This also must be a rough estimate, at least so far as
the Protestant population is concerned. Such as it is,
however, it gives much the greatest comparative Pro-
testant population to Ulster. The following enumera-
tion from the Irish Census for
as pretty near the truth :-

1861 may be received

From these figures we conclude that in 1861 the
per centage of Protestants to Roman Catholics was:-

Thus in Ulster Protestants and Roman Catholics were nearly in equal numbers; in all the other provinces the Roman Catholics were far more numerous than all sects of Protestants together.

During a great part of last century a tourist in Ulster would have found everywhere in the mountains and bogs, the Celtic race, the Irish language, and the Roman Catholic religion; and the arable land occupied by men of English or Scotch blood, speaking English or Scotch, and Protestants. Since then the Celts have been slowly mixing with the Saxons, attracted especially to towns where any manufacture was taking root. The Curate of Belfast in the end of last century assured an old friend of mine that when he settled in Belfast there were not in that town and the neighbouring parish of Shankhill five Roman Catholic families; there are now in the town upwards of 55,500 Roman Catholics.

Immediately after the conclusion of the war a commission was appointed to make inquiry respecting the murders that had been committed during the rebellion. The commissioners were officers of Cromwell's army-Puritans, perhaps not over-exigent in regard to the amount and kind of evidence sufficient

for the conviction of a Papist. They, in fact, held Mr. Froude says:

court-martials.

"The remnant of the Ulster murderers who had survived the wars remained to be brought to late justice. A high court of justice, under General Fleetwood, was held at Kilkenny, in the hall of the Assembly, to try them. Sir Phelim O'Neill and 200 others were convicted and executed. All the rest had been consumed in a war, the waste of life in which, compared with the population of the country exposed to its ravages, stands unparalleled in the annals of mankind."*

How

I hope Mr. Froude, when he wrote this, was ignorant of the facts of the case. If not, this passage is a marvel of scandalous disingenuousness. many of these two hundred and one murderers does the reader suppose were Ulster murderers-murderers of the Ulster massacre? Just one-not one hundred, gentle reader, but the unit one-viz., Sir Phelim O'Neill. The remaining two hundred were murderers of Leinster, Munster, and Connaught, where there has never been the pretence of a general massacre in this war. This strange but certain fact gives strong corroboration to the belief that Temple's account of the Ulster massacre is an outrageous exaggeration. We have all heard of the Temple of Truth; here we have the Temple of Falsehood. Mr. Froude must excuse me if I assure him, with perfect truth, that the spirit who dictates such garbled and calumnious histories as Temple's and his,

* English in Ireland, vol. i., pp. 128-9.

of this most deplorable epoch of Irish history, as little resembles Thalia, the muse of faithful, truthful, and impartial history, as the strumpet resembles the honoured and chaste Roman matron

"Chaste as the icicle

That's curdled by the frost from purest snow,
And hangs on Dian's temple."

VIII.

I have now, in conclusion, to invite my reader to witness, under the guidance of the Rev. Mr. Clogy, Rector of Cavan, the proceedings of the insurgents in the County Cavan, one of the six forfeited counties, during the first eight months of the war, throughout which he resided near the centre of the county and in the midst of the rebels. His testimony is given in his most interesting life of his stepfather-in-law, Bishop Bedell, a prelate of rare and truly apostolic virtues, never surpassed, if even equalled, by those of any other bishop of the Episcopal Protestant Church of Ireland, except Bishop Berkeley

"Manners with candour are to Benson given:

To Berkeley, ev'ry virtue under heaven.”—Pope.

Bedell had procured the translation into the Irish language, and the publication at his own expense, of the Old Testament, and by his zealous but gentle and tolerant advocacy of the Protestant faith, was by far

the most dangerous opponent the Roman Catholic priesthood had ever encountered in Ireland. He had even made a convert of the brother of the Roman Catholic Bishop of his diocese of Kilmore. In proof that the Rev. Mr. Clogy is free from all taint of partizanship in favour of Roman Catholics, I quote the following fiery and shocking denunciation of them. He has just given a copy of a Latin letter of Bedell to the Roman Catholic Bishop of Kilmore, on which he remarks:

"Did ever Polycarpus of Smyrna, or Ignatius of Antioch, or any other of the famous bishops and martyrs of the Primitive Church, who had their Father's name written on their foreheads-i.e., that made an open confession of the faith of Christ crucified, come nearer to him who before Pontius Pilate witnessed a good confession, and show a greater contempt of the world, and of death itself, under the cruel persecution of the pagans, than this our magnanimous confessor and blessed martyr of Jesus declareth in this short and pithy epistle, under the cruelty of bloody Papists? whose hatred of, and cruelty of all sorts against the people of God doth as far exceed that of their elder brother, the pagan, as they may find one day (if God be true) that the torments of hell, and those everlasting burnings prepared for dogs, and sorcerers, and whoremongers, and murderers, and idolaters, and for whosoever loveth and maketh a lie (for Popery is nothing else but a great and presumptuous lie against the true God and the truth of God contained in the Scriptures of truth, and every particular of it), are above those of their Popish purgatory; and they that follow him that was a murderer from the beginning, and abode not in the truth, may justly expect to be ranged with him, and to suffer as murderers, unless they repent of the works of their hands;