That we lie here in obedience to their precepts."

The incredibly base principle of Froude would have made it the obligation of the Greeks to deliver up Leonidas and Miltiades to the Persians-of the Swiss to surrender Tell to the Austrians-and of the Scots and Americans of the United States to send Wallace, Bruce, and Washington in chains to England, to receive from the halter the reward due to their absurd patriotism and violation of sound principle.

But we need entertain no apprehension that the philosophic nonsense of Mr. Froude, and the wrong-headed Irish faction to which he in truth belongs, will impair the influence which the narratives of this and similar acts of heroic devotion, in past or future time, will ever exercise, to warm the hearts of every generation of the educated youth of the world, and to fill them with patriotic love of country-love of liberty-and detestation of the oppressor.

The principles I have here denounced often crop up in the course of Mr. Froude's history. They form the foundation on which his three volumes are built, and the foundation is rotten.

II.

The task I have imposed upon myself obliges me, in the first place, to enquire into the grounds of the

rebellion of 1641, in Ulster; and to go, for that purpose, so far back as the rebellion of Hugh O'Neill, 3rd Earl of Tyrone, extending over the last eight years of the reign of Elizabeth. This rebellion led indirectly, and an asserted intention to rebel on the part of the same chieftain and O'Donnell of Tyrconnell, in the beginning of the reign of James I., led directly, to the confiscation of six counties in Ulster; and this confiscation, which I undertake to prove to have been an act of perfectly unjustifiable spoliation and outrageous wrong, was a principal, if not the principal cause of the rebellion of 1641.

The suppression of Hugh O'Neill's rebellion was not prosecuted with great vigour for the first five years, although the Queen employed one of her best generals, Sir John Norris, and at one time sent over the unprecedented number of 20,000 men for that purpose.

Norris had attained to great distinction as a soldier in Elizabeth's wars on the Continent, and it is sad to think that any man who achieved good name and fame should have acted the leading part in the following tragedy. In the early part of Norris's career in Ireland, the Earl of Essex was engaged in carving out for himself, with his sword, an estate in Ulster. He was carrying on a desultory war with Sorley Buy (Light-haired Somerled), the leader of the Antrim McDonnells, and had learned that he had sent the women and children, the sick and aged of his clan, to

the Island of Rathlin, six or seven miles from the Antrim coast, to be out of reach of Essex's sword. Essex thereupon ordered Norris to take two frigates that were lying off Carrickfergus, troops and artillery, to Rathlin. His orders were, to kill all he could find. On landing, he found Bruce's castle garrisoned by a small body of Sorley Buy's Highlanders, with 200 women and children under their protection, and quickly knocked the outworks of the castle to pieces. (The castle took its name from the circumstance that Robert Bruce had spent a winter in it, in hiding, when his fortunes were at the lowest ebb. It was here he received the lesson from the persevering spider, which induced him to make his final struggle for the crown of Scotland.) The garrison sent to Norris to propose surrender on condition that they should be permitted to return to the Highlands. Norris replied, they must surrender at discretion; and, on their doing so, he first cut their throats, and next those of the 200 women and children. He then proceeded to ferret out from caves round the island and other hiding-places, 400 other victims, whom, to use Mr. Froude's words, "he slaughtered as if they had been seals or otters." Essex sends an account of this terrible tragedy to Elizabeth, whose reply is not the least black incident relating to it." I am well pleased with your good service, and will take care to reward John Norris."— That woman's heart must have been made of mill-stone grit.

During the last three years of the war, a frightful change of scene took place under Charles Blount, Lord Mountjoy, Lord Deputy, and afterwards Lord Lieutenant of Ireland and Earl of Devonshire. The war was now carried on on the same principle, if not on the model of the late war in Munster for the destruction of the last Earl of Desmond, the head of the senior branch of the Anglo-Irish Geraldines, the result of which is thus described by the poet Spenser, an eye-witness of what he records :

"The proof whereof I saw sufficiently exampled in these late wars in Mounster; for notwithstanding that the same was a most rich and plentifull countrey, full of corne and cattle, that you would have thought they should have been able to stand long, yet ere one year and a half they were brought to such wretchednesse, as that any stony heart would have rued the same. Out of every corner of the woods and glynnes, they came creeping forth upon their hands, for their legges could not bear them; they looked like anatomies of death, they spake like ghosts crying out of their graves, they did eat the dead carrions-happy where they could find them, yea, and one another some time after, inasmuch as the very carcases they spared not to scrape out of their graves; and if they found a plot of watercresses or shamrocks, there they flocked as to a feast for the time, yet not able to continue long therewithall; that in short space there were none almost left, and a most populous and plentifull country suddainly left voyde of man and beast; yet sure in all that warre, there perished not many by the sword, but all by the extremities of famine which they themselves had wrought."

Sad contrast to the picture painted by the same poet's pencil as he knew it before the savage war, the

responsibility for the consequences of which he so flippantly throws on the victims!

"And sure," says he, "it is a most beautifull and sweet countrey as any is under heaven, being stored throughout with many goodly rivers, replenished with all sorts of fish abundantly, sprinkled with many very sweet islands, and goodley lakes, like little inland seas, that will carry even shippes upon their waters, adorned with goodly woods even fit for building of houses and shippes, so commodiously, as that if some princes in the world had them, they would soone hope to be lords of all the seas, and ere long of all the world: also full of very good ports and havens opening upon England, as inviting us to come to them, to see what excellent commodities the countrey can afford; besides the soyle itself most fertile, fit to yield all kind of fruit that shall be committed thereunto. And lastly, the heavens most milde and temperate, though somewhat more moist than the parts towards the east."

Mr. Froude's vivid picture of this war and its consequences is not less calculated to make the stony heart rue:

Every living thing was destroyed by which the insurrection could maintain itself. The corn was burned in the field; the cattle were driven into the camp and slaughtered. The men who could bear arms were out with their chief; the aged and the sick, the women and the little ones perished all in the flames of their burning houses. The official records of this deadly war return the killed and hanged in tens of thousands, and famine took up the work where neither sword nor rope could reach. Finally, when of the proud clan of the southern Geraldines there was none left but a few scattered and desperate bands, the last weapon was produced which never failed to operate. Pardon and reward were offered to those who would kill their comrades, and the bloody heads of