but he is not a practised novel-writer, and lacks some of the essential elements of the true literary artist. His sketches of Irish society and especially of Irish peasant life lack the delicacy and finish of the pictures given us by Banim, Carleton, and Gerald Griffin. He overdoes his good people, deals too much in the marvellous, and fails, as a priest should, in his love scenes. His work, also, lacks unity, and properly ends with Gerald Moore's acquittal of the charge of murder. The continental scenes belong to a separate work, and the portion relating to the obsession of Emma, is told in too gross and revolting a manner, and might have been advantageously omitted. These are not precisely times when young gentlemen like Frank Tyrrell are likely to be converted by witnessing exorcisms, because such things are looked upon either as mummery or superstition by our liberal Protestants. The author talks too much about the heart, which with him means feeling, and while justly praising the religious poor, seems to forget that the poor are not always religious. In Protestant countries they have very few of the sentiments or virtues he ascribes to them, and are not, under a religious point of view, much superior to the easy classes. In all Protestant countries, the poor, as a general thing, are irreligious, and seldom observe even the forms of worship. What he says is true of the mass of the Irish peasantry, but it must not be stated as true universally of the poor.

Nevertheless, Ailey Moore is an interesting tale, and contains materials for a dozen first-class novels. It is essentially an Irish story,-a story of Ireland's wrongs and sufferings, virtues and vices, presenting the lights and shadows of Irish life, with great truth and vividness. The author is a genuine Irishman, devoted alike to his religion. and his country, and writes boldly, feelingly, and eloquently in defence of both. It is true, he tells us little that we had not been told before, but the story of Ireland's wrongs, and the sufferings of her warm-hearted peasantry for their religion and nationality, is one that will bear to be repeated, and that will always possess a harrowing interest for every unperverted heart, and especially for us Americans, since so large a portion of our population are of Irish birth or of Irish descent.

It is difficult, notwithstanding all that has been said

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by both friends and enemies, to form a picture of the real state of things in Ireland. When we read the writings or listen to the conversations of Irish patriots we are apt to think there is some exaggeration in the case, and that too much of what is deplorable is charged to the English government. It is difficult to avoid suspecting that a portion of the evil is to be laid at the door of the Irish people themselves, and that they have failed to make the most they could of their situation bad as it unquestionably has been. The declamatory and passionate style in which the Irish patriots speak or write of their sufferings and the injustice of England, is not very well adapted to produce conviction in the minds of grave and unimpassioned Americans. But taking the best information we can get, and reasoning on it, coolly and impartially, we are forced to believe that it is impossible to exaggerate in the case, or to represent the wrongs which Ireland has received from the English government and the Anglo-Irish faction as greater than they actually have been. They have surpassed the power of any human language to express, especially since England became Protestant.

The English are not a bloodthirsty or a vindictive people, and though undemonstrative, they possess many noble and generous traits of character; but taken as a body, they are proud, haughty, arrogant, conceited, narrow-minded, and bigoted. There are exceptions to this character, and exceptions much more numerous since the French Revolution than before. There are English gentlemen who have travelled and had the rough corners of their characters rubbed off, their minds liberalized, and their views expanded by intercourse with the Continentals, who are surpassed by no gentlemen in the world. But the genuine homebred Englishman is a bundle of conceit and prejudice, fully persuaded of his own excellence, and of the infinite inferiority of every person or thing not English. We do not believe the English people have ever intended to be unjust or oppressive to the Irish, and we doubt if it is in the power of mortal man to convince them that they ever have been. It is thoroughly English to believe that an Englishman can do no wrong, and that to complain of any thing done by Englishmen is base ingratitude, is to take an entirely false view of one's own best

good, or to be carried away by faction or the blindness of party. The Englishman believes himself the noblest work of God, and that the Creator did his very best when he created him. His way of thinking and doing is the right way, and the only right way. Full of this conceit, he is unable to conceive it possible for any thing but gross ignorance or malice to dream of finding fault with any thing he says or does. He has rejected the Pope, because he is his own pope, denied the infallibility of the Church, because he could not admit her infallibility without denying his own. He thus strikes others, who do not hold him to be either infallible or impeccable, as arrogant and conceited, as intolerably self-sufficient, and it falls out that he is hated even when he confers benefits, and gives mortal offence even when he acts with noble and generous intentions. The English may be envied, may be feared, they may be admired for their energy, bravery, and success, but as a nation they are loved and respected by no foreign people.

