The same testimony, though on a smaller scale, was given me two or three weeks ago, by a clergyman who has been labouring for nearly forty years in a country parish of some 1500, and who says he is simply lost in adoration at that which God has wrought. I have myself been permitted to be one of the Mission preachers at Cheltenham and at Kendal, and I felt that God was indeed very nigh unto us. A cloud of mercy seemed to rest over the congregations. I cannot but earnestly wish that some such plan as I ventured to suggest in a letter which appeared in the "Guardian" and "Record" on March 18, might commend itself to the brethren; viz., that those in the Metropolis who sympathize with the effort should devote the first twelve days of Lent to it every year; the provinces giving us their aid then, and we giving them ours in Advent, or at some other season. But whatever plan is adopted, so His Spirit remaineth among us, we will not fear. God only grant that we may not grieve that Spirit by any relapse into lukewarmness or apathy about the salvation of souls, by any distrustfulness of His power and love, by any low expectations of success. What a lesson we have from Elisha's deathbed. Joash smote on the ground thrice with the arrows and stayed," and the man of God was wroth with him, and said, Thou shouldst have smitten five or six times; then hadst thou smitten Syria till thou hadst consumed it whereas now thou shalt smite Syria but thrice." Let us honour our God by large expectations of success. The oil will not cease to flow while there is a vessel of faith to receive it. And above all, let us not despise the day of small things for though the work be carried on in human weakness, the building is God's, and the head-stone shall be brought forth with shoutings, "Grace, grace unto it." E. H. B. FROUDE'S ENGLISH IN IRELAND IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. The English in Ireland, in the Eighteenth Century. By J. A. Froude, M.A. Vols. II. and III. London: Longmans. 1874. AMONG the portions of Spenser's Fairie Queene, with which ordinary readers are most familiar, is the Legend of Sir Artegall, or of Justice. It will be remembered by them, that when Astræa returned to Heaven, she left with him her groome, an yron man, who was always attendant upon her, to execute her stedfast doome :- "His name was Talus, made of yron mould, With which he thresht out falshood, and did truth unfould." It has been ordinarily supposed that under the semblance of Sir Artegall, we are to discover the lineaments of Lord Grey, who went to Ireland, with Spenser for his secretary, but we have never heard that the poet identified himself with Talus. He was probably only an imaginary character in the sixteenth century, but in the person of Mr. Froude he has become a reality in the nineteenth. In the course of our reading, we can never remember such an "uncasing of counterfeits out of the foreside of their forgerie;" and our only regret is, that the publication of these volumes has been so long delayed, that, even with the aid which they supply, it will be no easy matter to disabuse the public of the glamour and delusions under which they have been so long held spell-bound. Even if, by any ingenious process, a restoration can be effected of the popular idols which have been smashed to pieces by Mr. Froude's relentless iconoclasm, they will ever hereafter bear the marks of the sore battering which they have received. In his first volume, Mr. Froude had very plainly enunciated the general tenour of his views regarding the Irish people, and the relations of England towards them. In his judgment, the Celtic inhabitants of the country were a race not devoid of many admirable qualities, but with a singular incapacity for self-government, which had reduced them amongst themselves to a most deplorable state of anarchy and barbarism, and had rendered it indispensable for the great country which was in immediate proximity to them, to rule them with severity, but with justice. Probably none but Irish Celts will dispute the faithfulness of his portraiture of the people, when their own intestine brawls, and the selfish ambition of the Romish pontiffs, first led to their subjugation by England. Then England planted a garrison in the country, and from time to time has renewed it. This is not a pleasant view of the subject, and modern politicians have sought, by all sorts of sophistry, to evade the recognition of it; but it is nevertheless a fact, which the Irish Celt has been too shrewd, and too keen-sighted, ever to become unconscious of. Mr. Froude may justly claim some merit for making it impossible for any Englishman to be ignorant of what every Celt feels in the core of his inmost heart. This delusion is henceforward dispelled for all but wilful ignorance. Mr. Froude's history is a record of the mistakes committed by the garrison, and the mismanagement of it by the English authorities which planted it in the country. His bill of indictment against them is a most formidable one; and although his notion of England's wrong-doings is as different from that of an Irish patriot as can possibly be imagined, it is far more humiliating and unpleasant than the wild ravings which every sane person who has any tincture of information of the subject must be conscious, are, for the most part, mere distortions of the truth. We recall this fundamental proposition of Mr. Froude's as indispensable to the comprehension of his statements, and now proceed to the further elucidation of them which he has furnished in the volumes before us. As he tersely puts it, in Ireland there "was then a free representative legislature, which yet was not free, and was not representative-a gentry who could not rule-a Church which could not teach laws which could not be enforced-all the result of the preference of unreality to fact." The subject of the second volume is what Mr. Froude terms the Protestant revolt. He characterises this as an act of madness-madness in the colony which revolted, madness in the mother country which provoked the quarrel. The causes which led to it were partly religious, partly commercial. The garrison was Presbyterian; at any rate, it was so in its numerically preponderant element. It was thus, in a most important point, separated in sentiment from those who should naturally have been its officers and leaders. We deem it improbable that any holiness of life and conversation on the part of the Irish clergy, or hearty recognition on the part of the Irish gentry, would have completely bridged over this difference, and established thoroughly cordial relations between Presbyterians and Episcopalians. But much might have been effected by an exhibition of kindly sympathy in the face of a common enemy. Of this there was little or no manifestation, and from the north of Ireland there was for years an exodus of sullen discontent which bore bitter fruits in the American