Chapter II: Part 2

“A wild story concerning O’Rourke,” says the author of the History of the Irish Bards, “wanders about the County of Leitrim. O’Rourke was a powerful and turbulent chieftain of this country in the reign of Elizabeth. The Queen invited him to London, making him, at the same time, warm professions of honours and service, though she only intended, by this invitation, to lead him into a kind of exile, in order to secure his obedience. The ingenuous O’Rourke, duped by the Queen’s arts, promised to comply. Before his departure, he assembled his vassals and neighbours in the great hall of his castle, and entertained them with all the splendour of the times.[20] This is the feast so humorously described by Mac Gauran.

“On O’Rourke’s arrival at Whitehall, the Queen was ready to receive him. The elegant symmetry of his person, and his noble aspect, struck her Majesty, and she secretly determined to rank him with her choicest favourites. A sumptuous apartment was allotted him in the palace, and a train of domestics were ordered to attend him. One night, a female tapped at his door, and was readily admitted; but she retired before the morning broke. The lady continued her visits for several nights, always retiring about the same hour. O’Rourke’s curiosity was awakened and he often urged her, but in vain, to disclose her name. At length he discovered, by the light of the moon, a ring on one of her fingers, which he observed with strict care, in the hope that it would lead to a discovery. Next day espying the identical ring on her Majesty’s finger, he unfortunately insinuated to her that he had discovered his fair visitor. The following night an assassin was employed to punish him for his idle curiosity.” The public execution of O’Rourke is however on historical record.[21]

The fate of O’Neil, O’Rourke, and of O’Connor, who, to his own eternal disgrace,[22] had been lured over to the English court, was not calculated to encourage others, or to bring absenteeship into fashion. Even those, who from long sufferings, harassed spirits, and subdued energies, were desirous of peace and forgiveness at the expense of independence, were still afraid, from experienced treachery, “to come in,” as the phrase was; and were unwilling to absent themselves from the fearful security of their woods and mountains, to which they were romantically attached.

Lord Deputy Mountjoy, in a curious letter to the English council, observes that “all the Irish that are now obstinate, are so only out of their diffidence to be safe in forgiveness. They have the ancient swelling of liberty of their countrymen to work on, and they fear to be rooted out, and have their old faults punished upon particular discontents.”

The plunder of Shane O’Neil, who, attainted, and driven beyond the pale of law and of humanity, died a miserable death, did not satisfy those who had benefited by his ruin. There was something too terrible to be endured in the name of these fierce toparchs of the North, who were still crowned in their stone chair, “with heaven for their canopy and earth for their footstool;” and when the young and gallant Hugh O’Neil, the last of his race, worthy of their illustrious descent, started up to claim his inheritance, his death or his absenteeship (a political decease) were the alternatives proposed to themselves by those who had so largely profited by the confiscation of the immense property of his family. “In an Irish parliament,” says Morrison, “O’Neil put up his petition, that by virtue of letters patent granted to his grandfather, his father, and their heirs, he might there (in parliament) have the place of Earl of Tyrone, and be admitted to his inheritance. The title and place were granted him:” but the inheritance was “reserved for the Queen’s pleasure;” for the obtaining whereof, Sir John Perrot, (Lord Deputy,) upon O’Neil’s promise of a great rent to be reserved to the crown, gave him letters of recommendation into England. There he well knew how to humour the court; for in the year 1587 he got the queen’s letters patent for the earldom of Tyrone without any reservation of the rent he had promised.

Whatever was O’Neil’s secret for “humouring the court,” great efforts were made to fix him there as a permanent absentee; and the queen (who at the same time had the young and unfortunate Earl of Desmond shut up in the Tower[23]) gave O’Neil a troop of horse, a pension of a thousand marks, and such proofs of her personal favour, as might have subdued a less energetic mind, and abated a less deep-seated feeling of patriotism and independence. But the young Irish Hercules soon became weary of the court of his middle-aged Omphale. He sought “_to do her Majesty service_” in Ireland by his influence over his countrymen, rather than to submit to the bondage which he foresaw awaited his protracted residence in England. “He lived,” says Morrison, “sometimes in Ireland and much at the court of England:” yet by degrees he abandoned the English court altogether; and, resuming his natural position in Ireland as Earl of Tyrone, he contrived to preserve the good opinion of his countrymen even while acting for the queen, “with all the alacrity of a faithful subject.”

The reappearance of O’Neil in Ireland, his loyalty, and the queen’s favour, threw the Irish government into utter consternation; and the Lord Deputy Fitzwilliam, upon the execution of M‘Mahon (who was put to death for an offence committed before the law which declared it capital had been enacted) let fall some speeches against the Earl of Tyrone (says Morrison) notwithstanding his late services,[24] “which speeches coming to the Earl’s ears, were, as he afterwards said, the first causes which _moved him to misdoubt his safety_, and to stand upon his defence, now first combining with O’Donnel and other lords of the north, to defend their honour, estates, and liberties.” The horrors which ensued during a civil war of ten years’ duration, and which laid waste what Lord Verulam calls “the most miserable and desolate nation on the face of the earth,” produced the most effectual species of absenteeship; for it sent out of the world, those that were not driven by any other means out of the country; exterminating more than a third of the native population!

