what was to be
scraped together in the poorest of all treasuries. Nevertheless Scotland
by no means escaped the fate ordained for every country which is
connected, but not incorporated, with another country of greater
resources. Though in name an independent kingdom, she was, during more
than a century, really treated, in many respects, as a subject province.

Ireland was undisguisedly governed as a dependency won by the sword. Her
rude national institutions had perished. The English colonists submitted
to the dictation of the mother country, without whose support they could
not exist, and indemnified themselves by trampling on the people among
whom they had settled. The parliaments which met at Dublin could pass no
law which had not been previously approved by the English Privy Council.
The authority of the English legislature extended over Ireland. The
executive administration was entrusted to men taken either from England
or from the English pale, and, in either case, regarded as foreigners,
and even as enemies, by the Celtic population.

But the circumstance which, more than any other, has made Ireland to
differ from Scotland remains to be noticed. Scotland was Protestant. In
no part of Europe had the movement of the popular mind against the Roman
Catholic Church been so rapid and violent. The Reformers had vanquished,
deposed, and imprisoned their idolatrous sovereign. They would not
endure even such a compromise as had been effected in England. They had
established the Calvinistic doctrine, discipline, and worship; and they
made little distinction between Popery and Prelacy, between the Mass and
the Book of Common Prayer. Unfortunately for Scotland, the prince whom
she sent to govern a fairer inheritance had been so much annoyed by
the pertinacity with which her theologians had asserted against him the
privileges of the synod and the pulpit that he hated the ecclesiastical
polity to which she was fondly attached as much as it was in his
effeminate nature to hate anything, and had no sooner mounted the
English throne than he began to show an intolerant zeal for the
government and ritual of the English Church.

The Irish were the only people of northern Europe who had remained true
to the old religion. This is to be partly ascribed to the circumstance
that they were some centuries behind their neighbours in knowledge. But
other causes had cooperated. The Reformation had been a national as well
as a moral revolt.