her an influence upon than an integral part of
English history. It must be enough to say here that he is assumed to
have been born in Ajaccio, in Corsica, in 1769; that when he was ten
years old he tried to become French rather than Italian--a feat which he
never successfully accomplished--by entering the military school of
Brienne; that he served Louis the Sixteenth with indifference and the
Revolution with an ambition that was often baffled, and that he struck
the first of his many strokes at England when he won Toulon for France.

{306}

CHAPTER LXI.

"NINETY-EIGHT."

[Sidenote: 1798--Irish Catholic disabilities]

England was not concerned merely with the successes of France upon the
Continent, with the French power of resisting invasion and preserving
its capital and its constitution. The time was at hand when England
was to take the French Republic into consideration as a more active
enemy, whose enmity might take effect and be a very serious menace at
her own doors. The breath of the French Revolution was to Great
Britain like that of a sudden storm which sweeps round some stately
mansion and finds out all its weak places and shatters some of its
outlying buildings, although it cannot unroof its firmest towers or
disturb its foundations. The weakest spot in Great Britain, and indeed
we might almost say in the whole British Empire, was the kingdom of
Ireland. Ireland had for long been in a state of what might almost be
called chronic rebellion against the rule of England. England's
enemies had always been regarded as Ireland's friends by the Irishmen
who claimed especially to represent the national aspirations of their
country. This is a fact which cannot be made too clear to the minds of
Englishmen even at the present day, for the simple reason that no one
who is capable of forming a rational idea on the subject can doubt that
where a government is persistently hated that government must have done
much to deserve the hate.

It is not necessary here to undertake a survey of the many grievances
of which Ireland complained under the rule of Great Britain. One
grievance which was especially felt during the reign of George the
Third came from the persistent refusal of the Hanoverian Sovereign to
listen {307} to any proposals for the relief of the Roman Catholics
from the civil and religious disabilities under which they suffered.
The Catholics constituted five-sixths of the whole population of
Ire