their passage out. The desire to quit the country of their birth is described by the primate as a mania. Writing to the Archbishop of Canterbury in 1728, he says:-"We are under great trouble here about a frenzy that has taken hold of very great numbers to leave this country for the West Indies, and we are endeavouring to learn what may be the reasons of it, and the proper remedies." Two or three weeks later he reported to the Duke of Newcastle that for several years past some agents from the colonies in America, and several masters of ships, had gone about the country "and deluded the people with stories of great plenty and estates to be had for going for in those parts of the world." During the previous summer more than 3000 men, women, and children had been shipped for the West Indies. Of these not more than one in ten were men of substance. The rest hired themselves for their passage, or contracted with masters of ships for four years' servitude, "selling themselves as servants for their subsistence." The whole north was in a ferment, people every day engaging one another to go next year to the West Indies. "The humour," says the primate, "has spread like a contagious distemper, and the people will hardly hear anybody that tries to cure them of their madness. The worst is that it affects only Protestants, and reigns chiefly in the north, which is the seat of our linen manufacture." As the Protestant people, the descendants of the English and Scotch who had settled in the country in the full assurance that they were building homes for their posterity, were thus deserting those homes in such multitudes, their pastors sent a memorial to the lord-lieutenant, setting forth the grievances which they believed to be the cause of the desertion. On this memorial the primate wrote comments to the English government, and in doing so he stated some astounding facts as to the treatment of the people by their landlords. He was a cautious man, thoroughly acquainted with the facts, and writing under a sense of great responsibility. In order to understand some of those facts we should bear in mind that the landlords had laid down large portions of their estates in pasture to avoid the payment of tithes, and that this burden was thrown entirely upon the tenants who tilled the land. Now, let my readers mark what the primate states as to their condition. He says: "If a landlord takes too great a portion of the profits of a farm for his share by way of rent (as the tithe will light on the tenant's share), the tenant will be impoverished; but then it is not the tithe, but the increased rent that undoes the farmer; and, indeed, in this country, where I fear the tenant hardly ever has more than one-third of the profits he makes of his farm for his share, and too often but a fourth, or, perhaps, a fifth part, as the tenant's share is charged with the tithe, his case is no doubt hard, but it is plain from what side the hardship arises." What the gentlemen wanted to be at, according to the primate, was, that they might go on raising their rents, and that the clergy should receive their old payments. He admits, however, that the tenants were sometimes cited to the ecclesiastical courts, and if they failed to appear there they stood excommunicated; and he adds, "possibly when a writ de excommunicato capiendo is taken out, and they find they have £7 or £8 to pay, they run away, for the greatest part of the occupiers of the land here are so poor, that an extraordinary stroke of £8 or £10 falling on them is certain ruin to them." He further states that, to his own knowledge, many of the clergy had chosen rather to lose their "small dues" than to be at a certain great expense in getting them, "and at an uncertainty whether the farmer would not at last run away without paying anything." Such was the condition of the Protestants of Ulster during the era of the penal code; and it is a curious fact that it was the Presbyterians and not the Catholics that were forced by the exactions of the Protestant landlords and the clergy to run away from the country which their forefathers had been brought over to civilize. But there was another fact connected with the condition of Ulster which I dare say will be almost incredible to many readers. The tenantry, so cruelly rack-rented and impoverished, were reduced by two or three bad seasons to a state bordering upon famine. There was little or no corn in the province. The primate set on foot a subscription in Dublin, to which he himself contributed very liberally. The object was to buy food to supply the necessities of the north, and to put a stop to "the great desertion" they had been threatened with. He hoped that the landlords would "do their part by remitting some arrears, or making some abatement of their rents." As many of the tenants had eaten the oats they should have sowed their lands with, he expected the landlords would have the good sense to furnish them with seed; if not, a great deal of land would lie waste that year. And where were the provisions got? Partly in Munster, where