different from those which have led to murder
elsewhere. The reader of the English newspaper is shocked at the list
of children murdered by professional assassins, of wives murdered
by their husbands, of men murdered for their gold. In Ireland that
dreadful crime may almost invariably be traced to a wild feeling of
revenge for the national wrongs, to which so many of her sons believe
that she has been subjected for centuries.'

There is a mistake here. No murders are committed in Ireland for
'national wrongs.' The author has gathered together, as in a chamber
of horrors, all the cases of assassination that occurred during
the years of distress, provoked by the extensive _evictions_ which
succeeded the _famine_, and by the infliction of great hardships on
tenants who, in consequence of that dreadful calamity, had fallen
into arrears. People who had been industrious, peaceable, and
well-conducted were thus driven to desperation; and hence the young
men formed lawless combinations and committed atrocious murders.
But every one of these murders was agrarian, not national. They were
committed in the prosecution of _a war_, not against the Government,
but against the landlords and their agents and instruments. It was a
war _pro aris et focis_, waged against local tyrants, and waged in the
only way possible to the belligerents who fought for home and
family. Mr. Trench always paints the people who sympathise with their
champions as naturally wild, lawless, and savage. If he happens to
be in good humour with them, he makes them ridiculous. His son, Mr.
Townsend Trench, who did the illustrations for the work, pictures the
peasantry as gorillas, always flourishing shillelaghs, and grinning
horribly. With rare exceptions, they appear as an inferior race, while
the ruling class, and the Trenches in particular, appear throughout
the book as demigods, 'lords of the creation,' formed by nature to be
the masters and guides and managers of such a silly, helpless people.
Nowhere is any censure pronounced upon a landlord, or an agent, with
one exception, and this was the immediate predecessor of Mr. Trench
at Kenmare. To his gross neglect in allowing God to send so many human
beings into the world, he ascribes the chaos of misery and pauperism,
which he--a heaven-born agent--had to reduce to order and beauty.
But there were other causes of the 'poetic turbulence' which he
so gloriously quelled, that he might have brought to light, had he