upon his kind. He lost America; he was afterwards on the point of losing Ireland, and for the evil relations existing at this day between England and Ireland, his obstinacy and bigotry are mainly to blame. AMERICA. But, to return to America and the epoch we are now considering. Both parties were anxious to escape the responsibility of the spilling of blood, and the first collisions at Lexington and Concord were mainly accidental. Blood however was spilled and the parties committed to the strife. These were followed by the famous battle on the heights of Bunker's Hill, above Boston. Then came an act of the utmost daring and resolution on the part of the Americans. They determined no longer to stand on the defensive, but to show that they were belligerents in the widest sense of the word, and they invaded Canada. Their general in that invasion was an Irishman, Montgomery, who, if his life had been spared, would have possibly eclipsed Washington as a commander in the revolutionary war. led his forces with wonderful skill and success to the very walls of Quebec, but in the assault on that city, which was gallantly defended by the English under General Carleton, Montgomery fell, and with him the American enterprise upon Canada. This was on the last day of the year 1775. There is a poem of Burns' upon the American war, in which this exploit is summarized in the spirited lines :

"Then through the brakes Montgomery takes,

I wot he was na' slaw, man,
At Lowry burn he took a turn,
And Carleton did ca', man,
But yet what reck!-he at Quebec
Montgomery-like did fa', man,

With sword in hand before his band
Amang his enemies a', man."

He

Up to this time the Americans, though at war with the English, were fighting ostensibly not for independence of English connection but for independence of English taxation. But, in the May of the year we are now entering on, 1776, they flung away the scabbard and promulgated the famous Declaration of Independence, the centenary of which will, in a few months, be celebrated throughout all the United States with triumph and jubilee. Into the abstract principles asserted by that famous Declaration we decline to enter, nor will we further glance at the events of the war, which was brought to a successful termination by the aid of France, and concluded six years later (1782) by the Peace of Paris, in which England was compelled to recognise the independence of America. Certain it is, the American revolution was the immediate cause (whatever may have been the remoter ones) of the stupendous French Revolution of 1789, and that in two ways: First, by the retentissement of the principles it embodied, acting on a state of opinion but too well prepared to receive them; and, secondly, by the prodigious increase of the French debt occasioned by the war, and the consequent embarrassment of the French finances, necessitating the calling together of their states-general in 1789. All this, however, lay in the future.

IRELAND. But neither in America nor France, nor in any country on the face of the globe, have the changes wrought within

a century been so vast and striking as in our own. In 1776, Ireland contained about two millions and a half of inhabitants, two millions of Catholics, half-a-million of Protestants of all denominations. The penal laws were still in full force. It has been said that they were not executed, and as regards direct religious persecution, the saying, in a certain sense, is true. If the letter of the law, as it then stood, had been rigorously carried out, Mass could not have been said, nor a single Catholic rite performed in Ireland; for all these acts were crimes, subjecting the priest who solemnized them to banishment or transportation, and if he returned again into the country, to the penalties of high treason. Notwithstanding this state of the laws, there was undoubtedly a connivance* at the exercise of the Catholic religion, and, except now and again, in the case of a priest who had made himself obnoxious to the governing faction, the penalties enacted against the mere exercise of religion were not enforced. That there should have been even this poor connivance has excited the wrath and disgust of Mr. Froude, who has discerned clearly enough. that the aim of the governing minority was not to make the Catholics Protestants, which would have entailed as a consequence the transfer of power and property to the mass of the people, but was to hold all the power and property in their own hands, dealing with the mass of the people as subjugated serfs. But there is another fact to which Mr. Froude does not advert, namely, that the strict execution of the laws was impossible. The least consideration will make this manifest. If the governments of England and of Ireland had been really actuated to the uttermost by the spirit which animates Mr. Froude, and determined to extirpate the Catholic religion by transporting or hanging every priest who said Mass, how were they to effect it? They would have required to maintain in Ireland a Protestant army of at least a hundred thousand men. Fancy England, engaged in a series of foreign wars, and often at her wits' end for a supply of soldiers, affording such an army for such a purpose! Why, in the year we write of, Lord North, in the British House of Commons, spoke of enlisting Irish Catholics as a mode of recruiting soldiers to fight the Americans—an idea which happily proved futile. The connivance at the exercise of the Catholic religion not only fell in with the policy of the governing body, but was commanded by necessity. The other class of penal laws-those which debarred Catholics from all political power, all acquisition of property, all access to the professions-were enforced with the utmost rigour. Up to the time we write of, but two statutes had passed, having even the semblance of mitigation: one an Act of 1772, enabling Papists to take a lease of sixty-one years of unprofitable bog, to reclaim it for their landlords; the other, an Act of 1774, not conferring any right upon Catholics, but recognising their existence, by enabling them to take an oath of allegiance to his majesty, But how little the savage spirit of the laws was softened may be seen by an Act passed in the very year preceding the year we now enter upon, an "Connivance is the mitigation of slavery, not the definition of liberty."-Edmund Burke.

