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power in the

Roman

Catholics.

Thus the civil power had, in the space of a few The military months, been transferred from the Saxon to hands of the the Celtic population. The transfer of the military power had been not less complete. The army, which, under the command of Ormond, had been the chief safeguard of the English ascendency, had ceased to exist. Whole regiments had been dissolved and reconstructed. Six thousand Protestant veterans, deprived of their bread, were brooding in retirement over their wrongs, or had crossed the sea and joined the standard of William. Their place was supplied by men who had long suffered oppression, and who, finding themselves suddenly transformed from slaves into masters, were impatient to pay back, with accumulated usury, the heavy debt of injuries and insults. The new soldiers, it was said, never passed an Englishman without cursing him and calling him by some foul name. They were the terror of every Protestant innkeeper; for, from the moment when they came under his roof, they ate and drank everything: they paid for nothing; and by their rude swaggering they scared more respectable guests from his door.1 Such was the state of Ireland when the Prince of Orange landed at Torbay. From that time. every packet which arrived at Dublin brought and Irishry. tidings, such as could not but increase the Interests, by a Clergyman lately escaped from thence, licensed October 17. 1689.

Mutual en

mity be

tween the Englishry

1 King, iii. 2. I cannot find that Charles Leslie, who was zealous on the other side, has, in his Answer to King, contradicted any of these facts. Indeed Leslie gives up Tyrconnel's administration. "I desire to obviate one objection which I know will be made, as if I were about wholly to vindicate all that the Lord Tyrconnel and other of King James's ministers have done in Ireland, especially before this revolution began, and which most of anything brought it on. No; I am far from it. I am sensible that their carriage in many particulars gave greater occasion to King James's enemies than all the other maladministrations which were charged upon his government." - Leslie's Answer to King, 1692.

mutual fear and loathing of the hostile races. The colonist, who, after long enjoying and abusing power, had now tasted for a moment the bitterness of servitude, the native, who, having drunk to the dregs all the bitterness of servitude, had at length for a moment enjoyed and abused power, were alike sensible that a great crisis, a crisis like that of 1641, was at hand. The majority impatiently expected Phelim O'Neil to revive in Tyrconnel. The minority saw in William a second Oliver.

On which side the first blow was struck was a question which Williamites and Jacobites afterwards debated with much asperity. But no question could be more idle. History must do to both parties the justice which neither has ever done to the other, and must admit that both had fair pleas and cruel provocations. Both had been placed, by a fate for which neither was answerable, in such a situation that, human nature be- . ing what it is, they could not but regard each other with enmity. A king, who perhaps might have reconciled them, had, year after year, systematically employed his whole power for the purpose of inflaming their enmity to madness. It was now impossible to establish in Ireland a just and beneficent government, a government which should know no distinction of race or of sect, a government which, while strictly respecting the rights guaranteed by law to the new landowners, should alleviate by a judicious liberality the misfortunes of the ancient gentry. The opportunity had passed away: compromise had become impossible: the two infuriated castes were alike convinced that it was necessary to oppress or to be oppressed, and that there could be no safety but in victory, vengeance, and dominion. They agreed only in spurning out of the way every mediator who sought to reconcile them.

the Eng

lishry.

During some weeks there were outrages, insults, evil Panic among reports, violent panics, the natural preludes of the terrible conflict which was at hand., A rumour spread over the whole island that, on the ninth of December, there would be a general massacre of the Englishry. Tyrconnel sent for the chief Protestants of Dublin to the Castle, and, with his usual energy of diction, invoked on himself all the vengeance of heaven if the report was not a cursed, a blasted, a confounded lie. It was said that, in his rage at finding his oaths ineffectual, he pulled off his hat and wig, and flung them into the fire. But lying Dick Talbot was so well known that his imprecations and gesticulations only strengthened the apprehension which they were meant to allay. Ever since the recall of Clarendon there had been a large emigration of timid and quiet people from the Irish ports to England. That emigration now went on faster than ever. It was not easy to obtain a passage on board of a well built or commodious vessel. But many persons, made bold by the excess of fear, and choosing rather to trust the winds and waves than the exasperated Irishry, ventured to encounter all the dangers of Saint George's Channel and of the Welsh coast in open boats and in the depth of winter. The English who remained, began in almost every county, to draw close together. Every large country house became a fortress. Every visitor who arrived after nightfall was challenged from a loophole or from a barricaded window; and if he attempted to enter without passwords and explanations, a blunderbuss was presented to him. On the dreaded night of the ninth