corn was very cheap and abundant. But the people of Cork, Limerick, Waterford, and Clonmel objected to have their provisions sent away, although they were in some places "as cheap again as in the north; but where dearest, at least one-third part cheaper." Riotous mobs broke open the storehouses and cellars, setting what price they pleased upon the provisions; and, what between those riots and the prevalence of easterly winds, three weeks elapsed before the £3000 worth of oats, oatmeal, and potatoes could be got down to relieve the famishing people of the north, which then seemed black enough even to its own inhabitants. Hence the humane primate was obliged to write: "The humour of going to America still continues, and the scarcity of provisions certainly makes many quit us. There are now seven ships at Belfast that are carrying off 1000 passengers thither, and if we knew how to stop them, as most of them can neither get victuals nor work at home, it would be cruel to do it." The Presbyterian clergy suffered greatly from the impoverishment of their people. Several of them who had been receiving a stipend of £50 a year, had their incomes reduced to less than £15. In their distress they appealed to the primate, and, staunch churchman as he was, they found in him a kind and earnest advocate. Writing to Sir Robert Walpole, on March 31, 1729, he pleaded for the restoration of £400 a year, which had been given to the nonconforming clergy of Ireland from the privy purse in addition to the £1200 royal bounty, which, it appears, had been suspended for two years, owing to the death of the late king. "They are sensible," said his grace, "there is nothing due to them, nor do they make any such claim; but as the calamities of this kingdom are at present very great, and by the desertion of many of their people to America, and the poverty of the greatest part of the rest, their contributions, particularly in the north, are very much fallen off, it would be a great instance of his majesty's goodness if he would consider their present distress." In our own days a Presbyterian minister would be considered to deserve well of his country if he emigrated to America, and took with him as many of the people as he could induce to forsake their native land. But what was the great plea which Primate Boulter urged on the English minister on behalf of the Presbyterian clergy of his day? It was that they had exerted their influence to prevent emigration. "It is," he said, "but doing them justice to affirm that they are very well affected to his majesty and his royal family, and by the best inquiries I could make, do their best endeavours to keep their congregations from deserting the country, not more than one or two of the younger ministers having anyways encouraged the humour now prevailing here; and his majesty's goodness in giving them some extraordinary relief on this occasion of their present great distress would undoubtedly make them more active to retain their people here. I cannot help mentioning on this occasion that, what with scarceness of corn in the north, and the loss of all credit there, and by the numbers that go, or talk of going, to America, and with the disturbances in the south, this kingdom is at present in a deplorable condition." From the pictures of the times he presents we should not be surprised at his statement to the Duke of Newcastle, that the people who went to America made great complaints of the oppressions they suffered, and said that those oppressions were one reason of their going. When he went on his visitation in 1726 he "met all the roads full of whole families that had left their homes to beg abroad," having consumed their stock of potatoes two months before the usual time. During the previous year many hundreds had perished of famine. What was the cause of this misery, this desolating process going on over the plains of Ulster? The archbishop accounts for it by stating that many persons had let large tracts of land from 3000 to 4000 acres, which were stocked with cattle, and had no other inhabitants on their land than so many cottiers as were necessary to look after their sheep and black cattle, "so that, in some of the finest counties, in many places there is neither house nor corn-field to be seen in ten or fifteen miles' travelling, and daily in some counties many gentlemen, as their leases fall into their hands, tie up their tenants from tillage; and this is one of the main causes why so many venture to go into foreign service at the hazard of their lives if taken, because they cannot get land to till at home." My readers should remember that the industrious, law-abiding, Bible-loving, Godfearing people, who were thus driven by oppression from the fair fields of Ulster, which they had cultivated, and the dwellings which they had erected, to make way for sheep and cattle-because it was supposed by the landlords that sheep and cattle paid better-were the descendants of British settlers who came to the country under a royal guarantee of freeholds and permanent tenures. Let them picture