Lights and Shades of Ireland. IN THREE PARTS. Part E. EARLY HISTORY. Part EE. SAINTS, KINGS, AND POETS, OF THE EARLY AGES. Part EEE. THE FAMINE OF 1847 '48 AND '49. BY ASENATH NICHOLSON, OF NEW YORK. "When their soul was poured out into their mother's bosom."-JER. ii. 12. "Not e'en in the hour when my heart is most gay, LONDON: CHARLES GILPIN, 5, BISHOPSGATE STREET WITHOUT. 1850. PREFACE. THE reader of these pages should be told that, if strange things are recorded, it was because strange things were seen; and if strange things were seen which no other writer has written, it was because no other writer has visited the same places, under the same circumstances. No other writer ever explored mountain and glen for four years, with the same object in view; and though I have seen but the suburbs of what might be seen, were the same ground to be retraced, with the four years' experience for an handmaid, yet what is already recorded may appear altogether incongruous, if not impossible. And now, while looking at them calmly at a distance, they appear, even to myself, more like a dream than reality, because they appear out of common course, and out of the order of even nature itself. But they are realities, and many of them fearful ones-realities which none but eye-witnesses can understand, and none but those who passed through them can feel. No pretensions to infallibility either in judgment or description are made-the work is imperfect because the writer is so-and no doubt there are facts recorded which might better have been left out. In such a confused mass of material, of such variety and such quality, I am not so vain as to suppose that the best has always been selected or recorded in the best way. No originality is pretended in the first part it is an imperfect concentration of matter, gathered from various authors, with the simple object of placing before my own view a summary outline of the causes which have from age to age been combining to bring Ireland into the state as she now presents herself to the world, and that others who, like me, may be in perplexity, as I was in the beginning of my travels there, to know what she once must have been, and who now in this condition, may have a few doubts partially removed without the difficulty of plodding through intricate volumes, to reach the same point. If there are statements incorrect I am but a copyist, not pretending to be eye or ear witness of centuries gone by; neither has imagination been called in to magnify these statements-present effects spread before the vision tell that past causes must have been fearful ; and to the doubtful, who may write "proof" on the margin of these pages, when some barbarous acts recorded there may startle them, it is requested that they read the sentence passed in the enlightened Bible age of 1848, upon Smith O'Brien, that both justice and vengeance could not be satisfied with life— hanging and beheading; but let imagination fill the remainder of the frightful picture; and if past cruelties here recorded are doubted as impossible, come with me in the year 1850 and see the houseless wanderer dying in mountains and bogs, without food, without clothes, driven there by merciless landholders, who have fattened on soil wrested from the fathers of these exiles. If the world is tired of Henrys, Charles's, James's, Elizabeths, and Cromwells-if these old pages, thumbed and "dog-eared" as they are, have become tiresome-mark! they are but the counterpart of the tatters that are fluttering in every breeze in that island; they are the honest fathers of these their wayward, ill-governed children, and their true pedigree will be traced out; all things not only seek their level, but return to the right owner, sooner or later. But give us a new book, not blotted or blurred with false titles, nor besmeared with mud cabins; let not its leaves be either tattered or patched, but a fair stereotyped edition, written "within and without, justice, mercy, and good-will. Give us Victoria, with the shamrock in one hand, and the scales of justice in the other, for the title-page; and Ormonds, Desmonds, and Strongbows shall mingle their ungathered ashes with the dust of forgotten ages. The Second Part of the work is intended to present a few specimens of the "Lights of Ireland,” when she was mistress of her own land, sung her own songs, with a harp of her own, and worshipped her own God in temples which her own hands had built, |