but you will not see a real Irish name amongst them; you will
perceive that the priest-catchers were principally English soldiers; and
you will remark that the man in whose house the priest was discovered
generally shared his fate. But it was useless. They were hung, they were
tortured, they were transported to Barbadoes, and, finally, such numbers
were captured, that it was feared they would contaminate the very
slaves, and they were confined on the island of Innisboffin, off the
coast of Connemara. Yet more priests came to take the place of those who
were thus removed, and the "hunt" was still continued.

The number of secular priests who were victims to this persecution
cannot be correctly estimated. The religious orders, who were in the
habit of keeping an accurate chronicle of the entrance and decease of
each member, furnish fuller details. An official record, drawn up in
1656, gives the names of thirty Franciscans who had suffered for the
faith; and this was before the more severe search had commenced. The
martyrdom of a similar number of Dominicans is recorded almost under the
same date; and Dr. Burgat[502] states that more than three hundred of
the clergy were put to death by the sword or on the scaffold, while more
than 1,000 were sent into exile.

The third "beast" was the Tory. The Tory was the originator of agrarian
outrages in Ireland, or we should rather say, the English planters were
the originators, and the Tories the first perpetrators of the crime. The
Irish could scarcely be expected to have very exalted ideas of the
sanctity and inviolable rights of property, from the way in which they
saw it treated. The English made their will law, and force their
title-deed. The Anglo-Normans dispossessed the native Irish, the
followers of the Tudors dispossessed the Anglo-Normans, and the men of
the Commonwealth dispossessed them all. Still the Celt, peculiarly
tenacious of his traditions, had a very clear memory of his ancient
rights, and could tell you the family who even then represented the
original proprietor, though that proprietor had been dispossessed five
or six hundred years. The ejectments from family holdings had been
carried out on so large a scale, that it can scarcely be a matter of
surprise if some of the ejected resented this treatment. There were
young men who preferred starving in the woods to starving in Connaught;
and after a time they formed into bands in those vast tracts of land
which had