troops, and their daftard king ftood at a diftance from the fight. But mark their improvement in the course of a year! At Aughrim, now formed, by French tactics, they displayed the firmness of veterans and did not retreat, till St. Ruth fell; whofe jealoufy of the next in command had concealed the dif pofition of the field.

Vain is it then to fay, as Voltaire and others have faid, that the Irifh never fight well at home, though they always diftinguished themfelves abroad, efpecially when opposed to the English. It is repugnant to all reafon to fuppofe that they would not behave as well at home as as abroad, if they were equally inured to the habits and manoeuvres of difcipline. But when was this the cafe, except on the occafion to which I have referred? or perhaps at the fiege of Limerick, from which their brave general Sarsfield made even the prince of Orange retire, and at length obtained fuch honourable conditions for his country.

If any atonement can be made, for this anticipation of our civil hiftory, it must be for fake of that conclufion which may be drawn from it, and from almoft the whole of this work, viz. that the Irish want not talents for the arts of either peace or war, but that these talents have, at no period, been improved to that high degree of which they are fo fufceptible.

Every page in the history of Ireland, whether literary, ecclefiaftical, or civil, points to the execution of fome great plan for the illumination of a people, whofe genius, like the rude and rough gem, is either unknown or despised; and yet, if polished, would not only fhine but fparkle. The very æra to which this sketch has been deduced, viz. the revolution brought about by Henry II. in the religion and government of this country, is pregnant with inftruction, and affords a formidable leffon of the direful effects of that imperium in imperio which ignorance had fet up univerfally in the twelfth century,

and

and of which the fad veftiges are, to this day, par ticularly traced in this uncultivated land.

Having now traced thofe fteps by which the dominion of Ireland was annexed to the crown of England, I fhould here conclude these defultory stric tures, did I not wish to give a view of the ftate of the church, after its being affimilated to that of England and fubjected to that of Rome.

We have feen how ineffectual the endeavours of the Archbishop of Dublin proved to liberate his country; and we fhall find that his zeal remained unabated in every viciffitude of its fortune. After being obliged to bow to the fovereignty of the new Lord of Ireland, he took an, ineffectual journey into England, foon after the king's return from Normandy, to lay before him the grievances of his newly acquired kingdom, and to pour out the effufions of a heart bleeding for the unmerited miseries it endured. And at the council of Lateran A. D. 1179, he not only made the strongest remonstrances against the injuftice of the English in their management of Ireland, but pleaded, with zeal and fuccefs, in fa vour of the rights of his country and the immuni. ties of its church. I will never believe, that this great, this good man, bound himself by a folemn oath, before his obtaining the permiffion of Henry to attend this council, that he would not there at tempt any thing derogatory to the king's authority: for, however deeply he was penetrated by a sense of duty to his country, he felt himself under an higher obligation to truth and to his God. As it would add nothing to the praise of this virtuous prelate that he was canonized a faint by the See of Rome; fo it will not in the leaft tarnish the luftre of his character, to recollect that he died in banishment, under the displeasure of King Henry, whose interests he had opposed at Lateran..

After pulling up the weeds which grew upon the grave of our noble, our virtuous, our patriot faint

Laurence,

Laurence, we pafs with melancholy to the gloomy ftate of the nation at this period. The Archbishopric of Dublin was already found to be a place of too great confequence to be intrusted to an Irishman. The king, therefore, immediately difpatched a chaplain of the Pope's legate to put it under fequeftration: who, during the fhort time he governed the See, did every thing he could to extend the supremacy of his court in Ireland; and for this purpose he ordered all appeals to Rome.

Yet we do not find that this Ecclefiaftic's attachment to a foreign jurisdiction produced any reform in the Irish church. For in the year 1185, when John Cumyn, an Englishman, governed the fee of Dublin, O'Molloy, abbot of Baltinglafs and afterwards bishop of Ferns, preaching before a provincial fynod, (called by the Archbishop,) against the incontinence of the clergy, layed the fault upon the English and Welsh, whofe example, he afferted, had vitiated their brethren of Ireland. Giraldus Cambrenfis, who was prefent, made a fharp reply to the preacher, after the fermon was ended; whereupon a bitter conteft arose between him and the abbot. From all which a moderate man may conclude, that .there were faults on both fides.

SUP

SUPPLEMEN T.

LETTER S

TO AND FROM

IERNEUS, Colonel VALLANCEY, Mr. BURKE, OTHO, VERITAS, &c.

N the introduction to the foregoing work it was

of its first publication in a periodical paper, under the fignature of IERNEUS, the gentlemen, who had been affociates of Colonel Vallancey, in writing the Collectanea de rebus Hibernicis, departed from him, and published in the fame paper a long feries of letters addreffed to IERNEUS; and that a friend of the Colonel's had taken up the pen in his defence, which he seemed to rest upon a letter from the author of the fublime and beautiful. All which, that the reader may be the better enabled to understand, it may not be amifs to premise

That early in the year 1786, Colonel Vallancey published a volume of near fix hundred pages 8vo. intitled A Vindication of the ancient history of IreLand; in the 2d page of which, after reprobating the tranflation of Keating, is the following paragraph:

S

"Thefe

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"These blunders gave room to a modern author (the writer of the Southern Tour in Ireland) to "obferve, that the Irish hiftorians jumped from the "Baltic to the Nile, and from the Nile to the Baltic, as eafy as a man fteps over a gutter. He fhould "have learned the language of the original before " he had ventured to criticife."

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In regard to this paragraph it might be sufficient to remark, that I can find no paffage in the Southern Tour, as it is here called, which has the most distant allufion to the affertion it contains. Not that I hold myself responsible for the fentiments or opinions of the author; not even for the praises, by him lavished, on the learned Colonel Vallancey. The anonymous writer of that work publicly retracted fome of its errors, and would, I am perfuaded, feel no reluctance to retract others, which more plentiful reading and more mature reflection may have dif covered. But, as it may be urged that some other work of that writer may have given occafion to the above cited paragraph, let us fee how that matter ftands.

In the year 1784 I put into the Colonel's hand two or three Sections of what I called an analysis of the antiquity of Ireland, neither published nor intended to be published in that form, but only meant as the foundation for a preliminary effay to that history of the revolutions of Ireland to which I have allud ed above (pag. 1.) in which there is the following paffage: "Let those who can, partake of pleasure from the glory of the Gadelians; but we shall not follow them in their travels from Egypt to Crete, from Crete to Scythia, from Scythia to "Gothland, from Gothland to Spain, from Spain "back to Scythia, from Scythia to Egypt, from

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Egypt to Thrace, from Thrace to Gothland, from "Gothland to Spain, and from Spain to Ireland." Such is the paffage, confifting principally of a citation from Keating, fet down verbatim, which is fo

correctly