recognized 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 unfavourable 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. James unhappily 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 re-actions; 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 had cleared away, and the political horizon of Ireland once more disclosed a field for extended contemplation, its first appearance was sufficiently novel. Clans and palatinates had vanished; the manners, and, with few exceptions, the families of the old oligarchy of both races, had become extinct; the surface of society had been every where broken up, and arranged anew upon the English model; and nearly the whole pro

prietary of the island was now a body of British Protestants, of recent transplantation. At a change so striking, one is prompted to imagine, that the power, and consequent responsibility of England, may be dated, at least, from this era; but the im pression is weakened by a nearer survey. We can discover, beneath these superficial changes, the original principles of Irish calamity: a titular sovereign; a despotic aristocracy; a population debased, and unfit for freedom, if the laws had made them. free.

The new race of landlords, English and Scotch adventurers of a revolutionary age, were surcharged with the spirit of the times and countries which had given them birth. Liberty, if not the ruling passion, was, at least, the prevailing cry, in the greater island, during nearly the whole of the seventeenth century: an undefined liberty, which the peaceful were willing to limit to freedom from oppression; but which the bold would interpret, into freedom from responsibility. It was only natural, that these new men, soldiers of fortune, flushed with victory and pampered with its rewards, should cherish the more licentious signification. The liberty which animated their language and their conduct, was a restless, petulant, and aggressive spirit; liberty taken with others, as well as vindicated for themselves; an impatience of restraint, and an appetite for power. They professed, indeed, to respect England, as their model, not their mistress. Though the country of their birth, it was now a

foreign state, whose interference would be an insult to their emulous love of freedom; and in the country of their choice, they were exempt from control or competition. On the one side, there was no resident viceroy to offend them by his harmless pageant of monarchy; on the other, the longevity of the colonial parliament, and the necessary restrictions upon all civil franchises, relieved them from annoyances of a more popular nature. Ireland had, as yet, no public opinion to shame them into circumspection; and the constitutional forms which the crown had prematurely given, were a barrier against English influence, behind which they could pursue their domestic schemes. Thus, the circumstances from which they had risen, and those in which they were placed, combined to give them a mixed character, between the baronial insolence of their predecessors in Ireland, and the levelling intolerance of their more honest contemporaries, who sowed the seeds of democracy on the farther shore of the Atlantic. Ireland under their government was, in its relations with England, a separate, jealous, and almost hostile power; in its internal economy, an abortive and anomalous lusus of political nature, partly a close borough and partly a plantation.

The last flight of these adventurers had scarcely alighted upon the soil, when a novel species of

* A parliament lasted for the life of the sovereign: - it was proved by the evidence of Dr. Doyle and Mr. O'Connell, before the parliamentary committees, that restrictions were necessary.

patriotism, a graft,' as it is aptly called, of English faction upon an Irish stock *,' shot out into a precocious luxuriancy of sedition. In the month of October, 1692, within one year from the surrender of Limerick, the Commons of Ireland rejected a money bill, because it had not originated in their house. Many of the members were the well-paid followers of William; the rest had been the destined victims of the sweeping proscription of his rival; the supply was wanted, probably, to pay off the foreign army whose valour had contributed to raise or to uphold them; yet the omission of a doubtful etiquette was fatal to the application of their patron and deliverer. The celebrated Case of Ireland,' which appeared six years after, led to another and more dangerous controversy, between the colony and the mother country. Whatever may have been the merits of these, now fortunately obsolete questions, the daring and obstinate vehemence with which they were maintained by the colonists, is abundant proof of the weakness of England. The mass of the population, dissembling their fierce and recently exasperated animosities, were induced, for their own reasons, to favour the intrigues of their new masters: the murmur of independence gradually swelled into a storm, until, in 1724, the era of Wood's halfpence†, and Swift's

*Memoirs of Captain Rock.

After all due credit is given to the factious talents of Swift, it will still remain one of the mysteries of party, that not only Whigs and Jacobites, but Protestants and Roman Catholics,