with wounds, turned
loose into the woods or deserts.[*]

The stately buildings or commodious habitations of the planters, as if
upbraiding the sloth and ignorance of the natives, were consumed with
fire, or laid level with the ground. And where the miserable owners,
shut up in their houses, and preparing for defence, perished in the
flames, together with their wives and children, a double triumph was
afforded to their insulting foes.[**]

If any where a number assembled together, and, assuming courage from
despair, were resolved to sweeten death by revenge on their assassins,
they were disarmed by capitulations and promises of safety, confirmed
by the most solemn oaths. But no sooner had they surrendered, than the
rebels, with perfidy equal to their cruelty, made them share the fate of
their unhappy countrymen.[***]

Others, more ingenious still in their barbarity, tempted their
prisoners, by the fond love of life, to imbrue their hands in the blood
of friends, brothers, parents; and having thus rendered them accomplices
in guilt, gave them that death which they sought to shun by deserving
it.[****]

Amidst all these enormities, the sacred name of religion resounded on
every side; not to stop the hands of these murderers, but to enforce
their blows, and to steel their hearts against every movement of human
or social sympathy. The English, as heretics, abhorred of God and
detestable to all holy men, were marked out by the priests for
slaughter; and of all actions, to rid the world of these declared
enemies to Catholic faith and piety, was represented as the most
meritorious.[v] Nature, which in that rude people was sufficiently
inclined to atrocious deeds, was further stimulated by precept: and
national prejudices empoisoned by those aversions, more deadly and
incurable, which arose from an enraged superstition. While death
finished the sufferings of each victim, the bigoted assassins, with joy
and exultation, still echoed in his expiring ears, that these agonies
were but the commencement of torments infinite and eternal.[v*]

* Temple, p. 84.

** Temple, p. 99, 106. Rash. vol. v. p. 414

*** Whitlocke, p. 47. Rush. vol. v. p. 416.

**** Temple, p 100.

v Temple, p. 85, 106.

v* Temple, p 94, 107, 108. Rush. vol. v. p. 407.

Such were the barbarities by which Sir Phelim O'Neale and the Irish in
Ulster signalized their rebellion; an event memorable in the annals
of human kind,