laws that those who had the government of Ireland under the Crown of England intended to make a perpetual separation between the English settled in Ireland and the native Irish, in the expectation that the English should in the end root out the Irish." And another Englishman writes of this Statute: "Imagination can scarcely devise an extremity of antipathy, hatred, and revenge, to which this code of aggravation was not calculated to provoke both nations" (Plowden, _Historical Review of the State of Ireland_.) The foregoing summary of the condition of affairs in Ireland in the fourteenth century has been given, in order to illustrate and explain the bald historical facts handed down to us having reference to Mellifont during the same period. It will be remembered that in the year 1316, O'Neil complained to the Pope that Irishmen were by law excluded from entering monasteries within the Pale; accordingly, we read that in 1322, the monks of Mellifont, amongst whom the English element then prevailed, would admit no man to profession there who had not previously sworn that he was not an Irishman. Cox, who derives his information from some old document in the Tower of London, tells us that in 1323, the General Chapter of the Order strongly denounced this pernicious practice, but there is no such decree, nor is there any allusion to it in Martène at that date. That spirit seems to have been gratifying to King Edward II.; for, in 1324, he complained to the Pope of the violation of the law of exclusion, and Nicholas of Lusk, who was then Abbot, was superseded; very likely, was summarily deposed, for the infraction of it.