the capture of Chester Castle. 
 The scheme was to seize the arms in the castle, to has- 
 ten on to Holyhead, to take possession of such steamers 
 as might be there, and invade Ireland before the au- 
 thorities in Ireland could be prepared for the blow ; 
 but the plan was betrayed, and failed. Then in March, 
 
 1867, an attempt at a general rising w^as made in Ire- 
 land, and failed completely ; the very elements fought 
 against it. Snow, rare in Ireland, fell incessantly, and 
 practically buried the rising in its white shroud. Large 
 numbers of prisoners were taken in England and Ireland, 
 and sentenced to penal servitude. In Manchester two 
 Fenian prisoners were released from the prison-van by 
 some armed Fenians, and in the scuffle a policeman was 
 killed. For this, three of the rescuers — Allen, Larkin, 
 and O'Brien — were hanged. Mr. John Stuart Mill and 
 Mr. Bright strove hard to save their lives, with all the 
 eloquence and all the influence they could bring to 
 bear. Mr. Swinburne addressed a noble and equally 
 unsuccessful poetic ''Appeal" to England to "put 
 forth her strength, and release," for which his name 
 should be held in eternal honor by the people of Ire- 
 land. 
 
 A little later all England was shocked by an attempt 
 in its very heart to blow up Clerkenwell Prison, wherein 
 certain Fenian prisoners were confined. 
 
 But the succession of these events had convinced a 
 statesman, who came into power shortly after, that the 
 condition of Ireland urgently called for remedial leg- 
 islation. The Parliament which met at the close of 
 
 1868, under Mr. Gladstone's leadership in the Ffouse of 
 Commons, was known to be prepared to deal with some 
 of the most pressing of Irish questions ; of these the 
 foremost was the Irish State Church. It is not neces- 
 sary to enter at any length into the history of the man- 
 ner in which Mr. Gladstone accomplished the disestab- 
 lishment and the disendowment of the State Church of 
 Ireland. It is sufficient here to record the fact that it 
 was disestablished and disendowed. For centuries it 
 "bad been one of the bitterest emblems of oppression in 
 
,272 AN OUTLINE OF IRISH HISTORY. 
 
 Ireland. In a country of which the vast majority were 
 Catholic, it had been, in the words of Lord Sherbrooke, 
 then Mr. Lowe, " kept alive with the greatest difficulty 
 and at the greatest expense." It was an exotic with 
 the curse of barrenness upon it, and Mr. Lowe called 
 upon the government to "cut it down : why cum- 
 bereth it the ground ? " The government replied to 
 the appeal, and the State Church in Ireland ceased to 
 exist. This done, Mr. Gladstone turned his attention 
 to the Irish Land Question — a very pressing question 
 indeed. 
 
 CHAPTER X. 
 
 THE LAND QUESTION. 
 
 In all the melancholy chronicles of Irish misery and 
 disaffection, and of unsuccessful English measures to 
 remedy the misery and to coerce the disaffection, the 
 land plays an important part. 
 
 After the incessant confiscations and settlements of 
 Irish soil, the vast majority of the Irish people were 
 reduced to the condition of mere tenants at will of 
 landlords who were either foreigners in fact or in sym- 
 pathy. The majority of the landlords were actuated 
 only by the desire to get as high a price as they could 
 for their land ; and the need of land was so imperative 
 to the Irish peasant, who had nothing but the land to 
 live upon, that he was ready to take any terms, no 
 matter how terrible. Of course, he could not often 
 pay the terms exacted. The rack-rent begot the evic- 
 tion, and the eviction begot the secret societies — the 
 Ribbon lodges — which the Irish peasant began to look 
 upon as his sole protection against landlord tyranny. 
 What, exactly, were these Ribbon lodges, which are so 
 often named in all accounts of the Irish Land Ques- 
 tion ? For more than half a century the Ribbon So- 
 ciety has existed in Ireland, and even yet it is impos- 
 sible to say for certain how it began, how it is organ- 
 ized, and what are its exact purposes. Its aim seems 
 
AN OUTLINE OF IRISH HISTORY. 273 
 
 to have been chiefly to defend the land-serf from the 
 landlord, but it often had a strong political purpose as 
 well. Mr. A. M. Sullivan, in his "New Ireland," states 
 that he long ago satisfied himself that the Ribbonism 
 of one period was not the Ribbonism of another, and 
 that the version of its aims and character prevalent 
 among its members in one part of Ireland often differed 
 widely from those professed in some other part of the 
 country. *'In Ulster it professed to be a defensive or 
 retaliatory league against Orangeism ; in Munster it 
 was at first a combination against tithe-proctors ; in 
 Connaught it Avas an organization against rack-renting 
 and evictions ; in Leinster it was often mere trade- 
 unionism, dictating by its mandates and enforcing by 
 its vengeance the employment or dismissal of work- 
 men, stewards, and even domestics." All sorts of evi- 
 dence and information of the most confused kind has 
 been from time to time given with respect to Ribbon- 
 ism, much of it the merest fiction. All that is certain 
 is, that it and many other formidable defensive organi- 
 zations existed among the peasantry of different parts 
 of Ireland. 
 
 Perhaps Ireland was the only country in the world 
 in which a man had nothing to gain by improving the 
 land he lived upon. If he improved it, he was certain 
 in nine case-s out of ten to have his rent raised upon 
 him as a reward of his labor. He was absolutely at 
 the . mercy, or rather the want of mercy, of his land- 
 lord, whom he perhaps had never seen ; for many of 
 the landlords were absentees, living out of Ireland on 
 the money they took from the country. The Irish 
 peasant's misery did not pass altogether unnoticed. 
 Ever since the Union, select committees had again and 
 again reported the distress in the fullest manner. Too 
 often the report was left to lie in bulky oblivion upon 
 the dusty shelves of state libraries, or was answered by 
 a coercive measure. No attempt was made for many 
 years to feed the famished peasant or to relieve the 
 evicted tenant. Legislation only sought to make sure 
 that while their complaints Avere unheeded their hands 
 should be stayed from successful revenge. The great- 
 est concession that government made for many genera- 
 tions to the misery of the Irish tenant was to pass an 
 
274 AN OUTLINE OF IRISH HISTORY, 
 
 act prohibiting evictions on Christmas Day and Good 
 Friday, and enacting that the roof of a tenant's house 
 should not be pulled off until the inmates had left. 
 
 A select committee was appointed in 1819, under the 
 presidency of Sir John Newton, which reported on the 
 great misery of the laboring poor, and unavailingly 
 urged agricultural reform, especially advising the re- 
 clamation of waste lands. Another committee re- 
 ported in 1823 that the condition of the people was 
 miserable ; and, also, unsuccessfully urged the import- 
 ance of some form of agricultural relief. Two years 
 later, in 1825, a fresh select committee gave fresh evi- 
 dence as to the misery of the country, and made fresh 
 suggestions that something should be done for the Irish 
 tenant ; and, as before, nothing was done. The act of 
 1793, giving every forty-shilling freeholder a vote, had 
 indirectly injured the people, as the landlords leased 
 small patches of land to increase their political power. 
 The Emancipation Act of 1829, abolishing the vote of 
 the forty-shilling freeholder, removed with it the land- 
 lords' interest in small holdings, and so again caused 
 misery to the people by its introduction of the system 
 of clearances. In 1829 the condition of the tenant 
 farmers and laboring classes of Ireland was brought 
 forcibly under the notice of the government by Mr. 
 Brownlow, who went so far as to ask leaA^e to bring in 
 a bill to facilitate the reclamation of waste lands. The 
 bill passed the Commons, and was read a second time 
 in the Lords. It w^as then referred to a select commit- 
 tee, and heard of no more. But, on the other hand, an 
 Arms Bill, which an English peer was found to de- 
 nounce as vexatious and aggressive, was successfully 
 carried. In 1830 Mr. Henry Grattan, son of Ireland's 
 great orator, and Mr. Spring Rice, afterwards Lord 
 Monteagle, urged the sufferings of Ireland upon the 
 government, and strongly advocated the reclamation of 
 waste lands. But nothing -whatever was done beyond 
 the appointment of a select committee. This select 
 committee of 1830 had the same story to tell that all 
 its unfortunate predecessors told. It appealed in vain. 
 
