attributes almost all the calamity with which the English inhabitants of Ireland were visited, to the unprincipled and avaricious policy of its government. The insurrection was carried on in the different provinces with various success; those of the south exhibited more order and system in their operations than the north. Their conflicts, though not important in their results, were marked with circumstances of cruelty and barbarity equally disgraceful to the contending parties. There seemed to be little more than a rivalship of vengeance between the Irish and the English, in which the innocent and unoffending were almost always the victims; and the total oblivion of which may perhaps be now considered as the first duty of the historian as well as the reader.*

In addition to the authorities we have already adduced, in justification of the resistance of the Irish to the threats of extermination, and the actual infliction of great suffering, we shall subjoin the enlightened, comprehensive, and unanswerable observations of Doctor Curry, who has devoted so much labour to the establishment of truth, the refutation of calumny, and the confusion of all the hired libellers of the Irish people. These observations are to be found in his introduction to the Review of the Civil Wars of Ireland; and perhaps there could not be gleaned from the hundred volumes which have been written on the disastrous subject of the Irish insurrection, so satisfactory a consolidation of all those reasons which the most enthusiastic defenders of the Irish nation would wish to see advanced.

"At the period," says Doctor Curry, " from which I have commenced the review of the civil wars in Ireland, it will be found, that spiritual hatred mixed itself with our former seeds of dissension. The perverseness so long imputed to the Irish, as a people, was no longer charged on their nature, but on their religion. Almost every moral and civil duty was then confined

The struggles of the Irish were hitherto so unsuccessful, that the boldest and most confident of

within the pale of an ecclesiastical party; every species of treachery was placed beyond it; real crimes were disowned by one faction; imaginary crimes were imputed to another; and this state of things occasioned guilt on both sides, which, in a different state, would undoubtedly be avoided. High as most of those crimes were, yet most were exaggerated, and the innocent suffered with the guilty. To complete the misery of the times, the gospel of peace was tortured to defend the measures and sanctify the drunkenness of every governing, as well as every resisting set of men ; and thus it fared in Ireland, in some time after the accession of Queen Elizabeth to the throne.

"Queen Elizabeth, whose reign began in the height of ecclesiastical rage, had admirable talents for government. To plant civil order in the place of that misrule, which disgraced the three preceding reigns, was difficult. Her interest led her, and the success of her father and brother encouraged her, to change the religion then established in England. This she effected; but truth must oblige us to confess, that the new church was reared on the foundations of persecution, and that the violence so justły censured in Queen Mary's reign, was adopted as a justifiable measure in the present. The change was made by a quick act of legislative power, but without that moderation which sound policy should direct in establishments of this nature. By the change, one party in the nation was ruined, another was provok ed; papists were occasionally punished without discrimination; and, in the idea of party justice, this procedure appeared equitable; but the puritan protestant was punished also; and the clamour ran high among dissenters, that the old beast returned, with a change only of the rider and the habiliments. The party for a comprehensive reformation grew popular, and increased in strength and in numbers every day, as it increased in faction and enthusiasm. The new church, even in the act of extirpat ing the old, created to itself enemies on all sides; and thus it happened, that the system wove by civil policy, was in a great degree unravelled by the ecclesiastical. The natives of Ireland, ready at all times to recognize the temporal supremacy of their

their leaders began to despond. On the other hand, the English parliament determined to put forth all

sovereign, and reject every foreign claimant, lay or ecclesiastical, of such supremacy, merited being received into the society of constitutional subjects; and that they should be so received, had been the labour of Sir Henry Sydney, one of the wisest, ablest, and best governors ever sent into that kingdom -but in vain. The reformation, it is true, made no progress for a long time without the pale, and extraordinary efforts to enforce it by arms, would certainly be dangerous, as it might put an end to intestine divisions among the people, which hitherto proved so useful towards their reduction. To favour those di visions was previously the more politic alternative; and the queen received the submissions of many Irish chieftains at her court very graciously; dismissed them with honours and presents, and left them free as to the concerns of their spiritual conscience. It was otherwise within the pale and its environs; here even the seneschals of counties exercised plain tyranny over the people, and such particular severities were then inflicted, even in the opinion of the lord deputy himself (Lord Mountjoy) as were sufficient to drive the best and quietest states into a sudden confusion. The evils of persecution were severely felt in England particularly, and in several districts of Ireland, during the greater part of Queen Elizabeth's reign. One party was punished without discrimination, and the other (and indeed both) without sound policy. Those evils increased in the two succeeding reigns, when those three kingdoms, for the first time, had been united under one sovereign. James I., whom the trumpeters of faction charged with favouring popery, was a great and determined enemy to his popish subjects. His administration in Ireland, with little exception, is a full proof of this. His trimming conduct towards the papists of England, antecedently to his accession, is no proof to the contrary; for they gained nothing (and he intended they should gain nothing) by the laws he held out to them. Learned without knowledge, cunning without wisdom-one of his first gracious proclamations imputed a general gaol delivery to all his subjects, excepting murderers and papists-and this coupling of the latter with such criminals,

