hand transferred to the new clergy, or converted to worldly purposes, in order to prepare the way of the new religion as set forth by the king's order. It is but fair to point out, that the preachers of this religious revolution were only in part, though in a very considerable part, the receivers of the spoils. A new aristocracy arose on the ruins of the monasteries and churches. Some Irish houses may claim to have ancestors who came in with Strongbow; but many more founders of families came in penniless adventurers at the reformation. The Bagnals and Chichesters, in the north; the St. Legers, Boyles, and Kings in the south; and the Burkes and Croftons in the west, were formerly, and some of their descendants still are, the largest inheritors of ecclesiastical plunder. The chartered minorities of townsmen, whose consciences consented to take the oath of supremacy, were not without their recompense even in this world. The neighboring church and convent property was frequently assigned to these corporators, no matter how few in number, for the use indeed of the corporation; but as they generally contrived to become in their individual capacity tenants under themselves as a corporation, there was at least one description of occupants in the country, who held their lands on easy conditions. These corporate bodies, which continued exclusively Protestant down to the passage of the Irish Municipal Reform Bill in 1834, were often reduced to a ludicrously small number; but even in such Catholic cities as Limerick, Cashel, Clonmel, and Waterford and Drogheda, they continued to possess and dispose of, and often to alienate, the former endowments of pious chiefs and barons to the suppressed convents and colleges of the vicinity.