to consider that they were alone the NATION-and so forgetful of their position that they boldly considered that they could hold Ireland-be Ireland-independent of the country from whence they came. In this way Protestant Ireland was, in the strength of its Volunteers, about to join America in the assertion of unrestrained nationality. It subsequently, at the period of the Regency question, asserted separate sovereignty as well as nationality; and, at the time of the Union, its bold patriots of the ascendancy were found still clinging to what remained of the penal laws, while, with most absurd inconsistency, they asserted legislative independence. In vain it was then told them that they were but a section, a colonial plantation from another country-and if so unwise as to refuse amalgamation with the fatherland, it was as if a small craft were to cut the painter that kept it in the wake of some great admiral, while there were those on board who would soon start from below hatches, to shew that they were masters, and must hold the helm.

The Roman Catholics also were deteriorated under the penal law; they acquired all the bad habits of serfs. Indolent, insincere, and vengeful-losing the rights of freementime has shown how slowly they are acquiring the proper estimation or fair use of the privileges they have attained to; and therefore we see them still ready to transfer what they yet neither adequately value nor care to use independently, into the hands of others; and still bearing the deeplycherished remembrance of former oppression, they now as heretofore lend themselves to all who announce that they can and will, in due time, lead them on to secure that predominance, which must be attended with the recovery of long lost property, whether for their church or for themselves.

But it is not alone in a political point of view that the penal laws were injurious. They deeply affected the moral character of the Irish. They fostered the growth of turbulence, pride, venality, and irreligion amongst Protestants; they also made the Romish serfs grovelling, false priestridden, and fanatical-averse to any law, however in itself good, imposed by their oppressors and prepared in secret to use all cunning expedients to evade what they dared not openly oppose or overthrow. Thus, under these impolitic laws-blighting as would a strong east wind-noxious insects were generated, that eat up all that might otherwise have prospered; and idleness, immorality, ignorance - here superstition and there infidelity-like the palmer worm and the canker worm, covered the land, and made desolate what might have been so green and beautiful.*

In this state, and towards the latter end of the 18th century, the pride of the Irish squirarchy was only equalled by their ignorance and uselessness. Too proud to trade-too indolent to adopt any profession that required assiduity or learning-the sons of the gentry increased on all sides. But they swarmed not, as leaving the parental hive to collect honey, like the working bee; but to consume like the drone or commit mischief like the wasp. Restrained by his own exclusiveness, the younger son of a squire had in those days no resource but the army, and if that were not open for him, he must remain either as a wild sportsman, himself and dogs still encumbering the paternal hearth, or become a landholder; and even here his employment was limited by his pride of caste; he must not become a tiller of the ground; he might be but a grazier of cattle. Now, the very occupation, if such it could be called, of a stockfarmer, was instrumental in fostering those indolent and dissolute habits, to

which the young Irish were so naturally and nationally prone. Except at the period of the sale or purchase of their stock, their time hung heavy on their hands; and the very circumstance of attending fairs or markets in the way of their business promoted carousing, gambling, and quarrelsome propensities, and made them still more abandoned and ferocious. We who are old enough to recollect the condition of the gentry of the West and South of Ireland in the 18th century, ean but too well remember the lamentable ignorance, idleness, and dissipation that then prevailed. Reading was almost out of the question. In houses where thousands were spent in feasting and drinking, not a book was to be found except the almanac, the racing calendar, or some odd volume of a play book or immoral novel; while we look back with shuddering at the ferocity, the recklessness of human suffering that were exhibited at fairs, races, elections. In fact, no matter what the pretext was for assembling the GENTRY together, the meeting was too often disgraced by gambling, blasphemy, and bloodshed. We might support ourselves against the imputation of overcharging our picture by many cotemporary authorities. We might adduce, for instance, what Sir Jonah Barrington, in his Personal Sketches of Ireland, tells so amusingly and so graphically, and which, though in some instances over-coloured, yet we know, in the main, to be but too close to nature. We might also adduce what Dr. Crump says, in his very clever essay, concerning the sons of the gentry of the province of Munster. As it is

brief, we will but quote what an English traveller says of the Connaught squireens at the commencement of the present century:—

"They labour (says he) under all the disadvantages which arise from a want of a liberal education, without a compensation for that defect by diligence and regular habits. Their ideas are as grovelling as their manners are vulgar. What time they divert from business is devoted to frivolous amusement or licentious pleasures. They will be found galloping after a few famished hounds, or ranging the country in search of unfortunate females, whose poor parents sacrifice their daughters for a little money,

and who are soon either abandoned or turned over to some wretches who consent to marry them on condition of being made freeholders. Fond of society, they may be seen nightly drinking together, and lying with their clothes on, in a barrack room, which is a parlour into which some beds have been thrown, as a shake down."