their strength, and to prosecute the war in Ireland with increased vigour and resources. They enter

produced a resentment which, degenerating into mad revenge, contributed in a considerable degree to the detestable powder plot, entered into soon after by a few desperate men, to get rid of their persecutors. Charles, the successor of James, trod ruinously in his father's footsteps. He wanted to impose the English religion on his Scotch subjects. The covenanters would not bear the introduction of what they deemed a superstitious liturgy among them. They defended themselves against it by insurrection, and the parliament sitting at Westminster approved of their conduct. The northern Irish, finding affairs embroiled in Great Britain, and dreading fatal consequences from the resolutions denounced against papists in the English House of Commons, entertained the thought of availing themselves of the present opportunity of frustrating the intentions of their enemies, and shaking off the bondage they groaned under from the time of the queen's denial; but they meant to compass this end by means equally justifiable with those employed by the Scotch covenanters, and still without an impeachment of their loyalty. The memory of past grievances, the dread of present destruction, made those men desperate.

"For forty years before the period we mention, the whole body of the Irish papists bore ministerial invasions of the most distressing nature to the human mind. The lands possessed by their families for several ages, were, in the court casuistry of that age, pronounced invalid and resumable tenures, though no charge of treason or rebellion could be made to the heirs in actual possession. Upon this pretence of defective titles, some have been ruined, others threatened with ruin: and this was not all. The court harpies, grown impatient at the passive conduct of the proprietors, attempted to provoke them to open rebellion, by exercising the most galling tyranny over their consciences, by fining, imprisoning, and punishing in various shapes, such papists as refused to join in the established form of worship. Here, then, see how the natives have been alarmed with regard to property and spiritual liberty, and how they were tortured by state inquisitors, for not submitting to religious doctrines which spiritual directors

ed into a treaty with Scotland, in 1642, for sending her army into Ireland. Robert Monroe, at the

may preach, but which no civil power on earth has a right to im pose. They, surely, who vindicate the right of the Scots to insurrection in 1640, can, with no good grace, condemn that of the Irish in 1641; we do not defend either, but we may safely assert, that he who should, at this time of day, advance with my Lord Clarendon, that the Irish had no civil or religious grievances to complain of, during the forty years antecedent to the Ultonian rebellion in 1641,' has but a wretched alternative in opinion between wilful ignorance and barefaced dishonesty."

The malignant prejudice with which Mr Hume exaggerates the errors or the crimes of the Irish, and the furious prepossessions which he discovers through every page of his history against this unoffending and abused people, is well remarked upon by our able and honest countryman, Dr Curry. When Mr Hume was living, he and his friends were challenged by Dr Curry to an examination of the charges against the Irish people. Mr Hume was unwilling to correct those errors against the Irish character, and those insults against their feelings, which he well knew were so palatable to the insatiable monopoly of his English reader. Dr Curry, speaking of Mr Hume, observes, "It is indeed to be lamented that Mr Hume, one of the ablest writers of the present age, should, as an historian, suffer himself to be so far led astray by such cotemporaries as we have hinted at, as to transfer all, or most of the mischiefs of the year 1641, in Ireland, from the original authors to the unfortunate Irish alone. Parties less aggrieved, in Scotland, were up before them, and drew the sword, not only with impunity, but with advantage. The Irish in Ulster, who wanted to regain the lands they had lost, followed the example. We do not justify the act in either kingdom; we only advance in alleviation of the Irish crime, that the majority of the Irish nation had, in the two reigns of James and Charles, suffered a cruel bondage of thirty-eight years, with little intermission, and had now the most alarming prospect of extirpation before them. They did not mean to withdraw their allegiance from the king; even the weak leaders of the northern rabble had no such intention. The latter began and acted singly; most of the in