French numbering only eight hundred men, with whom were
about a thousand raw Irish peasants, most of whom had never had a
musket in their hands until within the few days that preceded the
battle,--races, we mean. A panic seized the British army, and it fled
from the field with the swiftness of the wind, but not with the wind's
power of destruction. The French had one small gun,--the British,
fourteen guns. Humbert afterward kept the whole British force at bay for
more than a fortnight, and did not surrender until his little army
had been surrounded by thirty thousand men. It is calculated that the
British made the best time from Castlebar that ever was made by a flying
army. It was no exaggeration to say that "the speed of thought was in
_their_ limbs" for a short time. Bull Run was a slow piece of business
compared to Castlebar; and our countrymen did not run from a foe that
was not half so strong as themselves, and who had neither position nor
artillery. The English have accused the Irish of not always standing
well to their work on the battle-field; but it would have required two
Irishmen to run half the distance in an hour that was made at Castlebar
by one Englishman. The most flagrant cases of panic that happened in the
'Forty-Five affair befell Englishmen, and rarely occurred to Irishmen or
to Scotchmen. The conduct of the Scots Royals at Falkirk was the only
striking exception to what closely approached to the nature of a general
rule.

The civil war which ours most resembles is that which was waged in
England a little more than two centuries ago, and which is known in
English history as "The Great Civil War," though in fact it was but a
small affair, if we compare it with that which took place nearly two
centuries earlier than Cromwell's time,--the so-called Wars of the
Roses. The resemblance between our contest and that in which the English
rose against, fought with, defeated, dethroned, tried, and beheaded
their king, is not very strong, we must confess; but the main thing is,
that both contests belong to that class of wars in which, to borrow
Shakspeare's words, "Civil blood makes civil hands unclean." Were there
no exhibitions of fear in that war, no flights, no panics on the _grand
scale_? Unless history is as great a liar as Talleyrand said it was,
when he declared that it was founded on a general conspiracy against
truth,--and who could suppose an English historian capable of
lying?--shameful exhibitions