At Hastings, the Saxons revelled while the Normans prayed. At Aughrim, the Irish prayed while the English revelled. Yet the same historians who appreciate the devotion of the Norman, and indicate its efficacy, make it a subject of ridicule in the Irish, and couple it with defeat. Providence and faith are often too lightly used to link a defective argument, or to round a happy period. Few will now deny that the Saxons were a more virtuous people than their Norman conquerors, or that the Irish were not much more so than the heterogeneous mass that followed the Prince of Orange. If the Saxons bent to the yoke of a conquering race, and prospered under it, let them glory in their wisdom and servility; but that the Celtic race, through every vicissitude, spurned it, hated the connection, and have still an undying faith in their ability to sever it, constitute, it is believed, a truer nobility of character. CHAPTER XVIII. THE BATTLE OF AUGHRIM. 'Twas five o'clock on the morning of July 12th, 1691. A heavy fog obscured the rising sun, and passed like a moving curtain along the hills that separated the adverse armies now preparing for the stern arbitrament of battle. What a chaos of human feeling surged and swayed beneath it! On the one side, the love of home, kindred, and country, and the memories that come of ages of persecution; on the other, that of power, plunder, and confiscation, and the wantonness that exalts vice into virtue, and deifies usurpation. The maintenance of legitimate right, and the establishment of perfect civil and religious liberty, called forth the royal army, and marked its footsteps from the advent of this war to its close. An unnatural usurpation, and the ambition to dominate in matters civil and religious, heralded the other, and its course was marked by cruelty and proscription. Their causes were markedly dissimilar, and of the spirit which impelled them to battle, each army, in its various gradations, was a fair representative. At early dawn, Ginckle, who induced the battle, was moving his men across the river, and forming them, according to prearrangement, on a level ground about a mile to the west of it, leaving still a span of two miles between him and his adversary. This was effected by eight o'clock, but an advance was suspended, owing to the heavy fog that lay over the hills, and rendered the manoeuvring of his army in the vicinity of the foe both troublesome and hazardous. As the line in which it was now drawn up, was that in which it entered the field of Aughrim, and which it preserved through the action, until forced to re-form after a series of futile assaults against the Irish right, it is here particularly described, in order to avoid disconnecting repetition hereafter.