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deed was a most worthy work for so virtuous, bountiful, and careful a sovereign and prince, and would conservate to perpetual memory her Majesty's godly zeal to true religion and learning, and her merciful motherly care over her poor and rude subjects here. The work, thus taken out of the hands of the local authorities, and committed to Elizabeth, was brought to a conclusion twenty-five years afterwards by the foundation of Trinity College, Dublin.

After his educational projects were finally nipped by the departure of Sidney from Dublin, March 25, 1571, Campion had to devise some other method of accounting for his absence from England. He therefore devoted ten weeks at this time to a hasty knocking together of a History of Ireland, which, read by the light of the circumstances under which it was conceived, is almost as much a pamphlet to prove that education is the only means of taming the Irish as a serious history.

The work is dedicated to his "singular good lord" and patron, Leicester, the chancellor of his university, to whom he says, that, in order that his travel into Ireland might seem neither causeless nor fruitless, he had thought it expedient, as one of his lordship's honourable charge, to yield him that poor book as an account of his poor voyage. He hoped it was not the last or the best gift he should offer; but he was sure that it had been "more full of unsavoury toil for the time than any plot of work he ever attempted." It was long before he could find a copy of "Gerald of Wales;" and what this writer left untouched, he had been forced to piece out by the help of foreign writers who incidentally touched upon Ireland, and by a number of brief extracts of rolls, records, and scattered papers, to handle and lay all which together he had not in all the space of ten weeks. He confesses, in his epistle to the loving reader, that, ever since his first arrival at Dublin, he, with the help of various gentlemen, had inquired out antiquities of the land. But he had no help from real Irish sources; though the native chronicles were "full fraught of lewd examples, idle tales, and genealogies, et quicquid Græcia mendax audet in historia," yet he was persuaded he might have sucked thence good store of matter, had he found an interpreter, or understood their tongue, which is so hard that it would have required a study of more years than he could spare months. He intended his book to be only a contribution to the subject, and desired the Irish antiquaries "hereafter at good leisure to supply the want of this foundation, and polish the stone rough-hewed to

See Note 10.

their hand," which, rough as it was, would have been much worse proportioned if the author had not been helped with the familiar society and daily table-talk of James Stanihurst, who, "beside all courtesy of hospitality, and a thousand loving turns not here to be recited, both by word and written monuments, and by the benefit of his own library, nourished most effectually" the writer's endeavour.

To the ordinary reader, the most interesting parts of the work will always be those which consist of the writer's own observations upon the soil and the inhabitants of Ireland, which "lieth aloof in the West Ocean, in proportion like an egg, blunt and plain at the sides, not reaching forth to sea in nooks and elbows of land as Britain doth." From these chapters I will give some extracts, since the book is scarce, as specimens of Campion's English style, in his own day greatly admired:

"The soil is low and waterish, and includeth divers little islands, environed with bogs and marishes: highest hills have standing pools in their top. The air is wholesome, not altogether so clear and subtle as ours of England. Of bees good store; no vineyards, contrary to the opinion of some writers, who both in this and other errors touching the land may easily be excused, as those who wrote of hearsay. Cambrensis in his time complaineth that Ireland had excess of wood, and very little champagne ground; but now the English pale is too naked. Turf and sea-coals is their most fuel. It is stored of kine; of excellent horses and hawks; of fish and fowl. They are not without wolves, and grey-hounds to hunt them, bigger of bone and limb than a colt. Their kine, as also their cattle, and commonly what else soever the country engendereth (except man), is much less in quantity than ours of England. Sheep few, and those bearing coarse fleeces, whereof they spin notable rug mantle. The country is very fruitful both of corn and grass; the grass, for default of husbandry, not for the cause alleged in Polychronicon, groweth so rank in the north parts that ofttimes it rotteth their kine. Eagles are well known to breed here, but neither so big nor so many as books tell.... Horses they have, of pace easy, in running wonderful swift. Therefore they make of them great store, as wherein at times of need they repose a great piece of safety. . . . I heard it verified by honourable to honourable that a nobleman offered, and was refused, for one such horse an hundred kine, five pounds lands, and an eyrie of hawks yearly during seven years. Only because a frog was found living in the meadows of Waterford somewhat before the conquest, they construed it to import their overthrow. . . . Generally it is observed, the further west, the less annoyance of pestilent creatures; the want whereof is to Ireland so peculiar, that whereas it lay long in question to whether realm, Britain or Ireland, the Isle of Man should pertain, the said controversy was decided, that forasmuch

