since I was here; and now Shane, in a plain three miles away from any wood, and where I would have asked of God to have had him, hath, with 120 horse, and a few Scots and galloglasse, scarce half in numbers, charged our whole army, and by the cowardice of one wretch whom I hold dear to me as my own brother, was like in one hour to have left not one man of that army alive, and after to have taken me and the rest at Armagh.  The fame of the English army, so hardly gotten, is now vanished, and I, wretched and dishonoured, by the vileness of other men’s deeds.’

This is real history that Mr. Froude has given us.  It places the actors before us, enables us to discern their characters, tells us who they are and what they have done.  It shows also the value and the necessity of documentary evidence for establishing the truth of history.  How different from the vague, uncertain, shadowy representations derived from oral tradition, or mere reports, though contemporary, circulated from mouth to mouth, and exaggerated according to the interests of one party or the other.  Let us for illustration compare Mr. Froude’s vivid picture of this battle, so disastrous to the English, with the account given of the same event by the Annalists called the Four Masters.  These writers had taken great pains to collect the most authentic records of the various Irish tribes from the invasion by Henry II. to the period of which we are writing.  They were intensely Irish, and of course glad of any opportunity of recording events creditable to the valour of their countrymen.  They lived in Donegal, under the protection of O’Donel, but they showed themselves quite willing to do full justice to his great rival O’Neill.  The presence of the lord deputy, the Earl of Ormond, and other great men at Armagh, with a select English army, would naturally have roused their attention, and when that army was encountered and vanquished in the open field by the Irish general, we should have expected that the details of such a glorious event would have been collected with the greatest care from the accounts of eye-witnesses.  The bards and historiographers should have been on the alert to do justice to their country on so great an occasion.  They were on the spot, they were beside the victors, and they had no excuse whatever for ignorance.  Yet here is the miserably cold, jejune, feeble, and imperfect record which we find in the Annals of the Four Masters:—­’The Lord Justice of Ireland, namely Thomas Fitzwalter (Sussex), marched into Tyrone to take revenge for the capture of Caloach O’Donel, and also for his own quarrels with the country.  He encamped with a great army at Armagh, and constructed deep entrenchments and impregnable ramparts about the great church of Armagh, which he intended to keep constantly guarded.  O’Neill, i.e.  John, having received intelligence of this, sent a party of his faithful men and friends with Caloach O’Donel to guard and keep him from the Lord Justice, and they conveyed