tnight in taking the single castle of Cahir; lingered about the
Limerick woods in pursuit of a nephew of the late Desmond, derisively
known as the "Sugane Earl," or "Earl of Straw," who in the absence of
the young heir had collected the remnants of the Desmond followers about
him, and was in league with Tyrone. A few weeks later a party of English
soldiers were surprised by the O'Byrnes in Wicklow, and fled shamefully;
while almost at the same moment--by a misfortune which was certainly no
fault of Essex's, but which went to swell the list of his disasters--Sir
Conyers Clifford, the gallant governor of Connaught, was defeated by the
O'Donnells in a skirmish among the Curlew mountains, and both he and Sir
Alexander Ratcliffe, the second in command, left dead upon the field.

Essex's very virtues and better qualities, in fact, were all against him
in this fatal service. His natural chivalrousness, his keen perception
of injustice, a certain elevation of mind which debarred him from taking
the stereotyped English official view of the intricate Irish problem; an
independence of vulgar motives which made him prone to see two sides of
a question--even where his own interests required that he should see but
one--all these were against him; all tended to make him seem vacillating
and ineffective; all helped to bring about that failure which has made
his six months of command in Ireland the opprobrium ever since of
historians.

Even when, after more than one furiously reproachful letter from the
queen, and after his army had been recruited by an additional force of
two thousand men, he at last started for the north, nothing of any
importance happened. He and Tyrone held an amicable and unwitnessed
conference at a ford of the little river Lagan, at which the enemies of
the viceroy did not scruple afterwards to assert that treason had been
concocted. What, at any rate, is certain is that Essex agreed to an
armistice, which, with so overwhelming a force at his own disposal,
naturally awakened no little anger and astonishment. Tyrone's personal
courtesy evidently produced a strong effect upon the other earl. They
were old acquaintances, and Tyrone was no doubt able to place his case
in strong relief. Essex, too, had that generosity of mind which made him
inconveniently open to expostulation, and he knew probably well enough
that the wrongs of which Tyrone complained were far from imaginary ones.

Another and a yet more furious lett