Act of the year 1775, by which magistrates were empowered to enter the house of any Papist to search for and take away his arms. The pretence for this arose from the disturbances of the wretched Whiteboys, the mere wild outbreak of oppressed human nature distorted and magnified into a Popish conspiracy. The Whiteboys certainly were guilty of many atrocious acts, and they were dealt with as atrociously. We see from the Annual Register of 1775 that several of these wretches, tried by special commission at Clonmel, and convicted late at night, were not even allowed an hour for repentance, but were immediately hanged and quartered by torchlight at the court-house door.

THE JESUITS.-To turn from events affecting particular States to the world-wide Church. Clement XIV. (Ganganelli) had died in the course of the preceding year, and Pius VI. (Braschi) was the Sovereign Pontiff. The great event still agitating the Church was the suppression of the Jesuits. That act was, we repeat, the work of the House of Bourbon. It had been begun by the Portuguese minister, Pombal, and, so far as Portugal was concerned, carried out with horrors of injustice and atrocity at which the world then and ever since has shuddered. Portugal, however, was a comparatively insignificant corner of Christendom. It was only when the immense family faction, the Bourbons in France, in Spain, and in Naples combined in threatening no less than schism if the obnoxious Order were not suppressed, that Clement XIV. was obliged reluctantly to yield. When at this day the House of Bourbon lies dethroned and contemned, it should not be forgotten of what sour fruit the parents had eaten that the teeth of the children should thus be set on edge. When the outcry against the Jesuits is examined and scrutinised one stands absolutely amazed at the absence of any ground of indictment. The late learned Father Theiner has written the life of Clement XIV. in a spirit of enthusiastic veneration towards the memory of that Pontiff, and certainly in a spirit of scarcely disguised bitterness and animosity towards the Order of the Jesuits. Unquestionably if a crime could have been brought home to the Jesuit body, justifying in the slightest degree the violent action of the Latin States against them, Father Theiner would not have failed to display it in the severest light. His work remains, therefore, a far greater vindication of the Jesuits than it is of Clement XIV. The Pope yielded with pain and reluctance to what he deemed an overpowering necessity, as the captain of a ship hews down mast and yard when the barque is struggling with the tempest. Clement XIV. died in 1775. His successor, Pius VI., had too many difficulties of his own to contend with to be in a position to reverse the policy of his predecessor. In a few years (a thing unexampled) he had to set out from Rome and journey to Vienna to implore the Emperor Joseph II. to hold his hand in the suicidal course of suppressing religious houses which that Emperor had fatally entered upon. This strange journey of Pius VI. curiously accords with the title of Peregrinus Apostolus which the prophecy of St. Malachy bestows upon him almost as curiously as the title of Aquila Rapax fits his successor, Pius VII., whom the rapacious Imperial eagle tore from the throne in Rome to his prison in Fontainebleau.

DISTINGUISHED MEN, &c.-It remains only to note a few things indicative of the time. And first, as to the distinguished men then living and their ages. Dr. Johnson was 67 years of age, Voltaire 82, Rousseau 64, Benjamin Franklin 71, Edmund Burke 47, Sheridan 26, Curran the same age, Grattan 31, Fox 29, William Pitt a lad of 19, the great Napoleon a child of seven years, and the great O'Connell a baby of a few months. How far the social habits of the time differed from ours may be seen in the novels of Richardson and Miss Burney. The fashionable hour of dinner was three, or, at latest, four o'clock. A certain stately ceremony presided over the social intercourse of strangers and even of intimates, very different from our free-and-easy fashions. Friends addressed one another as "sir" or "dear sir;" young ladies were taught to "bridle;" that is, first holding themselves stiff and erect, to bend their knees and head and raise themselves again with formal courtesy. The empire of fashion was such as it has ever been. The men wore the dress which is so familiar to us in Sir Joshua Reynolds' portraits-the same indeed as the court dress of to-day. The ladies had sweeping trains, and on their heads cumbrous and stately plumes of feathers, so ridiculous as to make our chignons venial in comparison. J. O. H.

