suddenly checked, and they only increased the tumult and the dangers of that untamed element into which they had plunged. Ireland was left only a place of desperate rivalry or of desolation, a field of battle, or a grave.
This state of misery continued for a period without example,—longer than the desolation of Egypt, longer than the decay of the Roman empire, longer than the dark ages, longer than any suffering brought upon a people by misfortune or crime, but that of God's malediction against the Jews; it lasted for six hundred years! Its history might have been written, like the roll in the Apocalypse, within and without, with "lamentation, and mourning, and woe." While the knowledge of Right was advancing over the face of Europe, like the sun, from the east, Ireland was still in the darkness, without the quiet of the sepulchre. Every nation, in its turn, made some noble acquisition in freedom, or religion, or science, or dominion. Ireland lay, like the form of the first man, with all the rapid splendours of the new creation rising and glowing round him; but she lay without the "breath in her nostrils."
The cause of these deplorable calamities was not in the English legislature; for the only crime of that legislature was in the slowness and unskilfulness of their cure. The original government of Ireland was, of all others, the most fatal to civilization; it was the government of tribes, the devotedness of clanship without its compensating and patriarchal affections, the haughty violence of the feudal system without its superb munificence and generous achievement. Ireland was torn in pieces by four sovereignties; the people were kept in chains at home, that they might be let loose on their neighbours with the ferocity of
