that she became aware of its ultimate aims, and felt its growing power
within her borders. There was, besides, in the two races, those
opposites of character--those natural antagonisms which repelled each
other with a force and vehemence not to be neutralized or unified by
any process within the reach of even the most humane or astute ruler.
They were too different peoples, with habits of thought, moral
perceptions, and ideas of chivalry at total variance with each other as
entertained by them individually. The great bulk of the English colony
was composed of unprincipled freebooters and degraded Saxon serfs; the
Conqueror having, a century previously, turned the masses of the
English into swine-herds, banished their language from court, and
reduced them to a condition of the most abject slavery. Hence their
stolid brutality, the low plane of their intelligence, and their
systematic murders. But, how different the condition of the Irish in
this respect. Far ages previous, both learning, refinement, and the
chivalrous use of arms, pervaded their shores. Evidences of the truth
of this assertion lie scattered around us in every direction. Girald
Barry--the English Cambrensis, William Camden, Archbishop Usher,
Vallancey, Lord Lyttleton, and a host of others, all bear witness to
the profound learning and noble chivalry of the Irish from the earliest
periods; while the various educational institutions throughout the
continent, founded shortly after the introduction of Christianity into
Ireland, establish, upon a basis the most immovable, the truth of an
assertion made by one of the authors just mentioned, namely, that "most
of the lights that illumined those times of thick darkness proceeded
out of Ireland". As may be presumed, then, a people so refined and
chivalrous--so sensitive to all that was noble and elevated--a people
who, as in the case of Alfred, had educated the very kings of the
invaders, as well as plucked their subjects from Paganism, were
averse to meeting the usurper on his own plane of warfare, and that