suffer the same fate. The rash youth at once fell into the trick ; he rushed in fiery mood before the Coucil Board, surrendered the sword of state, and the same hour saw the same man a viceroy and a rebel-and a dangerous rebel too; he made a common cause with the discontented Irish; he enlisted a large body of troops; wasted the country round Dublin with fire and sword, and laid seige to the city; and had the Butlers entered into the confederacy, which the Lord Thomas proposed to them, Ireland might have been lost to England. On this occasion Lord Thomas, as a good Papist, sent an embassy to the Pope; and his Holiness, who has ever been the refuge and the rallying point of the disloyal world, would, had the rebel been prosperous, have clapped him on the back, and said, "Well done, my son." Allen was so far successful; he had cheated the Geraldine into rebellion; but, perhaps, he did not calculate on the fierce manner in which it was to be conducted. His courage was not equal to his cunning;-and so when Lord Thomas laid seige to the Castle of Dublin, afraid of being taken, and of course hanged, under the advantage of a spring tide, he took ship at Dame's Gate, for England; but the vessel, unable to clear the bay, and driven back by contrary winds, was stranded at Clontarf, and the Archbishop was forced to come on shore, and take shelter in a small castle near the village of Artane. Lord Thomas had soon information that his enemy was within his reach, and accordingly, early on the following morning, hef repaired thither, with his retainers; and two confidential men, who preceded their master, rushed into the Bishop's room, tore him out of bed, and in his shirt, bareheaded and barefooted, brought the venerable man before his enemy. The prelate fell on his knees, and, in suppliant voice, implored pity, for the love of God, on a Christian and an Archbishop. It is allowed that the young Geraldine looked with compassion on his abased enemy; it is confessed he had no desire to have him slaughtered; but, with the insolence which the Anglo-Irish had learned from the Milesians to use towards the natives of England, whom they delighted to consider as mean and churlish, he turned aside from the kneeling Bishop, and said "Bier uaim a boddagh;" that is "Take away the clown"-meaning, it is supposed, that he should be removed and placed in safe custody; but his servants, wilfully mistaking their master's words, beat out the Bishop's brains, and left a revenge on themselves which overtook them all; for the two men who perpetrated the murder died of loathsome diseases. Fitzgerald and all his uncles, subsequently defeated, and hunted through Ireland, were obliged to surrender themselves, and were forwarded to England for trial; and when, on their voyage, the captain told them that his ship was named the Cow, the old prophecy was called to mind, that an Earl's five sons should be wafted to England in the belly of a cow, but should never return. With sorrowful hearts, therefore, they proceeded to London, where, in the tower, they were beheaded. Thus ended the career of Archbishop Allen, and of that proud Geraldine, whom his followers, from the splendour of

his train and trappings, named Silken Thomas; and if ever the Romance of Irish history is taken in hands, no doubt the writer will give the interesting story of Silken Thomas, and the strange aud varied fortunes of his younger brother, Gerald, a prominent place in his collection. Persons who are fond of placing their marks, and giving their own direction to the Almighty's vengeful bolts, observe that Archbishop Allen deservedly met his fate, for having a hand in the sacrilege of suppressing the English monasteries. And thus Godwin, Bishop of Hereford, fixes the fate of those who had hand, act, or part, in this affair: two of them fought a duel-one was killed, and the other hanged; a third threw himself headlong into a well; a fourth, though a rich man afterwards, came to beg his bread; Wolsey, stripped of the King's favour, died miserably; and the Pope, who gave his consent to the dissolution, lived to see Rome sacked, and himself and his cardinals made prisoners, amidst the mockery and outrage of a licen tious multitude. Allen, it appears, though a turbulent and intriguing spirit, was a man of hospitality and learning, a diligent inquirer into antiquities, and an active prelate in his diocese. His successors are indebted to him for that ample registry of the state of the churches in his see, which is still in existence, called the Liber Niger. It may be worth observing that the primates of the three kingdoms of England, Scotland, and Ireland-Becket, Allen, and Sharpe-met a similar fate, in consequence of meddling in political intrigues-giving their mind to what, if they wished to be true members of that order of which Timothy and Titus were prototypes, they should have cast behind them. But, as the Spanish proverb has it, "it is hard to straighten a crooked cucumber."

Artane looks poor and gloomy; it seems, as we have before observed, that the curse of the Papal interdict, inflicted on it in consequence of the murder of an Archbishop, was not yet removed. Popery certainly had a good and full-mouthed knack of cursing. On this occasion it anathematized the murderers, and interdicted poor Artane as follows:

"May no man be merciful to them; may their memory be forgotten; may God rain on them flames of fire and sulphur ; may they clothe themselves with this malediction and high curse every day when they put on their garments; may the water of vengeance be in their inward parts, as marrow in their bones; may they be girded with the girdles of malefactors, and partakers with Pharoah, Nero, Herod, Judas, the proditors of Jesus; and may they descend into hell quick. Good Lord, send them hunger and thirst; strike them with pestilence, that they be consumed, and their generation clean eradicated,; strike them with madness, leprosy, and blindness, &c. &c. And we interdict all the places where they go, and the place where the Archbishop was murdered."

So much for Artane. I may now get on to St. Doulough's. There are sundry things to stop me, and on which I might gossip away,

but I shall leave them aside, until I write a history of Fingall, and dedicate it, so please you, to the Editors of the CHRISTIAN EXAMINER.

