How Ireland was in an evil condition from the conquest; how Elizabeth tried to improve it by sending it wise governors; how the Earl of Desmond’s and the Earl of Tyrone’s rebellions were subdued; how the Earl of Essex behaved ill, and was put to death; and how Sir Philip Sidney was killed in battle. It is a long time since I mentioned Ireland to you. You know that in the reign of King Henry the Second the English took a great part of it, and drove the old Irish away to the west side of the island. Now the English, who settled in Ireland at that time, soon grew more like Irish than Englishmen, and they were as ready to quarrel with any new English that went to settle there as the old Irish had been to quarrel with them; so poor Ireland had never been quiet. The different lords of the new Irish, and the kings of the old were always fighting, and then they sent to England sometimes to ask for help, and often to complain of one another. Then the kings of England used to send soldiers, with private captains, who very often fought whoever they met, instead of helping one side or the other; and these soldiers generally treated the unhappy Irish as ill as the Danes used to treat the English. In Queen Elizabeth’s time the miserable people in Ireland were never a day without some sad quarrel or fight in which many of them were killed; and though Ireland is a good country for corn and cattle, and all things useful, yet there was nothing to be had there but oatmeal; the people lived like wild savages, and even a good many of the English that had settled there wore the coarse Irish dress, used bows and arrows, and let their hair grow filthy and matted, more like the wild old Britons you read of in the first chapter, than like Christian gentlemen. Ireland was strangely divided then; there was the part where the old Irish lived in huts among bogs and mountains; then the part with a few old castles that the first English settlers had built; and then that where fresh captains, who had come from time to time, had fixed themselves in forts and towns; and all these three parts were constantly at war. Elizabeth, when she found how very ill Ireland was governed, wished to make it a little more like England, and to try to bring the people to live in peace. She sent a wise Governor there, called Sir Henry Sydney, and then another called Arthur Lord Grey de Wilton; but all that these good men could do was to keep the new English a little in order, and to try to do justice to the other people. By the queen’s orders they set up schools, and a college in Dublin, in hopes that the young Irishmen would learn to become more like the men of other countries. But the bad way of governing Ireland had gone on too long to allow it to be changed all at once; and Elizabeth found she must send an army there to keep the different English and Irish chiefs in order, if she wished to have peace in the country.