natural disposition, which, in the main, is both loving and charitable. The faults we can trace in the Irish character to-day are partially those of human nature, which averages much the same in all civilized peoples, but many of them, and the gravest, can be attributed, without undue prejudice, to the odious penal laws which were sufficient to distort the characteristics of angels, not to speak of mortal men. Charles I, of England, was a thorough Stuart in despotic character, wavering policy, base ingratitude, and fatuous obstinacy. His reign was to furnish to Ireland one of the most consummate tyrants and highway robbers that ever cursed a country with his cruelty and greed. This moral monster was the infamous Thomas Wentworth, Earl of Strafford, whose “tiger jaws” closed on the unfortunate country with the grip of a dragon. This dishonorable “noble” counseled King Charles to commit an act of moral delinquency which, in our day, would be rightly, if coarsely, called “a confidence game.” The Irish Catholics, in convention assembled, had drawn up a sort of Bill of Rights, which they urged the king to confirm, and agreed to pay into the royal treasury the sum of £100,000, which they could ill spare, to show their “loyalty,” and also, no doubt, to influence Charles, who, like all of his family, dearly loved money, to grant “the graces” prayed for. Strafford advised the base king to take the money, but to manage matters so that the concessions he had solemnly promised should never go into effect! And the ignominious Stuart actually acted on the advice of this ignoble mentor. And so the poor Irish Catholic “gentry” lost both their money and their “concessions.” When we read this chapter of Irish history, we are tempted to feel less sympathy for the fate of Charles I, who was afterward sold to Cromwell and the English Parliament by the Scottish mercenary army of General Leslie, with which the king had taken shelter, for back pay, amounting to £200,000 (see Sir Walter Scott’s “Tales of a Grandfather”). This miserable monarch so far degraded himself, further, as to cause writs for the election of a Parliament to grant the Catholic claims issued in Ireland, but privately instructed Lord Falkland to have the documents informally prepared, so that the election might prove invalid; and, meanwhile, his Lords Justices went on confiscating Catholic property in Ireland and persecuting prelates, priests, and people almost as savagely as in the worst days of Mountjoy and Chichester. Strafford came to Ireland as Lord Deputy in July, 1633, and entered at once on his “thorough” policy, as he called it; and, to prepare himself for the task he had set himself to perform, he through the “Lords Justices” extracted a “voluntary contribution” of £20,000 additional out of the terrorized Catholic “nobility and gentry” of the “sister” island, who, no doubt, wrung it, in turn, out of the sweat of the faces of their peasant retainers. But this was a mere bagatelle to