nd some of the colonists formed
themselves into a fraternity which they called the "Brotherhood of St.
George," consisting of some thirteen gentlemen of the Pale with a
hundred archers and a handful of horsemen under them.

The Irish Government continued to pass Act after Act, each more and more
ferocious as it became more and more ineffective. Colonists were now
empowered to take and behead any natives whom they found marauding, or
whom they even suspected of any such intention. All friendly dealing
with natives was to be punished as felony. All who failed to shave their
upper lip at least once a fortnight were to be imprisoned and their
goods seized. Englishmen who married Irish women were to be accounted
guilty of high treason, and hung, drawn, and quartered at the
convenience of the viceroy. Such feeble ferocity tells its own tale.
Like some angry shrew the unhappy executive was getting louder and
shriller the less its denunciations were attended to.

XVIII.

THE DEEPEST DEPTHS.

The most salient fact in Irish history is perhaps its monotony. If that
statement is a bull it is one that must be forgiven for the sake of the
truth it conveys. Year after year, decade after decade, century after
century, we seem to go swimming slowly and wearily on through a vague
sea of confusion and disorder; of brutal deeds and yet more brutal
retaliations; of misgovernment and anarchy; of a confusion so
penetrating and all-persuasive that the mind fairly refuses to grapple
with it. Even killing--exciting as an incident--becomes monotonous when
it is continued _ad infinitum_, and no other occurrence ever comes to
vary its tediousness. Campion the Elizabethan historian, whose few pages
are a perfect magazine of verbal quaintness, apologizes in the preface
to his "lovyng reader, for that from the time of Cambrensis to that of
Henry VIII." he is obliged to make short work of his intermediate
periods; "because that nothing is therein orderly written, and that the
same is time beyond any man's memory, wherefore I scramble forward with
such records as could be sought up, and am enforced to be the briefer."

"Scrambling forward" is, indeed, exactly what describes the process. We,
too, must be content "to be the briefer," and to "scramble forward"
across these intermediate and comparatively eventless periods in order
to reach what lies beyond. The age of the Wars of the Roses is one of
great gloom and confusion in England; in Ireland