The wild Celtic rising of 1641 was followed by a rising of the old Englishry of the Pale--the descendants of the first Anglo-Norman settlers; both movements were probably encouraged from France; though widely different, they ran into each other. The great Civil War was now running its course in England; Ireland, for the most part, took the side of the king; the majority of Englishmen were certainly on the side of the Parliament. I cannot retrace the scenes of the contest in Ireland; after a fierce and protracted struggle, in which an envoy of the Pope became the representative of an ill-united Irish League; in which Preston and Ormond led the forces of the Pale, and Owen Roe O'Neill was at the head of the Irish Celts,--the whole island was subjugated by the sword of Cromwell, as it never had been subjugated before. Drogheda and Wexford are names of woe in the annals of Ireland; but the conquest of the Protector, ruthless as it was, was not so cruel as that of the Elizabethan soldiers; if deeply stained with blood, it was rapid and completely decisive. The colony in Ulster had begun to flourish; Cromwell designed a scheme for the colonisation of the vanquished country more thorough and extensive than any which had been designed before. Three-fourths of Ireland had been in arms against the Parliament; that assembly had made grants by anticipation of Irish forfeited lands to 'adventurers' who had advanced it moneys; an opportunity for immense confiscations had arisen; the Protector was not slow to take advantage of it; his Puritan fanaticism, his hatred of the Irish people, especially of its 'idolatrous Papists,' his strong English and religious sympathies, united to confirm him in his purpose. The forfeited lands in four of the Irish counties were appropriated to the Commonwealth and its uses; those in eighteen were to be granted to the 'adventurers' and the soldiery of the late conquest; those in seven were to be allotted to the army in England. The grants were to be either free, or to be purchased at nominal prices; the owners, who had lost their lands, were to be deported to Connaught--'Hell' was the alternative, the tradition runs--and 'Courts of Claims,' as they were called, were to be set up, to adjudicate on the conduct of those who were to be dispossessed--they were to be subjected to a test which scarcely one could satisfy--and practically to measure confiscation out under the pretence of law. By these means Cromwell calculated that some forty thousand colonists, of English blood and of the Puritan faith, would be poured into the millions of acres which the sword had placed in the hands of his Government; these would form a prosperous settlement loyal to England; would keep rebellion in Ireland for ever down; and would regenerate a land taken from a race akin to the Amalekites of old. As a foretaste of the new and glorious order of things, Sir William Petty, a very able man,