Immediately after the capitulation of Clonmel, Cromwell, summoned by Parliament to operate against the royalists of Scotland, set sail for England, leaving behind him Ireton and Ludlow to continue his bloody work. By Oliver’s direction, confiscation followed confiscation, and, when he became Protector of the English Commonwealth, many thousands of innocent boys and girls were shipped from Ireland to the West Indies and other colonies of England, where most of them perished miserably. Ireton died in Limerick, which yielded to his arms, after a desperate resistance, in 1651. Tradition says that he rotted from the plague, and that his last hours were horrible to himself and to all who surrounded his repulsive deathbed. He had caused to be killed in the city a bishop, many priests, and a multitude of other non-combatants; and these atrocities appalled his craven soul at the moment of dissolution. Ludlow, an equally ferocious soldier, concluded the work of conquest in Ireland, and, in 1652, the whole island was again rendered “tranquil.” “Order reigned in Warsaw,” but it was not the order that succeeds dissolution. Ireland, as subsequent events proved, was not dead, but sleeping. The close of “the great rebellion,” which had lasted eleven years, was signalized by the ruthless executions of Bishop Heber MacMahon—the warrior prelate who led Owen Roe’s army after that hero’s death—and Sir Phelim O’Neill, who was offered his life on the steps of the scaffold, if he consented to implicate the late King Charles I in the promotion of the Irish revolt. This, the English historians inform us, he “stoutly refused to do,” and died, in consequence, like a soldier and a gentleman. He had his faults—this fierce Sir Phelim. He was by no means a saint, or even an exemplary Christian—but he acted, “according to his lights,” for the best interests of his native country, and lost everything, including life, in striving to make her free. A gifted Irish poet (T. D. McGee) sings of him as “In Felix Felix,” thus: “He rose the first—he looms the morning star Of that long, glorious unsuccessful war; England abhors him! has she not abhorr’d All who for Ireland ventured life or word? What memory would she not have cast away That Ireland keeps in her heart’s heart to-day? “If even his hand and hilt were so distained, If he was guilty as he has been blamed, His death redeemed his life—he chose to die Rather than get his freedom with a lie. Plant o’er his gallant heart a laurel tree, So may his head within the shadow be!