LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS. VOLUME II. To face page CITY OF DUBLIN, IN THE TIME OF CHARLES I............. 13 A SERIES OF SEPARATE HISTORIES, (CONTINUED.) THE HISTORY OF IRELAND CHAPTER I. THERE is no other country in the world the history of which has been written and commented upon in so unjust a temper and tone as that of Ireland. And, strange to say, the persons who have been most frequently wrong in their statement of the evils of Ireland, and their proposals for remedying them, have been precisely those who have made the loudest professions of desire to serve her. It is not worth while to say how much of this mis-statement has arisen from their want of correct information, and how much from a deliberately bad spirit; certain it is, however, that Ireland has few worse enemies than those who in ignorance or in evil temper attribute motives and feelings to England and English statesmen of which they are quite innocent, and who assign for Irish poverty and Irish suffering causes which have really had no part in producing them. Unwise laws of centuries long passed are quite coolly cited as proof of a partial tyranny of Ireland by England; yet a single glance at English statutes, a single reflection upon the punishments which to a very recent date were allowed to disgust the wise and brutalize the bad, would show that Ireland was not a jot less mercifully governed than Kent or Yorkshire, and that the cruelties of English law, whether administered in London or in Dublin, were no proofs of English dislike of Ireland. The early history of most countries is so uncertain, that but little more credit is due to it than to any other romance; and when we read of the splendours of a country which during the whole period of its authentic history has been poor; of the power of a country which during all the period of its authentic history has been divided, turbulent, and weak; and of the learning and civilization of a country which even now has less of diffused learning and civilization than any other country in Europe, it is quite consistent with the severest logic and with the utmost charity to look upon the relations of the historian as being founded rather upon fancy than upon fact. The best authorities agree in stating Ireland to have been peopled from the Spanish colonies of the partly trading and partly piratical Phœnicians, and this statement, credible from the unanimity of authorities otherwise conflicting, is still farther strengthened by the facts of the Phoenicians having been well known to have traded largely with the British isles, and of the frequent finding, even at the present day, of ornaments and utensils which are indubitably of Phoenician manufacture. That gold and silver mines existed in Wicklow and some other parts of Ireland is asserted very positively, but we think with far more positiveness than proof; certain it is, that a recent attempt to find gold in a district in which it was once said to abound, proved to be a complete and lamentable failure. If as seems to be certain, Ireland was once colonized by individuals of a people so wealthy as the Phoenicians, that fact would at once account for the valuable articles so frequently recovered from the soil. But it by no means goes to prove that Ireland in the early ages could boast of either learning or civilization of the high order claimed for it. It is not the most refined or most learned class that will venture into far and foreign lands to war with the wild animals, to reclaim the morass, and to level the primeval forest. The hardiest, the rudest, the least civilized, those who have the most to hope for and the least to lose or to fear, are the men who usually go forth to colonize strange lands; and the Phoenicians who seized upon Ireland as their abiding place, were in all human probability the hardy and resolute rovers of the sea for many a long and strifeful year before they became dwellers upon and cultivators of the land.. That they came from Phoenicia, a civilized, ingenious, and wealthy land, proves literally nothing as to their own civilization or their own wealth, as any one may perceive who will take the trouble to observe the majority of the colonists who leave the civilized and luxurious nations of our own day, to build cities in the desert, and to place palaces and thronged marts stored with costly wares, where, even within the memory of man, the dense forest sheltered only the wild animal or the scarcely less savage man. The Phoenician colonies of Spain were at once eager speculators and bold seamen; visiting the British coast as traders, especially in order to procure tin, they could scarcely fail to admire the soil and climate of Ireland, and could have but little difficulty in subduing or destroying the mere handful of poor and all but actually savage aborigines, who must have been a mere handful, destitute as they were of commerce or manufactures, and warring, as we know that they did at a much later date, with the wolf and the hill-fox who disputed the swamp and the forest with them. When historians tell us that splendidly-manufactured and extremely costly articles are frequently excavated from the Irish soil, we do not dispute the accuracy of the statement, but we deny its cogency as proving that the early colonists of Ireland were learned, or civilized, or even wealthy. A magnificent ornament or a costly and ingenious machine taken from France or England to the arid desert of Africa or the swampy flat of the Swan river, would prove that the country had been visited