Is it any wonder that the people, witnessing amongst their betters such bloodthirstiness, such open defiance of lawlessness, such dissoluteness, such what was moral and religious, should copy from the pattern set before them, and imitate the same ferocity, nourish the same revenge, disregard, in like manner, the laws, and still alas pertinaciously retain what they had so aptly learned from their masters?-for it is but too true all the world over, that bad habits are retained with a

pertinacity in proportion to a people's ignorance; and amongst the ill educated peasantry the evil long remains after it has been eradicated from the higher classes that had heretofore set them the example.

It has been the especial misfortune of Ireland to have been, from the earliest time, without a strong central government. The island-unhappily divided into a number of almost equal Sovereignties was always distracted by the quarrels of its chiefs. And forced to take a part in such bootless feuds, the people spent their blood and perilled their happiness in a cause which to them was of little or no moment; and it well of them might be said→

“Quicquid delirant Reges plectuntur Hiberni.”

Moreover, it has so happened, that let who may have been the invader or the conqueror, he has adapted himself to the fashion of the natives-assuming with the habiliments the same love of battle, bloodshed, and rapine; he has come, not to teach, but to learn, for the worse; and so the foreigner has ever proved himself, when he had the means, to be "Ipsis Hibernis Hibernior." Thus it might be almost sup posed that there was in the climate some predisposing cause for a propensity to pugnacity; for let the immigrant be of what race he might -whether Belgic, Milesian, Danish, Norman, or English-he soon fell into

the national vice, and became adapted to the land of Ire.

But without at all having recourse to predispositions arising from race or climate, it may be assumed, that ignorance and idleness are proximate causes, fully sufficient to account for the past unhappy state of Ireland. For it may be observed, that in those districts where idleness has most prevailed, there have been the most turbulence and the least prosperity; and in proportion as the former has been removed, has the latter disappeared. In proof of this, we may adduce the case of the province of Ulster.

Pre

vious to the settlement of James the First and, indeed, subsequent to it, when the great rebellion under Phelim O'Neil had nearly upset that plantation-the northern province was infested by turbulent, ferocious, nomadic clans, that could be readily excited to war and plunder by the O'Neils or the O'Donnells, and who roamed up and down from one mountain range to another; and it was not until the close of the war between William and James that these Ulster creaghts, as they were called, were extirpated. Doctor Charles O'Connor, who, of all Roman Catholic historians, writes most temperately and intelligently, states that previous to the Rebellion of 1641, "there were in Ireland a great number of idle, active fellowsthe younger sons of the ULSTER and CONNAUGHT chieftains, who were unprovided with any livelihood-eager for confusion, and capable of any enterprise the most rash and daring.' And again, he says-" Connaught is, by nature, the strongest of our provinces. It then abounded in idle swordsmen, more numerous and dangerous than any in Ireland: 7,000 idle fellows had been booked down by officers, who were fit for nothing but arms, and lived upon their friends." Now, when the wars of 1641 and of King William had ceased-when, pursuant to the policy of Cromwell, the most turbulent and disaffected in the other provinces were transplanted to Connaught when thus the country beyond the Shannon became, as it were, the Alsatia, the refugium peccatorum of the island-when foreign enlistment ceased to provide a means of drafting off and employing the young gentry-when they must re

main as hangers-on round the family table at home, or, becoming graziers, take long and of course profitable leases of portions of the paternal property, and so diminish, year after year, the income of the heads of houses-then arose those shameful family feuds, and the almost constant state of disunion between the father and the eldest son-disputes which produced an entangled intermingling of hostilities between families, leading to duelling and bloodshed-disputes that poisoned society, and made manners ferocious: and duelling that became the great arbiter of all quarrels-and, as in the case of George Robert Fitzgerald-brought to light those atrocious scenes of which his instance was but a specimen of what was but too universal.

The foregoing remarks we have ventured on as denouncing a state of society that could alone foster and bring to maturity such a portent as George Robert Fitzgerald. No sun or shower could call into existence the serpent were there not a foul slime below, deep, dark, and abundant, in which the poisonous egg could be hatched. No-this insolent oppressor -this lawless rioter-this reckless duellist-this bold, calculating murderer, could not have lived and moved and had his horrid being in any other place, or under any other circumstances, than in Ireland, at the close of the 18th century, where there was slime enough to cover the egg, and give latitude of growth to such a

monster.

It is, therefore, in order to show in what a deplorable state the island was in the 18th century, in consequence of bad customs, fostered by bad laws; and that, backward as we are yet, Ireland has already made, and is making, wondrous strides towards moral and social well-being, as shown by comparing what we were fifty years ago with what we now are; that we drag the almost forgotten story of Fitzgerald before the public, desirous to induce our reader after contemplating scenes that only could have happened in the days of his fathers— to bless Providence that he has fallen on more privileged times, and to entertain the well-grounded expectation, that as Ireland has so improved in all things connected with the moral