n by his face, and "never
suffered any person whom they deigned to honour with this distinction,
to pass off without convincing proof of their attention." He also
mentions the case of a hermit named Driscoll, whose name and the same
details of his sufferings are given in Clancy's account of the
insurrection. This man was strangled three times, and flogged four
times, because a Catholic prayer-book was found in his possession, on
which it was _supposed_ that he used to administer oaths of disloyalty.

I shall now give the account of another historian. Plowden writes thus;
"These military savages [the yeomanry corps--it will be remembered what
Lord Moira said of them in Parliament] were permitted, both by
magistrates and officers, in open day, to seize every man they wished or
chose to suspect as a _Croppy_, and drag him to the guardhouse, where
they constantly kept a supply of coarse linen caps, besmeared inside
with pitch; and when the pitch was well heated, they forced the cap on
his head; and sometimes the melted pitch, running into the eyes of the
unfortunate victim, superadded blindness to his other tortures. They
generally detained him till the pitch had so cooled, that the cap could
not be detached from the head without carrying with it the hair and
blistered skin; they then turned him adrift, disfigured, often blind,
and writhing with pain. They enjoyed with loud bursts of laughter the
fiendlike sport--the agonies of their victim. At other times, they
rubbed moistened gunpowder into the hair, in the form of a cross, and
set fire to it; and not unfrequently sheared off the ears and nose of
the unfortunate Croppy." Plowden then details the atrocities of a
sergeant of the Cork Militia, who was called _Tom the Devil_. He
concludes: "It would be uncandid to detail only instances of the
brutality of the lower orders, whilst evidence is forthcoming of persons
of fortune and education being still more brutalized by its deleterious
spirit." He then mentions an instance, on the authority of both an
eyewitness and the victim, in which Lord Kingsborough, Mr. Beresford,
and an officer whose name he did not know, tortured two respectable
Dublin tradesmen, one named John Fleming, a ferryman, the other Francis
Gough, a coachmaker. The nobleman superintended the flagellation of
Gough, and at every stroke insulted him with taunts and inquiries how he
liked it. The unfortunate man was confined to his bed in consequence,
for six mon