were striving to instil the first germs of military science. What an unmanageable mob it was! swelling hourly through the constant influx of recruits, not one of whom possessed the faintest idea of discipline; each one of whom had a predilection for poteen and a dim suspicion of the incompetence of his leaders. It was at this juncture that the weak, well-intentioned country gentlemen, who had striven to occupy the empty shoes of their imprisoned betters, were swept into the shade by the unscrupulous influence of the lower clergy--uncultured, ferocious creatures, whose worst passions were aroused by the burning of their chapels, the desecration of their altars; men who scrupled not to play upon the vulgar superstition of a half-savage multitude for the gaining of a cherished end. They became hideous tyrants--such men as the priests of Tallat and of Boulovogue; merciless as their persecutors had been without mercy. Inflamed by wrong and intoxicated by a little brief authority, they were guilty of enormities which, at a quieter moment, they would themselves have surveyed with horror. The higher Catholic clergy withstood the force of the current, and, resisting temptation, publicly disapproved and deplored their acts; yet who (looking on the picture calmly at this distance of time) will throw the first stone at them? The multitude had, with deliberate art, been stung to madness. The bad passions of their teachers had been stirred in their most vital place. If the people were as ignorant as their own cattle, who was accountable for it? England, through the cruel enactments of centuries. If the members of the inferior priesthood were debased and wicked, who made them so? England, by persecuting them without ceasing, by forbidding their minds to be illumined by education--England, by her accursed Penal Code. The original champions being caged, three Catholic priests. Fathers Murphy, Kearnes, and Roche, overturning established authority, assumed the conduct of affairs, and set about the organising of their army. What had been hitherto a conflict of classes tinged with a religious bias, became now a purely religious crusade, accompanied by all the crimes which, through the history of the world, have been intimately associated with religion. What an inscrutable vision it is--that of the stately Spirit walking through earth's story, her fair features distorted, her white robes edged with blood, her pure skirts soiled by the vilest lees of the human heart--_always!_