ther, and bound up in thirty-two volumes, which are paged, indexed, and preserved with care; and that from these Sir John Temple made a selection of those best calculated to answer his purpose. We may fairly presume, that, in forming his anthologia, he culled the sweetest flowers, and that those that remain are inferior to those he selected. Of the latter, we shall give such specimens, as cannot fail to excite the astonishment and horror of every man whose conscience is not seared with the hot iron of inextinguishable hatred to Ireland and Irishmen. It may be a matter of surprise, why the tales were not dressed in better form;-why, since plausible stories cost the inventors as little talents or trouble as incredible ones, they did not frame consistent narratives, which would stand the test of examination, and not carry their own condemnation with them. The answer is obvious. The taste of the purchasers regulates the manufacture of every article; and the object being to bear down a nation hated for the injustice it had suffered, envied for the property it possessed, and devoted to destruction by religious bigotry and the spirit of rapine and plunder, the more terrible the tales, the more acceptable. The supernatural power of witches, and the apparition of ghosts, were as firmly believed, in those days of ignorance, as the existence and justice of the solemn league and covenant. Apparitions were therefore called in, as a necessary part of the machinery, to prop the evidence of the horrifying massacre, and wonderfully heightened its effect. Millions of acres of land, and hundreds of lives, were sacrificed, to appease the manes of those, whose screaming, shrieking ghosts were, for months together, invoking vengeance on their murderers, at Portnedown bridge. The depositions quoted by Temple, and which form the basis of his history, may be fairly divided into four classes: I. Those which rest wholly on hearsay; II. Those that assert things contrary to the order of nature; as the appearance of ghosts; III. Those which are so manifestly improbable, as to preclude the assent of rational beings; IV. Those which are drawn up without any internal evidence of their falsehood. That the two first classes are to be rejected, without a moment's hesitation, no man will dare deny. That they ever were admitted, and that such men as Carte, Warner, Leland, and Hume, should have made them the basis on which they erected their legendary tales, will be matter of eternal astonishment. The third class merits the same fate. We will give two instances, in illustration. May and Temple both state, that many of the English were so "surbated," by the fatigues of their flight from the murderous rebels, that they crawled into Dublin on their knees! To a person unacquainted with the geography of Ireland, it might appear that these miserable fugitives, who were so "surbated,"* had travelled two or three thousand miles over sands or rocks, or both; and worn out not only their shoes and stockings, but their feet. He could not conceive that the most distant point of the north, from Dublin, was not a hundred and fifty miles; that the average distance of the chief seats of the insurrection was only about ninety; and the roads neither sandy nor stony. But when he is duly enlightened on these very abstruse points, and has reflected that a man not goaded on by apprehension of skeins or daggers, could with ease walk one hundred miles in five or six days; that with such powerful stimuli, he would probably travel them in three or four; that it is not usual, in three or four, or even in five or six days' travelling, to wear out either shoes or stockings; that even if the shoes or stockings were worn out, it requires a far greater extent of travelling to wear out the feet; and that there is no instance on record, of a man preferring to travel on his knees instead of his feet, especially when fleeing from assassins: when he has duly weighed these considerations, and various others that must arise in his mind, he will conclude, that no man would have ever devised such a "Some, over-wearied with long travel, and so surbated as they came creeping on their knees!"431 "Some, tired with travel, and so surbated that they came into the city creeping on their knees!"432 431 Temple, 55. 432 May, 86. wretched story, but an abandoned impostor; and that none would give credit to it, but those whose folly was exactly commensurate with the fraud of the narrator. 66 A large portion of the falsehoods that so universally abound in Irish history, display, as we have had frequent occasion to remark, an equal degree of stupidity and wickedness. This is a strong case in point. The idea of people flying from the skeins and daggers of assassins, and so surbated," by a journey of fifty or a hundred miles, as to be obliged to creep or crawl on their knees, is so absurd, so ridiculous, so farcical, so improbable, as to excite contempt; and would itself, if it stood single, be almost sufficient to destroy the credit of any historian, who could seriously attempt to impose such a romance on the world. We shall be pardoned for glancing at another case of the testimony of this class. Temple informs us, that some of those "surbated" fugitives, who were "almost naked," refused to cover themselves with clothes which were offered them; that they "would not stir to fetch themselves food, though they knew where it stood ready for them;" and that "they lay in their own dung."* Com * "Those of better quality, who could not frame themselves to be common beggars, crept into private places: and some of them, that had not private friends to relieve them, even wasted silently away, and so died without noise. I have known some of them that lay almost naked, and having clothes sent, laid ment on such legends would be insulting to the understanding of the reader. We presume that every account of this description is nearly on a level with the story of the ghosts that were perched in the river, screaming for revenge, from Christmas till the end of lent;* and is entitled to the same unqualified rejection. The fourth class alone is entitled to any consideration: and even that stands a fair chance of being involved in the same condemnation. Perjury was the order of the day: witnesses were suborned to shed innocent blood:† and where we them by, refusing to put them on!!! Others that would not stir to fetch themselves food, though they knew where it stood ready for them!!! But they continued to lie nastily in their filthy rags, and even THEIR OWN DUNG!! not taking care to have any thing clean, handsome, or comfortable about them and so even worn out with the misery of the journey, and cruel usage, having their spirits spent, their bodies wasted, and their senses failing, lay here pitifully languishing; and soon after they had recovered this town, very many of them died, leaving their bodies as monuments of the most inhuman cruelties used towards them. The greatest part of the women and children, thus barbarously expelled out of their habitations, perished in the city of Dublin: and so great numbers of them were brought to their graves, as all the church-yards within the whole town were of too narrow a compass to contain."433 †The reader is requested to turn to the duke of Ormond's statement of the application to the Privy Council for the wages of prostitution; that is, payment for money expended for hiring those witnesses whose "feet were swift to shed innocent blood;" and, above all, to the horrible fact of a jury finding one thousand bills of indictment in two days.§ * Supra, 42. + Supra, 85. 433 Temple, 55. |
