The history of the Irish race presents certain features quite exceptional, and without parallel either in the ancient or in the modern world. For example, during these last two and a half centuries that strange history has been dual or double--half of it in Ireland and the other half in foreign lands. There were the Irish in Ireland undergoing the emaciating process of confiscations and plunder, writhing under their penal laws for religion, with occasional gallant efforts at resistance, either in support of a dynasty (the Stuarts) or by way of fierce insurrection, as in 1798. And there were the Irish abroad in many lands, refugees, exiles, emigrants, who were always plotting and preparing a descent from France or from Spain to redeem their countrymen from British oppression, or else giving their service as military adventurers to any power at war with England, hoping to deal their enemy somewhere, anywhere, a mortal blow. {11} But their thought was ever Ireland, _Ireland_. What country on this earth has ever inspired its children with so deep, so passionate, so enduring love? These side-scenes in the drama of Irish life have duly repeated themselves from generation to generation, down to the present day. We see one of them in the United States this moment. Always, alongside of the transactions in the island itself--the confiscations, and ejectments, and famines, and packed juries--there is a parallel series of transactions outside among the exiles, all bearing reference to the "fate and fortunes" of the Irish at home; all moved and inspired by that insatiable craving to liberate the land of their fathers, and make good their own footing among the green hills where they were born. Of this collateral or episodical history, Fr. Meehan has selected one of the most striking and touching scenes, has thoroughly investigated it in all its aspects, and in this volume presented us with a very complete _monograph_ of the outside life of O'Neill and O'Donnell, with their followers, from the moment when those chiefs suddenly dropped out of the large space they had so long filled in Ireland proper, and became a part of the external Irish world.