whole of that interval, they submitted to an English monarch as they had done before to one of the Milesian line, with the same readiness, the same inconstancy, and the same reservations. They acknowledged him as the centre of their federal union—a theoretic union, which their petty hostilities were constantly violating; as a superior, whose pre-eminence they attested by a slight tribute or occasional military service, and whose reciprocal good offices they looked for in their difficulties and disputes. This was the amount of his sovereignty: it could not, or would not, be understood by those sturdy lords, that he was to invade their precious right of mutual slaughter, or mitigate the internal anarchy of their dominions.

The great English lords were no less resolute than the Irish, in their opposition to the sovereign and their oppression of the people. Adventurers of reckless and ferocious habits, distinguished from the worst of the native chiefs by nothing but their superior skill in the arts of predatory warfare, they had conquered without the aid of the king, and were determined to govern without his interference. The honorary title of lord of Ireland excited neither their ambition nor their jealousy: perhaps they were pleased with the existence of a claimant, whose rank, while it placed him above competition, extinguished all pretensions to supremacy among themselves, and whose residence in another country left their movements uncontrolled. These dutiful subjects claimed only to be the irre.

sponsible deputies of their master, to enjoy the fulness of sovereign power, each within the circle which his sword had traced:-and from a multitude of causes, they were able to dictate the terms of their contumacious loyalty. Some of them, as the two great branches of the De Burgo family, the Geraldines of Kerry, and the Berminghams, lords of Athenry, renounced the language, laws, and usages of the mother country. They had been smitten with the barbaric circumstance and unlimited sway of the native chieftains: they became chieftains themselves; assumed Irish appellations, and moulded their motley followers into the form of Irish tribes. Others, retaining the English name and something of English manners, acquired at a less price nearly equal dominion. In the space of thirty years after the first descent, eight palatinates, comprehending two-thirds of the English settlements, were erected in Ireland there was afterwards added a ninth, the county of Tipperary, the splendid domain of the earls of Ormond. Within these districts, the lords possessed all royal rights, created knights and even barons, appointed their own judges, sheriffs, seneschals, and escheators, collected their own revenues, and held their own courts for the determination of all causes :—without, they exercised the detestable prerogative of waging civil war in all quarters of the island. Armed with these enormous powers, they proceeded to reduce or exterminate their own countrymen of the middle class, who had presumed

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to set an example of comfort and independence. Many of these fled; their lands were seized by the lords and parcelled out among the conquered Irish, to be held on Irish tenures: many others surrendered a part of their property, in the hope of being allowed the quiet possession of the remainder; but this grace was refused, and they were gradually broken in spirit and circumstances to the villanage of the native population.

This was the state of things, in the aboriginal clans, in the revolted septs of Anglo-Irish, and, except within a few garrison towns, in the Counties palatinate, from Henry the Second until James the First. Whether English lords or Irish chieftains obtained a temporary triumph, the mass of the people suffered equally their tyrants might change, but the tyranny was the same; the domestic and almost indigenous tyranny of their own primitive customs. A level district round the capital, containing the small shires of Louth, Meath, Kildare, and Dublin, limited the range of the English law, the jurisdiction of the viceroy, and except on some rare occasions, the ambition of the crown. Far from indulging schemes of more extended authority, the conscious weakness of royalty took refuge in a ludicrous but humiliating fiction; all beyond this pomarium was presumed not to be in existence, and in court language the land of Ireland was synonymous with the Pale. Of the Pale itself, an ample stripe comprehending a third and sometimes a half of each county, was

border land; in which a mixed code of English, Brehon, and martial law, and of such points of honour as are recognised among freebooters, suspended for a season the final appeal to the sword. Even between these penumbral regions and the castle of Dublin, there lived some little despots, who, according to the turn of affairs, were counsellors, colleagues, or opponents, of the English monarch; and so late as the reign of Henry the Seventh, the rebel earl of Kildare was taken from the tower of London, "to govern all Ireland, because all Ireland could not govern the earl."

Many circumstances had conspired to obtain for Henry the Eighth a general submission from the Irish aristocracy; and his vigorous common sense knew how to appreciate and improve the rare advantage. Cautiously abstaining from precipitate change, he allowed them the temporary use of whatever was most tolerable in their domestic customs; and in the mean time, endeavoured to prepare the multitude for the reception and enjoyment of more liberal institutions. He founded a system of national education: the schools were to be under the direction of the clergy, and through them, of the state; the children were to be trained, "to the good and virtuous obedience they owe their prince and superiors, and to receive instruction in the laws of God, with a conformity, concordance, and familiarity, in language and manners, with those that be civil people, and that do profess and know Christ's religion, and civil

and politic laws, orders and directions." But the haughty spirit of Elizabeth, and the scholastic intellect of James, were equally unfavorable to this temperate procedure. The former was impatient to crush the power of the nobles: she succeeded, and thus removed one formidable obstacle to the enfranchisement of Ireland; but the rising fabric of national schools was overthrown in the concussions of thirty years of rebellion. The latter overlooked, or perhaps could not estimate, another and greater difficulty, which was thus left in its original force; the difficulty arising out of the character of a race in which barbarism had been ingrained by immemorial oppression. Like the Irish parliament in 1793, or those good people of the present day who would emancipate the negroes, James mistook manumission for freedom: he left the habits while he abolished the usages, of the Brehon Code, and transplanted, all at once, the delicate and exotic blossoms of the English Constitution, to a sterner climate and an uncultivated soil. This temerity may be traced through the rest of the century, in a disastrous train of results and reactions; in the great rebellions, the bloody retribution of the regicide army, the act of settlement, and the unnatural contest of James and William.

When these horrors have cleared away, and the political horizon of Ireland once more discloses a field for extended contemplation, its first appearance is sufficiently novel. Clans and palatinates