taken place during, and subsequent to, the hostilities against the earl of Desmond and his adherents, of which he draws such a hideous picture as makes the hair stand on end. There is nothing in the horrors of the French revolution, to exceed the calamitous events of this war of extermination.

NOTE VI. ON CHAPTER II.

FP. 36. Better suited incarnate demons.] To palliate those enormities, of which the preceding notes afford some slight specimens, and to prove that the Irish were undeserving of any other fate than what they suffered, the English writers have exhausted the powers of language, in their reprobation and reproaches of the nation. From their accounts, it would appear that they were among the worst of the human species,*

other soone after, insomuch as the very carcasses they spared not to scrape out of their graves; and if they found a plot of water-cresses or shamrocks, there they flocked as to a feast for the time; yet not able long to continue therewithall; that in short space there were none almost left, and a most populous and plentiful country SUDDAINLY LEFT VOYDE OF MAN AND BEAST."99

"And here you may see the nature and disposition of this wicked, effrenated, barbarous, and unfaithful nation, who (as Cambrensis writeth of them) they are a wicked and perverse generation, constant in that they be always inconstant, faithful in that they be always unfaithful, trusty in that they be always

99 Spencer, 165.

and combined together nearly all the bad qualities of all other nations. Among the most

treacherous and untrusty. They do nothing but imagine mischief, and have no delight in any good thing. They are always working wickedness against the good, and such as be quiet in the land. Their mouths are full of unrighteousness, and their tongues speak nothing but curses. Their feet are swift to shed blood, and their hands imbrued in the blood of innocents. The ways of peace they know not, and in the paths of righteousness they walk not. God is not known in their land; neither is his name called rightly upon among them: their queen and sovereign they obey not; and her government they allow not: but as much as in them lieth, do resist her imperial crown and dignity. It was not much above a year past, that captain Gilbert with the sword so persecuted them, and in justice so executed them, that then they in all humbleness submitted themselves, craved pardon, and swore to be for ever true and obedient; for such a perverse nature they are of, that they will be no longer honest and obedient, than that they cannot be suffered to be rebels. Such is their stubbornness and pride, that with a continual fear it must be bridled; and such is the hardness of their hearts, that with the rod it must still be chastised and subdued; for no longer fear, no longer obedience; and no longer than they be ruled with severity, no longer will they be dutiful and in subjection; but will be, as they were before, false, truce-breakers, and traitorous. Being not much unlike to mercury, called quicksilver, which let it by art be ne'er so much altered and transposed, yea and with fire consumed to ashes; yet let it but rest awhile untouched, nor meddled with, it will return again to its own nature, and be the same as it was at the first and even so, daily experience teacheth it to be true, in these people. For withdraw the sword, and forbear correction, deal with them in courtesie, and intreat them gently, if they can take any advantage, they will surely skip out; and as the dog to his vomit, and the sow to the dirt and

:

rancorous and envenomed of those calumniators, Giraldus Cambrensis and Hooker claim a distinguished place.

puddle, they will return to their old and former insolence, rebellion, and disobedience."101

191 Hooker, apud Hollinshed, VI. 369.

Subject continued.

CHAPTER III.

Subornation.

One thousand

bills of indictment found in two days. Confiscation on a large scale.

"Wo to them that devise iniquity, because it is in the power of their hand; and they covet fields, and take them by violence; and houses, and take them away: :so they oppress a man and his house, even a man and his heritage." -Micah ii. 1, 2.

I DO not pretend that all the depositions carry their own condemnation indelibly stamped on their foreheads, like those quoted in the preceding chapter. No: it would be very extraordinary indeed, if, among the army of perjurers, who were suborned for the purpose of swearing away the lives of the pre-condemned Irish, there were none who could frame a consistent story. But there is so much of undeniable fraud, and falsehood, and perjury established in the evidence, as to discredit the whole. He who swears that a man was "cut, and hacked, and his entrails taken out, without bleeding,"102 must be a perjurer: but it does not thence follow, that he would have been other than a perjurer, had he omitted the miraculous part of the story.

102 Temple, 88.

I said, "suborned for the purpose of swearing away the lives of the Irish." This is not a rhetorical flourish, calculated to delude or to deceive the reader. It is a melancholy and heart-rending truth, that such was the depraved and deplorable state of the morality of the administration in Ireland, that money was lavished to purchase evidence for the nefarious purpose above stated. And so barefacedly and profligately was this trade of corruption carried on,-so totally lost were the privy council to all sense of principle and decency, and so well was their character established on this point, that one of the agents employed in the business of subornation, actually applied to them, in their public capacity, for the wages of his iniquity. This single fact, established on the unimpeachable evidence of the duke of Ormond,* would of itself be sufficient to induce

*"Indictments had been found against them" [Lord Dunsany, Sir John Netterville, and other noblemen and gentlemen of high standing]" and ABOVE A THOUSAND OTHERS, by a grand jury, IN THE SPACE OF TWO DAYS. There was certainly too much hurry in the finding of these indictments, (of which above three thousand were upon record) to allow time for the examination of each particular case, and they were too generally found upon very slight evidence. The Roman Catholics complained that there were strange practices used with the jurors, menaces to some, promises of rewards, AND PARTS OF THE FORFEITED ESTATES; and though great numbers of the indicted persons might be really guilty, there was too much reason given to suspect the evidence. I am the more inclined to suspect there was a good deal of corruption and iniquity in the methods of gaining the indictments, because I find a very re