Preface Dedicatory то THE IRISH NATION. BIOGRAPHY is of all narratives the most valuable. The revolutions of empires would be but a fairy tale to us, if they were not capable of supplying additional principles for our knowledge of human nature. Biography, like all things else, becomes more important as the influence of its subjects has been more extensive; for the future fates of a nation are made by its character, and its character is made by its celebrated men. But the deepest and holiest interest is thrown round Biography, when it is appealed to as the vindicator of an unhappy people; when the fallen are forced to bring in the dead to plead their cause, and find their only trophies in the tomb. The History of Ireland is the most calamitous moral document since the beginning of society. A government of barbarism was less succeeded than interrupted by a government of conquest; and the evil of this partial subjugation was reinforced by the 219. subordinate mischiefs of a divided law, a divided language, and a divided religion. The heroic savage of Ireland lost a share of his native virtues, and filled up their place by the arts of a perverted civilization. The arms and laws of England had made a sudden burst into the country, as irresistible as the invasion of the lava into the ocean; but their progress was as 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 north, 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; the 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 hungry and thwarted strength. Her government was a graduated tyranny, in which the sovereign stood at the highest point of licentiousness; and the people were sunk to the bottom of the scale, in chill and deadly depression. But no man who knows the history of Ireland, can compute the influence of Eng. land among the elements of her depression. She neglected, but she scarcely smote her. It was the physician disgusted by the waywardness of the patient, leaving disease to take its course, and not the assassin inflicting a fresh wound-where the blow was given, it was almost the result of necessity. England was then fighting for her freedom; the nations of the earth had not yet been awed into wisdom by the noble evidence that a people warring as she warred, cannot be conquered. She was engaged perpetually on her frontier; she had no time to think of the remote territory behind. She slept upon a rampart, from which she never cast her eyes, but to see |