The queen, however, says Bacon, “sought not an extirpation, but a reduction;” but such was the _reduction_, that at the end of the war, when Lord Mountjoy received the submission of a few “well-disposed chiefs,” he _disposed_ of the others in a very summary way, “and by fire, famine, or sword, weakened or ruined most of those who still continued obstinate.” Still, however, the master-blow of this deputy (who was after all one of the best Irish viceroys who served under the Tudors) was the ruin of the once magnanimous and invincible O’Neil. Having “taken the most of his fortresses, and what perhaps was more mortifying to him, having broken in pieces the chair of stone, wherein for many centuries the O’Neils of his family had been invested with more than kingly authority, he obliged the unfortunate chief “to tender his submission on his knees before the Lord Deputy and the council, and in the presence of a great assembly; whereupon the Lord Deputy, in the Queen’s name, promised the Earl for himself and his followers her majesty’s gracious pardon.” Is it wonderful that in the ensuing reign the O’Neils and the O’Donnels fled for ever from the scene of their sufferings and humiliation; or that having chosen Spain as the goal of their permanent absenteeship, they should have arrived there, only to die of broken hearts?

Remote as are the times, the events of which are here so slightly touched,--unfixed, capricious and despotic as were the government and the laws,--rude, wild, weak and disorganized as was the state of society,--yet, through the obscurity and confusion which hung over the neglected annals of the day, it is evident that absenteeism, sometimes encouraged or enforced by the English policy, was foreign to the national habits and natural temperament of the Irish; and that the aristocracy of the country were more than any other wedded to their native land by natural affection, by family pride, by power, by religion, and by every feeling and every prejudice which brightens or shadows the mixed and imperfect condition of humanity. Hitherto emigration had been the result of necessity or of despair; but it was reserved for the Stuarts, Ireland’s direst foes, the flatterers of her foible, and the enemies of her rights, to give a spell to absenteeism, which even the policy and the despotism of the Tudors could not lend to it. When the rude home of the Irish had by the sanguinary crusades of Elizabeth been rendered no longer endurable, the Stuarts held out a lure and presented a blandishment which suffering humanity could not resist; and under an impulse, consecrated by a mistaken sense of loyalty and chivalrous devotion, the long-enduring Irish rushed from the dreariness of their desolate abodes, and thronged to a court where they fancied they saw the representative of their native kings, seated on the throne of their foreign tyrants.

The drivelling and despotic pedant, James, with the true family instinct towards power, sought to win over that portion of his subjects whose religion preached “passive obedience and the divine right of kings,” and with whom he had so deeply tampered in the reign of his predecessor. On his coming to the throne, he loaded the Irish with favours, while he withheld rights; but with a disingenuous and stupid policy, secretly counteracting the intentions of his own council, he privately led the Irish to an open assumption of religious privileges, which he permitted his ministers in Ireland to oppose, not only by remonstrance and proclamation, but by “fire and sword.” To ingratiate himself still further with the Irish gentry, and to break down whatever yet remained of devotion to their country, or of “the old swelling of liberty,” inherited from their fathers, he invited the most distinguished among them to his court; where, “graciously received by the king,” and incontinently ridiculed by the courtiers, they obtained the honour of being made the heroes of a court masque, in which the sarcastic laureate, Jonson, has handed down to posterity their devotion to “_the king’s sweet faish_,” and the melancholy fact that they danced “_a fadan_” for the amusement of “_King Yamish_;” who, as the arch-patron of all buffoonery, doubtless chuckled over the degrading exhibition. How many Irish _absentees_ have since danced “_the fadan_,” for the amusement of mystifying royalty![25]

Thus prepared, by being “brayed as in a mortar” at home, and at once degraded and flattered abroad, the Irish nobility but too willingly lent themselves to the allurements held out by Charles the Second; (the falsest of all their royal friends;) and from the epoch of the Restoration absenteeship became a voluntary habit. It was then that what has been called the characteristic virtue of the Irish, became the source of one of their peculiar vices; and that the feeling of loyalty which had led them to follow the king in his misfortunes, and to embrace his almost hopeless cause in many a distant land, now once more lured them from their own, to “share the triumph and partake the gale” of his prosperity. The habits of a great capital and a gay court confirmed their taste for emigration, and excited a disgust for their native land, which became, in the end, as fatal to their interests as it was destructive of their patriotism. Then absenteeism became a species of national malady, a disease, infinitely more grievous in its effects than that terrible pestilence, which, a little before, in ravaging the population of Ireland, confined its mortal epidemia to a season and a generation.[26]

Absenteeism was no longer limited to the harassed Catholic gentlemen or loyal cavaliers, who came to seek the price of their sacrifice and their fidelity at the exchequer of royal gratitude, and found it, like that of the nation, closed by a fraudulent bankruptcy. The wealthy and the noble, the Protestant and the Papist, the English by blood, and the Scotch patentees; in a word, all who could afford to fly, now hastened to a court, where for a time an Irish mistress and an Irish minister held the ascendant; and where the Ormondes, the Ossorys, and the Villars, exchanged the honourable retreat of their own beautiful residences in Ireland, for the entresol of a royal villa at Newmarket, or “a lodging” in the harem of Whitehall.[27] Titles, and places, and pensions, and privileges, were then scattered among the Irish nobility, and became the premium of absenteeism; paying the sacrifice of patriotism in one sex, and of honour in the other. The talent, beauty, and virtue, which, if concentrated at home, might have redeemed and adorned the country from whence they were drawn, now served but to increase the sum of elegant profligacy in that region, whose very atmosphere was as fatal to manly independence, as it was to female purity. Ireland, thus abandoned by the heads of her noble families, deserted by her rank, her talent, her beauty, and her education, pouring out the “_profits of the land to those who refunded nothing_,”--unhappy Ireland, during the whole of the reign of Charles II. exhibited the most deplorable picture of a country left a prey to strangers, to undertakers, to patentees, to delegated powers, and official despotism; and of a society which, false in its position, and divested of all those ties and combinations which bind man to man, was totally destitute of every element that confers the strength of political cohesion, and disseminates the advantages of moral civilization.

