of the bayonet, madly excited the Irish thirst for blood.  Mr. Darcy Magee admits that, from this date forward till the arrival of Owen Roe O’Neill, the war assumed a ferocity of character foreign to the nature of O’Moore, O’Reilly, and Magennis.  ’That Sir Phelim permitted, if he did not in his gusts of stormy passion instigate, those acts of cruelty which have stained his otherwise honourable conduct, is too true; but he stood alone among his confederates in that crime, and that crime stands alone in his character.  Brave to rashness and disinterested to excess, few rebel chiefs ever made a more heroic end out of a more deplorable beginning.’  The same eulogy would equally apply to many of the English generals.  Cruelty was their only crime.  The Irish rulers of those times, if not taken by surprise, felt at the outbreak of open rebellion much as the army feels at the breaking out of a war, in some country where plenty of prize money can be won, where the looting will be rich and the promotion rapid.  Relying with confidence on the power of England and the force of discipline, they knew that the active defenders of the Government would be victorious in the end, and that their rewards would be estates.  The more rebellions, the more forfeited territory, the more opportunities to implicate, ruin, and despoil the principal men of the hated race.  The most sober writer, dealing with such facts, cannot help stirring men’s blood while recording the deeds of the heroes who founded the English system of government in Ireland, and secured to themselves immense tracts of its most fertile soil.  What then must be the effect of the eloquent and impassioned denunciations of such writers as Mr. Butt, Mr. A.M.  Sullivan, and Mr. John Mitchell, not to speak of the ‘national press’?  Yet the most fiery patriot utters nothing stronger on the English rule in Ireland than what the Irish may read in the works of the greatest statesmen and most profound thinkers in England.  The evil is in the facts, and the facts cannot be suppressed because they are the roots of our present difficulties.  Mr. Darcy Magee, one of the most moderate of Irish historians, writing far away from his native land, not long before he fell by the bullet of the assassin—­a martyr to his loyalty—­sketches the preliminaries of confiscation at the commencement of this civil war.

In Munster, their chief instruments were the aged Earl of Cork, still insatiable as ever for other men’s possessions, and the president, St. Leger:  in Leinster, Sir Charles Coote.  Lord Cork prepared 1,100 indictments against men of property in his province, which he sent to the speaker of the Long Parliament, with an urgent request that they might be returned to him, with authority to proceed against the parties named as outlaws.  In Leinster, 4,000 similar indictments were found in the course of two days by the free use of the rack with witnesses.  Sir John Read, an officer of the king’s bedchamber, and Mr. Barnwall