was recognised by the Treaty of Limerick.  An exclusively Protestant, Parliament was accompanied by such toleration as the Catholics had enjoyed under Charles ii.  The infamous law against the Irish trade in wool and the episcopal persecution of Nonconformists, were condemned in just and forcible terms by Froude.  Episcopal shortcomings seldom escaped his vigilant eye.  “I believe,” he said, “Bishops have produced more mischief in this world than any class of officials that have ever been invented.”  The petition of the Irish Parliament for union with England in 1703 was refused, madly refused, Froude thought; Protestant Dissenters were treated as harshly as Catholics, and the commercial regulations of the eighteenth century were such that smuggling thrived better than any other trade.  The country was pillaged by absent landlords, and “the mere hint of an absentee tax was sufficient to throw the younger Pitt into convulsions.”  The Irish Protestant Bishops provoked the savage satire of Swift, who doubted not that excellent men had been appointed, and only deplored that they should be personated by scoundrels who had murdered them on Hounslow Heath.

These lectures stung the Irish to the quick, and gave much embarrassment to Froude’s American friends.  The Irish found a powerful champion in Father Burke, the Dominican friar, who had been a popular preacher at Rome, and with an audience of his own Catholic countrymen was irresistible.  Burke was not a well informed man, and his knowledge of history was derived from Catholic handbooks.  But the occasion did not call for dry facts.  Froude had not been passionless, and what the Irish wanted in reply was the rhetorical eloquence which to the Father was second nature.  Burke, however, had the good taste and good sense to acknowledge that Froude suffered from nothing worse than the invincible prejudice which all Catholics attribute to all Protestants.  As a Protestant and an Englishman, Froude could not be expected to give such a history of Ireland as would be agreeable to Irishmen.  “Yet to the honour of this learned gentleman be it said that he frankly avows the injuries which have been done, and that he comes nearer than any man whom I have ever heard to the real root of the remedy to be applied to these evils.”  When his handling of documentary evidence was criticised, Froude repeated his challenge to the editor of The Saturday Review, which had never been taken up, and on that point the American sense of fair play gave judgment in his favour.  But how was public opinion to pronounce upon such a subject as the alleged Bull of Adrian ii., granting Ireland to Henry ii of England?  The Bull was not in existence, and Burke boldly denied that it had ever existed at all.  Froude maintained that its existence and its nature were proved by later Bulls of succeeding Popes.  The matter had no interest for Protestants, and the American press regarded it as a bore.  Burke had more success with the rebellion of 1641, and the Cromwellian