In the midst of this anti-social chaos, every act of the legislature served to render the atoms of the system more jarring and discordant, until finally “the _Act of Settlement_,” by unsettling every thing and rendering “confusion worse confounded,” added insult to injury, and multiplied both the causes and the effects of absenteeism to the opulent of all sects. The country was now more than ever given up to a particular faction, which made its powerful stand on the heights of ascendancy, under the sanction of a king who, in a great degree, owed his life and throne to those whom that ascendancy was to reduce to slavery and ruin.[30] It was at this period, more than any other, that the stale devices of Catholic conspiracies and Popish plots were resorted to, as a means of startling a distant ignorant legislature into new acts of rigour, which, by crushing all that remained to be crushed, by forfeitures and penalties, was to elevate a factious minority of the nation to the supremacy of power and wealth.

The English Parliament, frightened, or pretending to be so, by the state of things in Ireland, published a proclamation “for the apprehension and prosecution of all Irish rebels,” at a moment when Ireland had sealed by her best blood her devotion to the reigning dynasty; and the King, in the face of his pledged honour and royal promise, excluded from the act of indemnity (which was shortly after passed) more than two thirds of his Irish subjects, who had alone been faithful to him, when all else were false. While calumny and misrepresentation were thus working the destruction of Ireland abroad, there were none at home to “remonstrate,” as in the time of Elizabeth and James; none to protect or vindicate the national character, or to raise the dark veil, which the cupidity of domestic and predatory enemies had dropped over the injuries, the worth, and the misfortunes of the country. It is still more lamentable to add, that some of the most illustrious of the absentees, who haunted the Court as dependants, or influenced the Cabinet as counsellors, found it their account to sanction the misrepresentations, and to perpetuate a state of things by which the noble renegadoes were to be themselves the ultimate gainers. It is the effect of absenteeship to harden the heart against all the precious sympathies of patriotism, and it has ever been the practice of absentees to magnify and circulate the rumour of those national disorders which arise in part out of their own desertion of their native land, and which they suppose might offer a reason, if not an excuse, for their abandonment of the soil and its interests.[31]

The times, however, changed with the men, and the short reign of the unfortunate bigot James II. was pregnant with new and important events for Ireland. At the first temporary turn of the scale in Irish politics, absenteeism, which could scarcely increase, certainly did not diminish. By this change, the nation at large gained little; and the mean ambition of the nobility, who accepted power and place without one feeling of patriotism or sympathy for the country, was soon nipped in the bud, and for ever blasted with the fortunes of the monarch, on whose favour it was founded.[32] The Irish gentry supported the cause of despotism and bigotry in vain; and the impetuous imbecility of James served only to hasten that ruin, which public opinion had so deservedly prepared for him and his family. The mistaken adherence of the people to so bad a cause, was, in some measure redeemed by the disinterested fidelity with which they continued to serve that family in its adversity, which in prosperity had always repaid their services with ingratitude. It was the Irish (the ultra-royalists of all times) who, during the dark fortunes of the worthless _protégé_ of the Bourbons, clung to him, when all else deserted him. They manned his navy, recruited his army, replenished his coffers, and took their stand around his person on their native soil; and when they saw him the first to fly,[33] they still erected his torn standard, and rallied in his cause,[34] paying the penalty of their generous but misapplied devotion to a bigot and a tyrant, by utter ruin, and eternal exile. The outlawry and confiscations of 1688 drove near four thousand Irishmen of family into a dreary and perpetual absenteeism, and sent them to dole out for a pitiful hire, in the cause of oppression in other countries, the same valour, and the same spirit, which their fathers had displayed in support of the liberty of their own.

The sale of the estates of these unfortunate and involuntary absentees,[35] under the authority of the English parliament, changed a large portion of the Irish population, and introduced a new race of landed proprietors, whose interest it was _to stay at home_. The tide of absenteeship received a powerful check from the necessity of circumstances. Those Irish Catholics, who had escaped detection, or were exempt from suspicion, retired to their remote patrimonial domains, and sought safety in obscurity; hoping, by remaining peaceably at home, to escape the notice of a government which had sprung out of a revolution they had so lately opposed. The Protestants likewise found it their interest to remain the vigilant guardians of the new possessions they had recently acquired, and of the old, which they had so bravely protected. All parties were either impoverished or unsettled; and few had the means, if they had the desire, to remove from a scene of ferment and desolation, to one of security and enjoyment. For the Irish of any sect or race, there was then no resting-place.