to their minds this fine race of honest, godly people, rack-rented, crushed, evicted, heart-broken-men, women, and childrenProtestants, Saxons, cast out to perish as the refuse of the earth, by a set of landed proprietors of their own race and creed; and learn from this most instructive fact that if any body of men has the power of making laws to promote its own interest, no instincts of humanity, no dictates of religion, no restraints of conscience can be relied upon to keep them from acting with ruthless barbarity, and doing more to ruin their country than a foreign invader could accomplish by letting loose upon it his brutal soldiers. ARCHBISHOP TRENCH. Some writers have thought it necessary to justify the admission of Archbishop Trench into a gallery of Irish worthies, pointing out that, wherever he might have been born himself, his ancestors were all unmistakably Irish. There is no necessity whatever for this apology, the fact being that Dr. Trench is Irish by birth as well as by descent; he was born in Dublin, and not in England, as has been often asserted. Richard Chenevix Trench is the second son of the late Mr. Richard Trench, brother of the first Lord Ashtown. His mother, a woman of remarkable endowments, of whom her son has left a graceful memoir, was the grand-daughter of Dr. Chevenix, Bishop of Waterford. He was born on September 9, 1807. Having graduated in Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1829, he became perpetual curate of Curdridge Chapel; thence he passed to other cures, the most important of which, in its consequences on his after-life, was that of Alverstoke, near Gosport. Here he was under Dr. Wilberforce, afterwards the famous Bishop of Winchester. The friendship which was thus formed lasted throughout life, and joined the two men in many undertakings. When Dr. Wilberforce ceased to be Dean of Westminster Dr. Trench stepped into the vacant place; and in his new episcopal dignity as Bishop of Oxford, Dr. Wilberforce had his old friend beside him as examining chaplain. While Dr. Trench had thus been ascending the ladder of ecclesiastical promotion, he had been acquiring reputation in other directions. In 1835 he published Justin Martyr and other Poems, a work which was highly eulogized by such competent authorities as Blackwood's Magazine and the Athenæum, and which has passed through numerous editions. Sabbation, Honor Neale, and other Poems, followed in 1838, and further enhanced the reputation of the author, Blackwood declaring that he was "among the foremost of our young poets." At intervals followed Elegiac Poems, Poems from Eastern Sources, Genoveva and other Poems. Dr. Trench has also published Sacred Poems for Mourners, Sacred Latin Poetry, and Life's a Dream from the Spanish of Calderon. He has also written a considerable number of prose works. The greater part of those are devoted to theological subjects, and need not be recapitulated here. Besides these, he has published a series of books on philological subjects which are very widely known. The Study of Words, the most popular of the series, is a charming volume. The pedigree of our vocabulary is so traced as to make the reader appreciate the delight of following the history of an ancient and romantic family; and a subject which in most writers is dry, is enlivened with poetic feeling, anecdote, and a charming style. Dr. Trench was consecrated Archbishop of Dublin on January 1, 1864, on the decease of Dr. Whately. He took a prominent part in the agitation caused by the proposal to disestablish the Irish Church, and was afterwards engaged in some of the animated controversies that were involved in the reconstruction of that Church THE POETRY OF WORDS. (FROM "THE STUDY OF WORDS."1) Language is fossil poetry; in other words, we are not to look for the poetry which a people may possess only in its poems, or its poetical customs, traditions, and beliefs. Many a single word also is itself a concentrated poem, 1 By permission of the author. having stores of poetical thought and imagery laid up in it. Examine it, and it will be found to rest on some deep analogy of things natural and things spiritual; bringing those to illustrate and to give an abiding form and body to these. The image may have grown trite and ordinary now; perhaps through the help of this very word may have become so entirely the heritage of all, as to seem little better than a commonplace; yet not the less he who first discerned the relation, and devised the new word which should express it, or gave to an old, never before but literally used, this new and figurative sense, this man was in his degree a poet-a maker, that is, of things which were not before, which would not have existed, but for him, or for some other gifted with equal powers. He who spake first of a "dilapidated" fortune, what an image must have risen up before his mind's eye of some falling house or palace, stone detaching itself from stone, till all had gradually sunk into desolation and ruin. Or he who to that Greek word which signifies "that which will endure to