traditions of the parish are most specific in representing him as having been put to death for the faith; but whether in England, as some say, or in Dublin, there is no authentic account. Whether he died violently, or by slow, torturing imprisonment, he is equally entitled to the distinction of having been one of the martyred priests of Ireland."-Cogan's Diocese of Meath, vol. ii. p. 263.

Anno 1744.

REVS. NICHOLAS ENGLISH, DOMINICK KELLY, THOMAS NOLAN, MICHAEL LYNCH, AND JOHN GERALDINE.

We have now come to the last scene in the sanguinary drama of religious persecution which we have traced through two hundred years. From 1700, as my readers have seen, the rigor of persecution against ecclesiastics had slackened. The penal laws were, indeed, in all their malignant force, and their edge was yearly sharpened,* but priests were no longer put to death, and even their imprisonment had become comparatively rare. In the year 1743, under the administration of the Duke of Devonshire, a fresh act of active persecution led to such lamentable consequences as shocked the reviving humanity of the country, and led to the first regular toleration of the Catholic service.

"On the 28th of February, 1743, a proclamation was issued, signed by the lord-lieutenant and the members of the privy council, directing all justices of the peace and others diligently to put in force the laws for the detection and apprehension of popish prelates and priests; and large rewards were offered for the seizure and conviction of those proscribed persons, and of any others who should dare to conceal them or receive them into their houses. Nor was

• The first relaxation of the penal laws was in 1765.

this an idle threat. On Saturday, the 17th February, 1744, a certain alderman named William Aldrich went secretly to the Catholic parish church of St. Paul, in the north part of Dublin, and finding there a secular priest of the diocese of Dublin, named Nicholas English, in the act of saying Mass, (he had just read the preface,) he arrested him, and, only allowing him to lay aside the sacred vestments, sent him off to prison in a car. He then went to the convent of the Dominican nuns, and seeing two Dominican fathers who were chaplains there-Father Dominick Kelly, of Roscommon, and Thomas Nolan, of Gaula, in the county Fermanagh-sent them in another car to the same prison.*

"All the other priests, both secular and regular, immediately changed their places of abode and concealed themselves. The same Alderman Aldrich contrived, however, to arrest a Minorite named Michael Lynch, while he was deliberating about changing his domicile. All the bishops and priests fled to Dublin, because in so large a city it was easier to lie concealed than in the country. The faithful were deprived of all opportunity of hearing Mass, even on Sundays and holydays, except a few who managed to hear Mass in caves, and in Dublin in stables and other hidden places. As a certain Meath priest, of the name of John Geraldine, was saying Mass before a crowded congregation in the top story of an old and ruinous house, at the end of the Mass, just as the blessing was given and the people stood up, the house fell down; and the priest and nine laics of both sexes were killed on the spot, and many mortally wounded.

"The viceroy and the privy council were moved to pity by this lamentable event, and let it be known that they preferred that the chapels should be opened, rather

Father Thomas de Burgo, the writer, was, he tells us, himself attached to the church of St. Paul, and said Mass there at nine o'clock every day, while Father English said it at ten o'clock. Father De Burgo had formerly said his Mass at ten, and had changed hours with Father English only a few days before.

than that the citizens should be thus miserably cut off. All the chapels in Dublin were, therefore, opened on St. Patrick's Day, the seventeenth of March, 1745, and have remained open even to this day," namely, 1762.—Hib. Dom., pp. 175, 717.

From 1745, the Catholics of Ireland heard Mass and received the sacraments in safety. Bishops and priests were restored to their missions; the severity of the penal laws relaxed; the axe had become blunted with use, the gibbet clogged with the blood of its victims, and, although eighty-five years more passed away before Catholic Emancipation became law, they were years of comparative peace. The martyrs had fought the good fight and conquered. The fruit of their victory was the immortal crown they had earned for themselves: and this victory and triumph they had secured for the Church and for Ireland.

RETROSPECT.

THOUGH, from the year 1744, Catholic blood flowed less profusely in Ireland, persecution was not discontinued. From time to time, bigoted zealots and intolerant fanatics reminded the proscribed Catholics that the penal laws still stood upon the statute books. In their insatiable thirst for Papist blood, and in order to gratify their hatred for Popery, these misguided heretics continued to devise new plots in which to entrap their unsuspecting brethren. The same unfounded and unproven charges of high treason that sent the martyr Plunket to the gibbet in 1681, consigned the saintly Father Nicholas Sheehy to the gallows in 1766.

Before entering into any further specific cases of the martyrdom, physical and civil, to which the Irish race was subjected by the government of England, we would do well to give a hasty retrospective glance at the various stages of English policy, and its results, in the unhappy island.

The broad, fertile lands of Tipperary had become the spoil of Cromwellian planters and soldiers, while nearly all the Catholic people of Ireland who owned any portion of the land, were driven out of Munster, Leinster and Ulster, and on the first of May, 1654, they were forced across the Shannon into Connaught. The phrase used by the Cromwellians on the occasion was, "that they were to go to hell or Connaught." To the former place, however, as being no part of the inheritance of St. Patrick, they did not go, but they were obliged

to go to Connaught. Lest, even there, they might maintain any hope of relief by sea, or enjoy the sight of those fair provinces and that beautiful country once their own, a law was established that no Irishman, transplanted into Connaught, was to come within four miles of the river Shannon, on the one side, or within four miles of the sea, on the other. There was a cordon of English soldiery and English forts drawn about them, and there they were to l ve in the bogs, in the fastnesses, and in the wild wastes of the most desolate region in Ireland; there they were to pine and expire by famine and by every form of suffering that their Heavenly Father might permit to fall upon them. The fond hope, however, that they would yet have their own, -a hope which has never died out in an Irishman's bosom,-kept alive their natural antagonism to the Cromwellian settlers. The rough Puritan soldiers who came over to Ireland with the Bible in one hand and the sword in the other, and who had settled in the desolated plains of fair Munster, and the beautiful valleys of Leinster, were men of pluck, who would not tamely endure the restless spirit of these old outlawed proprietors, backed by the daring peasantry, who for generations had ever been the faithful clansmen or retainers of the ancient families. Having the administration of the civil laws and the disposal of the military in their hands, they proved themselves more than a match. for their dispossessed and hereditary foes, while every means in their power was mercilessly brought into use to accomplish their purposes.

When Cromwell died, in 1658, Ireland lay void as a wilderness; five-sixths of her people had perished; men, women and children were found daily perishing in ditches, starved; the bodies of many wandering orphans, whose fathers had embarked for Spain, and whose mothers had died of famine, were fed upon by wolves. In the years 1652 and 1653, the plague and famine had swept away