revolution. The same policy which recognized Presbyterianism in Scotland, should have shown it at least equal favour in the North of Ireland. We must refer the reader to Mr. Froude's volumes for the astonishing infatuation which drove Protestants at times into union with their bitterest enemies, at times into emigration from those who should have been their friends. But this was not all. The Presbyterians of Ulster were an industrious, intelligent race. They had multiplied in the land, and the country was prospering in which they dwelt. The flax manufacture had been particularly developed. It would have seemed but common sense and reason to have encouraged them to the very uttermost. The treatment which they experienced on one memorable occasion must be told, as a sample, in Mr. Froude's own words: "The fifth Earl and first Marquis of Donegal, already, by the growth of Belfast, by the fruits of other men's labours while he was sitting still, enormously rich, found his income still unequal to his yet more enormous expenditure. His name is looked for in vain among the nobles who, in return for their high places, were found in the active service of their country. He was one of those habitual and splendid absentees who discharged his duties to the God who made him by consenting to exist, and to the country which supported him by magnificently doing as he would with his own. "Many of his Antrim leases having fallen in simultaneously, he demanded a hundred thousand pounds in fines for the renewal of them. The tenants, all Protestants, offered the interest of the money in addition to the rent. It could not be. Speculative Belfast capitalists paid the fine, and took the lands over the heads of the tenants to sublet. A Mr. Upton, another great Antrim proprietor, imitated the example, and 'at once a whole country side were driven from their habitations.' The sturdy Scots, who in five generations had reclaimed Antrim from the wilderness, saw the farms which they and their fathers had made valuable let by auction to the highest bidder; and when they refused to submit themselves to robbery, saw them let to others, and let in many instances to Catholics, who would promise anything to recover their hold upon the soil." (vol. ii. pp. 118, 119.) The most substantial of the expelled tenantry gathered their effects together, and sailed for the New World, where they became the most bitter of the secessionists. Many of those who remained behind formed themselves into the Hearts of Steel, and rose in insurrection; but were easily quelled, as they had no quarrel with the Government, and the landlords did not persevere further. But much distress resulted; and then "Flights of Protestant settlers had been driven out earlier in the century by the idiotcy of the bishops. Fresh multitudes now winged their way to join them, and in no tender mood towards the institutions under which they had been so cruelly dealt with. The Honse of Commons had backed up the landlords. The next year they had to hear from the Linen Board that many thousands of the best manufacturers and weavers with their families had gone to seek their bread in America, and that thousands were preparing to follow.' Again a committee was appointed to enquire. This time the blame was laid on England, which had broken the linen compact, given bounties to the Lancashire millowners which Belfast was not allowed to share, and 'in jealousy of Irish manufactures' had laid duties on Irish sail cloth, contrary to express stipulation. The accusation, as the reader knows, was true. Religious bigotry, commercial jealousy, and modern landlordism had combined to do their worst against the Ulster settlement. The emigration was not the whole of the mischief. Those who went carried their arts and their tools along with them, and at the rate at which the stream was flowing the colonies would soon have no need of British and Irish imports. In the two years which followed the Antrim evictions, thirty thousand Protestants left Ulster for a land where there was no legal robbery, and where those who sowed the seed could reap the harvest. They went with bitterness in their hearts, cursing and detesting the aristocratic system of which the ennobling qualities were lost, and only the worst retained. The south and west were caught by the same movement, and ships could not be found to carry the crowds who were eager to go. The emigration was not only depriving Ireland of its manufactures, but of the sinews of its trade.' 'Rich yeomen with their old leases expired' refused to renew them in a country where they were to live at other men's mercy, and departed with their families and their capital. Protestant settlements which had lingered through the century now almost disappeared. Bandon, Tullamore, Athlone, Kilbeggan, and many other places, once almost exclusively English and Scotch, were abandoned to the priests and the Celts. Pitiable and absurd story, on the face of which was written madness! "Industry deliberately ruined by the commercial jealousy of England; the country abandoned to anarchy by the scandalous negligence of English statesmen; idle absentee magnates forgetting that duty had a meaning, and driving their tenants into rebellion and exile; resident gentry wasting their substance in extravagance, and feeding their riot by wringing the means of it out of the sweat of the poor; a Parliament led by patriots whose love of country meant but the art to embarrass Government, and wrench from it the spoils of office; Government escaping from its difficulties by lavishing gold which, like metallic poison, destroyed the self-respect and wrecked the character of those who stooped to take it; the working members of the community, and the worthiest part of it, flying from a soil where some fatal enchantment condemned to failure every effort made for its redemption-such was the fair condition of the Protestant colony planted in better days to show the Irish the fruits of a nobler belief than their own, and the industrial virtues of a nobler race! Who can wonder that English rule in Ireland has become a byeword? who can wonder that the Celts failed to recognise a superiority which had no better result to show for itself?" (vol. ii. pp. 124-127.) We have quoted this remarkable passage at length, because it explains, in what we believe to be a most truthful and sufficient manner, the real reasons why the Protestant religion has not been the prevalent religion of Ireland, and why peace and security have been unknown in the land. Against the violence of Papists the Protestant community could have abundantly held their own; but against the persistent discouragement of those who should have upheld them in every extremity, even their stubbornness yielded, and there was a drain from the country of its life-blood, which has not yet ceased. It may startle some of our readers to hear the terms in which Mr. Froude speaks of |