than as he narrates facts already recorded. Invention and fraud are synonymous terms. All that remain for modern writers, who treat of remote events, are, laborious research; judicious selection of materials; fidelity of quotation; and correct induction. How far I have succeeded with the second and fourth, the world will decide: but to the first and third I fearlessly lay claim. I have spared neither pains nor expense in procuring the necessary materials, nor time nor labour in their examination. Almost every book in the Philadelphia library, bearing on this subject, (and the number is immense) I have examined; and moreover procured many, which it does not contain, from New York, Baltimore, and Burlington.*

*It is not pretended, that I have read all the books I have quoted. Half a life would hardly be adequate to this purpose. No man of business could read Thurloe and Rushworth, amounting to fifteen ponderous folios, in less than two or three years. But four-fifths of the books to which I have referred, and many which were too barren to afford a single passage, I have examined page by page. Others have been more slightly searched; and of some, only certain volumes, on cotemporaneous events. Those accustomed to investigations of this kind, know that a single glance will frequently suffice to ascertain whether a page be likely to furnish suitable matter. This has been remarkably the case with Thurloe, Rushworth and Clarendon. Temple, Carte, Warner, Leland, and some others, who have furnished the principal part of my materials, required a closer examination, which they have accordingly received. But of the matter suitable for my purpose, even in these works, a large portion must have wholly escaped me, from the rapidity of my researches. Moreover, of my selections, I have not been able to avail myself of more than one-fourth part, in consequence of the limits I prescribed to this work.

On the subject of fidelity of quotation, I wish to state, that I have been as careful as human frailty would admit, to avoid errors: but, in the very unusual number of authorities, some may have crept in. If this be the case, I am satisfied they are few and unimportant. Should any be discovered, I shall regard the communication of them as a signal favour.

I have been led to notice slightly, and merely as connected with the subject, some of the proceedings of the Long Parliament and of Charles I. In this, as in all other cases of civil war, there were egregious and multifarious "faults on both sides," some of which truth has called upon me to state. Zealous friends of free government, who have been nurtured in idolatry of the Long Parliament, which they regard as immaculate, will hardly pardon a writer who holds them up to execration, for their "no quarter" ordinance; for their rancorous opposition to a cessation of arms; and for their devouring rage for the extermination of the Irish, and the confiscation of their estates: and the idolaters of the "royal martyr" will equally denounce me, for daring to expose his base perfidy to the Irish. This result has been foreseen, and is disregarded. They may censure and abuse as much as they will: but volumes of such censure and abuse will not disprove a single fact.

When this work was about two-thirds printed, I met with a most excellent history of Ireland, by

John Lawless, Esqr. published anno 1814, wherein the writer defends his country's character and rights, in an unusually bold, eloquent, masterly, and overwhelming manner. Having derived his materials from the same sources as Curry, sources to which I also have had recourse, it is not wonderful that there should frequently be a sameness between his work and this. I am gratified to state, that there is a coincidence between his views of most of the subjects, and those I have taken, particularly with respect to the rapacity and plunder of James I. I regret, however, to find, that he has very slightly passed over the two most important points embraced in this work: I mean the account of the pretended general conspiracy, and the legends of the massacre of 1641, which his powerful pen could have so ably exposed, and for the detection of which he must have had more copious materials in Dublin than I could procure in Philadelphia. This elegant and interesting history ought to be in the possession of every Irishman who feels for the honour and glory of his country.

The strong language of reprobation, which I have used towards the English administrations in Ireland, will probably excite the ire of some unthinking Englishmen, who may regard it as a libel on their nation. Such feelings can be entertained only by most illiberal minds. Every enlightened Englishman will sympathize in the horrible sufferings of Ireland, and consign to

infamy the memory of those oppressors, whose rapine and cruelty inflicted so much misery on so fair a portion of the globe, and pursued a system so well adapted to eternize hostility between the two nations, and which had not a single feature calculated to secure the attachment of a people who, easily alienated by hostility, are proverbially celebrated for being as easily conciliated by kindness as any in the world.

But the dreadful scenes exhibited in Ireland were not the result of any peculiarity in the English nation: they arose from the relations between the two islands. Perhaps, had the case been wholly reversed,-had Ireland been the master nation, Irishmen would have

"Play'd such fantastic tricks before high heaven,
As make e'en angels weep,"

and run riot in England, as Englishmen have done in Ireland: for, if there be one truth more clearly proved by history than another, it is, that bodies of men, or nations, are demons, when they have uncontrolled power over other bodies or nations. All the oppressions, the tyrannies, the rapines, the bloody persecutions, that load the polluted and wretched annals of mankind, bear the most irrefragable evidence to this appalling position.

The English, for two hundred years, have commemorated, with horror against the Dutch, the massacre at Amboyna; the statement of the atrocity of which bears the strongest marks of gross

exaggeration and falsehood: for who can allow himself to believe the tale, that "the tortured wretches were forced to drink water till their bodies were distended to the utmost pitch, and then caused to disgorge the water, and the process repeated," that they were burned, from the feet upwards, in order to extort the confession of a conspiracy;" that "the nails of their fingers and toes were torn off," or, finally, that "holes were made in their breasts, and the cavities filled with inflammable matter ?"* No man of common sense can pay a moment's attention to it. Yet this is the precise story, as it stands recorded. A rancorous hostility prevailed between the English and the Dutch and it is by no means improbable, that the conspiracy charged upon the former by the latter was real, and that the conspirators were justly and regularly punished. All the rest of the story, I repeat, has the most manifest and palpable appearance of exaggeration and embellishment, contrived for the purpose of rendering the Dutch odious. This is the more probable, from a consideration of the lying spirit of that age, of which I have given so many striking instances.

. But suppose the story of "the massacre of Amboyna" true; suppose all those horrid deeds were really perpetrated: ten thousand such scenes would fall incalculably short of the sufferings inflicted on the Irish, in the Desmond war, or the

* Encyclopædia Perthensis, I. 561.