The other un-Irish minister was Charles Marlay Fleury, of French extraction. His great-grandfather, Antoine Fleury, had fled from France at the persecution of Louis XIV., 1686, and lived some years in Nassau, from whence he came to Ireland (1690) as chapiain to King William. With him he rode along the banks of the Boyne, and his old cassock, pierced with more than one bullet, and preserved by his descendants, testifies to his daring on that occasion. He had a good living from the King-Coolbanagher, in the Queen's County,-and his tomb is to be seen in the graveyard of the French church in Portarlington.

These Fleurys could count nine successive links in the chain of Huguenot pasteurs, commencing in the reign of Francis I., and Charles Marlay was the tenth. Short of stature, but extremely welllooking, with fair complexion, he possessed an original and cultivated mind, and was a man full of character and attractivenees; he was also an accomplished musician. As a church minister he was zealous and active; as a preacher and platform speaker, of the very first class. He was absolutely a master of the English tongue. Antithesis, climax, and formed sentence, rolled smoothly from his eloquent lips. He was always cool, never impetuous, and held the hunting steed of his oratory well in hand. From his family antecedents it may be supposed he was a sound, but certainly not a

violent Protestant. He was evangelical in his views, and had a power of expression in extemporary prayer I never yet found equalled, much less surpassed.

Yet this man of brilliant talents and most blameless walk in social and domestic life was left to pine and die in comparative poverty, unnoticed by his diocesan, and unrewarded by the Liberal Government, because he upheld the cause of scriptural education, while twenty men, twenty times his inferiors in goodness and in gifts, were promoted to dignities and deaneries, and even to bishoprics, as a reward for the compliment they paid the Government in their approval of their system of education.

For in 1847 Lord Clarendon, our Viceroy, said, his "intention was to confine the Church patronage of the crown in Ireland to those who had given the most unequivocal support to the National Board."

And this principle-naturally productive of jobbing and tergiversation-was strictly carried out.

Yet shortly afterwards, Archbishop Whately, once a patron and supporter of the system, but always an honest and a pious man, writes: "The Jesuits in the National Board got rid bit by bit of all religion."

CHAPTER IV.

IN the year 1828 I went down to the King's County, having accepted the curacy of Kinnity. My rector was the Rev. John Travers, a truly religious man; he was as scholarly and as quaint as Parson Adams, and as kind and as simple-hearted as the Vicar of Wakefield.

On my way I spent a few bright days at Leap Castle with my friend Mr. Horatio Darby, who told me a fact which I do not think our English neighbours are at all cognisant of,—that a very large body of respectable Protestant yeomanry, numbering some hundreds, were among his brother's tenantry, and this in the immediate neighbourhood of Tipperary the turbulent.

I had before found the Protestants thickly clustering at Arvagh, and afterwards in the small parish of Abbeyleix, in the Queen's County. I had myself gone round and made the census, and found my own flock to consist of 1,000 souls, and all churchgoing people.

In 1842 the Protestants of İreland numbered two millions.

I could not but think how inaccurate the great Mr. Canning was when he said, “The Protestants of Ireland are a miserable minority, who never go to church, and hate a Papist!"

It is impossible to express the amount of mischief which a saying so ignorant and reckless as this might produce, or the animus it would be likely to stir up between the two countries. We are unquestionably a church-going people, and no true Irishman hates his Roman Catholic brethren, however he may dislike the dark faith which divides them from each other, and degrades by its superstition, and subjection to a foreign yoke, an otherwise most generous and intelligent race.

It was in Kinnity that I first made the acquaintance of the Rev. Frederick Fitz-William Trench, a very remarkable man and minister, and cousin to the author of Realities of Irish Life. His father was a brother of the first Lord Ashtown. Mr. Trench had been a gay and thoughtless man at Trinity College, Cambridge, till arrested by Mr. Simeon's preaching, when a change passed over him, and, entering the ministry, he became an able and devoted clergyman. His tall, attenuated form seemed well to represent the self-denial and holiness of his life, and the eloquent, yet severe simplicity of his preaching attracted, while it taught, the crowds who thronged his church at Clough gordan, in the county of Tipperary.

No doubt he had a leaning towards asceticism, and strangers thought him stern, but his friends. knew well how genial he was in private, and how kindly he participated in the happy amenities of domestic life; and also what a decided, though undeveloped, taste he possessed for pure literaturepublishing in his later life some excellent treatises on Church and doctrinal matters, and also an interesting volume called Illustrations of Truth. He was a man of inflexible determination; what he believed he avowed openly, acted on, and never swerved from; and he generally was in the right. He professed the politics of his family, and was a strong Whig, which circumstance separated him from many of his clerical brethren, especially on the matter of scriptural education; yet still he had the love of many, and the true respect of all. I think it was about the year 1840 that he got up a revival in his parish of Cloughgordan. Numerous clergymen, myself among the number, were his guests. Three or more daily services were held in the church, early prayer meetings before day-dawn in the cottages, lectures in school-houses, and preachings in the open air. Trench himself was the life of the movement. The Rev. John Brandon, a good man-a Boanerges-with a voice like a hunter's horn, addressed a crowd from the dickey of a carriage in the village street. Gentle Francis Hewson was an earnest pleader for his Master and the Gospel cause.