tation, which, added to the other three, makes up the total sum of that slaughter, in all likelihood, four times as great." Mrs. ̧ Macauley, however, surpasses all her compeers in the minuteness of the imaginary details of the massacre :-"Slaughtering the English," she says, "was represented by the priests as the most meritorious of religious acts. They exhorted the people, with tears in their eyes, to rid the world of these declared enemies to the Catholic faith and piety. Many of the rebels would say, after bragging of the number of barbarous murders they had committed, that they knew, if they should die, their souls would go immediately to heaven."-(History of England, London, 1766, vol. iii., p. 71). At next page, she adds :—“ Children were forced to carry their sick and aged parents to the place of slaughter. There were of those barbarians some so ingenious in their cruelty as to tempt their prisoners, with the hopes of preserving their lives, to imbrue their hands in the blood of their relations. Children were in this manner impelled to be the executioners of their parents, wives of their husbands, mothers of their children; and then when they were thus rendered accomplices in guilt, they were deprived of that life they endeavoured to purchase at so horrid a price. Children were boiled to death in cauldrons. Some wretches were flayed alive, others had their eyes plucked out, their ears, nose, cheeks, and hands cut off, and thus rendered spectacles to satiate the malice of their enemies. Some were buried up to the chin, and there left to perish by degrees."

It might be supposed that at least the reverend Protestant and Presbyterian historians of this period would abstain from such calumnies, sufficiently refuted by their own extravagant details. Whosoever would imagine this, must be but little acquainted with the hatred of Ireland's people and Ireland's creed that too often has taken root in anti-Catholic clerical breasts. The Rev. Patrick Adair, writing about the year 1690, declares that the Papists, in 1641, "raged as bears bereaved of their whelps, and destroyed all before them, burning and consuming men, beasts, corn, and the British and Protestants were partly destroyed and put to death, partly left in a worse case than death itself, and others standing amazed. It is attested by some worthy persons, and well acquainted with the case of these times, that there were about 300,000 persons, men, women, and children, destroyed one way or another. That which mainly instigated them to this wicked course was that they were Papists under the power and conduct of the Roman Antichrist, etc. Their education and principles did especially stir them up, being thereto animated by their priests and churchmen."-(A True Narrative of the Rise and Progress of the

Presbyterian Church in Ireland, by the Rev. Patrick Adair, Minister in Belfast, edited by Rev. Dr. Killen, Belfast, 1866, pp. 73-75). Forty years later the Rev. Daniel Neal, in his "History of the Puritans" (first published in 1731), writes:'On the appointed day, between thirty and forty thousand of the native Irish appeared in arms in the northern counties, and having secured the principal gentlemen and seized their effects, they murdered the common people in cold blood, forcing many thousands to fly from their houses and settlements naked, into the bogs and woods, where they perished with hunger and cold. No ties of friendship, neighbourhood, or consanguinity, were capable of softening their obdurate hearts. Forty or fifty thousand were massacred in a few days, without distinction of age, sex, or quality. In a few weeks the insurrection was so general that they took possession of whole counties, murdering the inhabitants."-(Edition of 1837, vol. ii., p. 95.) He subsequently adds, that "these bloody butchers overacted their parts to such a degree as to massacre near 200,000 Protestants in cold blood.”

In our own days the Right Rev. Dr. Mant, Protestant Bishop of Down and Connor, ventured to repeat, as sober history, these "fifty times refuted lies," as Edmund Burke has styled them. The plot was laid, he tells us, "for a general rebellion and massacre, by Popish priests and Jesuits of the continent, in conjunction with those of Ireland.. . And surely the incentive must have been powerful to prompt a whole nation, as it were, to do despite to our common nature, and to cast from them all the feelings of humanity, and to combine together for the purpose of involving all the English, man, woman, and child, old and young, in one sweeping destruction, and thus extirpate them utterly from the country."(History of the Church of Ireland, i., p. 557). The Very Rev. Richard Murray, Dean of Ardagh, in "Ireland and Her Church," also writes that "on the 23rd of October, the carnage began; on the 30th the order for a general massacre was issued from the camp of Sir Phelim O'Neill. . . . After rapacity had fully exerted itself, cruelty, and that the most barbarous that ever was known or heard of in any nation, began its operations.”—(p. 263).

In England the same tales are told with some slight variations, the better to adorn this cherished Protestant tradition. The Rev. Mr. Palmer, in Oxford, calculates that 160,000 was the number of the English Protestants thus massacred by the Irish, whilst the Rev. Mr. Kettlewell states that the priests, Jesuits, and friars "impressed upon the people that to kill a heretic was no more than to kill a dog, but that to relieve and

protect one was an unpardonable sin."-(A Short Account of the Reformation in Ireland, by Rev. S. Kettlewell, M.A., London, 1869, p. 98).

