their hair hanging down their backs, defiant of Poynings’ Law, and all other English enactments. They were gigantic warriors—all more than six feet tall—and with huge mustaches, the drooping ends of which touched their collarbones. They also carried truculent-looking daggers and immense battle-axes, such as might have won the admiration of Richard Cœur de Lion himself. The English courtiers—pigmies compared with the galloglasses—might have been inclined to make fun of their costumes, but those deadly appearing axes inspired awe, and no unpleasant incident occurred during the visit. “Shane the Proud” made a deep impression on Elizabeth, for he was physically magnificent and as fierce as her dreaded father. “By what right do you oppose me in Ulster?” she asked. “By very good right, madam,” he answered. “You may be queen here, but I am king in Ulster, and so have been the O’Neills for thousands of years!” Then she offered to make him Earl of Tyrone by letters patent. “Earl me no earls, madam,” he replied. “The O’Neill is my title! By it I stand or fall!” There was nothing more to be said, so the queen made him rich presents, after asking him to be her “good friend,” which, being a gallant, he promised, and then he went back to Ulster. But Shane, although a good general and a great fighter, was a bad statesman, and by no means a conscientious character. He oppressed the neighboring Irish chiefs, being, indeed, half mad with pride, and made a most unjust and unnecessary attack on the Clan O’Donnell, next to the O’Neills the most powerful of Ulster tribes. He not alone ruined the O’Donnell, but also dishonored him, by carrying his wife away and making her his mistress, in mad disregard of Irish public opinion. He also quarreled with the old MacDonald colony of Antrim—said by some writers to be Irish, not Scotch, in their origin—and used them with extreme harshness. In the end, his misconduct produced a revolt even among his own followers. His enemies, including the injured O’Donnells, speedily multiplied, and he who had been fifty times victorious over the English, was, at last, signally defeated by his own justly indignant fellow-countrymen. In this extremity, he fled with his mistress and a few followers for refuge to the MacDonalds, who, at first, received the fugitives hospitably, but soon, instigated, it is said, by one Captain Piers, an Englishman, fell upon O’Neill at a banquet and stabbed him to death. Had he loved his own people as much as he hated the English, he might have lived and died a conqueror. The MacDonalds did not respect the body of this dead lion. They severed the head from the trunk, pickled it, and sent the ghastly present to the English Lord Deputy in Dublin, who caused it to be spiked on the tower of Dublin Castle. O’Neill’s death, in the very prime of his military genius, relieved Elizabeth of her most dangerous Irish enemy. But another scion of that warrior race was under the queen’s “protection” in London, and was