liberty, and how they were tortured by state inquisitors for not submitting to religious doctrines, which spiritual directors may preach, but which no civil power on earth has a right to impose! -They surely who vindicate the rights of the Scots to insur rection in 1640, can with no good grace condemn that of the Irish in 1641.-We do not defend either, but we may safely assert, that he who should at this time of day advance, with my lord Clarendon, that the Irish had no civil or religious griev ances to complain of during the forty years antecedent to the Ultonian rebellion in 1641, has but a wretched alternative in option between wilful ignorance, and barefaced dishonesty.

We have advanced that the Irish in general wanted, in these confused times of king Charles I. to redress grievances by legal and constitutional means, and truth will warrant our saying so. They were firmly attached to our monarchical form of government; they were cordially loyal to the reigning prince, and ready to make a distinction between the severity of the law, and the disposition of the monarch, notwithstanding the unworthiness of his deputies, who betrayed him and them. By their representatives in parliament they made the highest professions of their affection, and were sincere. What then provoked to the sudden and desperate measures which followed? The answer is easy and ready. This devoted people found the king's upright intentions frustrated by an adjourn ment of the session of parliament in 1641, so contrary to the king's order, as well as interest. In that proceeding they discovered how the lords justices had been leagued secretly with the puritans at Westminister; how the king had been betrayed, and the hands of his enemies strengthened; how the claim to their own patrimonies (the hereditary possessions of several ages) had been kept up, and the intention of granting them to undertakers from England reserved. What idea could this disobedience to the king, this insecurity to the subject, suggest? It did not produce jealousy and mistrust alone: it confirmed them in a certainty, that a majority of the more ancient and wealthy proprietors were to be ruined, for the advantage of needy strangers, as was intended by lord Stafford's plan. All grew impatient, the northern men, already, grew desperate. The latter rose up in arms in the fatal month of October 1641. And several counties have all at once been exposed to the bar

barities of an exasperated multitude; an evil which would no remain to be a stain on the face of our annals, had the session been continued as the king intended, and had the bills prepared for the security of the ancient proprietors of the kingdom been passed into laws. Had this, I say, been the case, the despera does of Ulster would be kept down by their southern fellow subjects, who had no concern in the peculiar complaints of that party. But the lords justices and their agents took care to remove this line of separation, and render the men in possession as insecure, as the men ejected. This fact is one of the most important in the history of this island, and should be well understood. I say no more of it here, that I may not anticipate on the following Historical Review, wherein the details are given with equal candor and judiciousness.

The earl of Clarendon has left us an account of those times in the stile rather of a pleader, than of an historian. He was doubtless a nobleman of great abilities, but very unjust to the Irish nation. In representations anticipated by spiritual hatred and national prejudices, this man of strength, resigns all his vigour. No longer master of his subject, he yields himself up a willing captive, to such informations as were correspondent to his prior ideas of the people he undertakes to describe. He appears to have been incapable of receiving second impressions, and we can hardly on this account, charge him with delivering us a conscious untruth. History in such hands is neither better nor worse, than what the writer is enabled to make it, according to the degree of his partiality or aversion; and he must have little knowledge of men, who knows not, that this species of human infirmity, is but too often an ingredient in some of the best, as it always is in the worst characters, with whom the infirmity ends in vice. In the best, it resembles a cancerous excrescence on a beautiful face, and grows but two often out of our fairest principle, that of religion, from which it should, if possible, be rooted. Were religious indifference useful in any instance, it would be in this before us, where the more a man is lukewarm in religious party-zeal, the nearer he approaches to the character of a true patriot and good citizen. But there is a strength of mind superior to religious indifference itself, which gives all the qualifications necessary to constitute a good man,

and judicious historian. This strength the earl of Clarendon and other great men (protestants and papists) wanted, and still want. As painters of former times, they may give a good likeness: as contemporaries they are intolerable; of all men the most likely to be deceived, and the most laborious to deceive. The mischief they circulate is in proportion to their abilities, and that rank in life, which renders those abilities conspicuous.

It is, indeed, to be lamented, that Mr. Hume, one of the ablest writers of the present age, should as an historian suffer himself to be so far led astray by such contemporaries as we have hinted at, as to transfer all or most of the mischiefs of the year 1641 in Ireland, from the original authors, to the unfortunate Irish alone. Parties less aggrieved in Scotland were up before them, and drew the sword not only with impunity but with advantage. The Irish in Ulster who wanted to regain the lands they lost, followed the example. We do not justify the act in either kingdom. We only advance in alleviation of the Irish crime, that the majority of the nation have, in the two reigns of James and Charles, suffered a cruel bondage of thirty eight years with little intermission, and had now the most alarming prospect of extirpation before them. They did not mean to withdraw their allegiance from the king; even the weak leaders of the Northern rabble had no such intention. The latter began, and acted singly; most of the innocent protestants in the neighbouring districts had time to escape into places of security, before many murders were committed. The papists in the other provinces had no share in their guilt; they immediately published their detestation of it.