 The valuation of Ireland was undertaken in 1830, on 
 the recommendation of a select committee of the House 
 of Commons in 1824. To insure uniform valuation, an 
 
AN- OUTLINE OF IJ^/S^ HISTORY. 275 
 
 act was passed in 1836. requiring all valuations of land 
 to be based on a fixed scale of agricultural produce, 
 contained in the act. The valuators were instructed to 
 act in the same manner as if employed by a principal 
 landlord dealing with a solvent tenant. The average 
 valuation proved to be about twenty-five per cent, under 
 the gross rental of the country. In 1844 a select com- 
 mittee of the House of Commons was appointed to re- 
 consider the question ; and an act passed in 1846 changed 
 the principle of valuation from a relative valuation of 
 town lands based on a fixed scale of agricultural prod- 
 uce to a tenement valuation for poor-law rating, to be 
 made " upon an estimate of the net annual value ... of 
 the rent, for which, one year with another, the same 
 might in its actual state be reasonably expected to let 
 from year to year." The two valuations gave substan- 
 tially the same results. In 1852 another Valuation Act 
 was passed, returning to the former principle of valua- 
 tion by a fixed scale of agricultural produce ; but Sir 
 Richard Griffith's evidence in 1869 shows the valuation 
 employed was a "live-and-let-live valuation, according 
 to the state of prices, for five years previous to " the 
 time of valuation. 
 
 In 1830 famine and riot held hideous carnival. We 
 learn from the speech from the throne that the king 
 was determined to crush out sedition and disaffection 
 by all the means which the law and the constitution 
 placed at his disposal, but had no remedy to suggest 
 for the poverty and distress of the disaffected people. 
 In February 183 1, Mr. Smith O'Brien asked leave to 
 bring in a bill for the relief of the poor, but got no 
 hope or encouragement from the government. At this 
 time Mr. Hume attacked the ministry for introduc- 
 ing a coercive Irish policy, which was in direct opposi- 
 tion to the promises of conciliationthey had made while 
 they were in opposition. On the 30th of March, 1831, 
 Lord Althorpe proposed a vote of ^50,000, to be ad- 
 vanced to commissioners for expenditure on public 
 works in Ireland ; but its effect was counterbalanced 
 four months later by the introduction of Mr. Stanley's 
 Arms Bill, which Lord Althorpe himself described as 
 one of the most tyrannical measures he ever heard pro- 
 posed. A Sub-letting Act, which was now under dis- 
 
3T6 AN OUTLINE OF IRISH HISTORY, 
 
 cussion, prohibited the letting of property by a lessee, 
 unless with the express consent of the proprietor. Ac- 
 cording to Dr. Boyle, who attacked the bill, so long as 
 the rural population had no better employment or sure 
 chance of subsistence than the possession of a potato 
 field, it was idle to expect them to submit to eviction 
 from their miserable holdings. By this time the con- 
 dition of Ireland was truly desperate. Catholic Eman- 
 cipation had, indeed, allowed Irish Catholic members to 
 sit in the House of Commons, but it disfranchised the 
 forty-shilling freeholders, and it gave the landlords 
 greater opportunity for clearance. 
 
 Government answered the discontent in 183 1 by 
 another Coercion Bill. In 1834 Mr. Poulett Scrope 
 made an unsuccessful effort to do something for the 
 Irish tenant. In 1835 Mr. Sharman Crawford, then 
 member for Dundalk, moved for leave to bring in a bill 
 to amend the law of landlord and tenant, and he rein- 
 troduced his measure on the loth of March, 1836 ; he 
 obtained leave to bring in a bill, and that was the end 
 of it. In 1837 Mr. Lynch asked leave to bring in a bill 
 on waste lands, and was as unsuccessful as Mr. Sharman 
 Crawford. 
 
 In 1842 the Irish Artificial Drainage Act did some- 
 thing towards the reclam.ation of waste lands, which, 
 however, was of little use until amended by the Sum- 
 mary Proceedings Act of 1843. 1843 is a memorable 
 epoch in the history of the Irish land agitation. It was 
 the year of the Devon Commission, which Sir Robert 
 Peel appointed in answer to the repeated entreaties 
 of Mr. Sharman Crawford. The evidence of the 
 Devon Commission, in its two years' labors, showed, 
 as all other commissions had shown, that the condi- 
 tion of the Irish peasant was miserable in the ex- 
 treme ; that the fatal system of land tenure was the 
 cause of the misery ; and urged that the tenant 
 should be secured fair remuneration for his outlay 
 of capital and labor. Lord Devon was determined 
 that, if he could help it, the commission should not 
 prove valueless. On the 6th of May, 1845, he presented 
 a number of petitions, urging Parliament to secure to 
 industrious tenants the benefits of their improvements. 
 Lord Stanley replied by introducing a Compensation 
 
AN OUTLINE OF IRISH HISTORY. ^77 
 
 for Disturbance Bill in June, but he had to nbandon 
 it in July through the opposition of the Lords, the 
 Commons, and the select committee to whom it had 
 been intrusted. Mr. Sharman Crawford then introduced 
 the Tenant-right Bill, which he had kept back in 1843 
 in order to await the result of the Devon Commission. 
 In 1846 Lord Lincoln, urged by Mr. Sharman Craw- 
 ford, brought in a Compensation for Disturbance Bill, 
 but the ministry resigned before it came to a second 
 reading, and so it was forgotten. On the loth of June, 
 1847, Mr. Sharman Crawford's Tenant-right Bill was 
 rejected by a majority of eighty-seven. He brought it 
 forward again in 1848, and it was defeated on the 5th 
 of April by a majority of twenty-three. In 1848 Sir 
 William Somerville, as Irish Secretary, brought in a 
 bill which was practically the same as Lord Lincoln's 
 measure of 1846. The Irish members supported it. 
 The report upon the bill was not ready until too near 
 the end of the session to make any further progress 
 with it, but the government determined that Ireland 
 should not want some legislation during the session, 
 and so they suspended the Habeas Corpus Act. In 
 1849 Mr. Horsman urged unsuccessfully the presenta- 
 tion of an address pointing out to her majesty the con- 
 dition of Ireland. Early in 1850 Sir William Somer- 
 ville reintroduced his bill, which was read a second 
 time, given a committee, and suffered to disappear. 
 Mr. Sharman Crawford again unsuccessfully endeav- 
 ored to push forward his Tenant-right Bill. In 1851 
 Sir H. W. Barron's motion for a Committee of the 
 whole House to inquire into the state of Ireland was 
 negatived by a majority of nine. 
 
