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er part reasonably well drilled and trained to military evolutions. They had considerable stores of money, too, and ammunition; and had been concerting their movements for years before they took the field,-with the whole of the country which was to form the scene of their operations friendly to them, and hostile to their opponents. Yet they were totally routed, broken, and cut to pieces, in four or five months, by a regular army of 50,000 or 60,000 men, almost as little accustomed to actual warfare as themselves. Neither lesson, we trust, will be lost on the party to whom it is addressed; but the indocility of the unenlightened multitude, always the dupe of its wishes, and often the victim of its passions, will be far more pardonable than that of their rulers, whose business it is to know the signs of the times, and to learn wisdom, at least, from their own past miscarriages.

Two years ago, we should have thought it a duty to pass over these most melancholy transactions in silence; and to abstain, as we have always hitherto abstained, from everything that might recal sensations of unmingled, and, as it then appeared to us, of unprofitable anguish. But the great lessons to which we have just alluded, seem at this moment in too much danger of being forgotten, to justify us in omitting any opportunity of enforcing them and the admirable tone and temper in which those unhappy scenes are here retraced, makes it almost as much a matter of justice to the author as to the public, to lay some part of his account of them before our readers.-Nothing can be more just, or better written, than the following introductory

sentence.

In adverting to the events of this disastrous era, it would be an easy task to recapitulate its horrors, or, according to the once popular method, to rail at the memories of its victims: but it is time for invective and resentment to cease; or, if such a feeling will irresistibly intrude, it is time at least to control and suppress it. Twenty years have now passed over the heads or the graves of the parties to that melancholy conflict; and their children may now see prospects of prosperity opening upon their country, not perhaps of the kind, or to the extent to which in her more ambitious days she looked, but assuredly of a more rational description than could have been attained by violence; and such as, when realized, as they promise soon to be, will compensate for past reverses, or at all events console. At such a moment, in approaching this fatal year, we may dismiss every sentiment of personal asperity, or posthumous reproach: without wishing to disturb the remorse of those upon either side who may be repenting, or to revive the anguish of the many that have suffered, we may now contemplate it as the period of an awful historical event; and allude to the mutual passions and mistakes of those who acted

or perished in it, with the forbearance that should not be refused to the unfortunate and the dead.' II. pp. 2, 3.

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The general causes of dissatisfaction have been already explained; but undoubtedly they were stimulated into action by the excitements of the French revolution. The first splendours of that event, and the gigantic successes by which its progress was illustrated, gave a spirit of daring to the oppressed and discontented in every corner of Europe. The democratic principle,' as Mr Grattan finely expressed it, by a figure borrowed from Milton, was getting on and on, like a mist at the heels of the countryman-small, at first, and lowly, but soon ascending to the hills, and overcasting the whole field of the horizon. In Ireland too, we are assured by the author before us, the progress of intelligence, for the preceding twentyfive years, had been altogether unprecedented, and had been almost entirely expended on political inquiries. To this was to be ascribed the rapidity with which the volunteer associations pervaded the country in 1780-the spirit with which the Opposition contended for reform in the emancipated Parliament-and the formation of various Whig clubs and political societies by the friends of constitutional monarchy. For a long while, the object of all those persons was merely a redress of grievances; and it was not till after the year 1792, that any more daring scheme seems to have been seriously contemplated. Soon after that period, however, a great variety of secret societies were formed, under the name of The Irish Union,' whose designs were undoubtedly of a more dangerous nature-and who, professing to have lost all hopes of constitutional redress, at last entered into a confederacy for revolutionizing Ireland, and establishing a Catholic Republic. These conspirators were speedily joined by a more antient confederacy of the Catholics, which had existed ever since 1783, and perhaps earlier, under the name of the Defenders,' and had till this time been chiefly employed in protecting each other from the punishments and exactions of the law, or wreaking their lawless vengeance on those by whom it was sought to be enforced. Though the great body of the associates consisted of the labouring classes, there were not a few persons of good fortune in their ranks; a regular organization of the whole body had been adopted-arms very generally provided-and considerable contributions of money obtained. Old soldiers were sought after, with the greatest avidity, to superintend their drills and under these they met, night after night, to be instructed in the use of arms; sometimes in obscure cellars, hired for the purpose; sometimes in houses, where every inhabitant was in the secret. It even sometimes happened that

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in the metropolis these nocturnal exercises took place, in the habitations of the more opulent and ardent of the conspirators. • In the interior, their evolutions were performed upon a more • extensive scale. There, every evening that the moon, the signal of rendezvous, was to be seen in the heavens, the peasant, without reposing from the toils of the day, stole forth with his rude implement of war, to pass the night upon the nearest unfrequented heath, with thousands of his comrades, who were assembled at that place and hour, as for the celebration of some unrighteous mysteries.' II. 16, 17.

They sought assistance from France in the year 1796; and, upon the instigation of Tone, the armanent under Hoche was arranged. In the course of the following year, Mr C. says there were 500,000 in arms for the cause. The following passage deserves well to be weighed and remembered.

