The Sun.
London, England, 1829-08-15 00:00:00

LITERATURE.

MR. LAWLESS'S HISTORY of IRELAND DURING

THE REIGNS of GEORGE I. 11. 111. and IV.

This work we understand will shortly be in
the Press of Messrs. Whittaker and Co. Since
its announcement we have returned to the pages
of Mr. Lawless's History of Ireland, of which
we have now before us the third edition, printed
in Edinburgh ; of the style and manner in
which the forthcoming work will be executed,
we cannot give a more reasonable conjecture
than by the opinion our readers may form from
the passage we take indiscriminately from the
volume before us. Mr. Lawless commences the
reign of William the Third with the following
reflections. We think they are written with a
good and generous feeling, though palpably
breathing that indignant mind which felt for the
prolonged calamities of his native land :
" The surrender of Limerick, on the coadition of
Irish freedom, closed the struggle between this
enuntry and England. The right of William to
the Irish throne was acknowledged and submitted
to, and the establishment of the civil and religious
liberties of Irishmen was expected to have succeeded
to the intolerance of fanaticism and the rapacity of
monopoly. The battle was bravely fought by the
Irish people; and from the character which their il-
lustrious opponent enjoyed in his own country,
they most reasonably hoped that they might repose
vvith confidence on the faithful fulfilment of any
treaty to which the necessities of the English
monarch might have compelled him to accede. Ire-
land therefore sheathed her sword, in the ingenu-
ous confidence of having an honourable enemy to
treat with. How those expectations were fulfilled—
how that confidence was preserved—how the
honour of the English nation has been maintained
in her solemn treaties with Ireland, let it be the
office of history to record. It has hitherto been
our duty to relate the struggles of an armed, though
abused nation, with the jealousy, the bigotry, and
the rapacity of England. The reader has waded
through scenes of slaughter and desolation. He
has followed the Irishman in his various efforts to
defend the religion anti liberties of his country.
During this sad melancholy proaress, he was some-
times relieved by the spectacle of successful re-
taliation or unprovoked aggression; and he has
been often consoled by the temporary exhibition
of a courage which would add lustre to the
proudest achievements of ancient or modern (lays.
Until the period to which we have now arrived,
we had never to contemplate the cowardly exercise
of a tyranny which trampled on the man it de-
ceived; which tortured the victim it disarmed;
wheti pledged its faith in order to betray ; and
with all the contemptible malice of a voracious
jealousy, was perpetually plundering the courage
which it feared. _ _ _

" That revolution which was the fruitful parent
of so many blessings to England, was the copious
source of Ireland's bitterest sufferings; the great
event which completed the establishment of British
freedom, confirmed the slavery of Ireland. The
links of that chain which were struck from the
English nation were more than doubled on the
mind and the arm of Ireland. Zhe accumulated
vengeance of the last two hundred years, was
poured on the devoted head of our country by the
monarch of immortal memory.' Even the mise•
ruble instruments of English despotism were chained
to the oar ; they should strike at the will of their
masters, and truckle to their passions, if they
hoped to preserve their confidence. The little
miserable monopolists whom the reader will see
exhibiting from time to time on the political stage
of Ireland, were little more than the well paid exe-
cutioners of their fellow citizens; their duty was to
wield the lash and torture the victim ; their em-
ployment was the degradation and impoverishment
of their country; their wages, the government of
that country which their folly or their treason, or
their avarice had wasted. Every revolution ex-
perienced by Ireland, from the invasion, but left a
new ingredient of bitterness in the cup of misfor-
tune. Every change was from bad to worse; so
that the Irish patriot who sympathised with her
fortunes, might have lamented that the sword of
annihilation had left a subject on which her future
tyrants could indulge their malice. A celebrated
writer on the English Constitution, speaking of
the various revolutions which took place in Eng-
land, has the following observations :
" If we peruse the history of England,' says De
Lohne, we shall be peculiarly struck with one
circumstance to be observed in it, and which dis-
tinguishes most advantageously the English govern-
ment from all other free governments-1 mean the
manner in which revolutions and public commotions
have always been terminated in England. If we
read with some atteotien the history of other free
states, we shall see the public dissentions that have
taken place in them, have constantly been ter-
minated by settlereents, in which the interests
only of a few were really provided for, while the
grievances of the many were hardly, if ever, at-
tended to. In England the very reverse has hap-
pened, and we find revolutions always to have been
terminated by extensive and accurate provisions for
securing the general liberty.'
" In Ireland we have hitherto found that revolu-
tions terminated in the forging of new chains and
the multiplication of new tortures. The liberty of
England aod the slavery of Ireland have invariably
proceeded together; Ireland going down as Eng-
land ascended. Posterity have justly concluded
that the rights of Irishmen and the prosperity of
England cannot exist together—a melancholy truth,
which the -events of the present day only contribute
to confirm, and which is still left to the enlightened
English Government of future days to refute. The
lights of history cannot be extinguished, nor her
powerful voice silenced. The conclusions we have
drawn are irresistible, and the idle violence which
attempts to punish their publication only impresses
those troths more deeply on the mind. The glories
of William and of Anne—the victories of Marlboe
rough, and the universal conquests of Chatham, •
have been the most disastrous epochs of Ireland.
Never was the heart of our country so low as when
England was the envy and the terror of her
enemies. The sounds of English triumphs were to
her the sounds of sorrow—the little tyrants who
ruled her were inflamed with courage, and urged on
with increased rancour—the unhappy Catholics of
Ireland, who always constituted the nation, were
doomed to be again insulted and tortured with im-
punity—and the protestant Parliaments of our
country, as if their existence depended on their ser-
vility, will be seen sacrificing even their own pro-
perties, as well as those of their Catholic country-
men, to the insatiable monopoly of England—yet
all those scenes were the offspring of that revolu-
tion in which Engiishmen most justly triumph—a
revolution which, De Lolme says, terminated by a
series of public Acts in which no interests but those
of the people at large were considered and provided
for. The series of public Acts which the same
revolution produced in Ireland, were directed to
sacrifice the peace, happiness, and seeutity of Irish-
men to the establishment of a contemptible mono-
poly, which rendered them for seventy years the
degraded slaves of a system that beggared and in-
suted them. The enlightened Proteetant of the
present day, looks back with horror on that profli-
gate folly which gratified the malignity of a foreign
country, in the enactment of a system of legislation
which puts into the shade the more humane, be-
cause less lingering despotism of the inquisition.
lie shudders at the recollection of that infatuated
spirit of ascendancy which chained the hand of in-
dustry, barbarized the infant mind, broke up all the
social feelings, bribed the child to betray his parent,
and the perjured apostater, to plunder the innocent
and conscierithm Is. ne Protestants of the present
;day hasten with one voice to cancel the odious re-
coiJ and to bury it in 0;04 oblivion, The Ease