little short of his great compatriot. In battle after battle for twenty years they defeated the English with slaughter. Ireland, if more and more devastated by campaigns and forays, became the grave of tens of thousands of English soldiers and scores of high reputations. Writing from Cork, the Earl of Essex, after a disastrous march through Leinster and Munster, says: "I am confined in Cork ... but still I have been unsuccessful; my undertakings have been attended with misfortune.... The Irish are stronger and handle their arms with more skill than our people; they differ from us also in point of discipline. They likewise avoid pitched battles where order must be observed, and prefer skirmishes and petty warfare ... and are obstinately opposed to the English government." They did not like attacking or defending fortified places, he also believed. It was only his experience. The campaigns of Shane O'Neill, a bold but ill-balanced warrior, were full of such attacks, but one potent cause for Irish reluctance to make sieges a strong point of their strategy was that the strongest fortresses were on the sea. An inexhaustible, powerful enemy who held the sea was not in the end to be denied on sea or land, but the Irish in stubborn despair or supreme indifference to fate fought on. Religious rancor was added to racial hate. Most of the English settlers, or "garrison," as they came to be called, had become Protestants at the royal order. Ruin perched upon Ireland's hills and made a wilderness of her fertile valleys. The Irish chieftains with their faithful followers moved from place to place in woods and hollows of the hills. English colonists were settled on confiscated lands, and were harried by those who had been driven from their homes. It was war among graves. At last O'Neill made composition with the government when all was lost in the field, but the passionate Irish resolve never to submit still stalked like a ghost, as if it could not perish. When Elizabeth died it was thought that better things were coming to Ireland with James I., the son of Mary, Queen of Scots. Nothing of the kind. That curiously minded creature at once made an ingenuous proclamation: "Whereas his Majesty was informed that his subjects of Ireland had been deceived by _a false report that his Majesty was disposed to allow them liberty of conscience_ and the free choice of religion, now, etc." Fresh "transplanting" of English and Scotch settlers on the lands of the Irish was the gist of his answer to the "false reports." So again the war of surprise, ambush, raid, and foray went on in a hundred places at once, but the result was that the English power was even more firmly seated than before.