But scorns the immortal mind such base control; And in a flash from earth to heaven it goes. And in sweet converse pass the joyous hours; And in its watches wearies every star. IRISH HISTORY AND IRISH CHARACTER. BY GOLDWIN SMITH. [GOLDWIN SMITH, English historical scholar and political critic, was born at Reading in 1823; educated at Eton; graduated from Magdalen College, Oxford, with brilliant honors; was tutor at University College, and called to the bar; was secretary to the two commissions on Oxford Reform, and was on the Popular Education Commission of 1858. In that year he was made regius professor of modern history at Oxford; held the place till 1866, when he resigned; in 1868 accepted the chair of English and Constitutional History at Cornell University; in 1871 removed to Toronto, Canada, and has since resided there. He was placed on the Senate of Toronto University; edited the Canadian Monthly, 1872-1874; established The Week in 1884. He has been always an advanced liberal and reformer, and was one of the few conspicuous Englishmen who favored the North in the Civil War; but broke with his party on Home Rule. Among his many works are "Lectures on Modern History" (1861), "Irish History and Irish Character' (1861), "Rational Religion" (1861), "Church Endowments" (1862), "The Empire" (1863), "The Civil War in America" (1866), "Three English Statesmen" (1867), "Relations between America and England" (1869), "Conduct of England to Ireland" (1882), "History of the United States" (1893).] THE history of Ireland from the Conquest to the Union is the miserable history of a half-subdued dependency. Its annals are the weary annals of an aggression on the one side and of rebellion on the other; of aggression sometimes more, sometimes less cruel and systematic, of rebellion sometimes more, sometimes less violent and extensive, but of aggression and rebellion without end. Few are the points, few are the characters of moral interest in such a story. It is a long agony, of which the only interest lies in the prospect of its longdeferred close. Yet a knowledge of these events must be of the highest practical importance to those who may be called upon to deal as rulers or landlords with the Irish people. The destiny of the country has, to some extent, been written on its face by nature. It is a large island, close to a much larger island, which lies between it and the mainland. The course of its history could not fail to be greatly influenced by the history of its more powerful neighbor. It was almost certain, in the primitive age of conquest, to be subdued. Yet, from its magnitude, it was almost certain not to be subdued without a long and painful struggle. Had it been a third part of the size, its independence would have expired without a pang. Moreover, the channel between the two islands, though steam has now bridged it over, was broad enough to form, in the infancy of navigation, a considerable impediment to the arms of an English conqueror; more especially as the nearest point of contact with England was Wales, a mountainous district, remote from the early seats of English wealth and power, and one which itself long remained unsubdued. Britain itself is cut in two by the Cheviots and the wilds of the Border; whence its inhabitants were naturally divided into two nations with separate histories. Ireland is in closer contact with the northern division; and in the earliest times it exerted great influence on Scotland, if it was not, as seems most probable, the mother country of the Gael. In later times Scotland has exerted great influence on Ireland. Ulster has, in fact, become a part not so much of Keltic and Catholic Ireland as of Saxon and Presbyterian Scotland. England being interposed between Ireland and France, the continental country to which Ireland lies most open is Spain. By Spain, in the sixteenth century, the most determined efforts were made to detach Ireland from England. The architecture of the old houses in the town of Galway and the gay and graceful dresses of the neighboring peasantry are by some supposed to recall the time when that town was the port of a Spanish trade; a trade which was so prized as a source of wealth that, for an act of piracy committed on a Spanish vessel, a mayor of Galway, with Roman spirit, hanged his own son over his own gate. The mansions of little merchant princes, which once emulated the luxury and jealousy of Seville, have sunk into Irish squalor and decay; but from the coast of Galway the fisherman still sees a visionary shore rise out of the Atlantic; a dreamy recollection, perhaps, of Spain, realized again in the New World. The siren pamphleteers of France may sing as they will of the fitness of Ireland for all kinds of agricultural produce; of her self-sufficiency, variety of wealth, and of the immense population which she might maintain if she would only listen to disinterested advice, and facilitate the influx of the requisite capital by rebellion and civil war. According to all trustworthy economists, those of France included, Ireland is a grazing country. "The whole island," says M. de Lavergne, speaking of Ireland in former times, "then formed but one immense pasture, which is evidently its natural destination, and the best mode of turning it to account." The same writer remarks that the herbaceous vegetation of Ireland is admirable, and that it is not without reason that the trefoil has become the heraldic emblem of the green isle. The vast Atlantic clouds, which soften the hues and outlines of the scenery, drop fertility on the grazing lands and clothe the mountains high up with the brightest verdure. On the other hand, it is difficult, over a great part of the island, to get in a wheat harvest. The true agricultural wealth of the country is displayed in the great cattle-fair of Balinasloe. Its natural way to commercial prosperity seems to be to supply with the produce of its grazing and dairy farms the population of England; a population which is sure, from the quantity of coals and minerals beneath the surface of the country, to be very large in proportion to the agricultural area. The notion that a country can supply all