n accustomed
to treat on equal terms. We had sometimes envied their prosperity,
sometimes dreaded their power, sometimes congratulated ourselves on
their friendship. In spite of our unsocial pride, we admitted that they
were great nations, and that they could boast of men eminent in the
arts of war and peace. But to be subjugated by an inferior caste was a
degradation beyond all other degradation. The English felt as the white
inhabitants of Charleston and New Orleans would feel if those towns were
occupied by negro garrisons. The real facts would have been sufficient
to excite uneasiness and indignation: but the real facts were lost
amidst a crowd of wild rumours which flew without ceasing from
coffeehouse to coffeehouse and from alebench to alebench, and became
more wonderful and terrible at every stage of the progress. The number
of the Irish troops who had landed on our shores might justly excite
serious apprehensions as to the King's ulterior designs; but it was
magnified tenfold by the public apprehensions. It may well be supposed
that the rude kerne of Connaught, placed, with arms in his hands, among
a foreign people whom he hated, and by whom he was hated in turn, was
guilty of some excesses. These excesses were exaggerated by report; and,
in addition to the outrages which the stranger had really committed, all
the offences of his English comrades were set down to his account. From
every corner of the kingdom a cry arose against the foreign barbarians
who forced themselves into private houses, seized horses and waggons,
extorted money and insulted women. These men, it was said, were the sons
of those who, forty-seven years before, had massacred Protestants by
tens of thousands. The history of the rebellion of 1641, a history
which, even when soberly related, might well move pity and horror,
and which had been frightfully distorted by national and religious
antipathies, was now the favourite topic of conversation. Hideous
stories of houses burned with all the inmates, of women and young
children butchered, of near relations compelled by torture to be the
murderers of each other, of corpses outraged and mutilated, were told
and heard with full belief and intense interest. Then it was added that
the dastardly savages who had by surprise committed all these cruelties
on an unsuspecting and defenceless colony had, as soon as Oliver came
among them on his great mission of vengeance, flung down their arms
in panic terro