 Nothing, therefore, had been done for the Irish ten- 
 ant since the report of the Devon Commission. The 
 Encumbered Estates Act had been passed for the Irish 
 landlord. On the loth of February, 1852, Mr. Shar- 
 man Crawford obtained leave to bring in a bill to regu- 
 late the Ulster custom. Then the ministry went out 
 of office, and the bill, on its second reading, was re- 
 jected by a majority of one hundred and ten, under 
 Lord Derby's Conservative government. The govern- 
 ment showed a disposition to do something in the Irish 
 question. Mr. Napier, the Irish Attorney-General, 
 
278 AN OUTLINE OF IRISH HISTOHY, 
 
 drafted four bills for regulating the relations of land- 
 lord and tenant in Ireland, a Land Improvement Bill, 
 a Landlord and Tenant Law Consolidation Bill, a Leas- 
 ing Powers Bill, and a Tenants' Improvements Com- 
 pensation Bill, In 1853 the committee appointed to 
 consider Mr. Napier's bills and Mr. Sharman Craw- 
 ford's bill rejected the latter measure, and considerably- 
 amended, to the disadvantage of the tenant, the fourth 
 of Mr. Napier's measures. Since Mr. Napier had in- 
 troduced them the liberal party had come into power. 
 Mr. Napier, though in opposition, still did all he could 
 to assist the passing of his own measures, but his party 
 fought bitterly against them. In 1854 the bills were 
 referred to a select committee of the House of Lords. 
 The Tenants' Compensation Bill w^as condemned, and 
 the other bills sent down to the House of Commons 
 without it. In 1855 Mr. Sergeant Shee endeavored to 
 bring in a bill that was practically the same as this re- 
 jected measure, and the government took charge of it, 
 only to abandon it before the opposition of the land- 
 lords. Mr. Sharman Crawford's Tenant Bill was in 
 consequence introduced again by Mr. George Henry 
 Moore, the leader of the Irish party, in 1856, but it had 
 to be dropped in consequence of the opposition of the 
 government. It was again brought forward by Mr. 
 Moore in 1857, and again withdrav.m. In 1858 Mr. Ser- 
 geant Shee's Tenant Compensation Bill was reintro- 
 duced by Mr. John Francis Maguire, then leader of 
 the Irish party, and defeated by a majority of forty-five. 
 The indifference of the government at this time to the 
 Irish question was made the more marked by the fact 
 that the land question of Bengal had been settled in 
 accordance with ancient principles of Indian law, which 
 granted to the Indian subject much that was denied 
 the Irish subject. In i860, however, the famous Land 
 Act was passed, which proved so unsatisfactory. The 
 framers of the Act of i860 tried to simplify the rela- 
 tions of landlord and tenant by sweeping away all re- 
 mains of the feudal connection, and by establishing an 
 absolute principle of free trade and freedom of con- 
 tract as opposed to tenure. 
 
 But the Act of i860 was a failure, in so far as it was 
 based upon that principle of freedom of contract which 
 
AN OUTLINE OF IRISH HISTORY. 279 
 
 is wholly unsuited to the Irish Land Question. '' Tlie 
 Irish circumstances and Irish ideas as to social and 
 agricultural economy," said John Stuart Mill, "are the 
 general ideas and circumstances of the human race. It 
 is the English ideas and circumstances that are pe- 
 culiar. Ireland is in the mid-stream of human exist- 
 ence and human feeling and opinion. It is England 
 that is in one of the lateral channels." 
 
 To those who ask why the tenants take the land 
 when they cannot fulfil their contract, the answer is, 
 They cannot help themselves in what they do. The 
 Irish cling to their land because all their other means 
 of livelihood have been destroyed. They make the 
 best terms they can, which in truth, means bowing to 
 whatever the master of the situation imposes. The 
 freedom-of-contract argument has been very fairly dis- 
 posed of by asking, ''Why does Parliament regulate, 
 or fix and limit, the price which a railway company 
 charges for a travelling ticket ? Why are not the con- 
 tracting parties, the railway company and the traveller, 
 left to settle between them how miuch the price in every 
 particular case shall be ? " It is because the law says 
 they are not free contracting parties ; the railway com- 
 pany has a monopoly of that which is in a sense a ne- 
 cessity to the traveller and others. Also, if the matter 
 were left to contract, travellers would practically have 
 to give five shillings a mile if the company demanded 
 it. The immediate effect of the act was to produce an 
 immense flood of emigration, and to create the Fenian 
 Conspiracy. Mr. Chichester Fortescue's bill of 1866, 
 to amend that of i860, of course fell through. In 1867 
 the Tories brought in a fresh bill, which was practically 
 Lord Stanley's bill of 1845, which had to be abandoned. 
 In 1869 Mr. Gladstone came in, and on the 15th of 
 February, 1870, he brought in his famous Bill to Amend 
 the Law of Landlord and Tenant in Ireland, the first 
 bill that really did anything to carry out the recom- 
 mendation of the Devon Commission. But it did not 
 really place the tenant beyond the vicious control of 
 the landlord. It allowed him the privilege of going to 
 law with the landlord ; and going to law in such a case 
 generally meant the success of the man who was long- 
 est able to fight it out. The three objects of the Land 
 
280 AN OUTLINE OF IRISH HISTORY, 
 
 Act of 1870 were — first, to obtain for the tenants in Ire- 
 land security of tenure ; second, to encourage the mak- 
 ing of improvements throughout the country ; and, 
 third, to get a peasant proprietorship in Ireland. It 
 made no alteration in the tenancies held under the 
 Ulster tenant-right custom, which it merely sanctioned 
 and enforced against the landlords of estates subject to 
 it. The Ulster custom consists of two chief features — 
 permissive fixity of tenure, and the tenant's right to 
 sell the good-will of his farm. For a long time the 
 hope of getting the Ulster custom transferred to the 
 other provinces was almost the highest ambition of the 
 Irish peasant. 
 
 The framers of the act of 1870 dared not state open- 
 ly, and it was constantly denied, that the object of the 
 new measure was to give the tenant any estate in the 
 land, or to transfer to him any portion of the absolute 
 ownership. Its principle of arrangement between land- 
 lord and tenant was described as a process by which 
 bad landlords were obliged to act as the good landlords 
 did ; but it might have been more justly styled an 
 enactment by which the amusement of evicting tenants 
 was made a monopoly of the wealthier proprietors. 
 The principle of compensation for disturbance which 
 it introduced was clumsy and imperfect, and the eight 
 clauses which attempted to create a peasant proprietor- 
 ship in Ireland were no more successful than the rest 
 of the bill. "The cause of their failure is obvious," 
 says Mr. Richey, " to any one acquainted with the 
 nature of the landed estates title which it was consid- 
 ered desirable for the tenant to obtain. A Landed- 
 estates-Court conveyance affects not only the rights of 
 the parties to the proceedings, but binds persons, 
 whether parties or not, and extinguishes all rights 
 which are inconsistent with the terms of the grant by 
 the court. If by any mistake more lands than should 
 properly be sold are included in the grant, or the most 
 indisputable rights of third parties are not noticed in 
 the body of the grant or the annexed schedule, irre- 
 parable injustice is done and the injured parties have 
 no redress." The fact that the court was not made the 
 instrument for the perpetuation of the grossest frauds 
 
AN OUTLINE OF IRISH HISTORY. 281 
 
 is due solely to the stringency of its rules and the in- 
 telligence of its officers. 
 
 Interwoven with all these abortive land schemes and 
 land measures was incessant uninterrupted coercive 
 legislation. From 1796 to 1802 an Insurrection Act was 
 in force, and from 1797 to 1802 the Habeas Corpus Act 
 was suspended. From 1803 to 1805 the country was 
 under martial law, and from the same year to 1806 Ha- 
 beas Corpus was suspended. Insurrection Acts were 
 in force from 1807 to 1810, from 1814 to 1818, from 1822 
 to 1825. Habeas Corpus was again suspended in 1822 
 to 1823. In 1829, in the debate on Catholic Emancipa- 
 tion, Sir Robert Peel was able to say that " for scarcely 
 a year during the period that has elapsed since the 
 Union has Ireland been governed by the ordinary course 
 of law." From the date of that utterance to the present 
 day the country has not been governed by the ordinary 
 law for scarcely a single year. Arms Acts, suspensions 
 of Habeas Corpus, changes of venue, Peace Preserva- 
 tion Acts, and coercive measures of all kinds, succeed, 
 accompany, and overlap each other with melancholy 
 persistence. Roughly speaking, Ireland from the Un- 
 ion to 1880 was never governed by the ordinary . law. 
 The Union, according to its advocates, was to be the 
 bond of lasting peace and affection between the two 
 countries ; it was followed by eighty years of coercive 
 legislation. It was grimly fitting that the Union so un- 
 lawfully accomplished could only be sustained by the 
 complete abandonment of all ordinary processes of law 
 thereafter. 
 
 CHAPTER XL 
 
 HOME RULE. — THE LAND LEAGUE. 
 
