By most of those who take a wide and comprehensive range of its history, the dissensions which have distracted Ireland, and from time to time torn it in pieces, and caused it to flow with the blood of its neighbours and of its own children, will probably be ascribed, not more to the difference of religion among its inhabitants, than (p. 233) to the difference of origin. The struggles have been, not more between Protestants and Romanists, not more between Catholics of the church of England and Ireland, and Catholics in communion with the sovereign pontiff, than between English and Irish, between those who have regarded themselves as the aboriginal sons of the soil, and those of Saxon or Norman descent, whom they have hated and abhorred as intruders and invaders. The conflicts between these classes in Ireland, as they may be traced in its chronicles, were just as dreadful and as sanguinary before the Reformation, as ever they have been since the separation of the reformed church from the see of Rome. At all events, whatever may be the nature of the unhappy causes of disunion in the present day, till within comparatively modern times the struggles have been not more of a religious than of a national, or perhaps of a predial, character. Authentic history teems with evidence bearing directly on this point; and even the original documents, references to which are interspersed through this volume, are quite sufficient to establish it. Among other documents confirmatory of the view here taken, which it would be beyond the province of these Memoirs to recite, the statute of 4 Hen. V. (1416), referring as it does to similar enactments of previous reigns, and strongly expressive of the bitter jealousies which existed between the two nations, seems to claim a place here.