To Cecil, Arnold wrote thus: 'I am with all the wild Irish at the same point I am at with bears and ban-dogs; when I see them fight, so they fight earnestly indeed, and tug each other well, I care not who has the worst.' 'Why not, indeed?' asks Mr. Froude; 'better so than hire assassins! Cecil, with the modesty of genius, confessed his ignorance of the country, and his inability to judge; yet, in every opinion which he allowed himself to give, there was always a certain nobility of tone and sentiment.' Nobility was scarcely necessary to induce a statesman to revolt against the policy of Arnold. A little Christianity, nay a slight touch of humanity, would have sufficed for that purpose. Sussex was a nobleman, and considered himself, no doubt, a very godly man, but everyone must admit that, in all heroic qualities, he was incomparably beneath the uncultured Shane O'Neill, while in baseness and wickedness he was not far behind his northern foe, 'half wolf, half fox.' Cecil, however, was a man of a very different stamp from Sussex. Evidently shocked at the prevailing English notions about the value of Irish life, he wrote to Arnold: 'You be of that opinion which many wise men are of, from which I do not dissent, being an Englishman; but being, as I am, a Christian man, I am not without some perplexity, to enjoy of such cruelties.' The work of reform, however, did not prove so easy a task. Arnold's vigour was limited by his powers. The paymasters continued to cheat the Government by false returns. The Government allowed the pay to run in arrear, the soldiers revenged themselves by oppressing and plundering the people; and 'so came to pass this wonderful phenomenon, that _in O'Neill's country_ alone in Ireland--defended as it was from attacks from without, and enriched with the plunder of the Pale--_were the peasantry prosperous, or life or property secure_.' This fact might suggest to the English historian that the evils of Ireland do not all proceed from blood or race; and that the Saxon may be placed in circumstances which make him as false, as dishonest, as lazy, as disordered, as worthless as the Celt, and that even men of 'gentle blood' may become as base as their most plebeian servants. Nor did zeal for religious reformation redeem the defects of the Anglo-Irish rulers. The Protestant bishops were chiefly agitated by the vestment controversy. 'Adam Loftus, the titular primate, to whom,' says Mr. Froude, 'sacked villages, ravished women, and famine-stricken skeletons crawling about the fields, were matters of everyday indifference, shook with terror at the mention of a surplice.' Robert Daly wrote in anguish to Cecil, in dismay at the countenance to 'Papistry,' and at his own inability to prolong a persecution which he had happily commenced. An abortive 'devise for the better government of Ireland' gives us some insight into the condition of the people. 'No poor persons should be _compelled_ any more to work or labour