of the rebels. Here was the advanced post of the Royal army. General Lake, (the Lord Lake of India,) and Major-General Hutchinson, (the Lord Hutchinson of Egypt,) had assembled upon this point a respectable force; some say upwards of 4000, others not more than 1100; I heard from what may be considered respectable eyewitnesses, that the whole amount might be reckoned fairly at 2500. The disgraceful result is well known: the French, marching all night over mountain roads, and through one pass which was thought impregnable, if it had been occupied by a battalion, instead of a captain's guard, surprised Castlebar on the morning of the 27th. I say "surprised," for no word, short of that, can express the circumstances of the case. About two o'clock in the morning, a courier had brought intelligence of the French advance; but from some unaccountable obstinacy at head-quarters, such as had proved fatal more than either once or twice in the Wexford campaign, his news was disbelieved; yet, if disbelieved, why, therefore, neglected? Neglected, however, it was; and at seven, when the news was found to be true, the Royal army was drawn out in hurry and confusion to meet the enemy. The French, on their part, seeing our strength, looked for no better result for themselves than summary surrender, more especially as our artillery was well served, and soon began to tell upon their ranks. Better hopes first arose, as they afterwards declared, upon observing that many of the troops fired in a disorderly way, without waiting for the word of command; upon this they took new measures: in a few minutes a panic arose ; and, in spite of all that could be done by the officers, the whole army ran. General Lake ordered a retreat; and then the flight became irretrievable. The troops reached Tuam, 30 miles distant, on that same day; and one small party of mounted men actually pushed on the next morning to Athlone, which is above 60 miles from Castlebar.

Fourteen pieces of artillery were lost on this occasion. However, it ought to be mentioned that some serious grounds appeared afterwards for suspecting treachery: most of those who had been reported" missing," on this first battle, having been afterwards observed in the ranks of the enemy,-where it is remarkable enough, (or perhaps it argues that not being fully relied on by their new allies, they were put forward on the most dangerous services,) all of these deserters perished to a man. Meantime, the new Lord Lieutenant, having his foot constantly in the stirrup, marched from Dublin without a moment's delay. By means of the grand canal, he made a forced march of fifty-six English miles in two days; which brought him to Kilbeggan on the 27th. Very early on the following morning he received the unpleasant news from Castlebar. Upon this he advanced to Athlone, meeting every indication of a routed and panic-struck army. Lord Lake was retreating upon that town, and thought himself so little secure, even at this distance from the enemy, that the road from Tuam was covered

with strong patrols. Meantime, in ludicrous contrast to these demonstrations of alarm, the French had never stirred an inch from Castlebar. On the 4th of September, Lord Cornwallis was within fourteen miles of that place. Humbert, however, had previously dislodged towards the county of Longford. His motive for this movement was to co-operate with an insurrection in that quarter, which had just then broken out in strength. He was now, however, hemmed in by a large army of perhaps 25,000 men, advancing from all points, a few moves were all that remained of the game, played with whatever skill. Colonel Vereker, with about 300 of the Limerick militia, first came up with him, and skirmished very creditably, (September 6,) with part, or (as the Colonel always maintained) with the whole of the French army. Other affairs of trivial importance followed; and at length on the 8th of September, General Humbert surrendered with his whole army, now reduced to 844 men, of whom 96 were officers, having lost, since their landing at Killala, exactly 288 men. The rebels were not admitted to any terms; they were pursued and cut down without mercy. However, it is pleasant to know, that from their agility in escaping, this cruel policy was defeated not much above 500 perished and thus were secured to the Royal party the worst results of vengeance the fiercest, and clemency the most undistinguishing, without any one advantage of either. Some districts, as Laggan and Eris, were treated with martial rigour the cabins being burned, and their unhappy tenants driven out into the mountains for the winter. Rigour, therefore, there was; for the most humane politicians, erroneously as I conceive, believed it necessary for the army to leave behind some impressions of terror amongst the insurgents. It is certain, however, that under the counsels of Lord Cornwallis, the standards of public severity were very much lowered, as compared with the previous examples in Wexford.

The tardiness and slovenly execution of the whole service, meantime, was well illustrated in what follows:

Killala was not delivered from rebel hands until the 23d of September, notwithstanding the general surrender had occurred on the 8th, and then only in consequence of an express from the Bishop to General Trench, hastening his march. The situation of the Protestants was indeed critical. Humbert had left three French officers to protect the place, but their influence gradually had sunk to a mere shadow. And plans of pillage, with all its attendant horrors, were daily debated. Under these circumstances, the French officers behaved honourably and courageously.

worthy of a very minute investigation, I shall crowd into a single page; taking my excuse from the fact that I know the ground imperfectly, and only as a hasty traveller; but, in reality, shrinking from a subject which caused me grief even at that age, and which causes me humiliation even yet. For all parties were then deep delinquents: and the Government, that should have been so paternal and so willing to lead back its erring flock to the fold, as the first and the bloodiest in provocation, was the worst delinquent of all. Doubtless there are, as against such a government there ought to be, great ca

So terminated the Irish civil war of 1798; or, with reference to its local limitation, the Civil War of Connaught. But in the year 1798, Ireland was the scene of two rebellions; one in the autumn, confined to Connaught,-it is this which I have been circumstantially retracing,-and another in the latter end of spring, which spent its rage upon the county of Wexford. These two had no immediate connexion: that in Connaught was not the product of its predecessor; each, in fact, resting upon causes however ultimately the same, had its own separate occasions and immediate excitements; and each had its own separate leaders and local agents. The one was a premature explosion of the great conspiracy conducted for the last five years by the Society of United Irishmen: the other was an unpremeditated effort in support of an abrupt and illtimed foreign invasion. The general predisposing causes to rebellion were doubtless the same in both cases: but the exciting causes of the moment were different in each. And, finally, they were divided by a complete interval of two months.

One very remarkable feature there was, however, in which these two separate rebellions of 1798 coincided: that was-the narrow range, as to time, within which each ran its course. Neither of them outran the limits of one lunar month. It is a fact, however startling, that each, though a perfect civil war in all its proportions, frequent in warlike incident, and the former rich in tragedy, passed through all the stages of growth, maturity, and final extinction, within one single revolution of the moon. For all the rebel movements, subsequent to the morning of Vinegar Hill, are to be viewed not in the light of manœuvres made in the spirit of military hope, but as mere efforts of desperation, in the spirit of self-preservation, with the single purpose of reaching some ground having elbow-room sufficient, and other advantages, for general dispersion.

The Connaught campaign,-because I myself, by residence on its central positions, and by daily excursions, knew all its scenery and their exact limits, and because the alliance of a powerful nation raised it into more distinction as a chapter in civilized warfare,-I have dwelt upon at some length. The other though, philosophically speaking, a much more interesting war, and

made for all, there will still remain enough on record to establish this horrible fact, that the Government, in its immediate executive agents, seemed bent upon finding matter for punishment; and to such an excess that, when these agents did not find it, they proceeded systematically to create it by provocation, by irritation, by torture-not denied, but avowed, proclaimed, rewarded,--and finally, for I reserve this as the consummation of the climax, by inflictions of personal degradation of a nature almost to justify rebellion.

A few words will recapitulate this civil war, but each of these words may be taken as representing a chapter. The war of American separation it was which touched and quickened the dry bones that lay waiting as it were for life through every part of Christendom. The year 1782, brought that war to its winding up; and the same year it was which called forth Grattan and the Irish volunteers. That Ireland saw her own case dimly reflected in that of America, and that such a reference was moving in the national mind, appears from a remarkable fact in the history of the year which followed. In 1783, a haughty petition was addressed to the throne on behalf of the Roman Catholics, by an association styling itself a Congress. No man could suppose that a designation so ominously significant, had been chosen by accident; and by the Court of England it was received, as it was meant, for an insult and a menace. What came next? The French Revolution. All flesh moved under that inspiration; and the seed sown for the last ten years in Ireland, now germinated too fast and too rankly for the policy of her situation. Concealment or delay, compromise or temporizing, would not have been brooked, at this moment, by the fiery temperament of Ireland, but through the extraordinary composition, as well as extraordinary constitution of that secret society, into which the management of her affairs had now devolved. In the year 1792, as we are told, commenced, and in 1795, was finished, the famous association of United Irishmen. By these terms commenced and finished, we are to understand not the purposes, or the arrangements of their conspiracy against the existing government, but the network of organization, delicate as lace and strong as harness, which now enmeshed almost every province of Ireland, and knit the strength of her peasantry into unity and disposable divisions.