While England gained every thing by a revolution, which she owed to the moral and political education acquired during a century of struggle for civil rights and religious freedom, Ireland lost nearly all she had left to lose through her deficiency in these endowments, resulting from many centuries of anarchy and misrule. The picture, sketched by a master-hand, of the condition of affairs at this singular epoch, is full of a fearful and melancholy interest. “By the total reduction of the kingdom of Ireland in 1691,” says Burke, “the ruin of the native Irish, and in a great measure of the first race of the English, was completely accomplished. The new interest was settled with as solid a stability as any thing in human affairs can look for. All the penal laws of that unparalleled code of oppression which were made after the last event, were manifestly the effects of national hatred and scorn towards a conquered people, whom the victors delighted to trample upon, and were not at all afraid to provoke. They were not the effects of their fears, but of their security. They who carried on this system looked to the irresistible force of Great Britain for their support in their acts of power. They were quite certain that no complaints of the natives would be heard on this side of the water, with any other sentiments than those of contempt and indignation. Their cries served only to augment their torture. Machines which could answer their purposes so well must be of an excellent contrivance. Indeed, at that time, in England, the double name of the complainants, Irish and Papists, (it would be hard to say singly which was the most odious,) shut up the hearts of every one against them. Whilst that temper prevailed in all its force to a time within our memory, every measure was pleasing and popular, just in proportion as it tended to harass and ruin a set of people who were looked upon as enemies to God and man; and, indeed, as a race of bigoted savages, who were a disgrace to human nature itself.”[36]

In spite, however, of religious intolerance[37] and civil disqualification--of statutes which render commerce a crime, and laws which made industry penal[38]; of abuses of power numerous under William, and quadrupled under the last of the Stuarts and the first of the Brunswicks, still something like a counterpoise was found to balance these political evils in the _home residence of the educated gentry_, and in the political bustle and activity of an Irish Parliament. As soon as the positive calamities of war and confiscation ceased, as soon as an approach was made to European habits and policy, and industry was permitted to find a scope and a reward for its exertions, the nation made a sudden and a rapid progress in civilization and comfort, simply through the efficiency of its own resources, and the demands of its own market. It was in vain that the talismanic words “Irishman” and “Papist” were employed to arm passion and prejudice against the country; it was in vain that commercial jealousy threw shackles round its infant manufactures. In spite of these and many other obstacles, the moral strength of a country always distinguished for the natural endowments of its population,[39] rose superior to the cruel pressure of its political inflictions; and the domestic activity and intellectual improvement of the people--slow and limited as they appear, when compared with the advances of the sister kingdom--proceeded with a rapidity little short of miraculous, under so stultifying a system of legislation and government. It was then that the light of national genius concentrated its long-scattered rays to a point, and shining steadily from its proper focus, threw out those inextinguishable sparks of moral lustre,

“----Which are wont to give
Light to a world and make a nation live.”

It was then that the powerful collision of active, ardent, and energetic minds produced that brilliant burst of talent which, for something more than a century, flung over the political darkness of the land a splendour to which her struggles and her misfortunes served only to give a stronger relief and more brilliant effect. It was then that, after ages of mental depression, which the song of the Irish bard but deepened into a more poetical sadness,[40] the Irish intellect broke out, like the Irish rebellion, “threescore thousand strong,” when none expected or were prepared for the startling and splendid irruption. The old mart of learning was re-opened to the erudite of Europe, as in those times, when if a sage was missing, it was said “_emandatus est ad disciplinam in Hibernia_;” and the rich stream of native humour which, like a caverned river, had hitherto kept the “noiseless tenor of its way,” darkened by impending shadows, now rushed forth with the rapidity of a torrent, pure, sparkling, and abundant, at the first vent afforded to its progress. Science and philosophy now first raised their altars amidst the monkish monuments of an antiquated institution, and benefited the world by theories and by experiments originated in a land where public opinion and private faith were still struggling under the ban of legal proscription.[41] England then opened a running account with Ireland for dramatic contributions when her own resources had, by being too largely drawn upon, nearly become bankrupt;[42] and literary Europe stood indebted to Irish wit, fancy, and humour, for the richest treats, which render the leisure of the learned delectable, and the amusement of the idle instructive.[43]

Even the arts, in these stirring times of social concentration, awakened from their long and deadly slumbers; and the slowly reviving school of painting in England received some of its most noted disciples from Ireland, a country so little adapted, by its miseries and its commotions, to the cultivation of the most tranquil and meditative of intellectual pursuits.[44] At this time, too, the Irish muse found a willing and a worthy priestess in one of the fair daughters of the land,[45] where her temples had so long been closed; and “the mother of sweet singers,” awakened by the genius of national melody, beheld her sons

“Thronging round her magic cell,”

as in the days of the Mayos[46] and the O’Connors.[47]