At some distance, this church I am now approaching looks like others that are decorated with a spire; to be sure it stands in a better selected position than most modern churches, which are generally near a good situation, on a ridge of land that runs from the west towards the sea; but, after all, this spire is a pert, awkward citizen like thing, that marks off the taste and munificence of a vestry of Dublin merchants; but when you get near-when you rise to the elevation on which it stands, and observe the grey time-tinted aspect of the edifice-when you see presented before you its bizarre and fantastic structure the sharp elevation of its lofty and cryptic roofs the tower rising from the centre-the low and flat arch doorway, its numerous and picturesque angles, its multitudinous and many-shaped windows-you must acknowledge that it is as odd and curious a structure as ever your eye lit upon; and I challenge you, reader, to find me its match in the British Isles, or even in Christendom. Whoever built it—and I am sure I know him not-if he had not architectural taste, had certainly an eye for the picturesque, and he seemed desirous to present, in as small a compass as possible, all varieties of arch, angle, and window; and so he perforated his building with orifices, varying from the round abortive square hole and loop-hole to the most florid and ornate gothic window. I repeat it, that the spire that some Dublin merchant caused to be erected of wood, and crusted over with patent slates, destroys the singular effect of the building, it is the imposition of a modern absurdity on an ancient extravaganza. It looks as it were a deranged old nun, who, in the full babiliments of her order, has put on a leghorn bonnet “a la mode de Paris." What a fanciful monk, friar, or anchoret, it was that contrived and constructed this building; what turns, contrivances, holes, passages, and staircases; what a conglomeration of arches and demi-arches, pointed circular, contrasted, and eliptic, of which it is impossible to trace the centreing, or, in some instances, the support. And the whole thing is so minute. Before I have done I may somehow or somewhere give the dimensions; but here I will say that he must have been a little man, let him be Dane or Irish, who had it constructed; my life for it, it was not the nine feet Scandinarian, whose skeleton was dug up at Coolock, that was the builder. As for me, I had to double myself to enter the door, to squeeze and stoop to ascend the spiral staircases, for there are more than one; and to what is shown as the saint's tomb and the saint's bed; and I assure you, gentle reader, that if I was cut in two, the half of me would not fit at length in either one or the other. But let me be a little more particular, and try to describe more in detail. This edifice stands about fifty yards Westwards from the road: a lane leads up to it, which is, as usual in most approaches to old places in Ireland, filthy and disgusting in the extreme, and I had to rejoice in a pair of thick soaled shoes, as

I trudged through the soap suds and liquid nuisance that exuded from the cabins on either side. Opposite to the entrance to the lane, and on the road side, is a low granite cross; it was formerly in the churchyard, its proper place, whence it was about ten years ago taken and planted in its present position; why, I cannot tell. It now most commonly serves as a scratching-post

for pigs, and dogs, and asses. The churchyard lies high, and

commands a fine view: the building stands not due East and

West; the dimensions, as I observed before, are diminutive, being about forty-eight feet in length; the walls and roof are constructed of the durable blue limestone of the neighbourhood, the stones well squared, and the cement, by lapse of time, has become exceeding hard: there is no stone roof in Ireland that rises with so acute an angle, except, perhaps, that of Cormack's Chapel, on the Rock of Cashel. A singular porch projects from the South side of the tower, the lower part of which contains the door-way, low and imperfectly arched. The under part of the South-east angle of the porch is built in a buttress-like form; above this it is bevelled off for a short distance, the angle thus formed containing a window; it then becomes square, and is connected with the tower by a massive projection supported by receding arches, like the Church, cased and roofed with stone. The top of the porch is finished by a square parapet, which, as the people report, was formerly surmounted by the cross now in the street of the village. When you enter the interior you find that it consists of two unequal apartments; the entrance communicates with the smaller and Westward division, the partition-wall dividing the two apartments being nearly opposite the entrance; and attached to this partition, and just opposite as you enter, is what some call an altar, others the tomb of the saint; a sort of buttress, containing a spiral staircase, intrudes considerably on the area of this apartment. The altar or tomb I have just alluded to is two feet six inches broad, five feet long, two feet six inches high; a Gothic window of two compartments, of the description of arch called compressed, placed in the west end, gives light to the apartment; under which may be traced within, square-headed windows, now filled up by the accumulation of soil outside. In the North wall are three square recesses, said to have been also open to admit light, but now closed by the modern little place of Protestant worship, which may rather be called a churcheen, to use an Irish diminutive, than a Church: indeed this apartment, as every other in this singular edifice, was intended to be full of light, and I think there were six or seven windows in it, though it is not ten feet in length, or eight feet in breadth. And here I have somewhat to say concerning the incumbent of the parish; he may be, and I make no doubt is a very good and able minister, and I am to presume that he knows and does his duty in love; but I positively assert that he has no more taste than the squire who decorated the portraits of Vandyke, in his picture gallery, with scratch-wigs; for this worthy person has chosen to stop up all the windows he could reach to, with just such rough masonry as you would stop a barn window with, or repair a pig-sty; and thereby he has converted this lightsome and fantastic building into a dungeon: yes, but he did this, careful soul as he was, to keep out the village boys, who here, as every where else in Ireland, take delight in destruction, and like harpies, enter but to pollute and defile.