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The old Irish government was a mechanical, not a moral system; it was, what it has been so often likened to, a citadel in an enemy's country; its first and its last expedient was Force; it forgot that those whom no force can subdue, nor dangers terrify, will kneel before an act of conciliation. But it obstinately refused to conciliate; and the people at length, prepared by the sufferings and indignities of centuries, listened with sanguine or desperate credulity to the counsel which reminded them of their strength, and directed them to employ it in one furious effort, which, whether it failed or prospered, could not embitter their condition. The Irish aristocracy, who imagined that because they were loyal, they might proceed to every violent extreme, were a band of political fanatics, and would have made proselytes by the sword. They knew nothing of the real nature of the allegiance which they were so zealous to establish, and which was never yet established by the sword. They were not aware that the allegiance of a nation to the State is a feeling compounded of a thousand others,-half interest, half sentiment,-of gratitude, of hope, of recollections, of the numberless minute and "tender influences" that reconcile the subject to his condition; that it is seldom a direct and defined attachment to the sovereign, but a collection of many subordinate attachments, of which the sovereign has all the benefit; that it is but the youngest of the group of private virtues, and, like them, must be reared in the bosom of domestic comfort; that it is upon the moral allegiance of each rank to its immediate relations, of the servant to his master, of the artisan to his employer, of the tenant to his landlord, that must be founded the political allegiance of the whole to the State. Those mistaken loyalists supposed that they were teaching allegiance by a haughty and vindictive enforcement of the laws against its violation. They did not see that they were exacting from the laws what no laws could perform; that their positive provisions must be always impotent, where their spirit is not previously infused into the subject by manners and institutions. In Ireland these two were at perpetual variance. The Irish lawgiver

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passed his statute, setting forth, in pompous phraseology, its wisdom and necessity, and denouncing the gibbet against the offender, and then returned to his district, to defeat its efficacy, by giving a practical continuance to the misery, the passions, the galling epithets, and the long train of customary insults and local provocations that were for ever instigating to crime. He did, what was stranger and more absurd than this-he had the folly to put the State in competi tion with a power above it. He trampled upon the religion of the people. II. 22-29.

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Such were the true causes of the avidity with which the bulk of the Irish populace rushed into this lamentable conspiracy, and of the ill success which attended the efforts of the Government to arrest them. Not only, however, did they neglect those causes, but reviled, in the most abusive and contumelious terms, "all those who warned them of their existence, and of the consequences which must follow from disregarding them. To those who knew the steady loyalty and personal dignity of the late Mr Ponsonby, it must convey a very striking image of the temper of the times, to find his patriotic warnings as to the necessity of conciliation thus answered by the then Solicitor-General.

What was it come to, that in the Irish House of Commons they should listen to one of their own members degrading the character of an Irish gentleman by language which was fitted but for hallooing a mob? Had he heard a man uttering out of those doors such language as that by which the honourable gentleman had violated the decorum of Parliament, he would have seized the ruffian by the throat, and dragged him to the dust! What were the House made of who could listen in patience to such abominable sentiments?-sentiments which, thank God, were acknowledged by no class of men in this country, except the execrable and infamous nest of traitors who were known by the name of United Irishmen, who sat brooding in Belfast over their discontents and treasons, and from whose publications he could trace, word for word, every expression the honourable gentleman had used.' II. p. 35, Note,

In this spirit was the rebellion-we will not say provokedbut waited for and defied. In 1797, the Government did not believe in the likelihood of any general insurrection, and unquestionably were very ill prepared to resist it. In that year, when an attack was projected on Dublin, it is said (p. 38) that every militia soldier who was to have mounted guard that day in the city, was in the interest of the insurgents-and that a great proportion of the native forces throughout the country were of the same persuasion. In 1798, they were somewhat better informed as to the impending crisis. In March, they arrested a great number of persons, and issued a solemn proclamation announcing the existence of the conspiracy, and the likelihood of its speedy explosion. It was soon generally un

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derstood that the 23d of May was the day fixed for the rising; and-(but it is a relief to be able to give the sequel in the strik→ ing words of the author before us) as it approached, the fearful tokens became too manifest to be mistaken. In the interior, the peasantry were already in motion. Night after night large masses of them were known to be proceeding by unfrequented paths to some central points. Over whole tracts of country the cabins were deserted, or contained only women and children, from whom the inquirers could extort no tidings of the owners. In the towns, to which, in the intervals of labour, the lower classes delighted to flock, a frightful diminution of numbers was observed; while the few that appeared there, betrayed, by the moody exultation of their looks, that they were not ignorant of the cause. Throughout the capital the military array and bustle in some streets-the silence and desertion of others -the names of the inhabitants registered on every door-the suspension of public amusements, and almost of private intercourse-the daily proclamations-prayers put up in the churches for the general safety-families flying to England-partings that might be eternalevery thing oppressed the imagination with the conviction, that a great public convulsion was at hand. The parliament and the courts of justice, with a laudable attachment to the forms of the constitution, continued their sittings; but the strange aspect, of senators and advocates transacting civil business in the garb of soldiers, reminded the spectator that the final dependence of the State was upon a power beyond the laws. The vigorous precautions of the administration, instead of inspiring confidence, kept alive the public terror and suspense. In every quarter of the kingdom, the populace were sent in droves to the prisons, till the prisons could contain no more. The vessels in the several bays adjoining the scenes of disturbance were next converted into gaols. The law was put aside: a non-commissioned officer became the arbiter of life and death. The military were dispersed through every house: military visits were paid to every house in search of arms, or other evidence of treason. The dead were intercepted on their passage to the grave, and their coffins examined, lest they might contain rebellious weapons. Many of the conspirators were informally executed. Many persons who were innocent were arrested and abused. Many, who might have been innocent, were suspected, and summarily put to death.

Upon the appointed day the explosion took place. The shock was dreadful. The imagination recoils from a detail of the scenes that followed. Every excess that could have been apprehended from a soldiery, whom General Abercrombie, in the language of manly reproof, had declared to be in a state of licentiousness that rendered it formidable to all but the enemy; every act of furious retaliation to be expected from a peasantry inflamed by revenge and despair, and, in consequence of the loss of their leaders, surrendered to the auspices of their own impetuous passions, distinguished and disgraced this fatal conflict. After a short and sanguinary struggle, the insurgents were crushed. The numbers of them who perished in the field, or on

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