Irish Roman Catholics must be bigots and rebels, from the very nature of their religion, and who have advanced this falsehood in the very teeth of fact, and contrary to the most distinct evidence of history.

The Irish Roman Catholics bigots! The Irish Roman Catholics are the only sect that ever resumed power, without exercising vengeance.

Shew a brighter instance, if you can, in the whole page of history. Was this the conduct of Knox or Calvin, or of the brutal Council of Edward VI. who shed tears as he signed its bloody warrants ? Has this been the conduct of the Irish Protestants?

Had the Irish Roman Catholics, when they gained the ascendancy, debarred you of the rights of property, of the benefits of education, of the enjoyment of social worship, of the security of your domestic peace, of all that makes life grateful, by making it respectable? O how would you not have bewailed your unmerited sufferings---how would you not have adjured the detestation of God and man on such monstrous oppression!

How strangely does bigotry cramp the heart and understanding! who could have thought that so obvious and splendid a proof of the original virtues of the Irish Roman Catholics, as this, should have been slurred over, and almost effaced by the wilful blindness of Protestant writers!

So natural is it that lions should be always represented as vanquished, when men are the painters.

The Catholic religion, certainly, could have no effect in producing rebellions during Mary's reign, yet we have shewn that rebellion still existed.

The causes of it were still the same.

The old Irish inhabitants of Leix and Offalia, or the King and Queen's Counties, could not patiently resign their claims and possessions to the new settlers. They were ever spiriting up their friends and followers to resist, what they deemed an injurious usurpation of their lands, and thus brought down the vengeance of government upon their heads. Numbers of them were cut off in the field, or executed by martial law, and the whole race of them would have been thus utterly extirpated, had

not the Earls of Kildare and Ormond interceded with the Queen, and become sureties for the peaceable behaviour of some survivors !!—of some survivors!"

What a narrative delivered by the respectable Leland without comment or deduction!

Yet, as if the actual commission of unqualified confiscation, was not sufficient to spread alarm, and excite resistance; the English government made an unequivocal demonstration of their intention of possessing themselves of the whole kingdom.

The Chancellor was empowered to direet a commission for viewing all the towns, villages, and waste grounds of the kingdom, and reducing them to counties, shires, and hundreds.*

This was a direct blow at the independence of the Irish chieftains, and the government were very well aware of the effect this measure was likely to produce, for it provided that this commission might be

* The territory of every Irish sept came under the denomination of waste lands; for, as it was held in common by the whole sept, there were scarcely any divisions or enclosures.

suspended at any time in seven years, im case it created too much opposition.

Yet such is the inconsistency, such the wavering irresolution of conscious injustice; that at the very time the English government prepared, under the mask of law, to possess themselves of the lands of the native septs; they acquiesced in the constitution, and the lawful title of the Irish dynasties.

"Owen Macgennis, on the 6th of December, 1553, was admitted by the lord deputy to be chief of his sept."

Kevanagh, head of the great Leinster family of M'Marchad, was created a peer of the realm by the title of Baron Balyan, but by the same patent was nominated chief of his sept or nation; exercising the ancient jurisdiction over all his followers.

So little did the Irish chieftains acknowledge any actual right of sovereignty in the English government, that they still carried on their mutual wars, governed their se veral nations, elected their tanists or successors, without any deference to the lord deputy.

Yet his interference was sufficient to support the alarm which seems at this time

to have spread pretty generally through the Irish chieftains. The first object of the English government was to entail the Irish principalities on the eldest son; which was considered as a submission to the English yoke. The son in this case owed his appointment to the English, and would naturally be subservient to them; whereas when the chieftain was elected by his nation, the English government having no influence in his appointment, could have no pretence to consider him as a dependant.

Happily there is one instance of the nature and effects of this species of interference, which may be pretty clearly made out, from such incidental mention as is made of it by historians; and will serve as a specimen of all the rest. This is the extinction of the principality of Thomond.

Murrogh O'Brien, King of Thomond, swore fealty to Henry VIII, and accepted of the title of Earl of Thomond, which earldom was entailed on his son Connor. Murrogh O'Brien retained all his prerogatives, and the title only was entailed; the English government purposely confounded the earldom with the principality, and be

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