in England in the century preceding, so as to have compelled the Irish to the adoption of a uniform system of civil government and law, according to the Norman policy elsewhere, all asperities between the two races would have been at an end before the third generation, and Merus Hibernicus would have been a term unknown in the dictionary of nations. Such was the effect of a thorough conquest in England, where the national antipathies between Norman and Saxon did not long survive the period of the crusades. It was the misfortune of the Irish to be but half-conquered—to lose the point of honor, without participating in the strength and policy of their superiors. Thus the odium of conquest, which in other countries had been neutralized by the admission of the conquered to equal rights, remain ed here for many centuries, an independent cause of insolence, on the one hand, and of soreness on the other, limited only in its operation by the slight check abovementioned.

To an incomplete conquest, in the first place, most of the misfortunes of the country may be traced. The early adventurers did no more than win a title to be enforced at some future time. The submissions of the Irish kings were of little other effect than putting the title on record; and it depended on the vigour and policy of future ages, on the wisdom of British monarchs reigning four and five hundred years after, to obtain anything approaching to possession. But it was not that England was unwilling to make a final and beneficial conquest at first. She was unable; the retention of her possessions in France; the rivalry of the crown and nobility at home; the wars of the Roses; the wars in Scotland; these were objects of much more engrossing care than the improvement of so uncertain an estate as that possessed by her in the wilds of Ireland.

And the alteration of the institutions of a people can only be effected by a power able, if necessary, to enforce the change. Men do not part with native laws and manners on the mere solicitation of suspected friends; there must be force at hand to compel their acquiescence, or vain will be the most lucid exposition of the superiority of the system proposed. The plain truth is, that the great majority of the Irish beyond the Pale, would not have accepted the English law

had it been offered them, and that the English were too weak to force their laws upon them, and too wise to expose them to contempt by offering them unenforced, for the first five centuries after the conquest. Their Irish neighbours scorned their law, so long as the Pale, that boundary of the real conquest, extended between them. Independence is everywhere respectable; the odium of a partial conquest was more than counterbalanced among these dwellers beyond the limits of full subjection, by the credit they had in holding their own institutions; so that to be a mere Irishman, without the English Pale, for the first four centuries after the conquest, was not, by any means, a cause of contempt. Nay, such were the charms of a loose life among fosterers and gossips, that numbers of the English nobility voluntarily embraced the Irish mode of living, and, by their influence and countenance, so far rescued mere Irishism without the Pale, from the odium of the original conquest, that it is very questionable whether an Irish chief, or an Hibernianized noble, in those days, was not as much respected as a lord of the Pale in his own territories.

But, while the Irish without the Pale were thus wiping off the disgrace of conquest, by seducing into a congenial barbarism, the noblest families of the conquerors, it was very different with those who resided among the uncorrupted English within that boundary of order and discipline. Here they were the minority in number, engaged in servile pursuits, without pretension to independence or dignity, with the remembrance of defeat daily renewed by forced services to English authorities, and but partially and reluctantly admitted to a participation in those rights which alone could remove the odious distinction. And here indeed the policy of the English is justly blameable. We can well excuse them for not extending equal rights to those who would have spurned the offer; but we must condenin their partial enfranchisement of those who could not have refused the boon. This government of one people by two laws, within the same territory, was what first made the Merus Hibernicus a term of real reproach.

Of the Irish within the Pale, five septs alone were admitted to the enjoyment of English law; the Oneills of Ulster; the O'Maclaughlins of Meath (now extinct); the O'Briens of

Thomond; the O'Connors of Connaught; and the MacMurroghs of Leinster. These were the "quinque Sanguines"-the five free families; and whoever was not of their blood, and had not a special charter of denization, was an alien in the Pale-liable to all the penalties, but incapable of any of the advantages of the common law of the land he lived in; a monstrous injustice that would scarcely be believed at this day were the fact not on record in numberless plea rolls of our early courts. For example, in the common plea-roll of the 28 Edward the 3rd

"Simon Neale brings his action of trespass against William Newlagh, for breaking his close at Clondalkin, in the county of Dublin. The defendant pleads that the plaintiff is Hibernicus, and not of the five bloods. The plaintiff replies, that he is of the five bloods, to wit, of the Oneills of Ulster, who by grant, &c. do use the English law, and are reputed to be free men. The defendant rejoins, that he is not of the Oneills of Ulster, nor yet of the five bloods, and thereupon they are at issue," &c.

