temper.]

[Sidenote: It possesses the counterfeit of every virtue.]

[Sidenote: Their peculiar charm.]

[Sidenote: The foster-nurses and the minstrels.]

This is a partial account of the Irish difficulty. We must look deeper,
however, for the full interpretation of it; and outward circumstances
never alone suffice to explain a moral transformation. The Roman
military colonists remained Roman alike on the Rhine and on the
Euphrates. The Turkish conquerors caught no infection from Greece, or
from the provinces on the Danube. The Celts in England were absorbed by
the Saxon invaders; and the Mogul and the Anglo-Indian alike have shown
no tendency to assimilate with the Hindoo. When a marked type of human
character yields before another, the change is owing to some element of
power in that other, which coming in contact with elements weaker than
itself, subdues and absorbs them. The Irish spirit, which exercised so
fatal a fascination, was enabled to triumph over the Norman in virtue of
representing certain perennial tendencies of humanity, which are latent
in all mankind, and which opportunity may at any moment develope. It was
not a national spirit--the clans were never united, except by some
common hatred; and the normal relation of the chiefs towards each other
was a relation of chronic war and hostility. It was rather an impatience
of control, a deliberate preference for disorder, a determination in
each individual man to go his own way, whether it was a good way or a
bad, and a reckless hatred of industry. The result was the inevitable
one--oppression, misery, and wrong. But in detail faults and graces were
so interwoven, that the offensiveness of the evil was disguised by the
charm of the good; and even the Irish vices were the counterfeit of
virtues, contrived so cunningly that it was hard to distinguish their
true texture. The fidelity of the clansmen to their leaders was
faultlessly beautiful; extravagance appeared like generosity, and
improvidence like unselfishness; anarchy disguised itself under the name
of liberty; and war and plunder were decorated by poetry as the
honourable occupation of heroic natures. Such were the Irish with whom
the Norman conquerors found themselves in contact; and over them all was
thrown a peculiar imaginative grace, a careless atmosphere of humour,
sometimes gay, sometimes melancholy, always attractive, which at once
disarmed the hand which was raised to strike or punish them. The