The policy of Elizabeth toward the Irish nobility is well known to our readers. The fate of the house of Desmond was, in her mind, sealed from the beginning. It is now an ascertained fact that she drove the great earl into rebellion, who, for a long time, refused openly to avow his approbation of the confederates' schemes, and even seemed at first to cooperate with the queen's forces, in opposition to them. It was only after his cousin Fitzmaurice and his brother John had been almost ruined that, convinced of the determination of the English Government to seize and occupy Munster with his five or six millions of acres, he boldly stood up for his faith and his country, and perished in the attempt. It was then that "Protestant plantations" began in Ireland. The confiscated estates of Desmond--which, in reality, did not belong to him but to his tribe--were handed over to companies of "planters out of Devonshire, Dorsetshire, and Somersetshire, out of Lancashire and Cheshire, organized for defence and to be supported by standing forces."--(Prendergast.) Then the work set on foot by Henry II. in favor of Strongbow, De Lacy, De Courcy, and others, was resumed, after an interval of four hundred years, to be carried through to the end; that is to say, to the complete pauperizing of the native race. Among the "undertakers" and "planters" introduced into Munster by Elizabeth, a word may not be out of place on Edmund Spenser and Walter Raleigh, the first a great poet, the second a great warrior and courtier. They both united in advocating the extermination of the native race, a policy which Henry VIII. was too high-minded to accept, and Elizabeth too great a despiser of "the people" to notice. To Henry and Elizabeth Tudor the people was nothing; the nobility every thing. Spenser, Raleigh, and other Englishmen of note, who came into daily contact with the nation, saw very well that account should be taken of it, and thought, as Sir John Davies had thought before them, that it ought to be "rooted out." That great question of the Irish people was assuming vaster proportions every day; the people was soon to show itself in all its strength and reality, to be crushed out apparently by Cromwell, but really to be preserved by Providence for a future age, now at hand to-day. Spenser and Raleigh, being gifted with keener foresight than most of their countrymen, were for the entire destruction of the people, thinking, as did many French revolutionists of our own days, that "only the dead never come back."