er from the queen startled him for
his own safety. Availing himself of a permission he had brought with him
to return should occasion seem to require it, he left the command in the
hands of subordinates, flew to Dublin, and embarked immediately for
England. What befel him upon his arrival is familiar to every school
child, and the relation of it must not be allowed to divert us from
following the further course of events in Ireland.

[Illustration: CINERARY URN. (_From a Tumulus near Dublin_.)]

XXX.

END OF THE TYRONE REBELLION.

A very different man from the chivalrous and quixotic Essex now took the
reins. Charles Blount, Lord Mountjoy, had expected to be sent to Ireland
when Essex had suddenly been appointed with ampler powers and a more
extended consequence, and the disappointment had caused him to follow
the course of that ill-starred favourite with ill-concealed jealousy to
its tragic end.

Mountjoy was himself a man of cold, clear-sighted, self-seeking
temperament. In almost all English histories dealing with this period
his steadiness and solid unshowy qualities are contrasted with Essex's
flightiness and failure, to the natural disadvantage of the latter.
This, however, is not perhaps quite the last word upon the matter, and
it is only fair to Essex that this should be realized.

[Illustration: CAPTURE OF THE EARL OF ORMOND BY THE O'MORES. (_From the
"Pacata Hibernia," of Sir G. Carew_.) 1. Ormond and his followers; 2.
Rebel horse and foot; 3. Rebels concealed in woods; 4. Bogs.]

No master hand has as yet made this special portion of Irish history his
own. When he does so--if the keen edge of his perceptions, that is to
say, has not been dimmed by too strong an earlier prepossession--we
shall perhaps learn that the admitted failure of Essex, so disastrous to
himself, was more honourable than the admitted and the well-rewarded
success of Mountjoy. The situation, as every English leader soon found,
was one that admitted of no possible fellowship between two
alternatives, success and pity; between the commonest and most
elementary dictates of humanity, and the approval of the queen and her
Council. There was but one method by which a success could be assured,
and this was the method which Mountjoy now pushed relentlessly, and from
which Essex's more sensitively attuned nature evidently shrank. The
enemies it was necessary to annihilate were not so much Tyrone's
soldiers, as the poor, the feeble, the