The Rev. Mr. Froude has, last of all, devoted his talents to perpetuate and deepen this deadly calumny against our country. He regards the question as a most important one, for upon the truth of this massacre, he says "the justification of the subsequent policy of England towards Ireland depends." He takes care to tell us that he derives his information from the volumes of sworn "Depositions," the testimony, he emphatically adds, of "eye-witnesses who were examined in Dublin, fresh from the scenes which they had witnessed, before Commissioners of known integrity, men of all stations, and of both nations, whose evidence is the eternal witness of blood which the Irish Catholics have from that time to this been vainly trying to wash away."-(The English in Ireland, vol. i., p. 100.) He then repeats the story of the massacre, yielding to Mrs. Macauley alone in the minuteness of its details, and adding sufficient colouring of his own to show the malignant spirit that guides his pen. "Of practical intolerance there was at this time none at all. The Catholics were indulged to the uttermost, and therefore rebelled. . . . Lord Maguire and Hugh MacMahon undertook the more difficult enterprize at Dublin, while in the whole north, on the same day, the Irish people were to rise and dispose of the English settlers and their families. No distinct directions were probably given about killing them. An Irish mob let loose upon defenceless enemies might be left to their own discretion in such a matter. The Ulster farmers dispersed, surprized, and isolated, became the helpless victims of Irish ferocity on a scale on which it has rarely had an opportunity of displaying itself. . . On the morning of that fatal Saturday (October 23rd), there appeared before the houses of the settlers and their tenants, in the six escheated counties, gangs of armed Irish, who demanded instant possession, and on being admitted, ejected the entire families, and stripped most of them to the skin. Many resisted and were killed; many, the young vigorous men especially, who could save their own lives by flight, sought shelter for their women and their little ones in the houses of their Irish neighbours, with whom they had lived in intimacy. The doors of their neighbours were opened in seeming hospitality, but within there were not human beings, not even human savages, but ferocious beasts. The priests had so charmed the Irish, and laid such bloody impressions on them, as it was held a mortal sin to give relief or protection to the English. These helpless ones were either betrayed to the ruffians out of doors, or murdered by their

. .

hosts. Savage creatures of both sexes, yelping in chorus and brandishing their skenes: boys practising their young hands in stabbing and torturing the English children; these were the scenes which were witnessed daily through all parts of Ulster. The fury extended even to the farm-stock, and sheep and oxen were slaughtered, not for food, but in the blindness of rage. Many were buried alive. Those who died first were never buried, but were left to be devoured by dogs, and rats, and swine. The insurgents swore in their madness they would not leave English man, woman, or child alive in Ireland. They flung babies into boiling pots, or tossed them into the ditches to the pigs. They put out grown men's eyes, turned them adrift to wander, and starved them to death." As if all this did not suffice, he adds approvingly in a note, a passage from a Puritan pamphlet of the period: "The priests and Jesuits commonly anoint the rebels with their Sacrament of the Unction before they go to murder and rob, assuring them for their meritorious service, if they chance to be killed, they shall escape Purgatory and go to Heaven immediately."-(pp. 89 to 112).

We need not refer to the reception given by the Protestant literary world to this work of Mr. Froude. Many censured him for the want of philosophy so apparent in his pages: others found a thousand other various faults: but all awarded him the tribute of their applause for his narrative of the massacre of 1641. Take, for instance, the Edinburgh Review:"We are greatly indebted," it thus writes, "to our author for his powerful and graphic description of the appalling massacre of 1641, which was a desperate effort on the part of the native race to root out the English name and the Protestant religion from Ireland. We are doubly grateful to Mr. Froude for referring us to the indisputable evidence on which the story rests, no less than forty volumes of sworn depositions lying in Trinity College, Dublin, not to speak of the contemporary narratives of credible and competent eye-witnesses." (Ed. Rev., January, 1873, page 136). One would suppose that these Depositions had never been known till this modern historian transferred them to his pages. And yet Mr. Froude has nothing new. He does nothing more than repeat the old stories, sometimes in the same words, sometimes with increased malignity, which Temple and a hundred others had already narrated for the purpose of embittering the feelings of the Protestants of this empire against their Catholic fellow-subjects.

A plain statement of facts will suffice to refute all these lying tales-I should rather say, all this reckless falsification of history, for which it would be difficult to find a counterpart

in the annals of any other nation. There was no general massacre of English Protestants in Ireland by the native Catholics in 1641. No such massacre was premeditated by the Irish leaders: on the contrary, it was wholly inconsistent with their plans. They resolved that the English settlers, of late imported into the country, should be removed from their ill-gotten possessions, and, in accordance with this resolution, we find that in every district where the Confederates were successful, the new colonists were at once expelled with as little violence as could be hoped for amid the excitement of such a general revolution. It could not be expected that the excited populace would commit no crimes, nor could it be hoped that no outrages would mar the triumph of a cause otherwise so just. On such occasions individual malice will have its victims, and past injuries will be sure to be avenged. Nevertheless, thanks to the patient spirit and calm resolve of the Irish people, I do not hesitate to say that there is no example of so great a revolution having been elsewhere achieved amid such provocation, with so little bloodshed and so few crimes.

Let us here pause for an instant to consider the position of the Catholics of Ireland on the eve of this revolution.

In six counties of Ulster the entire population had been, a few years before, dispossessed of their lands, which were handed over, by the caprice of the monarch, to English and Scotch settlers. To such lands neither these receivers nor the giver had the slightest shadow of a claim. Nevertheless, the old Irish proprietors were driven forth at the point of the bayonet to make way for the new claimants; those that resisted were hanged for the offence: the rest, to maintain themselves and their families, were obliged to till for their new masters, or to hold as tenants some obscure corner of their own hereditary estates. Surely these men and their children must not have forgotten the harsh treatment they had received, and the scanty measure of justice that had been meted out to them. In like manner, the plantations in Munster, and the inquisitions in Connaught, had robbed and ruined the Irish of these provinces, and, as a rule, throughout all Ireland an unwise policy had been pursued for years to extirpate the natives in order to make way for strangers, and to plunder the Irish Catholics in order to meet the expenses of the English court, or to enrich some lawless adventurers. The scene was now reversed. The new English settlers were driven from their comfortable holdings, and compelled to undergo some, at least, of the annoyances to which they themselves had heretofore subjected the Irish proprietors.