was thought ill-handled if it did not yield, beyond the pay, 500 l. a year.  They received pay for each hundred men, when only sixty were on the roll.  The soldiers, following the example of their leaders, robbed and ground the peasantry.  In fact, the Pale was ’a weltering sea of corruption—­the captains out of credit, the soldiers mutinous, the English Government hated; every man seeking his own, and none that which was Christ’s.’  The purification of the Pale was left to Arnold, ’a hard, iron, pitiless man, careful of things and careless of phrases, untroubled with delicacy, and impervious to Irish enchantments.  The account books were dragged to light, where iniquity in high places was registered in inexorable figures.  The hands of Sir Henry Ratcliffe, the brother of Sussex, were not found clean.  Arnold sent him to the Castle with the rest of the offenders.  Deep, leading drains were cut through the corrupting mass.  The shaking ground grew firm, and honest healthy human life was again made possible.  With the provinces beyond the Pale, Arnold meddled little, save where, taking a rough view of the necessities of the case, he could help the Irish chiefs to destroy each other.’

To Cecil, Arnold wrote thus:  ’I am with all the wild Irish at the same point I am at with bears and ban-dogs; when I see them fight, so they fight earnestly indeed, and tug each other well, I care not who has the worst.’  ‘Why not, indeed?’ asks Mr. Froude; ’better so than hire assassins!  Cecil, with the modesty of genius, confessed his ignorance of the country, and his inability to judge; yet, in every opinion which he allowed himself to give, there was always a certain nobility of tone and sentiment.’  Nobility was scarcely necessary to induce a statesman to revolt against the policy of Arnold.  A little Christianity, nay a slight touch of humanity, would have sufficed for that purpose.  Sussex was a nobleman, and considered himself, no doubt, a very godly man, but everyone must admit that, in all heroic qualities, he was incomparably beneath the uncultured Shane O’Neill, while in baseness and wickedness he was not far behind his northern foe, ‘half wolf, half fox.’  Cecil, however, was a man of a very different stamp from Sussex.  Evidently shocked at the prevailing English notions about the value of Irish life, he wrote to Arnold:  ’You be of that opinion which many wise men are of, from which I do not dissent, being an Englishman; but being, as I am, a Christian man, I am not without some perplexity, to enjoy of such cruelties.’

The work of reform, however, did not prove so easy a task.  Arnold’s vigour was limited by his powers.  The paymasters continued to cheat the Government by false returns.  The Government allowed the pay to run in arrear, the soldiers revenged themselves by oppressing and plundering the people; and ’so came to pass this wonderful phenomenon, that in O’Neill’s country alone in Ireland—­defended as it was from attacks