from without, and enriched with the plunder of the Pale—­were the peasantry prosperous, or life or property secure.’  This fact might suggest to the English historian that the evils of Ireland do not all proceed from blood or race; and that the Saxon may be placed in circumstances which make him as false, as dishonest, as lazy, as disordered, as worthless as the Celt, and that even men of ’gentle blood’ may become as base as their most plebeian servants.  Nor did zeal for religious reformation redeem the defects of the Anglo-Irish rulers.  The Protestant bishops were chiefly agitated by the vestment controversy.  ‘Adam Loftus, the titular primate, to whom,’ says Mr. Froude, ’sacked villages, ravished women, and famine-stricken skeletons crawling about the fields, were matters of everyday indifference, shook with terror at the mention of a surplice.’  Robert Daly wrote in anguish to Cecil, in dismay at the countenance to ‘Papistry,’ and at his own inability to prolong a persecution which he had happily commenced.  An abortive ’devise for the better government of Ireland’ gives us some insight into the condition of the people.  ’No poor persons should be compelled any more to work or labour by the day, or otherwise, without meat, drink, wages, or some other allowance during the time of their labour; no earth tillers, nor any others inhabiting a dwelling, under any lord, should be distrained or punished, in body or goods, for the faults of their landlord; nor any honest man lose life or lands without fair trial by parliamentary attainder, according to the ancient laws of England and Ireland.’  Surely it was no proof of incurable perversity of nature, that the Irish peasantry were discontented and disaffected, under the horrid system of oppression and slavery here laid before the English Government.

As remedial measures, it was proposed that a true servant of God should be placed in every parish, from Cape Clear to the Giant’s Causeway; that the children should be taught the New Testament and the Psalms in Latin, ’that they, being infants, might savour of the same in age as an old cask doth;’ that there should be a university for the education of the clergy, ’and such godly discipline among them that there should be no more pluralities, no more abuse of patronage, no more neglect, or idleness, or profligacy.’  Mr. Froude’s reflection upon this projected policy is highly characteristic:—­

’Here was an ideal Ireland painted on the retina of some worthy English minister; but the real Ireland was still the old place.  As it was in the days of Brian Boroihme and the Danes, so it was in the days of Shane O’Neill and Sir Nicholas Arnold; and the Queen, who was to found all these fine institutions, cared chiefly to burden her exchequer no further in the vain effort to drain the black Irish morass, fed as it was from the perennial fountains of Irish NATURE.’[1]

[Footnote 1:  Vol. viii. p.377.]