In general, they were steady to their duty as christians, and to their loyalty as subjects. They in their own defence took up arms, not against the king, but against the king's enemies, who announced their excision in public resolutions, and parlia mentary votes. This is the truth of the fact. Mr. Hume passes it over as of no importance to the subject of his history.

He appears to have sat down with an intention to cure us of our unhappy-party prejudices, by pointing out their terrible consequences, in the last age, on our conduct as legislators, and our feelings as men. In general his observations are admirable, and stand in the place of excellent instructions,

enforced by striking examples. His mistakes at the same time are hurtful, and a wound from such a hand must be painful. But happily it cannot be mortal, in the case before us, as abundant materials of true information are still preserved entire. The documents in the following Review will shew that Mr. Hume's representation of Irish affairs in 1611, is not true history, but fine and pathetic writing. Pity it is, to find such a man adopting the untruths of sir John Temple, and spreading them on a new canvas heightened with all the colourings of his art. The piece has certainly cost him some labour; for horror and piety are wrought up here in high tragical strains. But the Irish certainly have not sat for the picture; and Mr. Hume in this part of his history must admit the justness of a charge, that he has given a wrong direction to the passions, he has taken so much pains to excite.

Mr. Hume is still alive to review and correct some mistakes in his history; and should he decline doing justice in the case before us (what must not be supposed) he, and not truth, will be affected.

The changes of religion in these kingdoms produced a most memorable æra in our history; and however the reformation hath operated, in spreading the base of civil liberty, yet it divided us into parties, and for a time produced terrible struggles for power and property in both kingdoms; in Ireland espe cially these things had a period. When all power was set on one side, and that contention ceased, yet the hatred which commenced with the original disputes remained, and exerted itself with remarkable violence, in the framing of penal laws, which doubtless should be but few, in countries which exist by industry, unless the object of such laws, be too formidable not to require its removal at any expence to the public. In this light hath popery been held, from the very commencement of queen Elizabeth's reign, and is seen in no other to this day. No experience of papists being known and acknowledged good subjects in other protestant countries; no experience of their. good conduct in our own, could hitherto remove the idea of their being enemies by principle to our protestant establishment. Sir William Blackstone, who has enlightened those nations by his admirable commentaries on our laws, pronounces on this subject, like those who are content with the first impressions

they receive, and think but little on a subject, in which they are but little concerned. "While papists," he says, “acknowledge foreign power, superior to the sovereignty of the kingdom, they cannot complain, if the laws of that kingdom will not treat them on the footing of good subjects." With great deference to so great an authority, this judgment includes a charge, which it is impossible to support, unless it can be proved that English and Irish papists are men of different principles from their brethren in Hanover and Canada. But this is not the case; the majority of English papists even in the days of queen Elizabeth (who stripped them of power and liberty) acknowledged no authority superior to her sovereignty, and renounced to the authority of Pius the Fifth, who wanted to withdraw them from the allegiance they owed her. This they have done, without any breach with the Roman see in matters purely spiritual; in things, I mean, which regard the next life, not the present. The papists of Ireland have, in a Formulary lately drawn up by themselves, renounced any authority, civil or temporal, claimed or unclaimed, by any foreign prince or prelate whatsoever, recognizing at the same time his majesty's title, and professing their allegiance to be due to him solely. Thus it is at present, even in Spain and Portugal, where no subject would dare own to recognize any foreign power superior to the sovereignty of those kingdoms; and nearer home in France, the sovereignty of that kingdom is so jealously guarded against all foreign pretenders and pretensions, that a professor who should bring this matter even into doubt, would be degraded from his office, if he did not meet with a severer punishment. Pity it is, that a point of knowledge, so much within his reach, should escape Judge Blackstone; pity it is indeed, that so great an authority, should be employed to give weight, and perhaps perpetuity to a popular error, so injurious to a million of his majesty's good subjects; for so I venture to denominate them, notwithstanding the hurt they do the public through a legal incapacity to serve it.

We are sorry to find any necessity for saying so much on this subject, and yet a little more must be added, before we dismiss it.

The supremacy of popes in matters merely spiritual, and directed as it ought to be, for the preservation of harmony