sh
were fought with every appliance of war, backed by the riches of a
prospering, strongly organized country, and impelled persistently by
the greed of land and love of mastery; but there was not a mountain
pass in Ireland, not a square mile of plain, not a river-ford, scarce
a hill that had not been piled high with English dead in that four
hundred years at the hands of the Irish wielders of sword and spear
and pike.

The Irish had not made their environment or their natures, and no
power on earth could change them. Over greater England had swept the
Romans, the Jutes, the Saxons, the Angles, the Norsemen, and the
Normans. All found lodgment and all went to the making of England.
Well, one might say, it had been for Ireland if she had developed
that assimilating power which made her successive conquerors in
process of time the feeders of her greatness, but the Irish would not
and could not. Instead, they developed the pride of race that no
momentary defeat could down. They became inured to battle and dreamt
of battle when the peace of an hour was given them. When the four
kings of Ireland were feasted in Dublin by King Richard II. of
England, an English chronicler remarked, "Never were men of ruder
manners"; but neither the silken array and golden glitter of
Richard's peripatetic court nor the brave display of his thousand
knights and thirty thousand archers filled them with longing for the
one or fear of the other. They went back to their Irish hills and
plains and fastnesses as obstinately Irish as ever.

They fought well at home, if unfortunately, the wonder being that
they continued to fight. The heavens and the earth seemed combined
against them.

II.--THE FIGHTING RACE ABROAD.

We next see Irish soldiers fighting abroad. The blood they had shed
so freely for the Stuarts at the Boyne, at Athlone, at Aughrim, at
Limerick was in vain. The king of France, if he sent armies to
Ireland, demanded Irish troops in return. The transports that brought
the French regiments over in May, 1690, took back over five thousand
officers and men from Ireland, who formed the first Irish Brigade in
the service of France. This, remember, was before the battle of the
Boyne. The men were formed on their arrival in France into three
regiments, those of Mountcashel, O'Brien, and Dillon, named after
their commanders, and were sent to Savoy. The French aid to James in
Ireland helped best in giving confidence to the raw Irish levies, but