as venomous beasts were known to breed therein, it could not be counted a natural piece of Ireland. Neither is this property to be ascribed to St. Patrick's blessing, as they commonly hold, but to the original blessing of God, who gave such nature to the situation and soil from the beginning. And though I doubt not but it fared the better in many respects for that holy man's prayer, yet had it this condition notified hundreds of years before he was born."*

With regard to the dispositions of the people, whom he divides into those of English descent and the mere Irish, he writes as follows:

"The people are thus inclined: religious, frank, amorous, ireful, sufferable, of pains infinite, very glorious, many sorcerers, excellent horsemen, delighted with wars, great alms-givers, passing in hospitality. The lewder sort, both clerks and laymen, are sensual and loose to letchery above measure. The same, being virtuously bred up and reformed, are such mirrors of holiness and austerity, that other nations retain but a show or shadow of devotion in comparison of them. As for abstinence and fasting, which these days make so dangerous, this is to them a familiar kind of chastisement; in which virtue and divers others how far the best excel, so far in gluttony and other hateful crimes the vicious they are worse than too bad. They follow the dead corpses to the grave with howlings and barbarous outcries, pitiful in appearance, whereof grew, as I suppose, the proverb to weep Irish. The uplandish are lightly abused to believe and avouch idle miracles and revelations vain and childish. Greedy of praise they be, and fearful of dishonour and to this end they esteem their poets who write Irish learnedly, and pen their sonnets heroical, for the which they are bountifully rewarded but if they send out libels in dispraise, thereof the gentlemen, especially the mere Irish, stand in great awe. They love tenderly their fosterchildren, and bequeath to them a child's portion, whereby they nourish sure friendship, so beneficial every way that commonly five hundred kine and better are given in reward to win a nobleman's child to foster. They are sharp-witted, lovers of learning, capable of any study whereto they bend themselves, constant in travail, adventurous, intractable, kind-hearted, secret in displeasure.

:

Hitherto the Irish of both sorts, mere and English, are affected much indifferently, saving that in these, by good order and breaking, the same virtues are far more pregnant: in those others, by licentious and evil custom, the same faults are more extreme and odious. I say, by licentious and evil custom, for that there is daily trial, of good natures among them, how soon they be reclaimed, and to what rare gifts of grace and wisdom they do and have aspired. Again, the very English of birth, conversant with the brutish sort of that people, become degenerate in short space, and are quite altered into *See Note 11.

CHARACTER OF THE IRISH.

33 the worst rank of Irish rogues; such a force hath education to make or mar."*

The mere Irish are quite another people from the AngloIrish; not that it must be supposed that their manners are now the same as Cambrensis describes; indeed, Campion wishes it to be observed "how much Ireland is beholden to God for suffering them to be conquered, whereby many of these enormities were cured, and more might be, would themselves be pliable." He first notices the damnable superstition of leaving the right arm of male infants unchristened (as they say), that it might give a more ungracious and deadly blow; and tells a story of a monk demanding of a grave gentleman who was confessing to him whether he were faultless in the sin of homicide. "He answered that he never wist the matter to be heinous before; but being instructed thereof, he confessed the murder of five-the rest he left wounded, so as he knew not whether they lived or no." He cites Strabo, who asserts that they ate human flesh, counted it honourable for parents deceased to be eaten by their children, and lived together promiscuously without regard to kindred. Though, since St. Patrick's days, Christianity has never ceased, yet it had but a lax hold before the conquest, especially in matrimonial matters. And this was a fault not corrected even in Campion's time:

