"Sketches of the Irish Bar"-Wyse's "History of the Catholic Associa tion"-O'Connell's Speeches and Debates in the United Parliament.
These are the chief authorities for all the times previous to the Catholic Relief Act. As to the sketch which follows, of transactions still later, it would be obviously impossible to enumerate the multifarious authorities: but the speeches of O'Connell and of William Smith O'Brien are still, for the Irish history of their own time, what the orations of Grattan were for his; and what the vivid writings of Swift were for the earlier part of the eighteenth century. The newspapers and the Parliamentary Blue Books also come in, as essential materials (though sometimes questionable) for this later period: and for the Repeal Agitation, the State Trials, the terrible scenes of the Famine, and the consequent extirpation of millions of the Irish people, we have, without scruple, made use (along with other materials) of the facts contained in "The Last Conquest of Ireland (perhaps)”—excluding generally the inferences and opinions of the writer, and his estimate of his contemporaries. Indeed, the reader will find in the present work very few opinions or theories put forward at all; the genuine object of the writer being simply to present a clear narrative of the events as they evolved themselves one out of the others.
Neither does this History need comment; and indignant declamation would but weaken the effect of the dreadful facts we shall have to tell. If the writer has succeeded-as he has earnestly desired to do —in arranging those facts in good order, and exhibiting the naked truth concerning English domination since the Treaty of Limerick, as our fathers saw it, and felt it;-if he has been enabled to picture, in some degree like life, the long agony of the Penal Days, when the pride of the ancient Irish race was stung by daily, hourly humiliations, and their passions goaded to madness by brutal oppression; and further, to picture the still more destructive devastations perpetrated upon our country in this enlightened nineteenth century; then it is hoped that