command by Father Roche for expressing his horror at the massacre of Scullabogue.

Father John was now preparing the plan of a campaign which involved the fate of Dublin itself, for he resolved to march from Wexford northward, so as to raise the population of Kildare on the one side and Wicklow on the other, and carry the metropolis at the head of an army of fifty thousand men. Meanwhile Lord Camden, unable to convince the English Cabinet of the necessity of sending immediate reinforcements into Ireland, raised several regiments of Dublin loyalists, who released the garrison for active service in the field. The army then marched southward in three divisions, converging upon Wexford, and fought the decisive battles of New Town Barry and New Ross, inflicting great losses upon the rebels. Here is one of the battle-scenes :

'Priests were seen moving up and down the lines in their vestments and carrying crucifixes. Mass was said at the head of every column, the men kneeling with marked and earnest devotion. For the moment Johnston thought that they were hesitating, but he was swiftly undeceived. It was now a little after three o'clock, daylight being scarcely yet fully established. They rose from their knees; the lines opened, and between them came herds of wild cattle rushing on amidst shouts and yells which burst from the enormous multitude, the rebels pricking them forward with their pikes.

Cannon had been

placed in the long straight street which leads from the market-place to the Bullet-Gate and poured round shot and grape into their dense masses. Multitudes fell. An entire column was annihilated-not a man escaped out of it. Brave as they were, so terrible a reception startled them. They fell back for a while, and the troops had time to rally and reform. But soon they came on again through smoke and flame, their courage and their overwhelming numbers compensating for want of discipline and inferiority of arms. Johnston's

advantage lay in his heavy guns. The rebels had no artillerymen, and such cannon as they captured they were unable to use. But the daring of the Irish on that day defied even artillery. A spectator from a window close to the spot from whence a gun was strewing the street with piles of dead, saw a man rush straight upon it and thrust his hat into the smoking nozzle, crying, "Come on boys, her mouth is stopped." In another second he was blown to atoms. Careless in their desperate fanaticism, the Irish showed for once in rebellion the contempt of danger, which, as soldiers in the army of their sovereign, they never fail to show.'

This was the battle of New Ross, in which the rebels lost two thousand six hundred men. At an early part of the engagement, a party of the rebels, cowards as well as savages, left the field of action to do a deed of appalling wickedness, which will never cease to make the ears of Protestant Irishmen tingle

with indignation. We refer to the burning of Scullabogue Barn, in which the rebels had confined a hundred and eightyfour Protestants, chiefly old men, women and children :

:

'The miserable beings who had been pent up there through a summer's afternoon and night must have been in a condition in which death would be a relief to most of them. Humanity may perhaps hope that till their murder was resolved on they were allowed the range of the yard. In the barn they were at any rate at that moment crushed so close together that their bodies supported each other, and they could neither sit nor lie on the ground. The doors were barred on the outside, and the rebels with their pikes thrust blazing faggots into the thatch. The majority must have been instantly suffocated. Those who were near the walls sought chinks and cracks for air, but were driven back by pike-points thrust into the openings. One little child crawled under the door and was escaping; a rebel ran a pike into it as a peasant runs a pitch-fork into a corn-sheaf, and tossed it back into the flames. A woman who came four days later to look for the remains of her husband and son found the ruins of the barn full of blackened bodies-"all in a standing posture "-an unintended confirmation of the received estimate of the number of those perished there.

'For this act the Irish Catholics have affected the same inadequate penitence with which they at once deny and excuse the massacre of 1641. They cut down the dimensions of their crime in defiance of evidence, and explain what remains as the consequence of the cruelties of their adversaries. They fail to recognise that, alike in 1641 and in 1798, no injury had been done to them, and no hurt had been designed against them till they had taken arms in rebellion, or were preparing for it so openly that the Government was compelled to take their weapons from them.'

National historians allege that the burning of the barn was done by way of retaliation for the slaughter of unresisting prisoners by the troops. It is only fair to give the Catholic explanation of this shocking occurrence.

Immediately after the decisive battle of Arklow, in which the rebels were desperately defeated, and Father Michael Murphy, their leader, cut in pieces by a cannon-ball, the rising in Ulster took place. But it was crushed without difficulty in the decisive battle of Ballinahinch, in County Down. Meanwhile, the massacre of Scullabogue was of more account than fifty regiments in pacifying Ulster, for the Presbyterians at once withdrew from the confederacy and passed into the ranks of the Orangemen. Lord Cornwallis was therefore able to concentrate his troops and give the finishing-stroke to the rebellion by destroying the camp at Vinegar Hill :—

'The rebel-army, sixteen thousand strong, were drawn up on the open ground on the brow. Their guns, thirteen in all, of various

sorts and calibre, were at the windmill. General Lake, with Dundas, attacked on the east side; Sir James Duff, with part of Loftus's division, on the north-west, from the bank of the river; Loftus himself was between them. On these three sides they forced their way simultaneously up the slope. The rebels held their ground for an hour and a half with moderate firmness. Lake's horse was killed under him early in the action. Father Clinch, of Enniscorthy, an enormous man, on a tall white horse, specially distinguished himself. But successive defeats had cooled the courage which had been so eminent at Arklow and New Ross. There was no longer the contempt of death which will make even the least disciplined enemy formidable. Lord Roden singled out Father Clinch and killed him. The rebels were afraid of being surrounded, and seeing the southern side of the hill still open, they fled down it and escaped to Needham's Gap to Wexford, from the scene of their brief and wild supremacy.'

