null, on pain of his high displeasure. He however comforted the
Protestant Episcopalians by assuring them that, though he was determined
to protect the Roman Catholic Church against them, he was equally
determined to protect them against any encroachment on the part of the
fanatics. To this communication Perth proposed an answer couched in
the most servile terms. The Council now contained many Papists; the
Protestant members who still had seats had been cowed by the King's
obstinacy and severity; and only a few faint murmurs were heard.
Hamilton threw out against the dispensing power some hints which he made
haste to explain away. Lockhart said that he would lose his head rather
than sign such a letter as the Chancellor had drawn, but took care to
say this in a whisper which was heard only by friends. Perth's words
were adopted with inconsiderable modifications; and the royal commands
were obeyed; but a sullen discontent spread through that minority of the
Scottish nation by the aid of which the government had hitherto held the
majority down. [148]

When the historian of this troubled reign turns to Ireland, his task
becomes peculiarly difficult and delicate. His steps,--to borrow the
fine image used on a similar occasion by a Roman poet,--are on the thin
crust of ashes, beneath which the lava is still glowing. The seventeenth
century has, in that unhappy country, left to the nineteenth a fatal
heritage of malignant passions. No amnesty for the mutual wrongs
inflicted by the Saxon defenders of Londonderry, and by the Celtic
defenders of Limerick, has ever been granted from the heart by either
race. To this day a more than Spartan haughtiness alloys the many noble
qualities which characterize the children of the victors, while a Helot
feeling, compounded of awe and hatred, is but too often discernible in
the children of the vanquished. Neither of the hostile castes can justly
be absolved from blame; but the chief blame is due to that shortsighted
and headstrong prince who, placed in a situation in which he might have
reconciled them, employed all his power to inflame their animosity, and
at length forced them to close in a grapple for life and death.

The grievances under which the members of his Church laboured in Ireland
differed widely from those which he was attempting to remove in England
and Scotland. The Irish Statute Book, afterwards polluted by intolerance
as barbarous as that of the dark ages, then contained sc