was resolved to put it to them in those very words, and was most confident there were not six in the house that would refuse them, telling him, by the sequel, we should see whether his lordship or myself better understood their minds in that point, and by that I would be content to be judged, only for order's sake I desired his lordship would vote this canon first in the upper house of convocation, and so voted, then to pass the question beneath also.' He adds that he enclosed the canon [Footnote 48] to Dean Leslie, 'which, accordingly, that afternoon was unanimously voted, first with the bishops, and then by the rest of the clergy, excepting one man, who simply did deliberate upon the receiving of the Articles of England.'" [Footnote 48: The first Irish canon.] We pause and draw a hard breath, after this dictatorial description of how to rule a church and have a church, to observe that the Irish Protestant prelates of those days were no mean men; Bramhall was Bishop of Derry, and Bedell of Kilmore, and the primate so hectored and overawed by this Cavalier-Cromwell was no less a personage than James Usher. But being as they were, as they well knew they were, the creatures of the state, what could they do when brought into conflict with the author and finisher of their law? Omitting the period of the civil wars and the Cromwellian Protectorate as a period phenomenal and exceptional, deserving study apart, we pass to the first parliament of Charles II., (1662,) in which one of the first contributions to the statutes which we find, is the renewal of the Elizabethan act of uniformity. In the same session was passed the acts of settlement and explanation, which have been called "the Magna Charta of Irish Protestantism." These acts confirmed to their Puritan possessors the properties of the Catholic gentry confiscated by Cromwell for their attachment to both Charleses, and extending into almost every county. Of 6000 proprietors, so confiscated, but 60--one per cent--were restored, in part or whole, to their hereditary estates. {208} Thirty years later, after William's victory over James II., 4000 remaining Catholic proprietors were subjected to a similar proscription--so that in that half-century 10,000 owners of estates forfeited them for their fidelity to their ancient, and their hostility to what Mr. Froude correctly calls "the intrusive religion."