Thus was crushed the formidable insurrection of 1798, at a cost of sixty thousand Irish lives. The country was left exhausted, but not tranquillised, filled, not with penitence, but with rancour and deep-seated hostility, and in such a condition of wretchedness and disaffection, as, in spite of the dreadful lessons of the rebellion, to meditate a new resort to arms five years later. Of the crimes of the leaders we think it impossible to form an exaggerated estimate, as whatever may be the real or supposed wrongs which armed resistance would redress, no wrong can be so great, no evil so hopelessly intolerable, as the disturbance of the settled order of society, especially in a country distracted by religious dissensions. It is natural to feel some sympathy for the fate of such persons as Lord Edward Fitzgerald, and nothing can show more strongly the effect that had been produced on the feelings of the nation by the wrongs she had suffered than that they should have seduced a person of such character into the rebellion; but a nation must really have exhausted every other alternative before it appeals to the sword, and must be all but unanimous to justify an insurrection. Irish writers have never ceased to decry the severities exercised towards the rebels after their defeat in the battle-field. It is true that the vengeance of the law followed the havoc of the sword, and that the yeomanry exercised the most cruel and wanton severities in their efforts to stamp out the last embers of the insurrection. We believe they acted with all the energy and ferocity of fear-which is often the most cruel of passions, restrained by no principle, and deaf to all the pleadings of compassion-for the French invasion coming in August revived the hopes of the rebels, and only served to aggravate the exasperation of the loyalists. Lord Cornwallis, who showed great humanity, was obliged to revive

the court-martials again and again after they had been temporarily suspended.* But it was a misfortune that the insurrection had to be crushed mainly by the Irish yeomanry, and not by English troops. Mr. Froude says truly: The yeomanry were strong enough to destroy the rebels; they were not strong enough to pardon them; but we must allow something for the fact that they had volunteered their services to grapple 'with the unseen enemy who for years had been the terror of 'their families; had compelled every Protestant house to 'convert itself into a fortress, and had filled the domestic life ' of Protestant Ireland with the most painful anxiety.' Yet, let it be recorded to their honour, that it was the yeomanry and militia-in other words, Irishmen themselves-who broke the back of the rebellion, and saved the country to the British Crown.

ART. VIII.-1. Trojanische Alterthümer.

Bericht über die

Ausgrabungen in Troja. Von Dr. HEINRICH SCHLIEMANN. 8vo. Leipzig: 1874.

2. Atlas Trojanischer Alterthümer. Photographische Abbildungen zu dem Bericht über die Ausgrabungen in Troja. Von Dr. HEINRICH SCHLIEMANN. 4to. (218 Photographic Plates with Descriptive Text.) 1874.

MUCH curiosity was excited, towards the close of last sum

mer, by the announcement, which appeared first in the German newspapers, but soon found its way into those of this country also that a German savant, who was known to have been engaged for a considerable time past in researches on the plain of Troy, had not only determined beyond a doubt the site of that far-famed city, but had brought to light the very palace of King Priam himself, and, what was more, had found upon the site a large portion of the treasures in gold and silver that had once belonged to the Trojan monarch, and which the Greek invaders, as it appeared, had omitted to carry off. Such a discovery was indeed calculated to arouse the attention, not only of archæologists and scholars, but of every cultivated person in the three kingdoms; for who is there that can pretend to that title, to whom the names of Priam and Hecuba, of Hector and Andromache, are not as familiar as household words? Great as was the interest attached to such marvellous

* Lord Cornwallis laments the excesses of the yeomanry, but admits that the rebels were far more cruel.

discoveries as those at Nineveh, which may be said to have brought to light again the existence of a buried empire, they were deficient in that highest source of interest which is derived from the association and connexion with persons well known in history, or in that poetical and legendary story, which is apt to impress itself more strongly on the mind than any true history.

At the same time this very circumstance was one of the causes which led to this first announcement being received with some incredulity as well as astonishment. The old undoubting faith of former days, which had received the Trojan War as an event as historical and unquestionable as the Crusades, and had looked on Agamemnon and Achilles as no less historical personages than Godfrey of Bouillon or Edward the Black Prince, had almost entirely passed away; and while many scholars were still content to believe that there must remain a substratum of fact underlying this accumulated mass of legend and fiction, others insisted on resolving the whole into those hazy mists of mythology, in which the bewildered inquirer gropes in vain for any glimpse of truth or reality. To be told, therefore, that the results of actual excavations upon the spot had not only proved the real existence of Troy, but the substantial truth of the Trojan War, and revealed objects of great intrinsic value, which could be assigned without hesitation to the period of that event, and might be reasonably believed to have belonged to the aged Priam himself, and been worn or handled by his sons and daughters, was indeed an assertion calculated to arouse the scepticism of more critical scholars, while those who still clung to the ancient legend would be apt to feel that it was too good news to be true.

6

For some time no definite information on the subject was received; and it was not till the publication of an article in the Revue des Deux Mondes' of January last, by M. Emile Burnouf, the learned director of the French school at Athens; and of one by Mr. Max Müller in The Academy,' almost exactly at the same time, that scholars and archæologists in this country had any means of forming a judgment for themselves of the real value and nature of the discoveries in question. Since then Dr. Schliemann's own work has appeared, containing not only a minute and detailed account of the whole course and progress of his excavations, but is illustrated with photographic representations of all the objects of interest discovered in the course of them, as well as with plans of the excavations and the ruins brought to light, which supply the fullest information concerning all the circumstances of this