The triumphs of Carolan, the last of the Firsgealaighthes or Irish Troubadours, were followed by those of Handel and Piccini;[48] and though the wild sweet tones of the Irish harp were still occasionally heard in the pauses of the Messiah and of the elegant Armida, still, taste, improving with the developement of the art, soon rendered the Italian and German schools of music the exclusive study in Ireland; and they excited an enthusiasm which well belonged to a people who, in all their wretchedness and degradation, had found in music a vehicle for their feelings and their passions, for their deep-seated indignation, and their long-meditated revenge. St. Bridget now hid her diminished head in her “cell of the oak;[50] while St. Cecilia saw more tapers lighted at her shrine in the Irish capital than ever illumined her dusky chapel in the Trastevere at Rome. Music halls were built for public concerts; and musical societies, assuming the importance and dignities of corporate bodies, were formed out of the amateur[51] and professional talent of the country; while the conciliating genius of harmony, refusing that “to a party which was meant for mankind,” devoted its divine powers to smoothing political austerities, reknitting the social affections, and promoting the first of all human virtues--charity.[52] Oh! surely this was the true purpose for which the Divinity breathed into the soul of man that fine susceptibility to the mystic charm of harmony, which lulls the harsher passions, and substitutes the excitement of delicious sensations for the bitter feelings and harassing emotions which the cross purposes of life call hourly into existence. Who now in Ireland but may look back with regret to the philharmonic societies “of other times,” from the magic of whose strains a shelter rose for the wretched, and in whose bands men of all parties blended the “concord of sweet sounds.” Who that in the present day has witnessed in the capital of Ireland, the different and dark purposes to which music and musical society have been perverted, but must lament that the sweetest of the arts should have been pressed into the service of civil dissension--should have fulfilled the purposes of party intrigue, and gratified the malice of a narrow-souled faction. Who but must shudder to perceive its influence directed to rousing the irritable fibre, and stirring up the bile of political malady; to exciting by its “musical cheers” the passions of the powerful few against the suffering many, and fomenting by its choicest harmonies the discord of social disunion and the dissonance of party hatred. Spirits of Handel and of Arne, of Calcott and of Mozart, how little did ye dream in your philosophy that your heaven-inspired strains should serve as the war-whoop of faction, the death-song of domestic peace, and national confraternity!!

While music excited in Ireland the same enthusiasm, and was cultivated with more science, than when “in early Greece she sung,” the drama partook of the triumph. Two royal theatres and an Italian opera-house[53] could scarcely supply the cravings of the public taste; and an audience, noted for its critical acumen, gave to the Irish stage a classical character, and developed a competition which drew forth candidates for dramatic fame even from the higher classes of society, conferring that respectability upon the members of the stage, which ought at all times to belong to a profession which holds so decided an influence over the morals and the manners of a nation.[54]

But though the circumstances of the times rendered the home residence of the Irish gentry more permanent than it has since ever been, or perhaps ever was before, the fashion universally prevailed of sending the youth of good family to make the grand tour; and the young and travelled aristocracy, the Fitzgeralds, the Caulfields, the Kirwans, the O’Neils, the Blakes, came back, no less to improve the tastes of their country, than to defend her cause, and to enlarge the sphere of her energies. A variety of refined amusements and elegant enjoyments, hitherto unknown in Ireland, came in their suite; which while they gave employment and food to the lowly and the industrious, tended to disseminate that taste for factitious pleasures, and that craving for refined gratifications, which though not in themselves the efficient causes of civilization, are in no small degree favourable to its developement.[55] Pleasure, lured to the Irish shores from distant regions, planted her gay standard, and raised her brilliant pavilions in the capital, at that time crowded with the wealthy and the educated. The ridottos of the music hall, with their fantastic arrangements and sylvan scenery,[56] recalled the similar festivities of the Italian carnival. Palaces succeeded to the cumbrous mansions of the seventeenth century; and Charlemont house, with its beautiful architecture, its splendid library, and invaluable collections, still preserved in all their integrity by the present noble owner, stands a singular monument not only of the pure taste and magnificent spirit of an Irish nobleman, who had even higher claims to the admiration and respect of his country, but of the genius of the times, and the prosperity--the short-lived prosperity--of the land in which such a private edifice was raised. The villas of Tuscany and Lombardy were repeated along the shores of a bay that wanted only a Vesuvius to rival that of Naples; and the names which these pretty villas still bear, recal the travelled tastes of their elegant founders.[57] Private theatricals (the dramatis personæ taken from the red book) were got up in the castles of the O’Neils and the halls of the Butlers; and the public assemblies, held under the newly-raised dome of the Rotunda, were types of the _casino nobile_ of Florence and Bologna;[58] while the Sunday evening promenades in its illuminated gardens contributed to the funds of a blessed charity, and bestowed that health and those spirits, without which the kindlier feelings are too frequently blighted, and the generous propensities absorbed in a querulous and fretful egoism.[59]