its own wants, like the Stoic notion that each man can be complete in himself and self-sufficing, is a mischievous dream. For the purposes of the great human community, nations and men alike have been so made as to be dependent on each other. The growth of flax and the linen manufacture form a variety in the occupations of the people, and, as a natural consequence, modify their intellectual character; and when the influx of capital shall enable the Irish thoroughly to work the various coal fields, another new social element of an important kind may perhaps be introduced. The mining element generally appears destined to remain of subordinate importance. As a commercial country Ireland is furnished with excellent harbors, and with a superabundance of internal water communication. But she pays a heavy price for her lakes and rivers in having nearly a seventh of her area covered with bog. The broad and brimming Shannon, half lake, half river, is fed by the vast and wasteful bog of Allen. The dampness of the climate, while it is the source of vegetable beauty, could not fail to relax the energies of the people, : and to throw them back in the race of nations of preeminence in things requiring physical exertion. We see this when we compare the early history of the Irish with that of the Scandinavians, braced to daring and enterprise by the climate of the north. These influences weigh heavily on man in the infancy of civilization in its more advanced stages they are in a great degree subdued and neutralized by the sovereign power of mind. Of the physical influences which affect the character and destiny of nations, the most important seems to be that of race. We need not here inquire whether peculiarities of race spring from an actual diversity of origin, or whether they were superinduced upon the common type of humanity by the different circumstances under which different primeval families or tribes were placed. That which it is important always to remark in touching on this subject is, that peculiarities of race, however strong, are not indelible. There is a considerable difference, as we shall have occasion to notice, between the character of the mass of Irishmen and that of the mass of Englishmen ; but between individual Irishmen and Englishmen who have received the same education and lived in the same society, the difference is not perceptible; and the same influences which produce a complete assimilation in certain cases may, if extended to the whole of both races, produce it in all. The sure test of language proves that the native Irish were a portion of the great Keltic race which once covered all Britain as well as all Gaul, and probably Spain. This race, swept from the plains of England and the Lowlands of Scotland by the conquering Teuton, found a refuge in the Welsh mountains, in the hill country of Devonshire and Cornwall, and in the Highlands of Scotland; but its great asylum was Ireland. In Ireland we probably see its peculiarities in their most native and genuine form. In France, where it has reached its highest pitch of greatness and most fully developed its tendencies and capacities, its natural character has been greatly modified by external influences, especially by the influence of Rome, both as an empire and as an imperial church. In the primeval struggle of races for the leadership of humanity, the Keltic race for the most part ultimately succumbed; but it was a mighty race, and at one moment its sword, cast into the scale of fate, nearly outweighed the destiny of Rome. The genius of Cæsar at last decided in favor of his countrymen a contest which they had waged at intervals during four centuries, not merely for empire, but for existence. Not only did the Kelts vanquish in the battlefields of Italy, at Allia, at Thrasymene and at Cannæ, and bring Rome to the extremity from which she was saved by Marius; they carried their terrible arms into Greece, sacked Delphi, and founded as conquerors their principalities in Asia Minor. They met the summons of Alexander with gasconading defiance; they overthrew the phalanx in the plains of Macedon. The most brilliant and reckless of mercenaries, they filled the armies of the ancient powers, and Carthage and her Keltic soldiery are as modern France and her Irish brigade. M. Martin, the French historian of France, says, speaking of the Kelts of that country, "From the beginning of historic time, the soil of France appears peopled by a race lively, witty, imaginative, eloquent, prone at once to faith and to skepticism, to the highest aspirations of the soul and to the attractions of sense; enthusiastic and yet satirical, unreflecting and yet logical, full of sympathy yet restive under discipline, endowed with practical good sense yet inclined to illusions; more disposed to striking acts of self-devotion than to patient and sustained effort; fickle as regards particular things and persons, persevering as regards tendencies and the essential rules of life; equally adapted for action and for the acquisition of knowledge; loving action and knowledge each for its own sake; loving, above all, war, less for the sake of conquest than for that of glory and adventure, for the attraction of danger and the unknown; uniting, finally, to an extreme sociability and indomitable personality, a spirit of independence which absolutely repels the yoke of the external world and the face of destiny." A critic might say that in this portrait of the Kelts by a Kelt is unconsciously depicted a point of character which is not named. Vanity is a quality which the French hardly disclaim, and which indeed, by partly creating the superiority which it implies, has helped to enable them to do great things. It might also be asked, whether by "practical good sense" is meant only a certain clearness of view, dexterity, and tact, or the highest practical wisdom; for of the highest practical wisdom the political history of France can scarcely be called an example. Those violent oscillations, again, between unreasoning faith and a skepticism almost as unreasoning, and between extremes of all kinds, to which M. Martin points, may lend an exciting interest to French |