 For some years after the failure of the Fenian insur- 
 rection there was no political agitation in Ireland ; but 
 in 1873 a new national movement began to make itself 
 felt ; this was the Home Rule movement. It had been 
 gradually formed since '1870 by one or two leading 
 
282 AN OUTLINE OF IRISH HISTORY. 
 
 Irishmen, who thonght the time was ripe for anew con- 
 stitutional effort ; chief among them was Mr. Isaac 
 Butt, a Protestant, an eminent lawyer, and an earnest 
 politician. The movement spread rapidly, and took a 
 firm hold of the popular mind. After the general elec- 
 tion of 1874, some sixty Irish members were returned, 
 who had stood before their constitutencies as Home 
 Rulers. The Home Rule demand is clear and simple 
 enough ; it asks for Ireland a separate government, 
 still allied with the imperial government, on the prin- 
 ciples which regulate the alliance between the United 
 States of America. The proposed Irish Parliament in 
 College Green would bear just the same relation to the 
 Parliament at Westminster that the Legislature and 
 Senate of every American state bear to the head author- 
 ity of the Congress in the Capitol at Washington. All 
 that relates to local business it was proposed to dele- 
 gate to the Irish Assembly ; all questions of imperial 
 policy were still to be left to the imperial government. 
 There was nothing very startling, very daringly inno- 
 vating, in the scheme. In most of the dependencies of 
 Great Britain, Home Rule systems of some kind were 
 already established. In Canada, in the Australasian 
 colonies, the principle might be seen at work upon a 
 large scale ; upon a small scale it was to pe studied 
 nearer home in the neighboring Island of Man. One 
 of the chief objections raised to the new proposal by 
 those who thought it really worth while to raise any 
 objections at all, was that it would be practically im- 
 possible to decide the border line between local affairs 
 and imperial affairs. The answer to this is, of course, 
 that what has not been found impossible, or indeed ex- 
 ceedingly difficult, in the case of the American repub- 
 lic and its component states, or in the case of England 
 and her American and Australasian colonies, need not 
 be found to present unsurpassable difficulties in the 
 case of Great Britain and Ireland. 
 
 '' If the Home Rule theory," says Mr. Lecky, "brings 
 with it much embarrassment to English statesmen, it is 
 at least a theory which is within the limits of the con- 
 stitution, which is supported by means that are per- 
 fectly loyal and legitimate, and which, like every other 
 theory, must be discussed and judged upon its merits." 
 
AN" OUTLINE OF IRISH HISTORY, 5>83 
 
 This is exactly what English statesmen and politicians 
 generally have refused to do. They will have none of 
 the Home Rule theory ; they will not admit that it 
 comes within the limits of a constitutional question ; 
 Home Rule never could and never shall be granted, 
 and so what is the use of discussing it ? This was cer- 
 tainly the temper in which Home Rule was at first re- 
 ceived in and out of Parliament. Of late days, politi- 
 cians who have come to concede the possibility, if not 
 the practicability, of some system of local government 
 for Ireland, still fight off the consideration of the ques- 
 tion by saying, " What is the use of discussing Home 
 Rule until you who support it present us with a clear 
 and defined plan for our consideration ? " This form 
 of argument is no less unreasonable than the other. 
 The supporters of Home Rule very fairly say, ''We 
 maintain the necessity for establishing a system of local 
 government in Ireland. That cannot be done without 
 the government ; till, therefore, the government is will- 
 ing to admit that Home Rule is a question to be enter- 
 tained at all, it is no use bringing forward any particular 
 plan ; when it is once admitted that some system of 
 Home Rule must be established in Ireland, then will 
 be the time for bringing forward legislative schemes 
 and plans, and out of the multiplicity of ideas and sug- 
 gestions creating a complete and cohesive whole.' ' The 
 principle of Home Rule obtains in every state of the 
 American Union, though the plan of Home Rule in 
 each particular state is widely different. The principle 
 of Home Rule obtains in every great colony of the 
 crown, but the plan pursued by each colony is of a very 
 different kind. When the people of the two countries 
 have agreed together to allow Ireland to manage for 
 herself her own local affairs, it will be very easy to 
 bring forward some scheme exactly deciding the form 
 which the conceded Home Rule is to take. But to 
 bring forward the completed scheme before a common 
 basis of negotiation has been established would be more 
 the duty of a new Abbe Sieyes, with a new "theory of 
 irregular verbs," than of a practical and serious politi- 
 cian. 
 
 At first the Home Rule party was not very active. 
 Mr. Butt used to have a regular Home Rule debate 
 
284 AN OUTLINE OF IRISH HISTORY, 
 
 once every session, when he and his followers stated 
 their views, and a division was taken and the Home 
 Rulers were, of course, defeated. Yet, while the Eng- 
 lish House of Commons was thus steadily rejecting, 
 year after year, the demand made for Home Rule by 
 the large majority of the Irish members, it was afford- 
 ing a strong argument in favor of some system of local 
 government, by consistently outvoting every propo- 
 sition brought forward by the bulk of the Irish mem- 
 bers relating to Irish questions. In 1874 it threw out 
 the Irish Municipal Franchise Bill, the Irish Municipal 
 Privileges Bill, and the bill for the purchase of Irish 
 railways. In 1875 it threw out the motion for inquiry 
 into the working of the Land Act, the Grand Jury Re- 
 form Bill, the Irish Municipal Corporations Bill, the 
 Municipal Franchise Bill. In 1876 it threw out the 
 Irish Fisheries Bill, the Irish Borough Franchise Bill, 
 the Irish Registration of Voters Bill, and the Irish 
 Land Bill. These were all measures purely relating to 
 Irish affairs, which, had they been left to the decision 
 of the Irish members alone, would have been carried 
 by overwhelming majorities. The Irish vote in favor 
 of these measures was seldom less than twice as great 
 as the opposing vote ; in some cases it was three times 
 as great, in some cases it was four, seven, and eight 
 times greater. 
 
 Mr. Butt and his followers had proved the force of 
 the desire for some sort of national government in Ire- 
 land, but the strength of the movement they had creat- 
 ed now called for stronger leaders. A new man was 
 coming into Irish political life, who was destined to be 
 the most remarkable Irish leader since O'Connell. 
 
 Mr. Charles Stewart Parnell, who entered the House 
 of Commons in 1875 as a member for Meath, was a 
 descendant of the English poet Parnell, and of the two 
 Parnells, father and son, John and Henry, who stood 
 by Grattan to the last in the struggle against the Union. 
 He was a grand-nephew of Sir Henry Parnell, the first 
 Lord Congleton, the advanced reformer, and friend of 
 Lord Grey and Lord Melbourne. He was Protestant, 
 and a member of the Protestant Synod. Mr. Parnell 
 set himself to form a party of Irishmen in the House of 
 Commons who should be absolutely independent of any 
 
AN OUTLINE OF IRISH HISTORY. 285 
 
 English political party, and who would go their own 
 way, with only the cause of Ireland to influence them. 
 Mr. Parnell had all the qualities that go to make a good 
 political leader, and he succeeded in his purpose. The 
 more advanced men in and out of Parliament began to 
 look up to him as the real representative of the popu- 
 ^^lar voice. In 1878 Mr. Butt died. He had done good 
 service in his life ; he had called the Irish Home Rule 
 party into existence, and he had done his best to form 
 a cohesive parliamentary party. If his ways were not 
 the ways most in keeping wuth the political needs of 
 the hour, he was an honest and able politician, he w^as 
 a sincere Irisliman, and his name deserves grateful re- 
 collection in Ireland. The leadership of the Irish par- 
 liamentary party was given to Mr. William Shaw, 
 member for Cork county, an able, intelligent man, who 
 proved himself in many ways a good leader. In quieter 
 times his authority might have remained unquestioned, 
 but these were unquiet times. The decorous and de- 
 mure attitude of the early Home Rule party was to be 
 changed into a more aggressive action, and Mr. Parnell 
 was the champion of the change. It w^as soon obvious 
 that he w^as the real leader recognized by the majority 
 of the Irish Home Rule members, and by the country 
 behind them. 
 