The Irish press!--and who that now knows the capital of Ireland, and beholds its utter incompetency to support the publication of even _one_ trifling periodical work, will believe that Ireland once _had a press_!--the Irish press then teemed with native literary productions; which if as mere “_pieces de circonstance_,” thrown off at a heat, they might sometimes want the higher finish of more elaborated composition, were still stamped with the ardour of the national spirit, and “faithful to its fires.” The frequent and “keen encounter of the wits” upon great questions, produced an animated competition, which even the statesman-like sobriety of English viceroys could not always resist. The Draper’s letter of Lord Chesterfield, (an imitation of Swift,) and the political caricatures of Lord Townshend, written at a later period, were proofs that Ireland was not always governed by the dull and the dogged, and that her metropolis once boasted of a society which _obliged_ the representatives of majesty as well as the representatives of the people to cultivate the suffrages of the public, by means never addressed to an uncivilized or an illiterate community. Politics and polemics then alike fell to the discussion of humour and talent. The public journals, though few, were fair; their editors were responsible both by their property and their personal consideration; and their contributors were frequently the most brilliant members of Irish society, the most learned sons of the Irish alma mater. Swift, Dr. Sheridan, Lucas, Flood, Burgh, Yelverton, Courtenay, Jephson, Bishop Marley, Grattan, Curran, and others equally notable, if not equally noted, contributed successively a portion of their luminous intellects to illustrate the pages of that mighty engine of public feeling--the PERIODICAL PRESS. Whatever side was advocated,--the country or the court, patriotism or power,--it does not appear that any journal was set up on a merely sordid principle, or an utter disregard of all truth and decency. There was then no waylaying with indiscriminate ruffianism the feelings of private individuals, no exhibition of the sacred details of the domestic life of political characters, as a means of existence to some outcast of society, who wanted the courage to seek a less dishonourable bread on the public highway. For when the genuine and educated gentry of Ireland, her hereditary senators and native legislators, made up the larger portion of the reading public of her capital, a journal edited by the nefarious and the base, by the hired assassin of reputation or the paid pander of ribald passions, would have been hunted down with one common feeling of national indignation and manly contempt. Where is the land, so lost in its degradation, so insensible to all its higher interests, as to endure that such a “damning witness” should go forth to the world and bear testimony to its moral, social, and literary depravity? Alas that there should be one! Alas that the land of wit and feeling should furnish forth readers, even from its high and official classes, to reward and encourage the instruments of its own disgrace! Alas for the country, where the hired servants of the government club their quota to propagate the rancorous overflowings of the vilest and most antisocial passions; where the ordained ministers of religion, subscribe for the dissemination of the grossest and most mischievous falsehoods; where the magistrate chuckles privately over the libel he is publicly bound to punish; and where to be pre-eminent in villainy and matchless in audacity, is the short road to command sympathy and ensure subsistence.

But if a reduction of absenteeism, if the permanent residence of the major part, of the wealth, the nobility, and above all, and more precious than all, of the EDUCATION of the country, produced these blessed effects, the greater good, the “last best gift,” which congregated interests and intellects could bestow on a community, Public Spirit, fell like dew in the desert upon the renovating nation. Men who had long learned to feel and to think, now, in the consciousness and confidence of their associated strength, first ventured to speak and to act: at once inspiring and inspired, they spoke as prophets and acted as patriots. The talent of the free suddenly burst into existence, as if by a divine miracle in the land of the enslaved; and eloquence, the inherent characteristic of the nation, which had occasionally broken forth in the rude but exciting harangues of the O’Donnels and the O’Neils, now shone out brilliantly, with a lustre which Athens in her best, and Rome in her greatest days, scarcely surpassed. Political oratory and political knowledge, proceeding from the same cause and bearing on the same point exhibited Ireland in a new aspect to the wondering world; and the names of Molyneux,[60] Ponsonby,[61] Prior,[62] Boyle,[63] Connolly,[64] Tottenham,[65] Lucas, Charlemont, Burke, Grattan, Curran--names which are now but sounds--will retain to the latest posterity their mystical and magic influence, as the signs of times and events, the glory of a nation’s history, and as the evoquing spells of that genius, which awakens liberty and watches over a nation’s happiness. Oh! these were times to live in and men to live among--when the capital of the kingdom was something better than a garrison or an assize town! when its fashionable assemblies were not thrown upon the eleemosinary contributions of barracks and boarding-schools, of military exquisites who “_never dance_,” and harmless young gentlemen who do nothing else! These were times, when the men were all at home, and their spirits all abroad! when the rush from the senate was sure to fill the drawing-room; and they who boldly fought in the one for the liberties of their country, came to lay their own liberty at the feet of beauty in the other. These were times, when even love and law went forth arm in arm together from the inns of court, to _that_ court, where the special pleading of counsel rarely failed to win the cause, where even losses were victories, and where the inconsiderate heart of the young legal aspirant selected its client for life without reference to politics, place, pension, or promotion. Then Leinster-house, and Charlemont-house, and Powerscourt-house, and Waterford-house, and Moira-house, and an hundred other splendid “_houses_” of the resident nobility, were open to the wit, the talent, the literature, and the gallantry of the country. Then, the cells of the University, silent as the tomb during the studious day, echoed at night to the song, the laugh, the epigram, or the jest of gay and brilliant spirits destined to come forth and enchant society by their social and colloquial powers; while they defended the independence of their country by their eloquence and patriotism. These were times when the charms of the lovely Gunnings, the more lovely Munroes,[66] and an hundred others of their lovely successors, were embalmed for posterity in the verses of contemporary poets; and when the amatory sonnets of one of the first orators of the age were not deemed inferior to his speeches at the bar, or his orations in the senate.[67] These were times when the young ladies of the capital did not wait for the _marching in_ of the divisions of a regiment, as their only chance of _marching out_ of the ranks of celibacy; for absenteeship was then but temporary: the young nobility and gentry, if they travelled and flirted abroad, came back to love and to marry at home; since, “where’er they roamed, whatever climes” they saw, they still saw nothing fairer than the fair they left behind them. These were times, which, when recalled, like Ossian’s Song of Sorrow, are both “pleasing and mournful to the soul.”