1 A True and Impartial Account of the most material Passages in Ireland since December 1688, by a Gentleman who was an Eyewitness; licensed July 22. 1689.

of December, there was scarcely one Protestant mansion from the Giant's Causeway to Bantry Bay in which armed men were not watching and lights burning from the early sunset to the late sunrise.1

the town of

A minute account of what passed in one district at this time has come down to us, and well il- History of lustrates the general state of the kingdom. Kenmare. The south-western part of Kerry is now well known as the most beautiful tract in the British isles. The mountains, the glens, the capes stretching far into the Atlantic, the crags on which the eagles build, the rivulets brawling down rocky passes, the lakes overhung by groves in which the wild deer find covert, attract every summer crowds of wanderers sated with the business and the pleasures of great cities. The beauties of that country are indeed too often hidden in the mist and rain which the west wind brings up from a boundless ocean. But, on the rare days when the sun shines out in all his glory, the landscape has a freshness and a warmth of colouring seldom found in our latitude. The myrtle loves the soil. The arbutus thrives better than even on the sunny shore of Calabria.2 The turf is of livelier hue than elsewhere: the hills glow with a richer purple: the varnish of the holly and ivy is more glossy; and berries of a brighter red peep through foliage of a brighter green. But during the greater part of the seventeenth century, this paradise was as little known to the civilised world as Spitzbergen or Greenland. If ever it was mentioned, it was mentioned as a horrible desert, a chaos of bogs, thickets, and precipices, where the she wolf still littered, and

1 A True and Impartial Account, 1689; Leslie's Answer to King, 1692. 2 There have been in the neighbourhood of Killarney specimens of the arbutus thirty feet high and four feet and a half round. See the Philosophical Transactions, 227.

where some half naked savages, who could not speak a word of English, made themselves burrows in the mud, and lived on roots and sour milk.1

At length, in the year 1670, the benevolent and enlightened Sir William Petty determined to form an English settlement in this wild district. He possessed a large domain there, which has descended to a posterity worthy of such an ancestor. On the improvement of that domain he expended, it was said, not less than ten thousand pounds. The little town which he founded, named from the bay of Kenmare, stood at the head of that bay, under a mountain ridge, on the summit of which travellers now stop to gaze upon the loveliest of the three lakes of Killarney. Scarcely any village, built by an enterprising band of New Englanders, far from the dwellings of their countrymen, in the midst of the hunting grounds of the Red Indians, was more completely out of the pale of civilisation than Kenmare. Between Petty's settlement and the nearest English habitation the journey by land was of two days through a wild and dangerous country. Yet the place prospered. Forty two houses were erected. The population amounted to a hundred and eighty.

1 In a very full account of the British isles, published at Nuremberg in 1690, Kerry is described as "an vielen Orten unwegsam and voller Wälder und Gebürge." Wolves still infested Ireland. "Kein schädlich Thier ist da, ausserhalb Wölff und Füchse." So late as the year 1710 money was levied on presentments of the Grand Jury of Kerry for the destruction of wolves in that county. See Smith's Ancient and Modern State of the County of Kerry, 1756. I do not know that I have ever met with a better book of the kind and of the size. In a poem published as late as 1719, and entitled Macdermot, or the Irish Fortune Hunter, six cantos, wolf-hunting and wolf-spearing are represented as common sports in Munster. In William's reign Ireland was sometimes called by the nickname of Wolfland. Thus in a poem on the battle of La Hogue, called Advice to a Painter, the terror of the Irish army is thus described:

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