tch with
her husband's murderer.'

'Shane, who was perhaps drunk, heard the words, and forgetting where
he was, flung back the lie in Gilespie's throat. Gilespie sprung to
his feet, ran out of the tent, and raised the slogan of the Isles. A
hundred dirks flashed into the moonlight, and the Irish, wherever they
could be found, were struck down and stabbed. Some two or three
found their horses and escaped, all the rest were murdered; and Shane
himself, gashed with fifty wounds, was wrapped in a kern's old shirt,
and flung into a pit, dug hastily among the ruined arches of Glenarm.
Even there, what was left of him was not allowed to rest. Four days
later, Piers, the captain of Knockfergus, hacked the head from the
body, and carried it on a spear's point through Drogheda to Dublin,
where, staked upon a pike, it bleached on the battlements of the
castle, a symbol to the Irish world of the fate of Celtic heroes.'[1]

[Footnote 1: Froude, p.418, &c.]

Mr. Froude might have added: Celtic heroes struck down by Celtic
hands. No lord deputy could boast of a victory over Shane O'Neill
in the field. Irish traitors in English pay, Irish clans moved by
vengeance, did the work of England in the destruction of the great
principality of the O'Neills, and it was by _their_ swords, not
by English valour, that Sidney 'recovered Ireland for the crown of
Elizabeth.' Whatever may have been the faults of Shane O'Neill, and no
doubt they were very great, though not to be judged of by the morality
of the nineteenth century, his talents, his force of character, his
courage and capacity as a general, deserved more favourable notice
from Mr. Froude, who, in almost every sentence of his graphic and
splendid descriptions, betrays an animosity to the Celtic race,
very strange in an author so enlightened, and evincing, with this
exception, such generous sympathies. After so often reviling the
great Irish champion by comparing him to all sorts of wild beasts, the
historian thus concludes:--

'So died Shane O'Neill, one of those champions of Irish nationality,
who under varying features have repeated themselves in the history of
that country with periodic regularity. At once a _drunken ruffian_,
and a keen and fiery patriot, the representative in his birth of the
line of the ancient kings, the ideal in his character of all which
Irishmen most admired, regardless in his actions of the laws of God
and man, yet the devoted subject in his creed of the ho