It is now seven hundred years since Ireland became in some manner subject to the English crown, and yet England has not advanced a step in gaining the affections of the Irish nation. Every Irishman in whom a single spark of Irish national feeling remains unextinguished, hates the English domination, and curses the English connection. Not the slightest progress has been made towards reconciling the Irish people to the English government, or towards making them look upon themselves as an integral portion of the empire, or its glory as their glory. The hatred of the Celt for the Saxon has only been intensified and rendered ineradicable by seven hundred years of contact. This is a singular fact. The Romans were great conquerors, but after a comparatively brief time the conquered lost their hatred of their conquerors and became proud of the Roman name. Gaul was subjected by the Roman arms, and converted into Roman provinces, but it ceased to regard Rome as its conqueror, and was when the Barbarian invasions began as loyal to the Empire as Italy herself. The French have conquered Brittany and Lorraine, and annexed them to France, and yet their inhabitants though still speaking their national language and retaining many of their old national habits and customs,

regard France as their country, and are proud of calling themselves Frenchmen. Why this difference? It is not owing to difference of race, for the ancient Gauls, the modern Bas-Breton, and the Irish are generally regarded as belonging to the same family. This difference is owing to the different genius of the respective conquerors. The ancient Roman was proud, cruel, but he could understand and respect the national feeling and religion of the conquered, in his government of them after the conquest was effected. The same can be said of the French. The Romans left the Provincials their identity, and made them add to the power and strength of the empire; France, the principal heir of the Roman Empire as well as of the Roman civilization, leaves also to her conquered provinces their identity, and finds her conquests adding to her power. But England tolerates nothing un-English, and makes her conquests virtual exterminations, and her conquests are never completed so long as the extermination is incomplete. The English, and in this respect we include their descendants in America, consequently ourselves, proceed always on the assumption, express or implied, that what is not English ought not to exist, and that it is impossible for a people to be prosperous, wise, virtuous, or happy in any way but the English way, or as we say here, the American way. They make war to the knife on every thing that does not smack of Englishism.

There is something remarkable in this English race both in its European and American branches. It can never live in peace with a weaker neighbor. It is hard to say what would have been the fate of Europe, if it had been a continental power. It would either have grasped the whole continent, or it would itself have ceased to exist. It can endure no neighbors, no power beside its own, that it is able to crush. We see this in the British expansion in Asia. It has annexed nearly the whole of India, and is now annexing, or preparing the way to annex Persia on the West and China on the North. We see it also in our own expansion on this continent. We could never live in peace with the native Indians, and always contrived to pick quarrels with them, provoke them to acts of vengeance, and then make war on them, exterminate them, or drive them back, and take their lands

from them. We do not annex Canada, because we should, were we to attempt it, have to reckon with the Mother Country, and we are not quite prepared for that as yet; but we are perpetually getting into disputes with our Southern neighbors; we have already got Texas, California, and New Mexico, and we are working our way down to the Isthmus of Darien. The race seems to lack the sense of international law, and to have persuaded itself that might makes right, and that a people not able to defend its possessions has no right to hold them. The people too weak to maintain its independence has, it seems to believe, no right to exist as an independent people. How long would the little Republic of San Marino have retained its separate existence had it been situated in the British Isles, or within the geographical limits of the United States?

Yet this so-called Anglo-Saxon race boasts itself the grand civilizing race of the modern world, and affects to despise all other races as inferior and semi-barbarous. But there is not a race or tribe in any part of the world that it has civilized by its arts, its arms, its missionaries, or its colonists, at least since the Norman Conquest. It has gained no conquests to civilization in the East. It has gained none in the West. Undoubtedly, the United States are a civilized state where three hundred years ago roamed only savage tribes. Yet it has become so not by civilizing those tribes, but by driving them out. The colonists brought their civilization with them and transmitted it more or less impaired to their descendants, but they have never extended it to the original inhabitants. They did not civilize the Indians, they exterminated them. Now a race which civilizes no savage or barbarous people, can by no allowable figure of speech or stretch of the imagination be called a civilizing race, for it civilizes nobody, although civilized itself. We acknowledge the race possesses noble and generous traits, that it is a strong and energetic, a bold and adventurous race, and England has retained its old constitution in greater integrity and vigor than any of the continental nations of Europe; but we have never been able to detect, at least since it became Protestant, the least benefit resulting from its influence in foreign nations. Its embrace is fatal. No nation has been