Again, at a gaol delivery before John Wogan, Lord Justice of Ireland, in the 4th of Edward the 2nd

"William, the son of Roger, being indicted of the murder of Roger de Canteton, feloniously by him slain, appears and says, that by the said homicide he could commit no felony, inasmuch as he saith, that the said Roger was an Irishman, and not of free blood. Also, he saith that the said Roger was of the name of O'Hederiscal (O'Driscoll) and not of the name of Canteton, and thereupon he puts himself on the country, &c. And the jurors say, upon their oath, that the said Roger was an Irishman, and of the name of O'Hederiscal, and was reputed to be an Irishman all his life. Therefore the said William is acquitted of the said felony. But, inasmuch as the said Roger O'Hederiscal was the Irishman of our lord the king, the said William is recommitted to gaol until he shall find sureties for the payment of five marks to our lord the king, in quittance

for his said Irishman."

Again, as an example of the case, where the party slain was of English blood, from the roll of the 29th of Edward the 1st

"Before Walter Lenfant and his brothers, the going judges at Drogheda, in the county of Louth, John Laurens, indicted for the murder of Geoffry Dowdall,

comes and does not deny the said homicide, but saith that the said Geoffry was an Irishman, and not of free blood, and for good and evil he puts himself upon the country, &c. And the jurors say, upon their oath, that the said Geoffry was an Englishman, and that, therefore, the said John is guilty of the murder of the aforesaid Geoffry. Therefore the said John is hanged," &c. &c.

Such was the degraded condition of

the mere Irish within the Pale, during the reigns of the three Edwards; but, while every assine recorded their humiliation along the eastern and southern coasts of the island, agents more powerful than even the going judges were at work through the midland counties, and among the wilds of the west and north, for their exaltation. These agents have been already hinted at in the licentiousness and pride of the Anglo-Norman nobility, who, rather than submit to the second-hand authority of a deputy governor, preferred establishing their own indepen dence among men of a congenial temper, where scorn of English law would secure them from the impertinent intrusion of sheriffs, and the inconvenient incursions of the courts, and hereditary attachment to rank and splendor had long solicited their acceptance of so many petty thrones among the hearts of a generous people who already looked upon their conquerors as kinsmen. The latter part of the reign of Edward the Third, had seen the pale extended side of the Shannon; English governover two-thirds of the country on this ment paramount in all the walled towns of the kingdom; the mere Irish in every county glad to purchase charters of denization, and the pride of conquest, in full gratification, from one end of the island to the other. The commencement of the reign of his weak successor saw the Pale shrunk to four counties along the coast; English government driven out of Munster and Ulster; the English language proscribed outside the walls of a few forts and cities, and the pride of a barbaric independence amalgamating the conisland. quered and conquerors all over the

For two hundred years this state of things continued; a nominal allegiance; a practical independence ; feuds and family wars, as in the days of Con-cead-catha; Norman lords, in the places of old Milesian kings, and mere Irishism anything but discredit. able.

At length came the Reformation-a change demanded by the intelligence of England. But in Ireland there was no intelligence. The preaching of ten thousand reformers would have been scarce sufficient to have prepared the Irish for the exercise of mental liberty. Whatever learning still lingered on through the turmoil of an unlettered and contentious oligarchy, was in the hands of men the most averse to innovation. The people were incapable of forming opinions for themselvesthose who formed their opinions for them, abhorred the thought of change. But the change had been effected throughout the dominant country, and uniformity, however premature in other respects, offered this advantage at least, that those who for centuries had had nothing in common with their fellowsubjects of England and the Pale, would at last possess a bond of union among themselves, and, with their neighbours, in identity of faith and religious discipline. Had the Reformation been effected in Ireland at this time, the odious distinction of mere Irishism would soon have been forgotten; but the miscarriage of the Reformation was even more signal than the former failure of the law; and it was now discovered that the readiest means of obtaining a chance of an agreement in religion, was to enforce a conformity in civil institutions.

It was then, on the impulse of the Reformation, that the first effectual efforts were made to restore the pale to its former extent. The Hibernized noble, who had dwelt in barbaric state, surrounded by brehons and bards among his vassals and kinsmen, on the laud from which his ancestors had expelled the English laws two centuries before, suddenly found himself exposed to new incursions of the civil authorities his brehon's chair usurped by the sheriff-the luxurious establishment of his neighbour Abbot broken up, and parcelled out among men, proud of their superior civilization-a more severe and less congenial discipline, in the place of that ecclesiastical pomp by which his own hollow pageantry of authority had been long countenanced-in a word, every thing to drive him either into English habits on the one hand, or rebellion on the other. The wealthier and wiser conformed the multitude resisted. As in every contest between discipline and desultory valour, the cause of government and order prevailed. The pale

extended daily, and in proportion as that patrimony of the law embraced the remainder of the country, so did mere Irishism again come more and more within the sphere of growing contempt. What had been independence, was now a double disability. The stigma of native birth, increased by the odium of non-conformity, became an aggravated cause of reproach. The respect which men with arms in their hands claim even from their enemies, was the only check to that utter contempt in which this much tried people were presently to be held.

