nts for the lands
of which they considered themselves to have been robbed, and of
recovering souls at the same time by carrying off young Protestant
girls of fortune to the mountains, ravishing them with the most
exquisite brutality, and then compelling them to go through a form
of marriage, which a priest was always in attendance ready to
celebrate."+ This is a very serious charge, perhaps as serious a
charge as could well be made against a religious communion. It was
an accusation improbable on the face of it; for while the Church of
Rome in the course of her strange, eventful history has tampered
with the sixth commandment, as Protestants call it, she has never
underrated the virtue of chastity, and has always proclaimed a high
standard of sexual morals. In his zeal to justify the penal laws
against Catholics Froude accepted without sufficient inquiry
evidence which could only have satisfied one willing to believe the
worst.

--
* English in Ireland, vol. i. pp. 417-434.
+ Ibid., p. 417.
--

Several years afterwards, in 1878, the subject was fully discussed,
and Froude's conclusions were shown to be unsound, by another
historian, William Edward Hartpole Lecky. Lecky was a much more
formidable critic than Freeman. Calm in temperament and moderate in
language, he could take part in an historical controversy without
getting into a rage. Freeman, after pages of mere abuse, would
pounce with triumphant ejaculations upon a misprint. Lecky did not
waste his time either on scolding or on trifles. The faults he found
were grave, and his censure was not the less severe for being
decorous. An Anglicised Irishman, living in England, though a
graduate of Dublin University, Lecky became known when he was a very
young man for a brilliant little book on Leaders of Irish Opinion.
He had since published mature and valuable histories of rationalism,
and of morals. His History of England in the Eighteenth Century is
likely to remain a standard book, being written with fairness,
lucidity, and candour. It is true that in his Irish chapters, with
which alone I am concerned, Lecky, like Froude, wrote with a
purpose. He was an Irish patriot, and bent on making out the best
possible case for his own country.

At the same time he was, for an Irishman, singularly impartial
between Catholic and Protestant, leaning, if at all, to the
Protestant side. Yet he repudiated with indignant vehemence Froude's
attempt to connect the Catholic Churc