But to return. When penal statutes and all that is intended by the false policy of shallow and self-interested legislators to disqualify man for the knowledge and assertion of his political rights, still continued to check the progress of civil liberty in Ireland, the combined effects of a portion of the liberal and educated resident gentry were found sufficient to make head against a government which the sternest upholder of English power, and he too an Irish chancellor,[68] declared “was enough to crush any nation upon earth;” and which one of the wisest and best philanthropists of that or any age[69] has defined to have been “such a combination of rapine, treachery, and violence as would have disgraced the name of government in the most arbitrary country in the world.” Other events, bearing upon the same point, tended at this epoch to soften, if not to remedy the evils of that terrific code, which disgraced England even more than it degraded Ireland.[70] While the church militant in Ireland usurped a power in the persons of its Protestant popes, the primates and archbishops, which smelt of the times of the Beckets and the Wolseys,--while Boulter and Stone preserved their own supremacy by their well-sustained system of dividing Ireland within herself, and adding to her restrictions by fomenting her discontents,--it _did_ happen that the necessity of circumstances occasionally procured for the country a chief governor, whose personal interests in the land from which he drew his maintenance and support, awakened “some bowels for a poor relation,” or whose higher order of genius and generalized views raised him above the level of the miserable local politics, the petty cabals, and factious intrigues of that remote and wretched spot which is, in position as in politics, the _cul de sac_ of civilized Europe. These happy incidents indeed were rare, and make but a poor set-off in the balance, of vice-regal virtue and talent, against the dulness, bigotry, and ostentatious pretension, which have so often covered their Midas’ ears under the coronet of delegated sway.

It was under a Devonshire that the susceptible Irish, always led by personal feelings, first began to rally with confidence and hope round a government that seemed to abate in the execution, if not in the spirit of the law, something of that sanguinary reign which had hitherto chilled loyalty into despair; and the personal qualities of this great Irish proprietor were productive of the most felicitous effects, at the most fearful epoch in the reign of the house of Hanover. The Stuarts, the abdicated, the Catholic Stuarts, had planted their standard on the English and Scottish shores, and the English and the Scotch, to a dangerous amount, rushed from all parts to support the principles of Toryism, in the person of him who was the “brief abstract” of all Toryism. Where then in this moment of frightful exigency, when empire, liberty, and life were at stake, where then were those “_enfans de la revolution_,” the Protestant princes of Brunswick, the defenders of the faith of Luther, to look for the rally of defence, for the protection of loyalty against Catholic oppression? It was to the native Irish, the Catholic Irish! that England, in the face of her own savage laws,[71] turned for aid against British rebellion; and while the Irish gentry of all sects remained immutably true to their legitimate (or according to modern doctrines their _illegitimate_) sovereign, the flower of the Catholic population rushed forth to man the navy and recruit the army, which was to make a stand against successful rebellion,--successful at least for a time, in every part of the British islands save alone in Ireland.

Still, however, in this moment of fearful exigency, when the old idols of Irish devotion were again presenting themselves to a susceptible people in all the charm of struggle and misfortune, something more than the mild wisdom which the gentle blood of Cavendish has always produced, was deemed necessary to watch over Catholic Ireland; and one was chosen suited to meet the difficulties of the day, and to carry on that system of conciliation begun by the Duke of Devonshire. This one was Philip Stanhope Earl of Chesterfield, who, as the “Mirror of (Irish) Magistrates,” in which succeeding chief governors of Ireland should “dress themselves,” merits a particular notice.

This nobleman, who had been for ten years in opposition, was selected more in necessity than in liking: and he with difficulty obtained an audience of leave from reluctant Majesty, on his departure for his viceroyalty. When he demanded in the closet, “his Majesty’s commands,” he was coolly told that he had already received his instructions, and was dismissed without any token of confidence or of courtesy. While the ministry put him forward as an instrument of conciliation, and loaded him with the responsibility of a difficult government, they wished to retain in their own hands the substance of power, and to shackle him with some creature of their own, in the character of secretary; but he laughed at the intrigue, and in their despite chose for himself one, whom he describes to his son as “a very pretty young fellow, who knew nothing of business;” for he was determined to rule by himself, to see with his own eyes, and to encounter no subaltern interference with the system he chose to adopt. Such was the spirit in which Lord Chesterfield entered on his arduous mission, and ascended the vice-regal throne of Ireland, on which he was placed by that influence to which even kings and ministers must sometimes submit,--the influence of circumstances! Docile mediocrity, the ordinary qualification of an Irish Lord Lieutenant, was now no longer adequate to meet the exigencies of the hour, as in those times of comparative tranquillity, when any stalking-horse of diplomacy might be led over the beaten course by some self-sufficient political jockey with the name of chief secretary; who, without the pageantry of the higher office, monopolized all its patronage and exercised more than its powers. At this moment dangers both internal and external called for qualities of a different order, and the English government was driven to the desperate resource of accepting the aid of great abilities, at the expense of abiding by the decisions of untrammelled independence. Such was the moment at which George the Second disdainfully appointed one of the cleverest men of his empire to the government of Ireland; and to this involuntary election he probably owed that he was not himself sent back “to give his little senate laws” in his patrimonial estate of Hanover.

