Page:The Works of the Rev. Jonathan Swift, Volume 19.djvu/110

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98
LETTERS TO AND FROM

ing people, to the utmost extremities of shame, cold and hunger, to serve the purposes of his own corruption, and make rebellion as lasting as the world.

Not all the mutual cruelty of the civil war, not the massacre acted in Ireland, first under the connivance of the roundhead justices at Clontarf, Ballock, &c.; next by the Scots in the island of Maggee, near Carrickfergus, and then by sir Phelim O Neil's brutal revenge in a part of the north, which was retaliated more than tenfold by Coote, Ireton, and Cromwell, over that whole kingdom, can equal the list of those loyal Irish families which have been raised out of the world in miserable infamy by the pen of Clarendon! The rump-parliament, and all its emissaries, were but transient plagues, that rioted for a while over the church, the state, and the royal family of England. The hand of God soon overtook them. They died, and all their iniquities and abominations had died with them, had not the church, the state, and the royal family, found their bane perpetuated to immortality, by the single corruption of Mr. Hyde, the chancellor of the exchequer and the lord high chancellor of England.

During his voluntary exile, Clarendon, to justify himself, and his amphibious companions of the former privy council, digested at Rouen that long and eloquent satire he had composed, for the most part, in the isle of Jersey, upon the king's father and all his friends, but especially the Irish; because they never can forgive who do the wrong. He has taken a vast deal of pains to blanch rebellion in all its promoters, and cast invidious colours upon the most eminent loyalists. He can scarce find a man of

thorough