This, it seems, was completed in 1795. In a complete history of these times, no one chapter would deserve so ample an investigation as this subtle web of association, rising upon a large base, multiplied in proportion to the extent of the county, and by intermediate links ascending to some unknown apex; all so graduated, and in such nice dependency, as to secure the instantaneous propagation upwards and downwards, laterally or obliquely, of any impulse; and yet so effectually shrouded, that nobody knew more than the two or three individual agents in immediate juxtaposition with himself, by whom he communicated with those above his head or below his feet. This organization, in fact, of the United Irishmen, combined the best features, as to skill, of the two most elaborate and most successful of all secret societies recorded in history; one of which went before the Irish Society, and one followed it after an interval of five-and-twenty years. These two are the Fehm-Gericht, or court of ban and extermination, which having taken its rise in Westphalia, is usually called the Secret Tribunal of Westphalia, and which reached its full development in the fourteenth century. The other is the Hetæria, ['Eraigia,] a society which, passing for one of pure literary dilettanti, under the secret countenance of the late Capo d'Istria, (then a confidential minister of the Czar,) did actually succeed so far in hoaxing the Cabinets of Europe, that one-third of European Kings put down their names, and gave their aid, as conspirators against the Sultan of Turkey, whilst credulously supposing themselves honorary correspondents of a learned body for reviving the arts and literature of Athens. These two I call the most successful of all secret societies; because both were arrayed against the existing administrations throughout the entire lands upon which they sought to operate. The German Society disowned the legal authorities as too weak for the ends of justice, and succeeded in bringing the cognizance of crimes within their own secret yet consecrated usurpation. The Grecian Society made the existing powers the final object of their hostility; lived unarmed amongst the very oppressors, whose throats they had dedicated to the sabre; and, in a very few years, saw their purpose accomplished.

for being placarded against the walls. The expedient had probably been suggested by Paris, where such newspapers were often placarded, and generally for the bloodiest purposes. But Louvet, in his Memoirs, mentions one conducted by himself on better principles: it was printed at the public expense; and sometimes more than twenty thousand copies of a single number were attached to the corners of streets. This was called the Centinel and those who are acquainted with the Memoirs of Madame Roland, will remember that she cites Louvet's paper as a model for all of its class. The Union Star was the paper which the United Irishmen published upon this plan; previous papers, on the ordinary plan, the Northern Star, and the Press, having been violently put down by the Government. The Union Star, however, it must be acknowledged, did not seek much to elevate the people, by improving their understandings: it was merely a violent appeal to their passions, against all who had incurred the displeasure of the secret Society. The newspapers of every kind it was easy for the Government to suppress. But the secret Society annoyed and crippled the Government in other modes, which it was not easy to parry; and all blows dealt in return were dealt in the dark, and against a shadow. The Society called upon Irishmen to abstain generally from ardent spirits, as a means of destroying the Excise; and it is certain that the Society was obeyed, in a degree which astonished neutral observers, all over Ireland. The same Society, by a printed proclamation, called upon the people not to purchase the quit-rents of the Crown, which were then on sale; and not to receive bank-notes in payment, because, (as the proclamation told them,) a "burst" was coming, when such paper, and the securities for such purchases, would fall to a ruinous discount. In this case, after much distress to the public service, Government obtained a partial triumph by the law which cancelled the debt on a refusal to receive the State paper, and which quartered soldiers upon all tradesmen who demurred to such a tender. But upon the whole, it was evident to all eyes, that in Ireland there were two Governments counteracting each other at every step; and that the one which more generally had the upper hand in the struggle was the secret Society of the United Irishmen; whose members and headquarters were alike protected from the attacks of its rival, the State-Government at the Castle, by a cloud of impenetrable darkness.

That cloud was at last pierced. A treacherous or weak brother, high in the ranks of the Society and deep in their counsels, happened, in travel

have thrown out some hints of his confidential station, perhaps in ostentation. This weak man, Thomas Reynolds, a Roman Catholic gentleman, of Kilkea Castle, in Kildare, colonel of a regiment of United Irish, treasurer for Kildare, and in other confidential stations for the secret Society, was prevailed on, by Mr. William Cope, a rich merchant of Dublin, who alarmed his imbe

