torn from their former owners on pretexts usually of the flimsiest kind, and were flung to Court favourites, to jobbing speculators, to greedy adventurers of the baser sort. By this time three-fourths probably of the soil of Ireland had passed into the hands of a new race of possessors; the descendants of Anglo-Norman nobles and of the Celtic princes had been sufferers well-nigh in the same proportion. At last Strafford marked out the whole province of Connaught, for what has been called 'his majestic rapine;' this and other innumerable acts of spoliation and wrong unquestionably were the paramount cause of the great Celtic rising of 1641. Another and soon to be a most potent element of evils and troubles had already begun to make its sinister presence felt in Ireland. In the great religious schism of the sixteenth century, England had become Protestant, Ireland had remained Catholic, and each had taken opposite sides in the conflict that followed; though the Elizabethan wars were rather struggles of race than of faith. But as conquest and confiscation progressed in Ireland, the Anglican Church, a scion of the Norman Church of the Pale, was erected on the ruins of its Celtic Catholic rival; the land more and more became possessed by settlers alien in creed from the old owners, and from the vanquished children of the soil; and harsh laws had begun to deepen the distinctions between them. Nevertheless, though its signs had in some measure appeared, the era of Protestant ascendency and Catholic subjection had not been developed in Ireland, as yet, in its worst aspects.