Ireland and the guilt of England are not disguised; and the author has not written to stimulate the anger of one nation or to attenuate the remorse of the other. To both he gives wise and statesman-like advice, that may soon be very opportune. The first American war was the commencement of the deliverance of Ireland, and it may be that a new American war will complete the work of regeneration which the first began. Agreeing as we do with the policy of the author, and admiring the spirit of his book, we shall not attempt either to enforce or to dispute his conclusions, and we shall confine our remarks to less essential points on which he appears to us in the wrong.
There are several instances of inaccuracy and negligence which, however trivial in themselves, tend to prove that the author is not always very scrupulous in speaking of things he has not studied. A purist so severe as to write "Kelt" for "Celt" ought not to call Mercury, originally a very different personage from Hermes, one of "the legendary authors of Greek civilisation" (p. 43); and we do not believe that anybody who had read the writings of the two primates could call Bramhall "an inferior counterpart of Laud" (p. 105). In a loftier mood, and therefore apparently with still greater license, Mr. Goldwin Smith declares that "the glorious blood of Orange could scarcely have run in a low persecutor's veins" (p. 123). The blood of Orange ran in the veins of William the Silent, the threefold hypocrite, who confessed Catholicism whilst he hoped to retain his influence at court, Lutheranism when there was a chance of obtaining assistance from the German princes, Calvinism when he was forced to resort to religion in order to excite the people against the crown, and who persecuted the Protestants in Orange and the Catholics in Holland. These, however, are matters of no consequence whatever in a political history of Ireland; but we find ourselves at issue with the author on the important question of political freedom. "Even the highly civilised Kelt of France, familiar as he is with theories of political liberty, seems almost incapable of
