d and sixty-one fighting men,
were reduced to four thousand three hundred, one-fourth part of whom
were rendered unserviceable.

As the calamities of the besieged were great, so likewise were the
terrors and sufferings of their protestant friends and relations; all of
whom (even women and children) were forcibly driven from the country
thirty miles round, and inhumanly reduced to the sad necessity of
continuing some days and nights without food or covering, before the
walls of the town; and were thus exposed to the continual fire both of
the Irish army from without, and the shot of their friends from within.

But the succours from England happily arriving put an end to their
affliction; and the siege was raised on the 31st of July, having been
continued upwards of three months.

The day before the siege of Londonderry was raised, the Inniskillers
engaged a body of six thousand Irish Roman catholics, at Newton, Butler,
or Crown-Castle, of whom near five thousand were slain. This, with the
defeat at Londonderry, dispirited the papists, and they gave up all
farther attempts to persecute the protestants.

The year following, viz. 1690; the Irish took up arms in favour of the
abdicated prince, king James II. but they were totally defeated by his
successor king William the Third. That monarch, before he left the
country, reduced them to a state of subjection, in which they have ever
since continued; and it is to be hoped will so remain as long as time
shall be.

By a report made in Ireland, in the year 1731, it appeared that a great
number of ecclesiastics had, in defiance of the laws, flocked into that
kingdom: that several convents had been opened by jesuits, monks, and
friars; that many new and pompous mass-houses had been erected in some
of the most conspicuous parts of their great cities, where there had not
been any before; and that such swarms of vagrant, immoral Romish priests
had appeared, that the very papists themselves considered them as a
burthen.

But notwithstanding all this, the protestant interest at present stands
upon a much stronger basis than it did a century ago. The Irish, who
formerly led an unsettled and roving life, in the woods, bogs, and
mountains, and lived on the depredation of their neighbours, they who,
in the morning seized the prey, and at night divided the spoil, have,
for many years past, become quiet and civilized. They taste the sweets
of English society, and the advantages of civi