poet, began to win him golden opinions in the city | and surrounding territory. He was recommended also by the crown, to the office of sheriff for Cork. But the rebellion of Tyrone broke upon the goodly prospects, and surrounded every peaceful habitation with restless disquietudes and apprehensions. The inmates of one of Desmond's castles could not sleep undisturbed by the terrors which left no home secure. Frightful rumours were the daily conversation; the quiet woods, which the poet so long had peopled with the fawns, satyrs, and ■ hamadryades, in which his fancy loved to revel, teemed with no imaginary groups of wolvish kernes and ruffian bonaghts fiercely looking out upon his castle and awaiting the night: night was haunted by fearful apprehensions-evil noises mingled in the winds, and the echoing signal was heard among the hills. Hapless is their state who are under the influence of such terrors inflicting by anticipation the sufferings which may not arrive. But this was not the good fortune of poor Spenser, of whose felicity we more lament the ruin because it was so complete. Blest in the union he had formed, a happy father, a husband much loving and much loved, admired, respected, and, after a life of toil, possessed of a growing fortune: one fatal hour reversed his fortunate position, and sent him a houseless fugitive with his helpless family, again to try his fortune, in the uncertain favour of which he had so long experience. "We cannot here offer any precise detail of the dreadful particulars of a disaster, the horror of which is perhaps better to be understood from a single incident than from any description. The poet with his family were compelled to fly with such precipitation, that their youngest infant was left behind. It was, perhaps the error of the wretched parents, inexperienced in popular convulsion, to imagine that a helpless and innocent babe could not be really in any risk; and they conceived that they had provided fully for its safety, by leaving the necessary directions for its journey on the following day, in a manner more accommodated to its tender age. The castle was plundered and burned, and the infant perished in the flames. The family only escaped by the promptness of their flight. They reached London, where they took lodgings in King Street.

pected that any one will apply to the emergency of another, that clear and elaborate scrutiny into the whole combination of their advantages and disadvantages, which is necessary for conduct under the pressure of difficulty: counsel is cheap and easy, and all are ready to bestow it; but sound and considerate advice few have at their disposal when they need it for themselves. Our application of these reflections is but conjectural, and the result of our own long observation of the ways of the world. But it is certain that Spenser had many high and influential friends, and claims of no slight order upon the sympathy of the good and wise, and upon the gratitude of all-the proudest ornaments of the Elizabethan age are Spenser and Shakespeare, with either of whom (different as they are) no other can be named. Poor Spenser with a family-stripped of his estate-with the claim of service and the noble title of genius-was, if not absolutely deserted, allowed to sink into ne. glect and penury. It is said, and not authoritatively contradicted, that when reduced to the most abject want, lord Essex sent him a sum of money which the poet's pride induced him to refuse. The circumstance is very likely to have received the exaggerations, so commonly attendant upon all incidents which can be distorted into scandal against the upper classes. We have already, in another memoir,* had occasion to examine a very similar story. We however think it sufficiently confirms the general inference of his having suffered from want; nor can we entertain any doubt that his spirit must have been shattered, and his pride diseased into a morbid irritability by the sufferings and mortifications ever attendant upon such misfortunes.

"It is, in the midst of these painful circumstances, cheering to contemplate, that his wifethe haughty beauty whom he had wooed for three years, and who adorned and exalted his short interval of worldly happiness-did not wrong the deep love and the immortalizing praises of the poet; but with the attachment and constancy peculiar to her sex, walked with him like a ministering angel, in the fiery furnace of affliction and bitterness: confirming her claim in sober history, to the encomium with which poesy has handed down

her name.

"Spenser only survived his flight from the country of his adoption, 'a little more than kin and less than kind,' for five years, and died at his inn in King-street, in January, 1598, in the 45th year of his age. The world, which felt that he was to be no longer a burden, but thenceforth an honour, showered upon his heedless grave its most unavailing honours and distinctions. His funeral was conducted with a pomp more suited to his real merits, than to his fortunes. The earl of Essex contributed the cost, and the poets of the day came to shower their verses into his grave. He was buried in Westminster Abbey, next to Chaucer, the only other name that could yet be named with his. His wife is understood to have survived him for some years, but not to have married again."