 Mr. Parnell and his following have been bitterly de- 
 nounced for pursuing an obstructive policy. They are 
 often written about as if they had invented obstruc- 
 tion ; as if obstruction of the most audacious kind had 
 never been practised in the House of Commons before 
 Mr. Parnell entered it. It may, perhaps, be admitted 
 that the Irish members made more use of obstruction 
 than had been done before their time ; yet it should be 
 remembered that the early Irish obstruction was on 
 English measures, and was carried on with the active 
 advice and assistance of English members. The Tory 
 party was then in power, and the advanced Liberals 
 were found often enough voting with the Obstruction- 
 ists in their fiercest obstruction to the existing govern- 
 ment. The Irish party fought a good fight on the 
 famous South African Bill, a fight which not a few 
 Englishmen now would heartily wish had proved suc- 
 cessful. It should also be remembered that Mr. Par- 
 
286 AN OUTLINE OF IRISH HISTORY, 
 
 nell did some good service to English legislation : he 
 worked hard to reform the Factories and Workshops 
 Bill in 1878, the Prison Code, and the Army and Navy- 
 Mutiny Bills. Many of his amendments were admitted 
 to be of value ; many, in the end, were accepted. His 
 earnest efforts contributed in no small degree to the 
 abolition of flogging in the army. 
 
 The times undoubtedly were unquiet ; the policy 
 which was called in England obstructive and in Ireland 
 active was obviously popular w^th the vast majority 
 of the Irish people. The Land Question, too, was 
 coming up again, and in a stronger form than ever. 
 Mr. Butt, not very long before his death, had warned 
 the House of Commons that the old land war was 
 going to break out anew, and he was laughed at 
 for his vivid fancy by the English press and by English 
 public opinion ; but he proved a true prophet. Mr. 
 Parnell had carefully studied the condition of the Irish 
 tenant, and he saw that the Land Act of 1870 was not 
 the last word of legislation on his behalf. Mr. Parnell 
 was at first an ardent advocate of what came to be 
 known as the three F's — fair rent, fixity of tenure, and 
 free sale. But the three F's were soon to be put aside 
 in favor of more advanced ideas. Outside Parliament 
 a strenuous and earnest man was preparing to inaugu- 
 rate the greatest land agitation ever seen in Ireland. 
 Mr. Michael Davitt ^vas the son of an evicted tenant ; 
 his earliest youthful impressions had been of the misery 
 of the Irish peasant and the tyranny of the Irish land- 
 lord. The evicted tenant and his family came to Eng- 
 land, to Lancashire. The boy Michael was put to work 
 in a mill, where he lost his right arm by a machine 
 accident. When he grew to be a young man he joined 
 the Fenians, and in 1870, on the evidence of an inform- 
 er, he was arrested and sentenced to fifteen years' penal 
 servitude ; seven years later he was let out on ticket-of- 
 leave. In his long imprisonment he had thought 
 deeply upon the political and social condition of Ire- 
 land and the best means of improving it. When he 
 came out he had abandoned his dreams of armed rebel- 
 lion, and he went in for constitutional agitation to re- 
 form the Irish land system. 
 
 The land system needed reforming; the condition 
 
AN OUTLINE OF IRISH HIS TORY. 287 
 
 of the tenant was only humanly endurable in years of 
 good harvest. The three years from 1876 to 1879 were 
 years of successive bad harvests. The failure of the 
 potato crop threatened the bulk of the population of 
 Ireland with starvation. The horrors of the famine of 
 1847 seemed likely to be seen again in Ireland. The 
 Irish members urged Lord Beaconsfield's government 
 to take some action to relieve the distress ; but nothing 
 was done, and the distress increased. Early in August 
 it was plain that the harvest was gone ; the potato 
 crjp, which had fallen in 1877 from ^Ti 2,400,000 to 
 ^5,200,000, had now fallen to ^3,300,000 ; famine was 
 close at hand. Mr. Davitt had been in America, plan- 
 ning out a land organization, and had returned to Ire- 
 la:id to carry out his plan. Land meetings were held 
 in many parts of Ireland, and in October Mr. Parnell, 
 Mr. Davitt, Mr. Patrick Egan, and Mr. Thomas Bren- 
 nan founded the Irish National Land League, the most 
 powerful political organization that had been formed 
 in Ireland since the Union. The objects of the Land 
 League were the abolition of the existing landlord 
 system and the introduction of peasant proprietorship. 
 The Land League- once founded, Mr. Parnell imme- 
 diately went to America to raise money to meet the 
 distress ; and while in America he was invited to state 
 the case of Ireland before the House of Representa- 
 tives at Washington. He returned to Ireland with 
 nearly ^250,000 for the relief of distress, and many 
 thousands for the political purposes of the Land 
 League. Relief was indeed imperative, famine was 
 abroad, and eviction had kept pace with famine. There 
 were over twelve hundred evictions in 1876, over thir- 
 teen hundred in 1877, over seventeen hundred in 1878, 
 and nearly four thousand in 1879 — over ten thousand 
 evictions in four years. The government did nothing 
 to stay famine or eviction ; it contented itself with put- 
 ting Mr. Davitt and some other Land Leaguers on trial 
 for some speeches they had made, but the prosecutions 
 had to be abandoned. The Land League Fund, large 
 as it was, was not nearly enough to cope with the ex- 
 isting distress, and fresh funds were raised by the Lord 
 Mayor of Dublin, Mr. E. D. Gray, M.P., and by the 
 Duchess of Marlborough, wife of the Lord-lieutenant, 
 
288 AN OUTLINE OF IRISH HISTORY. 
 
 whose generous action was in curious contradiction 
 to the repeated assurances of the government that no 
 serious distress existed. The condition of the country 
 was strengthening the Land League and weakening 
 the government. Lord Beaconsfield appealed to the 
 country, denouncing the Liberal party for their sym- 
 pathy with Irish faction. The Home Rule members 
 of the House of Commons issued a manifesto calling 
 upon Irishmen everywhere to vote against the sup- 
 porters of Lord Beaconsfield's government. The ad- 
 vice was implicitly followed. The general election re- 
 turned Mr. Gladstone to power at the head of a large 
 majority. The Home Rule party in the House was 
 largely reinforced, chiefly by men returned under the 
 influence of Mr. Parnell, who was now definitely elect- 
 ed as the leader of the Irish parliamentary party. 
 
 Mr. Shaw and a few friends separated themselves 
 from Mr. Parnell's party and sat on the Ministerial 
 side of the House, while Mr. Parnell and his followers 
 sat with the Opposition. The Irish party had great 
 hopes from Mr. Gladstone's government, on account of 
 the strong Radical element in its constitution, and be- 
 cause it expressed the intention of dispensing with ex- 
 ceptional legislation. The government, on its part, 
 undoubtedly expected cordial allies in the members of 
 the advanced Irish party. Both sides were disap- 
 pointed. Truly says Mr. Sullivan, " When one looks 
 back on the warm sympathies and the bright hopes of 
 that hour, the realities of the situation in 1882 seem 
 like the impossible sorrows and disappointments and 
 disasters of a horrid dream." It was, perhaps, impos- 
 sible that it should be otherwise. In the excitement 
 of a great general election, the sympathies between the 
 English Liberals and the Irish people were, perhaps, 
 unconsciously exaggerated, and pledges were, if not 
 made, suggested, by men striving to overthrow the 
 Tory government, which were not found easy to imme- 
 diately satisfy when they became, in their turn, the 
 members and supporters of a government. The Irish. 
 party, on the other hand, found that the hopes that 
 they had entertained of speedy settlement of some of 
 the most pressing Irish grievances were not to be real- 
 ized as rapidly as they had expected. There was thus 
 
AN OUTLINE OF IRISH HISTORY. 289 
 
 a coolness between the government and the new Irish 
 party as soon as the new Parliament began, and this 
 coolness gradually deepened into distinct hostility. 
 