by people from a wealthy and civilized land, but certainly not that the individuals were themselves either the one or the other; in short, as a general rule, the very fact of emigration would be decisive on the opposite state of the case. That the Phoenicians were the dominant people in Ireland-anciently called Ierne, or Erin, which signifies the western land-and that the magi, or priests of the fire-worshippers of Persia, were the actual governing authorities, both lay and religious, as the Druids were in Britain, there is abundant proof. From the far East, indeed, Europe seems to have been supplied with its early superstitions, as well as with the fierce swarms of nomade and desperate barbarians, who, entering Europe on the north, at length found even the vast steppes and forests of Scandinavia too narrow for them, and whose furious assaults levelled cities and terminated the stern rule of ages, only, in the end, to found nations at once mightier in conquest, wiser in law-giving, and possessing, as it should seem, as great a superiority in permanency, as in extent, of empire. As the aborigines, if such existed when the Phoenicians colonized Ireland, had made way for a more civilized, wealthy, and luxurious people, so these in their turn were soon obliged to make way for or submit to a fiercer and more hardy people. The Scoti, one of those Scandinavian hordes, which under the various names of Northmen, Sea-kings, Danes, and Saxons, defied un navigated seas and natural barriers to prevent them from overrunning the fairest and richest portions of Europe (B. c. 200), sent forth from the north of Spain, where they had been colonized, a powerful and fierce horde led by Milesius. Hence these Scoti are more commonly called Milesians, the term Scoti being generally confined to another swarm of the same fierce race, which at a later date endeavoured to settle, also, in Ireland; but, unable to effect their purpose, departed northward, and founded the powerful Scots, who, now at war with the Picts and now in alliance with them against the comparatively civilized Britons, were so long noted for strength, courage, and perseverance, before they were famous for aught else; and who taught even the Roman legions to respect them as foes, ages before they had any of those arts of peace which the Roman eagles had heralded into many other lands. ༣ That the vast immigrations which have changed the face of all Europe originated in the east of the world, and that the north of Europe, by what ever tribes nominally peopled, was, in fact, but the resting-place and nur sery of such immigrants, very many circumstances go to prove; but per haps none more strongly than the general resemblance in both the political and the religious rule of tribes nominally and directly coming from distant parts and settling in distant parts. Thus we find that the Phoeni cians direct from the east of the Mediterranean strikingly resembled, in many points, both civil and religious, the Scoti or Milesians of the Spanish coast who certainly had settled there from the north of Europe, where, it is nearly as certain, they had originally halted on their march from the eastern quarter of the world; and these, again, in like manner resembled the Britons. Between the Magi of the Phoenician Irish, (those priests of the false faith of Zoroaster who were perfectly undisturbed in their rites, or rather who were continued in their power as priests, sages, seers, and statesmen by the fierce Milesians), and the Druids of Britain, there were so many and such striking resemblances, that the Milesians called their priests Magi and Druids indiscriminately. The dark grove and the unsparing sacrificial knife of the stern and unquestioned priest marked both offshoots or corruptions of the fire-worshippers; and the mysteries, cruelties, and sacrifices, from the first fruits of the earth to the first-born child of the idolator's family, of the Druids were, with but such difference as long journeys and distant residence will easily and fully account for, the mysteries, the cruelties, and the sacrifices of the Magi too 1 The dreadful and fierce sacrifices of the Druids were put an end to in Britain by the Romans; but, strange to say, that mighty and enterprising people seem never to have visited Ireland, where the Magi exercised their terrible rule quite undisturbed during all the long lustres of the Roman sway in Britain. Yet, geographically speaking, Ireland was well known to the ancients. The Greeks called it Ierne, the Romans Hibernia; and it was also called the Holy or Sacred Isle, not, as has been with much defiance of chronology and common sense affirmed, on account of its owing its Christianity to one of the immediate disciples of the great founder of our faith, but to the precisely opposite reason that it was notorious as the residence of the Magi, and as the scene of their terrible rites long after those rites had disappeared elsewhere before the all-conquering and all-reforming Roman. The Scoti, or Milesians, whether intermarrying with the Phoenician first colonies, or annihilating them, are the real ancestors of the Irish people; and yet we are asked to believe in wealth, learning, and civilization, among this horde of semi-savages; these contemporaries and coequals of the other Scandinavian and Scythian hordes who, probably during ages, had been wandering by slow degrees and in savage guise from the steppes of Tartary to the forests of Germany, and from the bleak north, with its ice-chained rivers and piercing blasts, to the luxuri 1 |