"Yea, even at this day, where the clergy is faint, they can be content to marry for a year and a day of probation, and at the year's end to return her home upon any light quarrels, if the gentlewoman's friends be weak and unable to avenge the injury. Never heard I of so many dispensations for marriage as these men show. I pray God grant they be all authentic, and builded upon sufficient warrant.”+

The writer then continues the list of their old customs, their faithlessness and perjury, their oaths upon St. Patrick's staff, and the barbarous ceremonies of crowning the king of Ulster. Then he turns to "their trade at this present:"

"Clear men they are of skin and hue, but of themselves careless and bestial. Their women are well favoured, clear coloured, fairhanded, big and large, suffered from their infancy to grow at will, nothing curious of their feature and proportion of body. Their infants of the meaner sort are neither swaddled nor lapped in linen, but folded up stark naked into a blanket till they can go, and then if they get a piece of rug to cover them they are well sped. Linen shirts the rich do wear for wantonness and bravery, with wide hanging sleeves pleated-thirty yards are little enough for one of them. They have now left their saffron, and learn to wash their shirts-four or five times in a year. Proud they are of long crisped glibbes, and † See Note 13.

See Note 12.

D

do nourish the same with all their cunning: thereof they take it for a notable piece of villany.*

to crop the front

Shamrocks, water-cresses, roots, and other herbs they feed upon. Oatmeal and butter they cram together. They drink whey, milk, and beef-broth. Flesh they devour without bread; corn, such as they have, they keep for their horses. In haste and hunger they squeeze out the blood of raw flesh, and ask no more dressing thereto; the rest boileth in their stomachs with aqua vitæ, which they swill in after such a surfeit by quarts and pottles. Their kine they let blood, which, grown to a jelly, they bake and overspread with butter, and so eat it in lumps.

One office in the house of great men is a tale-teller, who bringeth his lord on sleep with tales vain and frivolous, whereunto the number giveth sooth and credence. So light are they in believing whatsoever is with any countenance of gravity affirmed by their superiors, whom they esteem and honour, that a lewd prelate within these few years, needy of money, was able to persuade his parish that St. Patrick in striving with St. Peter to let an Irish Gallowglas into heaven had his head broken with the keys; for whose relief he obtained a collection.

Without either precepts or observation of congruity they speak Latin like a vulgar tongue learned in their common schools of leechcraft and law, whereat they begin children, and hold on sixteen or twenty years, conning by rote the aphorisms of Hippocrates and the Civil Institutions, and a few other parings of these two faculties. I have seen them where they kept school, ten in some one chamber, grovelling upon couches of straw, their books at their noses, themselves lying flat prostrate, and so to chant out their lessons by piecemeal, being for the most part lusty fellows of twenty-five years and upwards.

Other lawyers they have liable to certain families, which after the custom of the country determine and judge causes. These consider of wrongs offered and received among their neighbours, be it murder, or felony, or trespass. All is redeemed by composition, except the grudge of parties seeking revenge; and the time they have to spare from spoiling and proyning, they lightly bestow in parleying about such matters. The Breighoon, so they call this kind of lawyer, sitteth him down on a bank, the lords and gentlemen at variance round about him, and then they proceed. They honour devout friars and pilgrims, suffer them to pass quietly, spare them and their mansions, whatsoever outrage they show to the country beside them. To rob and prey their enemies they deem it none offence, nor seek any means to recover their loss, but ever to watch them the like turn. But if neighbours and friends send their cators to purloin one another, such actions are judged by the Breighoons aforesaid. Toward the living they are noisome and malicious; the same being dead, they labour to avenge eagerly and fiercely. They love and trust their foster-brethren more than their own."+