The frightful event we have chronicled naturally aroused the worst passions of the angered Catholic population of Ulster, and some cruel reprisals resulted. We are sorry to be obliged to state that credible history ascribes most of the violence committed on the Irish side to Sir Phelim O’Neill; but no charge of the kind is made against O’More, MacGennis, McGuire, Plunket, O’Byrne, or any of the other noted chiefs of the period. It is impossible to arrive at any accurate statement of the number of those who perished on both sides, outside of the numerous battlefields of the long struggle; but it is certain they have been grossly exaggerated, particularly by English writers, who took for granted every wild statement made at the period. But, even granting that all the charges made were true, which, of course, we do not admit, the fact would not stamp the charge of cruelty on the Irish nation. It was an age of cruelty—the age of the Thirty Years’ War in Germany, which gave to the world the horrors of the sack of Magdeburgh; the age of the wars of the Fronde in France, and almost that of the Spanish atrocities in the Netherlands. And Cromwell was soon to appear upon the scene in Ireland, to leave behind him a name more terrible than that of Tilly in Germany or of Alva in the Low Countries. In fact, in the seventeenth century, Europe, from east to west, was just emerging from Middle-Age barbarism, and Ireland, most likely, was neither better nor worse than most of her sister states. We love and respect the Irish race, but we do not believe in painting it whiter than it is. The nation, plundered and outraged, was goaded to madness, and whatever crimes were committed under such circumstances may well be attributed to the workings of temporary insanity. It is, however, regrettable that around the history of the Irish insurrection of 1641 there should linger blood-red clouds, which even the lapse of two and a half centuries has not been able to dissipate. On the Anglo-Irish side of the conflict, the name of Sir Charles Coote stands out in bloody pre-eminence. Like Sir Phelim, he had the grand virtue of physical courage—he feared nothing in mortal shape—but in all else he was a demon-brute, and his memory is still execrated throughout the length and breadth of the land he scourged with scorpions. His soldiers are accused of having impaled Irish infants on their pikes—their mothers having been dishonored and butchered—without rebuke from their inhuman commander. On the contrary, McGee, a very painstaking and impartial historian, quotes Sir Charles Coote as saying that “he liked such frolics.” (McGee’s “History of Ireland,” Volume I, p. 502.) It is not unpleasant to note that, after a career of the most aggressive cruelty, he was finally killed by a musket-shot during a petty skirmish in the County Meath, and it is popular belief that the shot was fired by one of his own band of uniformed assassins.