 There was soon an open breach. The wretched con- 
 dition of the Irish tenants, and the terrible number of 
 evictions, led the Irish party to bring forward a bill for 
 the purpose of staying evictions. The government, 
 which up to that time had not seen its way to take any 
 action, then adopted some Irish suggestions in its Com- 
 pensation for Disturbance Bill, which proposed to ex- 
 tend for a very few months a portion of the Ulster 
 tenant-right custom, which gives a dispossessed tenant 
 compensation for improvements he may have made. It 
 was rejected by the House of Lords, and the govern- 
 ment refused to take any steps to force the Lords to ac- 
 cept it. But it promised to bring in a comprehensive 
 measure the next session, and it appointed a commis- 
 sion to inquire into the condition of the agricultural 
 population of Ireland, on vchich commission they ab- 
 solutely refused to give any place to any representative 
 of the tenant-farmers' cause. The agitation out of 
 doors increased. The Land League advised the people 
 to co-operate for their own interests, and to form a sort 
 of trade-union of the tenant class, and to stand by each 
 other in passively resisting, not merely evictions, but 
 exactions of what they considered an unjust amount of 
 rent above the rate of Griffith's valuation, 
 
 Griffith's valuation was undoubtedly a very rough- 
 and-tumble way of estimating the value of lanS, but, 
 at least, it was very much more reasonable to go by 
 than the rates of the rack-rents. All rents, therefore, 
 above Griffith's valuation w^ere condemned by the Land 
 League, and a practical strike was organized against 
 the landlords extorting them. The strike was sup- 
 ported by a form of action, or rather inaction, which 
 soon became historical. Boycotting, so called from 
 the name of its first victim, meant the social excom- 
 munication of any rack-renting or evicting landlord, 
 any oppressive agent, any land-grabber. No one who 
 held the cause of the League dear was to work for, buy 
 from, sell to, or hold any communication with the ob- 
 noxious persons. The process was strictly legal ; noth- 
 ing was to be done to the offender ; nothing was to be 
 
290 AN OUTLINE OF IRISH HISTORY. 
 
 done for him. So long as the League and its followers acted 
 strictly within the law, kept simply on the defensive, and 
 avoided all aggression, its position was invulnerable. The 
 famine and the accompanying evictions had left bitter fruit. 
 Men who had been starving,who had seen their families, their 
 friends, dying of hunger, who had been evicted to rot on the 
 roadside for all that their landlord cared — such men were not 
 in the spirit for peaceful counsels. The proud patience which 
 the gods are said to love is not always easy to assume, at 
 least for unpolished peasants, starving, homeless, smarting 
 under a burning sense of wrong, and a wild, helpless desire 
 for revenge. There were many outrages in different parts 
 of the country, as there had been after every Irish famine; 
 men were killed here and there; cattle, too, were killed and 
 mutilated. These outrages were made the most of in Eng- 
 land. Scattered murders were spoken of as part of a widely 
 planned organization of massacre. People were eloquent 
 in their sympathy for the sufferings of cattle and horses in 
 Ireland who never were known to feel one throb of pity at 
 the fashionable sin of torturing pigeons at Hurlingham. 
 But Ireland was disturbed, and for the disturbance there 
 was what Mr. Bright had called at an earlier period of his 
 career the ever-poisonous remedy of coercion. Ministerial- 
 ists argued that within ten months the mutilation of animals 
 in Ireland had increased, to forty-seven, therefore the liber- 
 ties of a nation of five millions should be suspended. They 
 forgot that in the same ten months of the same year there 
 was a total of 3,489 convictions in England for cruelty to 
 animals, many cases of which were of the most horrible 
 kind. 
 
 Mr. Parnell, Mr. Dillon, Mr. Sexton, and other Members 
 of Parliament, were prosecuted. At the trial, Mr. Justice 
 Fitzgerald declared that the Land League was an illegal 
 body. The government cannot then have agreed with Judge 
 Fitzgerald, or it would scarcely have allowed the League to 
 mcrease in strength for the greater part of a year with im- 
 punity. The state trials came on at the close of 1880. As 
 the jury could not agree, Mr. Parnell went back to Parlia- 
 ment with greater power than he ever had before. When 
 Parliament met in 1881, it was known that Mr. Gladstone was 
 going to bring in a Land Bill and a Coercion Bill. The 
 
AjV outline of IRISH HISTORY. 391 
 
 Land League's advocacy of open agitation had done much 
 to decrease the secret conspiracy which Coercion bills have 
 always engendered. The government refused any conces- 
 sion. They would not even bring in the Land Bill first, 
 and the Coercion Bill afterwards. Then the Irish members 
 broke away from the government altogether, and opposed 
 the Coercion Bill with all the means in their power that par- 
 liamentary forms allowed. For many days they successfully 
 impeded the measure, and the obstruction was only brought 
 to a close in the end of February by a coup d'etat^ when the 
 Speaker, intervening, declared that the debate must go no 
 further. The next day Mr. Michael Davitt was arrested. 
 The news was received with exultation in the house,* and 
 with indignation by the Irish members, who strove to speak 
 against it, and thirty-six were expelled from the sitting in 
 consequence. 
 
 The severance of the extreme Irish party and the govern- 
 ment was now complete. Mr. Bright, who had often sup- 
 ported Ireland before, and was looked upon as a true friend 
 by the Irish people, was now one of the bitterest opponents 
 of the whole national movement and of its parliamentary 
 leaders. The Irish national press was fiercely exasperated 
 to find Mr. Bright voting for coercion for Ireland. He had, 
 indeed, voted for coercion before in his younger days, but he 
 had always been eloquent against it, and his utterances were 
 brought up against him by the Irish papers. They remind- 
 ed him that in 1866 he had described coercion for Ireland 
 as an "ever-failing and ever-poisonous remedy," and they 
 asked him why he recommended the unsuccessful and ven- 
 omous legislation now. They pointed to his speech of 1849, 
 in which he said, " The treatment of this Irish malady re- 
 mains ever the same. We have nothing for it still but force 
 and alms." They quoted from his speech of 1847: ** I am 
 thoroughly convinced that everything the government or 
 Parliament can do for Ireland will be unavailing unless the 
 foundation of the work be laid deep and well, by clearing 
 away the fetters under which land is now held, so that it may 
 
 * " Every English member in the House rose to his feet on the an- 
 nouncement of Mr. Davitt's arrest, and such enthusiastic cheering was 
 never before known in Parliament," says one report. 
 
292 AN OUTLINE OF IRISH HISTORY. 
 
 become the possession of real owners, and be made instru- 
 mental to the employment and sustentation of the people. 
 Honorable gentleman opposite may fancy themselves inter- 
 ested in maintaining the present system; but there is surely 
 no interest they can have in it which will weigh against the 
 safety and prosperity of Ireland." Such a passage as this 
 might have served, it was urged, as a motto for the Land 
 League itself. What other doctrine did the Land League 
 uphold but that the land should become the possession of 
 real owners, and be made instrumental to the employment 
 and sustentation of the people ? Might not the Land League 
 have fairly asked the government what interest it could have 
 in the present system of land which would weigh against the 
 safety and prosperity of Ireland ? Had he not told them, 
 too, in 1866, that " The great evil of Ireland is this: that 
 the Irish people — the Irish nation — are dispossessed of the 
 soil; and what we ought to do is to provide for and aid in 
 their restoration to it by all measures of justice ? " He dis- 
 liked the action of the Irish members now, because they 
 were acting against the Liberal party; but had he not said 
 in 1866 also, " If Irishmen were united, if you one hundred 
 and five members were for the most part agreed, you might 
 do almost anything that you liked; " and further said, " If 
 there were one hundred more members, the representatives 
 of large and free constituencies, then your cry would be 
 heard, and the people would give you that justice which 
 a class has so long denied you." "Exactly," replied his 
 Irish critics. "We have now a united body of Irishmen, 
 the largest and most united the House has ever seen, and 
 you do not seem to look kindly upon it. You do not seem 
 to be acting up to your promise made in Dublin in 1866 — 
 ' If I have in past times felt an unquenchable sympathy with 
 the sufferings of your people, you may rely upon it that if 
 there be an Irish member to speak for Ireland, he will find 
 me heartily by his side.' " At the same speech in Dublin, 
 Mr. Bright said, " If I could be in all other things the same, 
 but in birth an Irishman, there is not a town in this island I 
 would not visit for the purpose of discussing the great Irish 
 question, and of rousing my countrymen to some great and 
 united action." " This is exactly what we are doing," said 
 his Land League critics; "why do you denounce us now? 
 