be held up to and judged by the sunlight," gave first its ethical signification of "sincere," “truthful,” or as we sometimes say, “transparent," can we deny to him the poet's feeling and eye? Many a man had gazed, we are sure, at the jagged and indented mountain ridges of Spain before one called them "sierras" or "saws," the name by which now they are known, as Sierra Morena, Sierra Nevada; but that man coined his imagination into a word, which will endure as long as the everlasting hills which he named. "Iliads without a Homer," some one has called, with a little exaggeration, the beautiful but anonymous ballad poetry of Spain. One may be permitted, perhaps, to push the exaggeration a little further in the same direction, and to apply the same language not merely to a ballad but to a word. . . . Let me illustrate that which I have been here saying somewhat more at length by the word "tribulation." We all know in a general way that this word, which occurs not seldom in Scripture and in the Liturgy, means affliction, sorrow, anguish; but it is quite worth our while to know how it means this, and to question the word a little closer. It is derived from the Latin "tribulum"-which was the threshing instrument or harrow, whereby the Roman husbandman separated the corn from the husks; and "tribulatio" in its primary significance was the act of this separation. But some Latin writer of the Christian church appro priated the word and image for the setting forth of a higher truth; and sorrow, distress, and adversity being the appointed means for the separating in men of whatever in them was light, trivial, and poor, from the solid and the true, their chaff from their wheat, he therefore called these sorrows and trials "tribulations," threshings, that is, of the inner spiritual man, without which there could be no fitting him for the heavenly garner. Now in proof of my assertion that a single word is often a concentrated poem, a little grain of pure gold capable of being beaten out into a broad extent of gold-leaf, I will quote, in reference to this very word "tribulation,” a graceful composition by George Wither, a poet of the seventeenth century. You will at once perceive that it is all wrapped up in this word, being from first to last only the expanding of the image and thought which this word has implicitly given; it is as follows: "Till from the straw, the flail the corn doth beat, This deeper religious use of the word "tribulation" was unknown to classical antiquity, belonging exclusively to the Christian writers: and the fact that the same deepening and elevating of the use of words recurs in a multitude of other, and many of them far more signal instances, is one well deserving to be followed up. Nothing, I am persuaded, would more mightily convince us of the new power which Christianity proved in the world than to compare the meaning which so many words possessed before its rise, and the deeper meaning which they obtained so soon as they were assumed as the vehicles of its life, the new thought and feeling enlarging, purifying, and ennobling the very words which they employed. [Mr. Prendergast was born in Dublin in 1807, and was educated at Reading, England, under the Rev. Dr. Valpy. He graduated at Trinity College, Dublin, and was called to the bar in 1830. In conjunction with the Very Rev. Dr. Russell, the president of Maynooth College, he was appointed by Lord Romilly to select state papers relating to Ireland from the Carte Collection of Papers in the Bodleian Library, Oxford. Mr. Prendergast was afterwards engaged in cataloguing the state papers (Ireland) of James I. He is the author of The Cromwellian Settlement of Ireland, a second edition of which appeared in 1870. This is a very remarkable product of industry, informed by zeal. It is the first work that has thrown full light on a dark period in Irish history. In its pages we have an account of that terrible tragedy in Irish history-the displacement of the old Irish and Anglo-Irish families by the retainers of Cromwell; and the story is told with great dramatic skill. Every student of Irish history-and especially of the history of the Irish land-should make himself familiar with this excellent book. Mr. Prendergast is at present engaged on a new work on "The Scandinavians." He is an honorary member of the Royal Historical Society of Great Britain.] THE CLEARING OF GALWAY. (FROM "THE CROMWELLIAN SETTLEMENT."1) [One of the measures of the English parliament during the Protectorate was to sell several of the Irish towns in order to satisfy the demands of the soldiery and public creditors. The results of this step was that the old inhabitants were 66 cleared out" in order to make way for the new immigrants from England. In most cases the persons displaced were themselves originally of the English race. The following extract describes this process in the capital of Connaught.] Galway seems to have been, even before the English conquest, the seat of foreign traders; and some time after the invasion of Henry II. 1 By permission of the author. |