MY

THE K DORCAS SOCIETY.

BY M. C. BISHOP.

Y last contribution to this Magazine described days spent in the south of Italy.* I will hope that notes taken of "things heard and seen" during a late visit to an Irish county some twenty miles from Dublin may not be altogether uninteresting.

The village of K, like many other Irish villages, creeps down a hill, acrosss a valley, and up the bluff at the other side of a bridge more or less important, now for traffic, but in former times as a military post. And like many other Irish villages, K possesses numerous public-houses, which appear more thriving than the other cabins. Its street is irregularly edged by two lines of thatched roofs in various stages of decay, but from their first winter stained with damp until in lapse of years they become mere slopes of dank moss. Half a dozen of "Emporiums" and establishments for the sale of soft goods display their dusty and mouldy wares behind windows closely nailed down, but over their sunken doorway is advertised in too many cases their license to sell spirits as well as other "groceries." There is little to relieve the teints degradés of moist decay, and the usual swarms of muddy children are for the most part dressed in clothes that in ragged edge and colour are more like brown seaweed wrack than aught textile. Yet there are indications here and there of lessened squalor-red geraniums and pots of mignonette have been seen behind some window-panes, and there is little if any begging when travellers halt at the inn.

"A Visit to Pompeii and the Author of Fleurange." IRISH MONTHLY, Vol. III. p. 380.

Meantime I am aware that these slimy roofs cover half a dozen embodied virtues, not so prevalent in other countries; and no one dares to doubt of the Irish æsthetic capacity. But the struggle for mere existence has crushed all thought of comfort, and hope of material beauty out of the very poor; and it is by the poor in Ireland that the key-note of national feeling is set. The grey limestone and green fields are chilling, and probably in no country is there so little to rouse the sense of agreeable colour as in Irish foregrounds. Chaucer might have been pleased by the supremacy of leaf over flower in them, and certainly the delight of the eye is sternly kept in check, to the increase, let us hope, of the theological virtues. On their development a well-wisher to Ireland must needs dwell, for there is little satisfactory in the apparent conditions of life. Why the many sporadic attempts to give Irish cottiers self-helping habits have failed as they have to supply the needed backbone, is one of the mysteries of the British Empire. The Union, the Famine, Emancipation, Disestablishment, Land Bills, and Shannon Navigation, leave the village of K― much the same as in Arthur Young's time. There is one notable exception : the Church of the nation has become a visible as it was ever an invisible success at K, and the fine building reared within the past seven years, mainly by the parishioners, checks the depression which the cabins might cause. But before its erection there was small sign of life much less of the progress which should mark all Christian communities in healthy climates. There is a fair sprinkling of resident gentry in the neighbourhood, but K- was until lately "no affair of theirs." The landlord of the village is an absentee, and so its poverty, if not greater, grew more startling as recent years brought improvement into neighbouring estates.

Who can fix exactly the date or even the parentage of a successful idea? About nine years ago two ladies who occasionally drove through K—, and drove slowly because of its double hill, were seized with the wish to do something for the more miserable of the cottagers. These good intentions were quickened by the recurrence of one of those bad seasons which are periodical in Ireland. Mrs. W. and Lady H., who happened to be the nearest residents, considered if some help more permanent than the mere distribution of coals and blankets could be given, and their idea has fructified and developed into the charitable work of which I should like to tell the readers of this Magazine, and all who are interested in the solid welfare of Ireland even in its slightest indications.

No one who knows Ireland but must agree that Irish regeneration can only be from within. Whatever education can best supply "character" is the one needed, and want of it brings Irishmen at times very low, as the statistics of English and American cities painfully attest. Habits of foresight, self-denial, and practical calculation of the results that follow certain causes, are more wanted than even the three Rs. So, it would seem, thought Mrs. W. and Lady H., and when they considered how to provide coal for the shivering and clothes for the ragged, they contrived a scheme by which their help should be conditional on certain prepayments and on perseverance in knitting and needlework.