Under the railway from Graypoint on Belfast Lough runs a carriage-drive two miles long, to the famous seat of the O’Neills, where his lordship’s mansion is situated, enclosed among aged trees, remembrancers of the past.  Perhaps, there is no combination of names in the kingdom more suggestive of the barbaric power of the middle ages and the most refined culture of modern civilisation.  The avenue, kept like a garden walk, with a flourishing plantation on each side, was cut through some of the best farms on the estate, and must have been a work of great expense.  Taking this in connection with other costly improvements, among which are several picturesque buildings for the residence of workmen—­model lodging-houses resembling fancy villas at the seaside—­we can understand how his lordship, within the last fifteen years, has paid away in wages of labour the immense sum of 60,000 l., at the rate of 4,000 l. a year.

The Abbot of Bangor never gave employment like that.  William O’Donnon, the last of the line, was found in the thirty-second year of Henry VIII. to be possessed of thirty-one townlands in Ards and Upper Clandeboye, the grange of Earbeg in the county Antrim, the two Copeland Islands, the tithes of the island of Raghery, three rectories in Antrim, three in Down, and a townland in the Isle of Man.  The abbey, some of the walls of which still remain, adjoining the parish church, was built early in the twelfth century.  We are informed by Archdall, that it had so gone to ruin in 1469 through the neglect of the abbot, that he was evicted by order of Pope Paul II., who commanded that the friars of the third order of St. Francis should immediately take possession of it, which was accordingly done, says Wadding, by Father Nicholas of that order.  The whole of the possessions were granted by James I. to James Viscount Clandeboye.

Bangor was one of the most celebrated schools in Ireland when this island was said to have been ’the quiet abode of learning and sanctity.’  As to the quiet, I could never make out at what period it existed, nor how the ‘thousands’ of students at Bangor could have been supported.  The Danes came occasionally up the lough and murdered the monks en masse, plundering the shrines.  But the greatest scourges of the monasteries in Down and elsewhere were, not the foreign pagans and pirates, but the professedly Christian chiefs of their own country.  It appears, therefore, that neither the Irish clergy nor the people have much reason to regret the flight of the Celtic princes and nobles, who were utterly unable to fulfil the duties of a government; and who did little or nothing but consume what the industry of the peasants, under unparalleled difficulties, produced.  The people of Clandeboye and Dufferin might have been proud that their chief received 40 l. a year as a tribute or blackmail from Lecale, that he might abstain from visiting the settlers there with his galloglasse; but Lord Dufferin, the successor