timber which he turns out here.  But he took a greater pride in a group, sacred from the axe, of really magnificent Scotch firs, such as I had certainly not expected to find in Ireland.  Nearer the mansion are some remarkable Irish yews.  The gardens are of all sorts and very extensive, but we found the head-gardener bitterly lamenting the destruction by a fire in one of the conservatories of more than six thousand plants just prepared for setting out.

There are many curious old books and papers here, and a student of early Irish history might find matter to keep him well employed for a long time in this region.  It was from this region and the race which ruled it, of which race Mr. Kavanagh is the actual representative, that the initiative came of the first Anglo-Norman invasion of Ireland.  Strongbow made what, from the Anglo-Norman point of view, was a perfectly legitimate bargain, with a dispossessed prince to help him to the recovery of his rights on the understanding that these rights, when recovered, should pass in succession to himself through the only daughter of the prince, whom he proposed to marry.  It does not appear that Strongbow knew, or that Dermot MacMorrogh cared to tell him, how utterly unlike the rights of an Anglo-Norman prince were those of the elective life-tenant of an Irish principality.  FitzStephen, the son by her second marriage of Nesta, the Welsh royal mistress of Henry Beauclerk, and his cousin, Maurice Fitzgerald, the leaders into Ireland of the Geraldines, were no more clear in their minds about this than Strongbow, and it is to the original muddle thus created that Professor Richey doubtless rightly refers the worst and most troublesome complications of the land question in Ireland.  The distinction between the King’s lieges and the “mere Irish,” for example, is unquestionably a legal distinction, though it is continually and most mischievously used as if it were a proof of the race-hatred borne by the Normans and Saxons in Ireland from the first against the Celts.  The O’Briens, the O’Neills, the O’Mullaghlins, the O’Connors, and the M’Morroghs, “the five bloods,” as they are called, were certainly Celts, but whether in virtue of their being, or claiming to be, the royal races respectively of Minister, of Ulster, of Meath, of Connaught, and of Leinster, or from whatever other reason, these races were “within the king’s law,” and were never “mere Irish” from the first planting of the Anglo-Norman power in Ireland.  The case of a priest, Shan O’Kerry, “an Irish enemy of the king,” presented “contrary to the form of statute” to the vicarage of Lusk, in the reign of Edward IV. (1465), illustrates this.  An Act of Parliament was passed to declare the aforesaid “Shan O’Kerry,” or “John of Kevernon,” to be “English born, and of English nation,” and that he might “hold and enjoy the said benefice.”