It is impossible adequately to express the vexation and rage of the English, on finding their efforts for the civil reformation of the Irish baffled, as they were for the next hundred years. They loaded them with reproaches; they exaggerated all their follies and vices; they denied them the possession of the ordinary virtues even of savage life; nay, of the ordinary forms of humanity; but still they could not despise men with arms in their hands. The dissolution of religious houses had removed the chief examples of domestic luxury, and the necessities of war had compelled the people generally to adopt a coarser sort of diet, and a ruder style of living. The meanness of the Irish houses, and the poverty of their tables, soon became the peculiar subjects of ridicule, while their manners, morals, and general character, were assailed by the most spiteful libels. The opinions which the English delighted to entertain of them, during the latter end of the reign of Elizabeth, may be generally gathered from all the cotemporary works; but "Derrick's Image of Ireland," printed at London in 1581, and dedicated, by permission, to the accomplished Sir Philip Sidney, affords a more striking example of the prevailing taste of that day, than any other work with which we are acquainted. Derrick had been a follower of Sir Henry Sidney, during his government of Ireland, where he had doubtless seen much barbarism and poverty; but whether anything like that which he describes, and gloats over in his scurrilous production, is highly improbable. Such as his poem is, it is valuable for the plates, which will yet be of the greatest service to the historian of Irish costumes, as well as for our present purpose of showing to what a height the unnatural appetite for abuse of every thing Irish had risen in the reign of Elizabeth. He

6. Thus they be mortal foes

Unto the commonwealth,
Maintaining rakehelles at their heeles
Through detestable stealth.
Thei harpe upon one stryng,
And therein is their joye,

7. When as they find a subtile sleight,
To work true men's annoye.
For mischief is the game

Wherein thei doe delight,

8. As eke they holde a great renowne,
To burn and spoile by night.
When tyme yields true men ease,
Such rest thei pretermitte,

9. And give themselves to other artes,
For their behoof more fitte.
To wounde the harmeless sorte,
It is their knavishe guise,
And other some to stiffle quight,
In slumbrynge bed that lyes.
Another sorte thei spoile,

Even naked to the skin,
And leave him nothing for to wrappe
His naked body in.

10. Thei leave no kind of thyng

That may be borne awaie;

The potte, the pan, the horse, the cowe,
And much more maie I say, &c. &c.

11. And when thei have their lust,

The sillie captive beaste
Must presentlie be knocked down,

To make the knaves a feaste, 12. But who shall be the coke?

It is no question here;

13. Nor for the pantler's chipped loves,
Do thei ask once a year.
Each knave will plaie the cooke
To stand his lord in steed;

14. But tagge and ragge will equal be,
When chiefest rebell feedes.
Well, beeves are knocked down,
The butchers plaie their parte,
Thei take eche one the intrails forthe
The liver and the harte;
15. And being breathyng nowe
The unwashen puddyngs thei
Upon the coals or embers hotte
For want of gredyron laie,
And, scarce done half enough,
(Draffe serveth well for hogs,)
Thei take them up and fall thereto
Like ravenying hungrie dogs,

16. Devouring gutte and limme, &c. &c.

17. No table there is spread,

They have no court-like guise,

The yearth sometimes standes them in
steede,

Whereon their victuall lyes.
Their cushions are of straw,

Of rushes, or of haye, &c. &c.
Their platters are of woode,
By cunnyng turners made,
But not of peanter (credit me)
As is our English trade.

6. Wood-karnes are as grasshoppers and caterpillers to their country and people.

7. The joye of rebells is in plagyng of true men.

8. Spoyling and burning is the Irish karne's renown.

9. Wood-karnes exercise when true men take rest:

To rob, burn, and murder,

When true men take rest,
With fire, sword, and axes
These traitors are prest.
Thei take no compassion of
Men, children, nor wives,
But joye when thei do them
Deprive of their lives.

10. Irishe karne seldom leave any thyng worth the bearyng awaie behind them, but either thei take it, or else do set it on fire.

11. The stolne poore cowe must be knocked down, as soon as thei come home, to make the theeves a feaste.

12. The woodkarne's cokes.

13. Bread seldomly used among woodkernes.

14. Master and man all one at eating of meat.

15. A most perfect description of Irishe horse-boys eatyng their

meate.

16. The rudeness of horse-boys, Is herein set open,

Who fill them with driff-draffe, Farewell the good token. 17. The very order of the wilde Irish, their sittyng, table, dishes, and cushens described. O brave swinish fashion,

Found out amongst hogges;
Deservyng for manners

To sitte emongst dogges.