repulsed with great slaughter in every attempt. The Durhams were not only exposed to the fire of the enemy's small arms, but were also galled by their cannon. A piece of these, directed at first much too high, designedly by a soldier, taken prisoner by the rebels, of the name of Shepherd, appointed to manage the gun, was afterwards levelled so by Esmond Kyan, a rebel chief, that it broke the carriage of one of the battalion guns, and obliged the left wing of the regiment to shift its ground, by advancing twenty paces, to avoid being enfiladed by the shot. One of the balls carried away the whole belly of a soldier, who yet lived some minutes in that miserable condition, extended on the ground, and stretching forth his hands to his associates. Whatever talents general Needham may have possessed as a leader, of which I think it not necessary to give my opinion, he displayed for some time the courage of a soldier, riding from post to post exposed to the enemy's fire. He, however, at last, began to talk of a retreat. The resolution of colonel Skerrett, on that occasion, saved Arklow, and, in my opinion, the kingdom. His reply to the general, when addressed on the subject of a retreat, was in words to this effect.*

* This proposal of a retreat has been most uncandidly denied in a pamphlet, by Sir Richard Musgrave, who has, however, acted in this quite consistently with his general manner as a writer. I refer the reader to Appendix, No. 9.

"We cannot hope for victory otherwise than by preserving our ranks: if we break, all is lost, "and from the spirit which I have seen displayed "at this awful crisis by the Durham regiment, I "can never bear the idea of its giving ground." By this magnanimous answer of the colonel the general was diverted some time from his scheme of a retreat, and in that time the business was decided by the retreat of the rebels, who retired in despair, when frustrated in their most furious assault, in which Father Michael Murphy, priest of Ballycannoo, was killed, by a cannon shot, within thirty yards of the Durham line, while he was leading his people to the attack. This priest had been supposed by the more ignorant of his followers to be invulnerable by bullets of any other kind of weapon; to confirm them in which belief he frequently shewed them musket balls, which he said he caught in his hands as they flew from the guns of the enemy. Though I was well acquainted with the extreme credulity of the lower classes of my Romanist countrymen, I could not give credit to this account until I found it confirmed beyond a doubt by various concurring testimonies. The same divine protection was believed to be possessed by Father John, the famous fanatic already mentioned.

This battle, though not altogether the most bloody, was perhaps the most important of this war, since it probably decided the fate of Ireland.

As the rebels were not pursued, for a pursuit would have been very hazardous, particularly near the close of the evening, which was the time of their retreat, they carried away most of their wounded, so that their loss could not be ascertained, but may have amounted to three or four hundred. The loss of the Durham regiment, out of three hundred and sixty men, of which it consisted, was twenty privates killed and wounded. The loss of men sustained by the rest of the army I could not accurately learn; but it was very small, much less than might have been expected; for though the weight of the combat lay on the Durhams, the action was every where warm, and the defence bravely maintained,

CHAP III.

Reflections -Tinnehely-True blues— Kilcavan — Ask Hill-Vinegar Hill-Roche-Davis - KillegnyKillan-Vinegar Hill-Needham's Gap-HoretownWexford-Dixon- Massacre - Priests-Offers of Surrender-Captain Boyde-Bloody Friday.

As the repulse at Arklow decided the fate of S the rebellion, so it fortunately left undecided a question how far the Romanists would have carried religious animosity if the insurrection had been successful. The violent acts of the insurgents in Gorey and its neighbourhood were not near so great as in the southern parts of the county. Of the latter I shall speak hereafter. The former might, by an advocate of their cause, be coloured with a pretext of retaliation, since acts of the same kind had been committed by the loyalists, as the burning of houses, the quartering of men on families for subsistence, imprisonments, trials of prisoners by court-martial, the shooting of prisoners without any trial, and the insulting of others by cropping the hair and covering the head with a pitched cap. But an opinion is entertained, I fear indeed with too much foundation, that if the post of Arklow

had been taken, and thus a wide prospect opened for the success of the rebellion, the protestants remaining in the power of the rebels, in the county of Wexford, were to be massacred with few exceptions. Many also believe that the persons excepted from this first massacre were destined for an ultimate slaughter on the final success of the insurgents, and that even the leaders of the rebels, who were protestants, were to be included in this proscription. The war from the beginning, in direct violation of the oath of United Irishmen, had taken a religious turn, as every civil war in the south or west of Ireland must be expected to take, by any man well acquainted with the prejudices of the inhabitants. The terms protestant and orangeman were almost synonymous with the mass of the insurgents; and the protestants whom they meant to favour, were generally baptized into the Romish church by the priests of that communion. But whatever degree of religious bigotry or party hatred had been hitherto discovered by the insurgents in general, many individuals had evinced much humanity in their endeavours to mitigate the fury of their associates.

This bigotry and fury I consider not as attributable to well educated and well informed Roman catholics. From political causes, which I now hope to see speedily removed, the lower orders are so degraded by superstition and enflamed with