a revolution, in the circumstances of Ireland, to betray all he knew to the Government. His treachery was first meditated in the last week of February, 1798; and, in consequence of his depositions, on March 12, at the house of Oliver Bond, in Dublin, the Government succeeded in arresting a large body of the leading conspirators. The whole committee of Leinster, amounting to thirteen members, was captured on this occasion; but a still more valuable prize was made in the persons of the arch-leaders and members of the Irish Directory, -Emmet, M'Nevin, Arthur O'Connor, and Oliver Bond. Their places were quickly filled up as far as names went; and a hand-bill was issued, on the same day, to pre vent the effects of despondency amongst the great body of the conspirators. But Emmet and O'Connor were not men to be effectually replaced : Government had struck a fatal blow, without being fully aware at first of their own good luck. On the 19th of May following, in consequence of a proclamation, (May 11,) offering a thousand pounds for his capture, Lord Edward Fitzgerald was apprehended at the house of a Mr. Nicholas Murphy, a merchant in Dublin, after a very desperate resistance. The leader of the party, Major Swan, a magistrate, was wounded by Lord Edward; and Ryan, one of the officers, so desperately, that he died within a fortnight. Lord Edward himself languished for some time, and died in great agony on the 3d of June, from a pistol shot, which took effect on his shoulder. Lord Edward Fitzgerald was an injured man. From the warm generosity of his temper, he had powerfully sympathized with the French republicans, at an early stage of their revolution; and, having, with great indiscretion, but an indiscretion pardonable in so young a man, and of so ardent a temperament, publicly avowed his sympathy, he was ignominiously dismissed from the army. That act made an enemy of a man who certainly was not to be despised; for, though weak as respected the powers of self-control, Lord Edward was well qualified to make himself beloved he had considerable talents; his name, alone, as a younger brother of the only ducal family in Ireland, was a spell and a word of command to the Irish peasantry; and finally, by his marriage with a natural daughter of the then Duke of Orleans, he had obtained some important connexions and openings to connexions in France. The young lady whom he had married, was generally known by the name of Pamela ; and it has been frequently supposed that she is the person described by Miss Edgeworth, under the name of Virginia, in the latter part of her "Belinda." How that may be, I cannot pretend to say: Pamela was certainly led into some follies in this country; in particular she was said to have gone to a ball without shoes or stockings; which seems to argue the same sort of ignorance, and the same docility to any chance impressions, which characterize the Virginia of Miss Edgeworth. She was a daughter, I believe, of the wretched Philippe Egalité, by the truly disgust

that Prince's family, as governess to his children, especially to the sister of the present French King. Lord Edward's whole course had been marked by generosity and noble feeling of every kind. Far better to have pardoned such a man, and conciliated his support; but "those were not times of conciliation."

Some days after this event, were arrested the two brothers, named Shearer, men of talent, who eventually suffered for treason. These discoveries were made by a treachery of a peculiar sort; not from a treacherous brother, but a pretended brother, who had succeeded in passing himself off for a United Irishman. Government, without having penetrated to the heart of the mystery, had now discovered enough to guide them in their most energetic precautions; and the conspirators, whose policy had hitherto been to wait for the co-operation of a French army, now began to fear that the ground would be cut from beneath their feet if they waited any longer. More was evidently risked by delay than by dispensing with foreign aid. It was resolved, therefore, to commence the insurrection on the 23d of May; and, in order to distract the Government, by simultaneous assaults upon all the military posts in the neighbourhood of Dublin. This plan was discovered; but scarcely in time to prevent the effects of a surprise. On the 21st, late in the evening, the conspiracy had been announced by the Lord Lieutenant's Secretary to the Lord Mayor; and, on the following day, by a message from his Excellency to both Houses of Parliament.

The insurrection, however, began on the appointed day. The skirmishes were many, and in many places; and, generally speaking, they were unfavourable in their results to the insurgents. The mail-coaches, agreeably to the preconcerted plan, had been all intercepted; their non-arrival being everywhere understood as a negative signal that the war had commenced. Yet this summons to the more distant provinces had not been answered. The communication between the capital and the interior, almost completely interrupted at first, had been at length fully restored; and a few days saw the main strength (as it was supposed) of the insurrection suppressed without much bloodshed.

Just at this moment, when all the world was disposed to think the whole affair quietly composed, the flame burst out with tenfold fury in a part of the country from which Government, with some reason, had turned away their anxieties and their preparations. This was the county of Wexford, which the Earl of Mountnorris had described to the Government as so entirely pacific in purpose, and so well-affected to the loyal cause, that he had pledged himself for its good conduct. On the night before Whitsunday, however, May 27, the standard of revolt was raised by John Murphy, a Catholic priest, well known in the further progress of this insurrection, under the title of Father Murphy.

The campaign opened inauspiciously for the