Reader-reader-is it not a pity, a bitter pity, that such delineations, as this is but a fair sample of, should be singed, scorched, irreparably injured, by their fatal, and we cannot but believe, their forced juxtaposi

Life of Sheridan. - Dublin University Magazine,

"The rebels had some days before surprised Cary's fort, Arklow, and Chichester forts-had besieged the houses of all the English gentry in the surrounding country, and had committed great slaughter upon the inhabitants-and were actually on their march to Dublin. At the approach of Coote, they retired and scattered among the Wicklow mountains. He pursued his march to Wicklow; the rebels possessed the town, and had invested the castle, which was in a condition of extreme distress. They did not wait to be attacked, but retired on the appearance of the English soldiers. Coote entered the town and caused numerous persons to be seized and executed as rebels; his party also had caught the angry spirit of their leader, and numerous acts of violence occurred. Historians of every party have agreed in their representations of this transaction, and it has left a stain on the memory of Coote. This we cannot pretend to efface; we are not inclined to make any concession to the exaggerations of the party historians on either side, but we equally revolt from the affectation of candour which compromises the truth, for the sake of preserving the appearance of fairness. Coote has been the scapegoat of impartiality. Leland, who is in general truth itself in his historic details, and more free from bias than any historian of Ireland, mentions his conduct in terms of denunciation-which we should not advert to did they not involve some injustice. The following is Leland's statement: 'this man was employed by the chief governors to drive some of the insurgents of Leinster from the castle of Wicklow which they had invested; he executed his commission, repelled the Irish to their mountains, and in revenge of their depredations, committed such unprovoked, such ruthless, and indiscriminate carnage in the town, as rivalled the utmost extravagance of the northerns. This wanton cruelty, instead of terrifying, served to exasperate the rebels, and to provoke them to severe retaliation.'

"We perfectly agree with those who consider that no personal resentments, or no crimes committed by other rebels elsewhere, can be called a justification of the cruelties inflicted upon the people of Wicklow, if it be assumed that they were not involved in the offence. And even if they were, we must admit that the conduct of Coote was violent, sanguinary, and beyond the limits of justice and discretion; it was unquestionably vindictive, perhaps also (for we have not seen any minute detail) brutal and savage. But we are bound to repel the affirmation that it was unprovoked, and the assumption that the sufferers were unoffending persons executed to gratify private revenge. We cannot suffer even Sir Charles Coote to be painted in gratuitous blackness, to balance Sir Phelim O'Neile in the scale of candour. Wicklow town was at the time a nest of rebellion, and the retreat of every discontented spirit in Leinster. The oppression and rapine of the iniquitous castle-party, the agents and dependents of the lords-justices, had filled the strong tribes of the Byrnes, the Kavanaghs, the

grounded hostility; and few at the time in the town of Wicklow were free from liability to suspicion. To what extent Coote received informations, true or false, on which he acted in the heat of the moment, cannot be ascertained; that such must have been numerous and grounded on the facts is not to be doubted. It was Coote's notion that the exigency of the crisis (for such it then appeared) demanded the display of severe and exemplary justice; we differ from this opinion, but see no reason to call it worse than error. He therefore resolved on a stern duty, which would under the circumstances have been revolting to a humane spirit; but which harmonized well with the 'sava indignatio' of Coote. That he committed such unprovoked, such ruthless, and indiscriminate carnage in the town as rivalled the utmost extravagance of the northerns' is a statement that yet requires to be proved: we deny the charge. "The defeat of the English at Julianstown bridge, carried consternation to the government and inhabitants of Dublin. Coote was recalled from Wicklow to defend the metropolis; he obeyed the order. He had approached with his party within a few miles of Dublin, when his march was intercepted by Luke Toole, with a force generally supposed to amount to a thousand men. Coote's men amounted at most to four hundred, but the rebels were routed so quickly and with such slaughter, that it is said this incident made Coote an object of terror during the remainder of his life. He then resumed his march, and was made governor of Dublin. He endeavoured to secure the city, a task attended with no small embarrassment, as the fortifications were in a state of utter dilapidation; the city wall had fallen into ruin, and having been built four hundred years before, was ill adapted to the altered state of military resources.

"While thus engaged, Coote was frequently called out into the surrounding districts, to repel incursions or repress manifestations of insurrection. On these occasions he was uniformly effective, but acted, there is reason to believe, with the fierce and thorough-working decision of his character. On the 15th of December he was called out by the report that three hundred armed men had plundered a vessel from England at Clontarf, and deposited their plunder in the house of Mr. King, where they took up their quarters. For some time before, there had been a considerable disposition to insurrectionary movement along the whole coast, from Clontarf to the county of Meath. Plunder and piracy had become frequent under the relaxation of local jurisdiction, consequent upon the general terror; and the fears of the government at last awakened them to a sense of the necessity of guarding against so near a danger. Several of the gentry also of these districts had committed themselves by acts of no doubtful character; and it was with their known sanction that strong parties of armed men were collected in Clontarf, Santry, Swords, Rathcoole, &c.: these parties committed numerous acts of violence, and overawed the peaceful, while they gave encouragement to the turbulent. The party here particularized was evidently under the sanction of Mr. King, a gentleman of the popular party, in whose house they stored their plunder; they were in strict combination with the people of Clontarf, who had actually formed a part of their strength, and joined them with their fishing boats.

