. Yet, whether it was due to the standing barrier of the sea, or
whatever may have been the cause, much less was known by Englishmen of
Ireland than of Scotland. Witness the works of Shakespeare, whose mind,
unless as to book-knowledge, was encyclopaedic, and yet who, while he
seems at home in Scotland, may be said to tell us nothing of Ireland,
unless it is that--

"The uncivil kerns of Ireland are in arms."[73]

During more recent times, the knowledge of Scotland on this side the
border, which before was greatly in advance, has again increased in afar
greater degree than the knowledge of Ireland.

It is to Mr. Lecky that we owe the first serious effort, both in his
_Leaders of Public Opinion_ and in his _History of England in the
Eighteenth Century_, to produce a better state of things. He carefully
and completely dovetailed the affairs of Ireland into English History,
and the debt is one to be gratefully acknowledged. But such remedies,
addressing themselves in the first instance to the lettered mind of the
country, require much time to operate upon the mass, and upon the organs
of superficial and transitory opinion, before the final stage, when they
enter into our settled and familiar traditions. Meantime, since Ireland
threatens to absorb into herself our Parliamentary life, there is a
greatly enhanced necessity for becoming acquainted with the true state
of the account between the islands that make up the United Kingdom, and
with the likelihoods of the future in Ireland, so far as they are to be
gathered from her past history.

That history, until the eighteenth century begins, has a dismal
simplicity about it. Murder, persecution, confiscation too truly
describe its general strain; and policy is on the whole subordinated to
violence as the standing instrument of government. But after, say, the
reign of William III., the element of representation begins to assert
itself. Simplicity is by degrees exchanged for complexity; the play of
human motives, singularly diversified, now becomes visible in the
currents of a real public life. It has for a very long time been my
habit, when consulted by young political students, to recommend them
carefully to study the characters and events of the American
Independence. Quite apart from the special and temporary reasons bearing
upon the case, I would now add a twin recommendation to examine and
ponder the lessons of Irish history during the eighteenth century. The
task m