Fate gave Mr. Pitt a cruel game to play, but he was not one to blench at phantoms. It was a game beset with difficulties--tortuous, dirty, dark. So he turned up his cuffs and played it like the bold man he was, without flinching; in an age, too, when the end was acknowledged to justify the means. The crime which he had to commit was of his master's ordering, and must lie at his door--at the door of good King George, that well-meaning stupid boor. On his shoulders and no others must be laid the horrors of '98--of that hideous carnival which, though it took place but eighty years ago, stands without rival in the annals of human wickedness. Some, maybe, will hope that this chronicle is overdrawn. Unhappily it is not so. There is no historical fact recorded in these pages in connection with that bitter time for which there exists not ample evidence. The cruelty of devils lies dormant in each one of us. From 1796 to 1800, it had full play in Ireland. There is no doubt that if Mr. Pitt had been allowed his way, he would have dealt fairly by the sister island; that he intended a broad emancipation of the serfs, an honourable course which would have landed him on his father's pinnacle. But his hands were tied in two ways. First by the bigotry of George, who loathed with a lunatic abhorrence all opinions which differed from his own; secondly, by the upheaval of '89, which, by overturning established dogmas, opened out awful vistas of new danger to the body politic. The position being what it was, he cut his coat according to his cloth, accepted what he could not help, and arranged that a religious feud must be fomented to boiling-point, in order to make its suppression an excuse for political slavery. To carry out this project he needed a trusty coadjutor; one who was crafty, ambitious, selfish, clever, unprincipled, and, above all, Irish; and this _rara avis_ he found in the Irish chancellor, Lord Clare (whose acquaintance we made in 1783, when he was Fitzgibbon, attorney-general). This man he reckoned up at once at his true worth, and set him accordingly to fight the battle with the patriots. A better tool it was not possible to find, for he despised his countrymen for their unpractical romance, looking on them as stepping-stones for his own personal aggrandisement. His domineering airs had in the intervening time coerced to his own way of thinking a host of weathercock viceroys, had raised him to the woolsack, rendered him supreme in the law courts. Mr. Pitt begged this glorious creature to make a trip to London, and proceeded to open his mind to him, or rather that murky cupboard which he exposed as such to the admiration of his dolls, when he chose to cajole them into the belief that they were colleagues.