have been so often repeated, that credulity has become conviction, and the minds which had the firmness to repel the exaggerations of malignant falsehood, have been seen to sink under the indefatigable industry of the hired libeller.

The insurrection of 1641 was the natural effect of persecution; it was the vindictive ebullition of great public spirit, driven to madness by the goadings of religious intolerance. The cruelties committed during this moral convulsion, were provoked by a series of unrelenting oppressions, never to be satiated with the misery of the Irish; and the terrible vengeance which the latter inflicted on their enemies, should teach the future governors of Ireland, that the people are always barbarized by intolerance, and rendered savage by injustice. We shall not, in this compendium, follow the various fluctuations of the different parties which acted in the insurrection of 1641; we shall not pursue the course of the rebel or the loyalist; we shall not follow Roger O'Moore and his companions through the multiplicity of dangers and enterprizes in which they were, engaged: such a relation would be little more than a picture of barbarous cruelty and recriminatory vengeance,-a revival of all those afflicting details which the friend of Ireland and humanity would anxiously bury in everlasting oblivion. We shall not in this volume disgust the reader by a recital of the atrocious massacre at island Magee by the English; nor shall we set down the terrible vengeance which the Irish, soon

after, at Portnadown, inflicted on their sanguinary enemies. *

* The unaccountable credulity which could for a moment countenance the circulation of the fables to which the terrified imaginations, or perhaps the corrupt policy of the writers, gave birth, is not easily reconcileable with the common sense which regulates the judgment and religious opinions of modern days. What man can refrain from smiling at the solemn gravity with which an historian will record the following absurdities :-" Hundreds of the ghosts of protestants," says Sir John Temple, " that were drowned at Portnadown bridge, were seen in the river bolt upright, and were heard to cry out for revenge on those rebels. One of these ghosts was seen with hands lifted up, and standing in that posture, from the 29th of December to the latter end of the following lent."

A modern historian (Mr Taaffe) has the following sensible observations on those miserable records of murderers, and ghosts, and goblins, which haunted the imaginations of every fool, and were the favourite theme of every knave, long after the period when it was supposed such events occurred.

"At this day (1810) it is not so material to know how many were massacred by either side, as to discover the motives that prompted the parties to those atrocities, and the prime movers of the rebellion, at whose door all the cruelties are to be laid; first, it is notorious, as already proved from the Scots covenant, (that canting, fanatical, intolerant libel on religion and common sense), and the denunciations of the English commons, as well as the sanguinary petitions received and encouraged by them, that they kindled a fanatical enthusiasm for the extermination of popery and papists; a furious zeal for such infernal projects being diligently propagated among the ignorant multitude. Nor were men of education exempt from the contagion; witness the anathema pronounced by Dr Usher against any toleration of popery, declaring, (on the catholics offering a considerable composition for the relaxation of the penal laws,) that it was sacrilege to compound with idolatry for money.' Armed fanatics thus tutored to blood, would think it meritorious to slay the reputed idolaters. But there was also another obvious motive, besides difference of

6

Could we, in passing through the scene of blood and desolation which our country exhibited at this period, discover a single gleaming of humanity, or a single effort of justice, we should feel it our duty to put it on record; but the Irish heart was so brutalized by oppression, that to destroy and to extirpate seemed to be considered as the summit of patriotism, and the generous emotions of the human bosom to be swallowed up in the barbarous denunciations of mutual cruelty and hatred.

It is to be lamented, that Mr Leland should have set down, with such peculiar accuracy, the numerous atrocities which the insurrection of 1641 furnished to his pen; and it is a subject of still greater regret, that the eloquence of the historian always assumes a bolder tone, and the colouring of his picture always becomes more glowing, whenever the vindictive barbarities of his countrymen are about to be described. There is no allowance for an unoffending people driven to madness

religion, that much more exasperated the northern Irish against the British planters. These men were, by violence and fraud, possessed of the estates of the native Irish about thirty years before, and were now living in opulence; while the descendants of the most ancient proprietors in Europe, or perhaps in the world, were pining in indigence, or emigrating for bread to foreign countries; than which no cause is more capable of exciting enmity. The royal robbers, James and Charles, prepared the combustible of very extensive discontent, and the puritans kindled the wisp. This will satisfactorily appear from the places where the insurrection commenced; counties where ancient proprietors were unjustly dispossessed of their estates, which were partly bestowed, and partly sold, to English adventurers."

by the persecutions of an insatiable avarice. The historian has no commiseration for the thousand families of the native Irish, whom the agents of England expelled from their homes; whose properties they confiscated, and whose children they beggared if the English suffer, the indignation of Mr Leland is roused, and his eloquence flows in a strong and irresistible current. The following is a good sample of the moderation with which this impartial historian records the acts and proceedings of his countrymen.

"They who escaped the utmost fury of the rebels, languished in miseries horrible to be described. Their imaginations were overpowered and disordered by the recollection of tortures and butchery. In their distraction, every tale of horror was eagerly received, and every suggestion of frenzy and melancholy believed implicitly. Miraculous escapes from death; miraculous judgments on murderers; lakes and rivers of blood; marks of slaughter indelible by every human effort; visions of spirits chanting hymns; ghosts rising from rivers and shrieking out revenge; these and such like fancies were propagated and received as incontestible." When Mr Leland is, in the next page, describing the merciless slaughter of the Irish in island Magee, a district bordering on Carrickfergus, where three thousand unoffending innocent persons, men, women, and children, according to Mr Carte, in his life of Ormond, were barbarously sacrificed to the fury of a remorseless soldiery, we cannot hear a single sigh of compassion; not a breathing of pity,

nor a single reflection of reprobation or condolence with the reader. The duty of the historian should rather be directed to heal than to irritate; to account for the cause, rather than exaggerate the cruelties, which persecution often provoked, and which justice to the devoted Irish would always have prevented. The parliament of Ireland, and the Lords Justices, Borlase and Parsons, interested in the protraction of that insurrection to which their cruelties had given birth, discouraged every effort which was made by their most efficient generals, to put an end to the power of the insurgents. "Whatever were the professions of the chief governors," says Mr Leland, "the only danger they really apprehended, was that of a too speedy suppression of the rebels." The Earl of Ormond was, in numerous instances, limited in his resources, restrained in his progress, and absolutely prohibited in the adoption of those plans which would have speedily extinguished the flame of insurrection.

Confiscation and plunder was the great object of the puritan governors of the pale; and, as Mr Leland has the candour to acknowledge, "the favourite and anxious wish of the Irish governors, and their friends, the English parliament, was the utter extermination of all the catholics of Ireland. Their estates," continues the same historian, "were already marked out and allotted to their conquerors; so that they and their posterity were consigned to inevitable ruin." Mr Carte, in his life of the Earl of Ormond, gives the same opinion on the designs of the government of Ireland at this period, and *