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to establish an administration without him. Ireton served under Fairfax in the second civil war in the campaigns in Kent and Essex, and was responsible for the executions of Lucas and Lisle at Colchester. After the rejection by the king of the last offers of the army, he showed special zeal in bringing about his trial, was one of the chief promoters of “Pride’s Purge,” attended the court regularly, and signed the death-warrant. The regiment of Ireton having been chosen by lot to accompany Cromwell in his Irish campaign, Ireton was appointed major-general; and on the recall of his chief to take the command in Scotland, he remained with the title and powers of lord-deputy to complete Cromwell’s work of reduction and replantation. This he proceeded to do with his usual energy, and as much by the severity of his methods of punishment as by his military skill was rapidly bringing his task to a close, when he died on the 26th of November 1651 of fever after the capture of Limerick. His loss “struck a great sadness into Cromwell,” and perhaps there was no one of the parliamentary leaders who could have been less spared, for while he possessed very high abilities as a soldier, and great political penetration and insight, he resembled in stern unflinchingness of purpose the protector himself. By his wife, Bridget Cromwell, who married afterwards General Charles Fleetwood, Ireton left one son and three daughters.

Bibliography.—Article by C. H Firth in Dict. of Nat. Biog. with authorities there quoted; Wood’s Ath. Oxon. iii. 298, and Fasti, i. 451; Cornelius Brown’s Lives of Notts Worthies, 181; Clarke Papers published by Camden Society; Gardiner’s History of the Civil War and of the Commonwealth.

IRIARTE (or Yriarte) Y OROPESA, TOMÁS DE (1750–1791), Spanish poet, was born on the 18th of September 1750, at Orotava in the island of Teneriffe, and received his literary education at Madrid under the care of his uncle, Juan de Iriarte, librarian to the king of Spain. In his eighteenth year the nephew began his literary career by translating French plays for the royal theatre, and in 1770, under the anagram of Tirso Imarete, he published an original comedy entitled Hacer que hacemos. In the following year he became official translator at the foreign office, and in 1776 keeper of the records in the war department. In 1780 appeared a dull didactic poem in silvas entitled La Música, which attracted some attention in Italy as well as at home. The Fábulas literarias (1781), with which his name is most intimately associated, are composed in a great variety of metres, and show considerable ingenuity in their humorous attacks on literary men and methods; but their merits have been greatly exaggerated. During his later years, partly in consequence of the Fábulas, Iriarte was absorbed in personal controversies, and in 1786 was reported to the Inquisition for his sympathies with the French philosophers. He died on the 17th of September 1791.

He is the subject of an exhaustive monograph (1897) by Emilio Cotarelo y Mori.

IRIDACEAE (the iris family), in botany, a natural order of flowering plants belonging to the series Liliiflorae of the class Monocotyledons, containing about 800 species in 57 genera, and widely distributed in temperate and tropical regions. The members of this order are generally perennial herbs growing from a corm as in Crocus and Gladiolus, or a rhizome as in Iris; more rarely, as in the Spanish iris, from a bulb. A few South African representatives have a shrubby habit. The flowers are hermaphrodite and regular as in Iris (fig. 1) and Crocus (fig. 3), or with a symmetry in the median plane as in Gladiolus. The petaloid perianth consists of two series, each with three members, which are joined below into a longer or shorter tube, followed by one whorl of three stamens; the inferior ovary is three-celled and contains numerous ovules on an axile placenta; the style is branched and the branches are often petaloid. The fruit (fig. 2) is a capsule opening between the partitions and containing generally a large number of roundish or angular seeds. The arrangement of the parts in the flower resembles that in the nearly allied order Amaryllidaceae (Narcissus, Snowdrop, &c.), but differs in the absence of the inner whorl of stamens.

Fig. 1.—Yellow Iris, Iris Pseudacorus.
1. Flower, from which the outer petals and the stigmas have been removed, leaving the inner petals (a) and stamens. 2. Pistil with petaloid stigmas.	3. Fruit cut across showing the three chambers containing seeds. 4. A seed. 1-4 about 1/2 nat. size.

Fig. 2.—Seed-vessel (capsule) of the Flower-de-Luce (iris), opening in a loculicidal manner. The three valves bear the septa in the centre and the opening takes place through the back of the chambers. Each valve is formed by the halves of contiguous carpels.

Fig. 3.—1. Crocus in flower, reduced. 2. Flower dissected. b, b′, Upper and lower membranous spathe-like bracts; c, Tube of perianth; d, Ovary;
e, Style; f, Stigmas.

The most important genera are Crocus (q.v.), with about 70 species, Iris (q.v.), with about 100, and Gladiolus (q.v.), with 150. Ixia, Freesia (q.v.) and Tritonia (including Montbretia), all natives of South Africa, are well known in cultivation. Sisyrinchium, blue-eyed grass, is a new-world genus extending from arctic America to Patagonia and the Falkland Isles. One