This privilege we owe to the great kindness of Rev. Dr. Moran, the distinguished Vice-Rector of the Irish College of St. Agatha, Rome, who has permitted us to anticipate the publication of the second part of the first volume of his _History of the Catholic Archbishops of Dublin since the Reformation_, in which the event is described. Of the volume itself we shall soon have occasion to speak at some length. For the present it is enough to say, that like each of Dr. Moran's other works, it has the great merit of being a work for the times. His _Life of Archbishop Plunkett_, and his _History of the Irish Persecutions_, were valuable, no doubt, for the light they cast on an important epoch, and for the proof they afforded of our forefathers' constancy in the faith. Far more valuable, however, than these are Dr. Moran's _Essays on the Origin, Doctrines, and Antiquities of the Irish Church_, in which, with an extraordinary lucidity of reasoning and a singular amount of erudition, he answers all the arguments and refutes all the theories of modern Protestant writers and lecturers, who have undertaken the hopeless task of proving that the religion of the early church of our fathers was identical with that which had its origin in the corruption and cruelty of Henry VIII. and his daughter Elizabeth, and which, as far as it has extended, was introduced into Ireland by fire and sword and the most cruel penal laws. Any one who reads Dr. Moran's essays will admit that not only Whiteside and Napier, who have ventured to lecture on the ancient doctrines of the Irish Church, with which they were altogether unacquainted, but also some learned antiquarians who have treated of the same subject, were quite astray in their views, and had no solid arguments on which to ground their opinions. Our first extract is taken from the life of the venerable Archbishop, Dr. Matthews, who governed the see of Dublin in a most critical and disastrous period, from the 2nd May, 1611, to the 1st of September, 1623, when he died an exile in Rome. This extract is found at page 262, and gives an account of the persecutions to which Catholics were subjected in the reign of James I., who was supposed to be less hostile than his predecessor Elizabeth: