looked upto such a man with enthusiastic ardour; he was the theme of their songs; the daughters of Ireland regarded him as their hero, and her sons followed him with pride and with rapture. Every hill and every valley rung with the name of Roger O'Moore. The Irish standards were wrought with his name, and the national signal which passed through every province of Ireland was-" God, our Lady, and Roger O'Moore." Such was the character of the leader who organized the formidable insurrection of sixteen hundred and forty-one-an insurrection into which the native Irish were driven by the denunciations of the bigot and the avarice of the confiscator. Dr Curry, in his invaluable review of the civil wars of Ireland, has satisfactorily vindicated the character of his country against the vicious imputation, that the insurrection of which we are writing, was as unprovoked as it was barbarous; that it burst forth in the calm of public confidence, when Ireland was about to enjoy the blessings of a limited government, when the privileges of the people were beginning to be respected, when national industry, the manufactures and agriculture of the country, were rising from the ruins of civil war and anarchy. Dr Curry has protected his country against the malicious charges of the impudent slanderer, and has proved, by a chain of unanswerable evidence, that the native Irish had no refuge but their courage and their arms against the threats of extermination and the rapacity of fanaticism.

The unfortunate Charles himself, has borne testimony to the provocations which were practised by the governors of Ireland, Parsons and Borlase,

to irritate the Irish to insurrection. "If I," said Charles in his reply to a declaration of the English commons, "had been suffered to perform my engagements to the Irish, there would have been no rebellion in Ireland. Had the governors of Ireland passed the bills for securing the estates of the natives, or for confirming the other promised graces, the Irish would not have had recourse to violence for a redress of their grievances." The extirpation of the catholics seems to have been determined upon by the same governors; Mr Carte, in his life of Ormond, has the following strong testimony to the intention of the anti-catholic party of this period: "Some time before the rebellion broke out, it was confidently reported that Sir John Clotworthy, who well knew the designs of the faction that governed the house of commons of England, had declared there in a speech, that "the conversion of the papists in Ireland, was only to be effected by the bible in one hand, and the sword in the other ;" and Mr Pym, another distinguished member, gave out, "that they would not leave a priest in Ireland:" to the like effect, Sir William Parsons, (one of the Irish governors), out of a strange weakness or de, testable policy, positively asserted before many witnesses, "that within a twelvemonth, no catholic should be seen in Ireland." He had sense enough to know the consequences that would naturally arise from such a declaration, which, however it might contribute to his own selfish views, he would hardly have ventured to make so openly and without disguise, if it had not been agreeable to the po

litics and measures of the English faction, whose party he espoused, and whose directions were the general rule of his conduct."—" It is evident," says Dr Warner in his history of the Irish rebellion, from the Lords Justices letter to the Earl of Leinster, then lieutenant, that they hoped for an extirpation, not of the mere Irish only, but of all

Mr Taaffe has the following observations on the causes of the Irish insurrection of 1641. Their fidelity and truth are supported by all the protestant writers of this period who did not feel an immediate interest in calumny and misrepresentation. "The Irish insurrection," says Mr Taaffe," was but a part of the revolutionary scheme, formed in England and Scotland by the puritans. This is the master-key to the proceedings of the party in both islands. The furious denunciations against popery, contained in the solemn league and covenant, in sundry acts of parliament, and in fanatical petitions to parliament for the extermination of papists, encouraged, pompously received and published; torture and death inflicted on many professors of that religion-all were directed to that end. It is difficult to conceive," continues Mr Taaffe," that any person calling on the name of Christ, and not quite insane, would seriously intend the diabolical project of exterminating a nation for religious opinions; but all those threats, alarms, and false rumours of fictitious plots, however ridiculous, were among the revolutionary schemes of working up the many headed hydra to the utmost fury. It was deemed necessary to fanaticise the public to prepare for great changes in church and state, and the hue and cry against popery, involving the established prelacy, partly through the affinity of the two churches, partly through the imprudence of Charles and Laud, was a potent engine to work on minds ignorant and credulous, especially to tales of malignity. The Bible and the spirit of canting hypocrisy and fanaticism, were to the English democrats of the seventeenth century, what the age of reason and infidelity were to the French democrats of the eighteenth. The means different, for a similar object, as a revolution of opinion must precede a revolution in the states."

the old English families also, that were Roman Catholics." Dr Curry says, that this dread of an extirpation, as appears from a multitude of depositions taken before Dr Henry Jones, and other commissioners appointed by the Lords Justices, prevailed universally among the catholics of Ireland, and was insisted upon as one of their reasons for taking up arms. The Earl of Ormond, in his letter of January the 27th, and February 26th, 1641, to Sir William St Leger, imputes the general revolt of the nation, then far advanced, to the publishing of such a design. The most illiberal historian who has presumed to blacken the fame of his country by the imputation of principles it has a hundred times abjured, will not now persevere in the denial of the real object and views of those malignant fanatics who drove the Irish to madness in the year 1641. The extirpation of the Irish catholic, and the humiliation of the English sovereign, went hand in hand; and the hope of obtaining the properties of the Irish became a new stimulus to a policy as sanguinary as it was foolish.

The catholic clergymen did not escape the tongue of the slanderous; and the missionaries of peace and patience, under unmerited sufferings, were at the same moment represented as the instigators of rebellion, the disseminators of doctrines which would dissolve society, and the sycophantic and spiritless defenders of the most servile doctrines. It is strange, that even at the period in which Mr Leland wrote, the mind of the historian could have been so insensible to the suggestions of truth, as to

put on record the following libellous effusion-the progeny of falsehood and bigotry, and the laboured attestation of a corrupted, though able writer, to the calumnies of fanaticism. Speaking of the catholic clergy of this period, Mr Leland says, " that they had the influence, even over the gentry of their communion, with which they were invested by the tenets of their own religion. The ignorant herd of papists they governed at their pleasure. They had received their education and imbibed their principles in the foreign seminaries of France and Spain. Hence they returned to Ireland, bound solemnly to the pope in unlimited submission, without profession or bond of allegiance to the king. Full fraught with these absurd and pestilent doctrines, which the moderate of their own communion profess to abominate; of the universal monarchy of the pope, as well civil as spiritual; of his authority to excommunicate and depose princes; to absolve subjects from their oaths of allegiance, and to dispense with every law of God and man; to sanctify rebellion and murder, and even to change the very nature and essential difference of vice and virtue ; and with this and other impious trumpery of schools and councils, these ecclesiastics filled their superstitious votaries."

The authority on which Mr Leland has thought proper to ground the preceding observations, is a disgraced and excommunicated catholic clergyman, who, smarting under indignity, stops at no charge, however monstrous, against the doctrine and principles of the church which degraded him. Mr