It was in vain that “Popery and the Pretender”[72] was the cry _mille fois repeté_ in the ears of this new and singular Lord Lieutenant,--that the old measures of the Boulters and the Stones were proposed as the golden rules of vice-regal conduct,--that preachers from the pulpit aroused the crusading spirit of intolerance against a sect beaten down to the earth,--that the domineering party of a haughty ascendancy assailed the audience-room of the Viceroy, and “stopped the chariot or boarded the barge,” to teach him how to rule, to force him to recur to a system beyond the rigour of the law, which enabled them to reign by dividing, while it placed him on the list of mannikin lord lieutenants, the wire-worked puppet of a bigoted faction. The acute, the elegant Chesterfield, soon fathomed the depths of their ferocious feebleness, and he played with the virulence he did not deign to wrestle with. When the advocates of intolerance preached persecution, he answered their counsels by an apotheghm and a _bon-mot_,--he quoted Cicero when they cited Nassau,--he gave them parties for their politics,--suppers for their sophistry, he forced them to swallow his measures with his claret,--and he stopped the mouths of many with good dinners on whom good arguments would have been thrown away. In a word, he knew them all, he defied them all; and in despite of that party in the ministry which supported an anti-national faction, he saved the wretched country they were driving into a rebellion, which at that peculiar moment might have separated Ireland for ever from the mother country.

By this personal combination of wisdom, humanity, and impartiality, Lord Chesterfield preserved a Catholic population in the most perfect peace and obedience, during the whole of that rebellion, which in Protestant England and Presbyterian Scotland had nearly restored the Stuarts to the throne they had forfeited by their blind and bigoted attachment to papal institutions--a memorable example of the value of an enlarged philosophy in governors, and of the disposition of the people to be grateful for kindness in their rulers, of their proneness to yield a willing obedience to authority, if encouraged by the slightest show of justice and fair dealing in those whom chance has placed over them.

But narrow hearts and narrow intellects, impervious to the more generous impulses of nature, and placing the whole force of government in the scaffold and the bayonet--oppressing those they fear, and fearing those they oppress--have too long exerted their baleful influence in brutalizing and debasing the Irish nation into permanent anarchy, creating those abuses, which they now plead in justification of their own unpitying rigour: and if in rare and distant intervals the patriotism and the kindly feelings of a Chesterfield have again found themselves under the canopy of the viceregal throne, the oppressor and the oppressed have alike been opposed to their beneficent activity. The good which Chesterfield effected in times of difficulty and danger, can now scarcely be hoped for even in the halcyon hour of peace: and should the British empire be again involved in foreign conflict, Ireland, unemancipated Ireland, might be urged to seek new destinies for herself in an alliance from which she _might_ have something to hope, but from which she could have nothing to fear more terrible than she has already encountered during the ceaseless miseries of nearly six centuries. Of this truth, harsh and repulsive as it may seem, no one who has studied the subject can entertain a rational doubt. The example of America is before the eyes of the people, and the hope delayed and the promise and the pledge unredeemed lie deep in their hearts: restrictive and penal laws, too severe even for occasional application, have become also permanent on the statute book; famine and pestilence have grown almost periodical in their visitations. From such premises what other conclusion can be drawn? An influence behind the throne, and greater than the throne, has chilled the sympathies and arrested the outstretched hand of royalty; even the collective wisdom of the empire has cowered before a party, and truckled to a faction; the cup of reconciliation, though pledged by a sovereign, has been drugged with poison; and a divided cabinet has distracted the country and paralyzed the exertions of the only public functionary, who for years has administered the laws of the country with any thing approaching to the spirit of mercy and of fairness.

From the period of Lord Chesterfield’s administration, the effects produced by the permanent residence of the Irish gentry, were felt in that most blessed consequence, the developement of a public spirit. The English in Ireland, says Burke, began to feel that they were domiciliated, and had a country; and the Irish found that what was technically called “the English interest,” was gradually fading before one common and independent national will! It was in vain that one of the belligerent chiefs of the church (always the fomentors of Irish discord) still struggled to uphold a system which was ruin to the many and power to the few. The proud churchman and servile courtier, the arrogant and despotic primate of the day, was taught to feel that he had other times and other men to deal with than those living when the country sunk under the weight of Boulter’s iron crosier. It was in vain that he affected to “_do the king’s business_,” (as he termed it) as other Protestant Wolseys had done it; and openly avowed his intention of carrying every government measure, _à coup de main_, and in spite of all constitutional opposition; for he lived to see the Irish gentry arrayed against the undue influence of despotic churchmen under the standard of an Irish speaker! The Irish patriots, led on by the chief of the Irish aristocracy,[73] and united with the middle and the mercantile classes, formed but one caste in feeling and in effort to array public opinion, against unconstitutional measures,[74] and to put down for ever the direct and ruinous interference of ecclesiastical statesmen! The government was now awakened to the danger of employing the zealous and intemperate, by the resistance which the primate had roused into activity; and Stone, struck off the list of privy counsellors, the object of national hatred and party contempt, exhibited one more example of the vanity of unfounded ambition, and the weakness of that policy which is opposed to public virtue, and the plain rule of right.

The rapid progress which at this period public opinion and political science were making, through the agency of a resident and educated gentry, was so highly estimated, that an English Lord Lieutenant, (Lord Harcourt,) as the most popular measure he could bring forward to counteract the distasteful effect of other less gracious and salutary acts, proposed on the part of government (1773) a tax on absentees! Never was such a tax less called for; for the absentees were not in that day in the proportion of one to an hundred, compared with those of the present times. Yet the draining of the resources of Ireland in the smallest proportion, the pouring forth of any modicum of native treasure into foreign coffers, was considered as nothing less than high treason to the country. The great English landholders of Ireland made a powerful resistance to a tax which principally affected themselves; but the majority by which the measure was rejected was so small[75] as to leave no doubt of its popularity, and of the feelings of the public on the subject.