AN OUTLINE OF IRISH HISTORY, 293 
 
 Why do you vote for Coercion Acts to prevent the discus- 
 sion of the great Irish question ? " 
 
 But all such recriminations were vain and valueless. Mr. 
 Bright had changed his opinions, and there was no more 
 use in reminding him that he had once encouraged Irish 
 agitation than in taunting Mr. Gladstone with having been 
 once a member of the Tory party. That Mr. Bright was 
 no longer a friend to the leaders of Irish public opinion, 
 that he was no longer at the side of those who undoubt- 
 edly represented the feeling of the nation, was a mat- 
 ter indeed for regret. A friend the less, an enemy the 
 more, is always to be regretted. But they had to go on and 
 do the best they could without him; they could not turn 
 from the course of their duty, even because a great speaker 
 and a great statesman did not think and act in his old age 
 as he had thought and acted when he was younger. 
 
 After the Coercion Act was passed, one or two men were 
 arrested, and then the government arrested Mr. John Dil- 
 lon. Mr. John Dillon was one of the most extreme of the 
 Irish members. His father was Mr. John B. Dillon, the 
 rebel of 1848, and one of the founders of the Nation news- 
 paper. When the rebellion was crushed, John Dillon fled 
 to France, and returned to England years later, under the 
 general amnesty, and was elected for the county Tipperary. 
 He earned honorable distinction in the House of Commons 
 by his efforts to bring about an alliance between the Irish 
 party and the English Radicals, and some of Mr. John 
 Bright' s speeches contain the warmest tributes to his honor 
 and his ability. Mr. John Dillon, the son, was a man of 
 much more extreme opinions. He was imbued with the in- 
 tense detestation of English rule which English politicians 
 find it difficult to understand, and he never seemed to have 
 much sympathy with or belief in parliamentary agitation. 
 Some months after his imprisonment Mr. Dillon was re- 
 leased, on account of ill health. The Coercion Bill proved 
 a hopeless failure. The government did its best by impris- 
 oning members of the Land League, local leaders, priests, 
 and others, in all directions, to give the country over again 
 into the hands of Ribbonmen and other conspirators, and 
 take it out of the hands of the constitutional agitators. 
 The Land Bill was passed, and proved to be utterly inade- 
 quate to the purpose it was intended to serve. 
 
^^4 AN OUTLINE OF IRISH HISTORY. 
 
 With the conclusion of Parliament a Land League Con- 
 vention was summoned in the Rotunda, Dublin, in the early 
 days of September, 1881. The convention represented the 
 public feeling of Ireland, as far as public opinion ever can be 
 represented by a delegated body. The descendants of the 
 Cromvvellian settlers of the norrti sat side by side with men 
 of the rebel blood of Tipperary, with the impetuous people 
 of the south, with the strong men of the midland hunting 
 counties. The most remarkable feature of the meeting 
 was the vast number of priests who were present. 
 
 The attitude of the Catholic clergy of Ireland towards the 
 League was very remarkable. It was said at first, by those 
 who did not understand the Irish clergy, that the Church 
 and the League would never form an alliance. The Land 
 League soon began to gain powerful supporters among the 
 Irish ecclesiastics. Archbishop McCabe had attacked it 
 early in the movement. His attack had raised up a power- 
 ful champion of the Land League in Archbishop Croke, of 
 Cashel. The Nationalists welcomed Archbishop Croke as 
 their religious leader, and he travelled through Ireland in a 
 sort of triumph, receiving from the peasantry everywhere 
 the most enthusiastic reception. The priests in general be- 
 gan to accept the Land League programme enthusiastically. 
 The priesthood have always been the warmest supporters 
 of any movement that has really appeared to promise to do 
 good to the Irish people. Clerical sympathy with the Land 
 League was in itself a proof of its law-abiding and consti- 
 tutional principles, which ought to have counted for much 
 with the government. But the government appeared to be 
 obstinately shut against all impressions. Instead of being 
 impressed by the significance of the ecclesiastical support 
 of the League, the government seemed determined to force 
 the priests ^and the Leaguers into closer sympathy by ar- 
 resting, on the 20th of May, a Catholic priest, Father 
 Eugene Sheehy, of Kilmallock. A great number of priests 
 spoke at the Convention, young and old; all were in warm 
 sympathy with the League and its leaders. The meeting 
 was singularly quiet; the speeches were moderate in the ex- 
 treme; but the country was in a terribly disordered state, 
 and even the strong force of coercion struggled in vain 
 against the general disorganization. 
 
AN OUTLINE OF IRISH HISTORY. 295 
 
 At this crisis the government, for some reason or other, 
 liberated Father Sheehy, who at once comm.enced a vigor- 
 ous crusade against the ministry, and his entry into Cork, 
 in company with Mr. Parnell, resembled a Roman triumph. 
 The government was now determined to make a bold stroke. 
 Mr. Gladstone made a bitter attack on Mr. Parnell, to which 
 Mr. Parnell fiercely replied, and a few days after a descent 
 was made upon the leaders of the Land League. Mr. Par- 
 nell, Mr. Sextouj Mr. Dillon, and the chief officers of the 
 League were arrested, and conveyed to Kilmainham prison. 
 Mr. Egan, who was in Paris, and some others, escaped ar- 
 rest. An address * was at once issued to the Irish tenants, 
 
 * This address which was known as " the No Rent manifesto," roused 
 the Irish race in America to unprecedented action. A huge conven- 
 tion was called at Chicago and a pledge of financial backing given the 
 "people at home" on the lines of that manifesto. An idea of the en- 
 thusiasm manifested over this exhibition of pluck and detremination in the 
 Irish leaders may be had from the fact that the Irish World alone com- 
 menced to raise and cable funds at the rate of $15,000 a week, going as 
 high as $17,000. The world has never witnessed such a popular money- 
 raising era. The manifesto was clothed in the following language: 
 
 "PAY NO RENT!" 
 The Land League Will Stand by the Evicted, 
 
 THE manifesto. 
 
 Fellow Citizens — The hour to try your souls and to redeem your 
 pledges has arrived. The executive of the National Land League, 
 forced to abandon its policy of testing the Land Act, feels bound to ad- 
 vise the tenant farmers of Ireland from this day forth to pay no rents un- 
 der any circumstanCfes to their landlords until Government relinquishes 
 the existing system of terrorism and restores the constitutional rights of 
 the people. Do not be daunted by the removal of your leaders. Do 
 not let yourselves be intimidated by threats of military violence. It is 
 as lawful to refuse to pay rents as it is to receive them. Against the pas- 
 sive resistance of the entire population military power has no weapon. 
 Funds will be poured out unstintedly for the support of all who may en- 
 dure eviction in the course of the struggle. Our exiled brothers in 
 America may be relied upon to contribute if necessary as many millions 
 of money as they have contributed thousands to starve out Landlordism 
 and bring English tyranny to its knees. You have only to show that 
 you are not unworthy of their boundless sacrifices. One more crowning 
 struggle for your land, your homes, your lives — a struggle in which you 
 have all the memories of your race, all the hopes of your kindred and all 
 the sacrifices of your imprisoned brothers. 
 
 One more struggle in which you have the hope of happy homes and 
 
296 AN OUTLINE OF IRISH HISTORY. 
 
 signed by the imprisoned Land Leaguers, and calling upon 
 them to pay no rent until their leaders were liberated. The 
 government immediately declared the Land League illegal, 
 and suppressed its branches throughout the country. The 
 result was a great increase in the outrages, and the country 
 became more disturbed than ever. The men who could 
 have kept it quiet, who had restrained the popular feeling, 
 were in prison. 
 
 After a while Mr. Sexton was liberated on account of ill- 
 health, and the imprisonment of the other Land League 
 leaders was evidently a great embarrassment to the govern- 
 ment. Private overtures of freedom were made to them, 
 if they would consent to leave the country for a time — at 
 least, of freedom, if they would consent to cross the Chan- 
 nel to the Continent, even though they came back the next 
 day. But the prisoners refused any such compromise. 
 They considered that they had been unfairly imprisoned, 
 and they would accept no conditions. Meanwhile the affairs 
 of the country were going from bad to worse. The govern- 
 ment was unable to cope with the disaffection, and the Land 
 Act was unavailing to meet the misery of the people. What 
 Mr. Parnell has always predicted has come to pass. The 
 Land Courts were overcrowded with work; there were thou- 
 sands of cases in hand, which it would take years to dispose 
 of, and in the meantime the people were suffering terribly, 
 and the landlords were taking every advantage of the delay. 
 To meet the difficulty, Mr. Parnell sent out from his prison 
 
 national freedom to inspire you, one more heroic effort to destroy Land- 
 lordism, a«d the system which was and is the curse of your race will 
 have disappeared forever. Stand together in face of the brutal, cow- 
 ardly enemies of your race! Pay no rent under any pretext! Stand, 
 passively, firmly, fearlessly by, while the armies of England may be en- 
 gaged in their hopeless struggle against the spirit which their wea- 
 pons cannot touch, and the government, with its bayonets, will learn in 
 a single winter how powerless are armed forces against the will of a 
 united, determined and self-reliant nation. 
 
 Charles S. Parnell, 
 A. J. Kettle, 
 Michael Davitt,. 
 John Dillon, 
 Thomas Brennan^ 
 Thomas Sexton^ 
 Patrick Egan. 
 
AN OUTLINE OF IRISH HISTORY. ^97 
 
 the draft of an Arrears Bill to relieve the tenant from the 
 pressure of past rent, and this measure was practically ac- 
 cepted by the government, who promised, if the Irish party 
 withdrew their measure, to bring in a ministerial bill to 
 the same effect. Fresh surprises were in store. Rumors 
 of a change of policy on the part of the government were 
 suddenly confirmed by the liberation of Mr. Parnell, Mr. 
 Dillon, Mr. O'Kelly, and many other of the Land League 
 prisoners, and, more surprising still, by the release of Mr. 
 Michael Davitt.* Ever since the suppression of the Land 
 League the fiercer spirit of the secret societies had been 
 abroad in Ireland. To them the ministerial concessions 
 pointed at a reconcilement which they detested. 
 
 The ministry seemed really to have awakened to the grav- 
 ity of the situation, and to have suddenly accepted Fox's 
 theory of the necessity of governing Ireland according to 
 Irish ideas. Mr. Forster, the most uncompromising oppo- 
 nent of such a theory, resigned, and Lord Frederick Caven- 
 dish, a younger son of the Duke of Devonshire, was ap- 
 pointed Chief Secretary for Ireland in his place. Then 
 came the terrible Phoenix Park tragedy. On Saturday the 
 6th of May, 1882, Lord Frederick Cavendish landed in 
 Dublin; that same evening he and Mr. Burke, one of the 
 Castle officials, were killed in the Phoenix Park in the clear 
 summer twilight, by persons who escaped at the time. 
 
 The government at once brought in a Crimes Bill, one of 
 the most stringent ever passed against Ireland. It then 
 brought in, and carried, after a strong opposition in the 
 House of Lords, its Arrears Bill, a measure to enable the 
 tenant farmers of Ireland, under certain conditions, to wipe 
 out the arrears of rent which had accumulated upon them. 
 
 In the August of 1882 a National Exhibition of Irish 
 manufactures was opened in Dublin, the first enterprise of 
 the kind ever conducted by the national party, in complete 
 independence from Castle patronage; it was a great success. 
 
 * The negotiations which brought these things about are known in the 
 popular mind as the " Kilmainham Treaty," and have been severely 
 criticised by American nationalists, whose principal objection was that 
 they had been led into unusual efforts to raise money by the issuance of 
 the '* No Rent Manifesto," which manifesto was quietly withdrawn by 
 these negotiations. 
 
"298 AN OUTLINE OF IRISH HISTORY. 
 
 On the day that the exhibition was opened, a statue of 
 O'Connell was unveiled in Sackville Street, opposite the 
 O'Connell Bridge, and a vast procession of all the guilds 
 and associations of DubUn was organized in its honor. 
 There was a conviction in England, and in the minds of 
 the Castle authorities, that such an event could not pass off 
 without some desperate scenes of disorder, if not of insur- 
 rection. But the peace and order of Ireland's capital city- 
 was not disturbed, and the spectacle of the vast procession, 
 many miles in length, of the stately statue that had been 
 raised to a national hero, of the beautiful building richly 
 stored with the work of Irish hands, and the creations of 
 Irish intellect, all accomplished entirely by the Irish people 
 themselves, under the guidance of their national leaders, 
 without foreign aid or countenance, afforded one of the 
 strongest arguments in favor of Home Rule ever advanced 
 in Ireland. A people who could carry out so successfully, 
 with such perfect peace and order, so difficult an enterprise, 
 might be admitted, even by the most prejudiced, to have 
 within them all the capacity for successful self-government. 
 On the day following the O'Connell Centennial, the free- 
 dom of the City of Dublin was conferred on Mr. Parnell and 
 Mr. Dillon. The same day another popular Irish member, 
 Mr. E. D. Gray, M. P., was committed to Richmond prison, 
 O'Connell' s old prison, on a charge of contempt of court, 
 which was the cause of a parliamentary inquiry into the ex- 
 ercise of that curious judicial privilege. Mr. Gray was the 
 owner of the Freeman's Jonrfial, and at the time was High 
 Sheriff of Dublin. He had written in his paper some cen- 
 sures on the conduct of a jury * whose verdict had sentenced 
 a man to death. The judge before whom the case had been 
 tried, Mr. Justice Lawson, immediately sent Mr. Gray to 
 prison for three months for contempt of court, and fined 
 him ;£5oo. After two months' imprisonment Mr. Gray 
 was released; the fine was paid by subscription in a few 
 days. When Parliament met in a winter session, the case 
 was brought forward as one of privilege, and submitted to 
 a select committee. 
 
 * The Fieeman's Journal \\2^di undertaken to describe the drunken 
 orgies of a packed jury which held the life of an innocent man, Francis 
 Hynes, since admitted to have been innocent by the members of the 
 government that hanged him. 
 
AN OUTLINE OF IRISH HISTORY. 299 
 
 At one time during the autumn of 1882, the Irish execu- 
 tive seemed likely to be much embarrassed by a strike 
 among the Irish Constabulary, a body of men on whom the 
 executive naturally were forced to depend greatly. Some 
 hundreds of police struck; there were some fierce distur- 
 bances in Dublin; at one time it seemed as if the police in 
 every town in Ireland were discontented and prepared to 
 combine against the government; but the government made 
 some concessions, and what at one time seemed a very se- 
 rious danger faded away into nothingness. 
 
 In October another National Convention was held in 
 Dublin, and a new and vast organization formed, embracing 
 in one all the Irish demands for Home Rule and for Land 
 Reform. With its inauguration begins a new chapter in 
 Irish history. 
 
FORDS' NATIONAL LIBRARY. 
 
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 —Brooklyn Daily Standard. 
 

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