dishonourable, nay, infamous? Let us hear what the deepest of our political thinkers, Burke, has written upon a somewhat parallel case: 'When men are encouraged to go into a certain mode of life by the existing laws, and protected in that mode as in a lawful occupation--when they have accommodated all their ideas, and all their habits to it, ... I am sure it is unjust in legislature, by an arbitrary act, to offer a sudden violence to their minds and their feelings; forcibly to degrade them from their state and condition, and to stigmatise with shame and infamy that character and those customs, which before had been made the measure of their happiness and honour. If to this be added an expulsion from their habitations, and a confiscation of all their goods, I am not sagacious enough to discover how this despotick sport, made of the feelings, consciences, prejudices, and properties of men, can be discriminated from the rankest tyranny.'[146] I have referred to an instance, within my knowledge, of the operation of the new Irish land code, in the case of a middleman, his under-tenant, and a despoiled owner of a rent. I now refer to an instance, also within my knowledge, of what compulsory purchase would do in the case of an Irish landlord. This person is a scion of one of the princely Irish-Milesian houses; his forefathers were lords of a tract extending from the Boyne to the Shannon. They belonged to one of the famous 'five bloods of Ireland,' acknowledged to be half-royal by Henry of Anjou; they intermarried with the great Norman-Irish _noblesse_; one of their matronage was half-sister of Surrey's fair Geraldine; the ruins of the abbeys they founded are still to be seen. Their domains were torn from them in the reign of Mary Tudor; but they fought stubbornly with their tribe in the great Desmond war; they retained, though proscribed, the rank of princes, until the close of the sixteenth century; leaders of the house then carried their swords into foreign armies, and have given a field marshal to Austria and grandees to Spain. The direct line of the chiefs, however, remained in Ireland; it vegetated in obscurity until the Irish rising of 1689-90; one of its members then appeared in the Parliament of James II. in Dublin, and perished, at the head of his regiment, it is said, at Aughrim. The fortunes of his descendants are not without interest; one is believed to have been a companion-in-arms of Villars at Malplaquet and Denain; two of his remote offspring, the tradition exists, perished in the ranks of Napoleon's armies. But the heir of the family bowed under the yoke of the Irish penal laws, and became a Protestant, at least in name; his near kindred gave Ireland Anthony Malone, one of the most illustrious Irishmen of the eighteenth century, and gave England the best commentator on her most immortal poet. One of his representatives, the person of whom I write, still possesses a fragment of the immense possessions his fathers