As the story is here told, one or two points come out very distinctly. Spenser advocates unpitying severity in the suppression of rebellion, and does not shut his eyes to what that means. His Ireneus, the peacemaker, says to his Eudoxus, "Where you think that good and sound laws might amend and reform things amiss there, you think surely amiss. For it is vain to prescribe laws where no man careth for the keeping of them, nor feareth the danger for breaking of them. But all the realm is first to be reformed, and laws afterwards to be made for keeping and continuing it in that reformed estate." "How then," Eudoxus asks, "do you think is the reformation thereof to begin, if not by laws and ordinances?" Says Ireneus, "Even by the sword.". Thereby he hoped "to settle an eternal peace," which "must be brought in by a strong hand, and so continued until it grow into a steadfast course of government." The strong hand had prevailed. In Fynes Moryson's "History of Ireland from the Year 1599 to 1603," the book to which he appended the Description of Ireland which is here reprinted, we read of horrors seen by Sir Arthur Chichester, Sir Richard Moryson, and the other commanders of the forces sent against Brian MacArt, in their return homeward at the end of March 1603: "Three children (whereof the eldest was not above ten years old), all eating and gnawing with their teeth the entrails of their dead mother, upon whose flesh they had fed twenty days past, and having eaten all from the feet upward to the bare bones, roasting it continually by a slow fire, were now come to the eating of her said entrails in like sort roasted, yet not divided from the body, being as yet raw. Former mention hath been made in the Lord Deputy's letters of carcasses scattered in every place, dead of famine. And no doubt the famine was so great as the rebel soldiers taking all the common people had to feed upon "[not to recall preceding notes of "the Army's cutting down the Rebels' corn for these last two years," and such record as Sir Henry

Dockwra's, "Then through the country, spoiling and burning such a quantity of corn and number of houses as I should hardly have believed so small a circuit of ground could have afforded, if I had not seen it"]-"the common sort of the rebels were driven to unspeakable extremities, beyond the record of most histories, that ever I did read in that kind, the ample relating whereof were an infinite task, yet will I not pass it over without adding a few instances. Capt. Trevor and many honest gentlemen lying in the Newry can witness, that some old women of those parts used to make a fire in the fields, and divers little children driving out the cattle in the cold mornings, and coming thither to warm them, were by them surprised, killed and eaten; which at last was discovered by a great girl breaking from them by strength of her body, and Capt. Trevor sending out soldiers to know the truth, they found the children's skulls and bones, and apprehended the old women, who were executed for the fact. The captains of Carrickfergus and the adjacent garrisons of the northern parts can witness, that upon the making of peace and receiving the rebels to mercy, it was a common practice among the common sort of them (I mean such as were not sword-men) to thrust long needles into the horses of our English troops, and they dying thereupon, to be ready to tear out one another's throat for a share of them. And no spectacle was more frequent in the ditches of towns, and especially in wasted countries, than to see multitudes of these poor people dead, with their mouths all coloured green by eating nettles, docks, and all things they could rend up above ground."

Tyrone made his submission to Queen Elizabeth at a time when it was not yet known in Ireland that she was dead; for she died on the 24th of March. A messenger from London brought the news as private information to Mountjoy, the Lord Deputy, at night on the 27th, and the information was kept secret. Tyrone made his submission formally on the 30th of March, and

on the 5th of April came the public and official information of Elizabeth's death and the accession of King James the First.

Here Sir John Davies takes up the tale, holds that the cruelty of force has done its work, and that King James has in Ireland the one purpose before him of uniting England and Ireland by community of laws and interests and national goodwill. In his retrospect of the past causes of failure to attain this end, he finds, as Spenser and others did, one cause of failure in community of blood. From the days of Strongbow downward, English settled in Ireland had become more Irish than the Irish. They had added lands to lands by the strong hand; had thrown off allegiance to English law and fastened on the Brehon laws of which they could make profit for themselves; they intermarried with their neighbours, put their children to the breasts of Irish foster-mothers, changed English for Irish names, and became oppressors of the Irish people upon their estates by their exactions of coin and livery. English armies in Ireland had been usually too weak to enforce submission; or, if strong at any time, were too soon broken up. They were always ill-paid, and therefore illgoverned, whereby they added to the general confusion. The kings and the great lords of England seldom visited the neighbour land. "Touching the absence of our kings," said Sir John Davies, "three of them only since the Norman Conquest have made royal journies into this land, namely, King Henry the Second, King John, and King Richard the Second. And yet they no sooner arrived here but all the Irish (as if they had been but one man) submitted themselves, took oaths of fidelity, and gave pledges and hostages to continue loyal; and if any of those kings had continued here in person a competent time till they had settled both English and Irish in their several possessions, and had set the law in a due course throughout the kingdom, these times wherein we live had not gained the honour of the first conquest and reducing of Ireland." And Sir John Davies

laid all stress upon the past neglect, which those times were to repair, of equal laws for the inhabitants of England and Ireland. English law had been current only in the English Pale. It had not even been accounted felony to slay a man of Irish blood. Even Sir Edward Poynings' Act, passed in the time of Henry the Seventh, whereby all statutes made in England were enacted, established, and made of force in Ireland, though wisely intended to be general for the whole kingdom, was not in force beyond the English Pale. "These good laws and provisions made by Sir Edward Poynings were like good lessons set for a lute that is broken and out of tune; of which lessons little use can be made, till the lute be made fit to be played on."

Within the English Pale we have strong evidence from Spenser of the equal greed with which men preyed upon the government they served and on the people among whom they were planted. He asks in aid of reform, "that no offices should be sold by the Lord Deputy for money, nor no pardon nor no protections bought for reward, nor no beeves taken for captaincies of countries, nor no shares of bishoprics for nominating their bishops, nor no forfeitures nor dispensations with penal statutes given to their servants or friends, nor no selling of licences for exportation of prohibited wares, and specially corn and flesh, with many the like, which need some manner of restraint, or else very great trust in the honourable disposition of the Lord Deputy." Where the Lord Deputy himself misused his opportunities, what could be looked for from the captain, colonel, or man-at-arms? Richard Boyle, who was knighted at the beginning of King James's reign, was sworn in 1606 a privy councillor for the province of Munster, was created Lord Boyle, baron of Youghall, in 1616, and Earl of Cork in 1620. He tells us himself, that when he first landed at Dublin in June 1588, "all my wealth then was twenty-seven pounds three shillings in money, and two tokens which my mother had given me, viz., a

B

diamond ring, which I have ever since and still do wear, and a bracelet of gold worth ten pounds; a taffety doublet cut with and upon taffety, a pair of black velvet breeches laced, a new Milan fustian suit laced and cut upon taffety, two cloaks, competent linen and necessaries, with my rapier and dagger." He had seven sons, of whom five survived him, and eight daughters, of whom seven married noblemen; and to each of his children he was able to leave, when he died, a fine estate in Ireland. But he died after the year 1613, and his name reminds us that we have in this volume no more than a chapter of the story which the generous sketch by Sir John Davies and his faith in James the First have made to look like a completed tale.

I will add only one more of the general impressions left after a reading of these records. There is recognition in each of the courage of the Irish. They depended much upon their cattle, and so especially upon food made from the milk of their cows, that extremes of famine would not drive them to the killing of a milch cow. In the horrible story of the killing and eating of children by old women in the fields, the children were in charge of cows whose daily milk made their lives precious. From oldest time there had been cattle plunder; it was in some sense the theme of a great cycle of ancient Irish poems, the Tain Bo, the Cattle Plunder of Chuailgne. But Fynes Moryson, when he tells of precautions against cattle plunder, adds note of "the Irish using almost no other kind of theft;" and Sir John Davies is found making special note of a fact that has been observed in our own day of the wildest seasons of political offence :-"I dare affirm," he says of the circuits of judges in Ireland upon the end of the war, "that for the space of five years last past there have not been found so many malefactors worthy of death in all the six circuits of this realm (which is now divided into thirtytwo shires at large) as in one circuit of six shires, namely, the western circuit, in England. For the truth is," he adds, "that in