To the lovers of Ireland—­to those who sympathize with her sufferings and resent her wrongs, there can be few things more interesting than the history of the struggles which sprang from devotion to her cause, and were consecrated by the blood of her patriots.  The efforts of the Irish race to burst the fetters that foreign force and native dissensions imposed on them, and elevate their country from bondage and degradation to a place amongst free nations, fill a page in the world’s history which no lover of freedom can read without emotion, and which must excite wonder, admiration, and regret in the mind of every man with whom patriotism is not a reproach, and who can sympathize with a cause ennobled by fidelity and sacrifice, and sanctified by the blood and tears of a nation.  “How hands so vile could conquer hearts so brave,” is the question which our National Poet supposes to arise in the mind of the stranger, as he looks on the spectacle of Ireland in her decay; but another question will suggest itself to those who study the history of our country:  it is, how a feeling so deeply rooted as the love of independence is in the hearts of the Irish people—­an aspiration so warmly and so widely entertained—­which has been clung to with so much persistency—­which has survived through centuries of persecution—­for which generations have arisen, and fought, and bled, and dashed themselves against the power of England with a succession as unbroken as that of the waves upon our shores—­a cause so universally loved, so deeply reverenced, and so unflinchingly supported by a brave and intrepid race, should never have attained the blessing of success.  A more signal instance than that which Ireland can supply of the baffling of a nation’s hope, the prolonged frustration of a people’s will, is not on record; and few even of those who most condemn the errors and weakness by which Irishmen themselves have retarded the national object, will hesitate to say that they have given to mankind the noblest proof they possess of the vitality of the principles of freedom, and the indestructibility of national sentiment.

It is for us, however, Irish of the Irish, that the history of the struggle for Ireland’s rights possesses most attractions.  We live amidst the scenes where the battles against the stranger were fought, and where the men who waged them lived and died.  The bones of the patriots who laboured for Ireland, and of those who died for her, repose in the graveyards around us; and we have still amongst us the inheritors of their blood, their name, and their spirit.  It was to make us free—­to render independent and prosperous the nation to, which we belong—­that the pike was lifted and the green flag raised; and it was in furtherance of this object, on which the hearts of Irishmen are still set, that the men whose names shine through the pages on which the story of Ireland’s struggles for national existence is written, suffered and died.  To follow out that mournful but absorbing story is