which his inconsiderate violence deserved. The Earl of Ormonde, who was lieutenant-general of the kingdom, was indignant when he heard of the fate of his protegè, and immediately insisted on the trial of Coote as an offender against the laws of the land. The lords-justices were unwilling to give up the man on whose military talent and bravery they chiefly rested their trust, and who, they were conscious, was but their instrument in a station of the duties of which he was wholly ignorant. The Earl of Ormond expostulated with them in vain, and even threatened to throw up his office: they apologized, and temporized, and invented lame excuses, until it was plain that they were not to be persuaded by threats or entreaties: and Coote escaped. But the act which was thus made additionally notorious, produced a pernicious effect among the Roman catholic aristocracy and gentry, whose fears it appeared strongly to confirm.

We are utterly at a loss for words to express our sorrow, at being forced to quote such passages as the foregoing. There was a time-not long enough gone by for Mr. Wills's justification, by reason of forgetfulness, or ignorance-when it would have been a breach of plain honesty towards one's country, to forbear characterizing such sentiments as they deserve,-a time when to do so would have been to incur no trivial danger, a time when they might have halooed on a Coote in ermine, or in yeoman uniform, to the feast of blood. But, thank God, that time is over. The days of our endurance, of our weakness, of our danger, are numbered the spirit of Coote may not be dead; but the coward ruffianism of that spirit will never with impunity ride down this land again. The eulogy of such a spirit, we should hope, will always shock the feelings of the race, whose fathers were its unavenged victims. But strong in our moral and their physical might, we shudder at our fathers' fate without any selfish fear. England has at length been taught to know, that the days of her pizarro-isin in Ireland are past misery, the last misery of a centurytrodden people,-misery is our's, that the pestilent doctrines of misrule, that once were robed and truncheoned here, should still lurk about our otherwise good and pureminded men, like the poisoned arrow shot by the dying savage, accomplishing its errand, when the hand that aimed it could no more applaud its harm. Ah! tis an incorrigible evil, this of anti-nationalism; tis a terrible, immitigable cruelty, and stark thwarting of nature's choicest gifts, that asks a man, so utterly unsuited to the work of the political historian as James Wills, to fabricate a book professing to be a national history. Pray, that when next he

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takes the pen in hand, he may not have to try the hopeless task of writing in red ink.

Turn we now to a very different work,the first avowed production in set form of John C. O'Callaghan. A word about hin, too. There is but one phrase that thoroughly gives vent to the universal feeling, wherewith O'Callaghan impresses everyone, with whom for long or brief space he is thrown into cantact,-that of a man who is thoroughly in earnest. We knew a sceptical acquaintance of his once, who, after talking highly of him, and regretting he had not applied himself steadily to some regular profession, for which, in the estimation of the wordling, he had several qualifications-whispered in our ear" but don't you think he is a little mad ?" It may easily be supposed, that if a doubt of this sort had ever entered into our minds, we had not named it here. No; O'Callaghan is a sound hearted and clear headed man. The earnestness of the man,the force, the vigour, the imagination,--is as madness to the money-worshipping drudge. Of course it is. Such qualities have always been the most illegible of all riddles to the plodder. "A little mad;" and who that hath done aught worth talking of in this world,-who that hath ever striven, with inward sustainment, and with that alone, to save his country or his time from the suicidical round of ill habit, and of commonplace, and dull cunning, that has not been looked upon as mad-" a little mad." If madness be great hope,-hope too great for small hearts to contain,-great faith,-faith too great for dim huxter-minded men to grasp,-great longings,-longings for the realization of that which to all, except great hope and faith, seems to be, and truly is, impossible, then was Solon mad, and Mahomet, and Tell, and Vasa, and Columbus, and William Penn, and Roger Williams, and Hampden, Rousseau, Franklin, Mirabeau, Grattan, Washington, Bolivar,— O'Connell. If these had not been such as to impress the blind, whose eyes they were sent into the world to open, that they were a little-perhaps not a little-mad, what had they achieved? or where had we been now ?

And the same necessity of edifying for a time the equable, patent candle-light of their day, forces itself on men whose destinies are less lofty, perhaps, but not less imperative on them to fulfil, or less necessary for their generation to have fulfilled, than those of the few and rare ones. Had John O'Callaghan flogged himself to the bar, or to trade, or to