bilitye to
indure his wretchednesse, the which will surely come to passe in very
short space; for one winters well following of him will so plucke him on
his knees that he will never be able to stand up agayne.'

He could commend this expeditious way from personal knowledge, and could
assure the Queen that the people of the country would soon 'consume
themselves and devoure one another. The proofs whereof I saw
sufficiently ensampled in these late warres of Mounster; for
notwithstanding that the same was a most rich and plentifull countrey,
full of corne and cattell, that you would have thought they would have
bene able to stand long, yet ere one yeare and a halfe they were brought
to such wretchednesse, as that any stonye heart would have rued the
same. Out of every corner of the woodes and glynnes they came creeping
forth upon theyr hands, for theyr legges could not beare them; they
looked like anatomyes of death, they spake like ghosts crying out of
their graves; they did eate of the dead carrions, happy were they if
they could finde them, yea, and one another soone after, insomuch as the
very carcasses they spared not to scrape out of theyr graves; and if
they found a plot of watercresses or shamrokes, there they flocked as to
a feast for the time, yet not able long to continue therewithall; that
in short space there were none allmost left, and a most populous and
plentifull countrey suddaynely left voyde of man or beast; yet sure in
all that warre, there perished not many by the sword, but all by the
extremitye of famine.'

VI

In a few years the Four Masters were to write the history of that time,
and they were to record the goodness or the badness of Irishman and
Englishman with entire impartiality. They had seen friends and relatives
persecuted, but they would write of that man's poisoning and this man's
charities and of the fall of great houses, and hardly with any other
emotion than a thought of the pitiableness of all life. Friend and enemy
would be for them a part of the spectacle of the world. They remembered
indeed those Anglo-French invaders who conquered for the sake of their
own strong hand, and when they had conquered became a part of the life
about them, singing its songs, when they grew weary of their own Iseult
and Guinevere. The Four Masters had not come to understand, as I think,
despite famines and exterminations, that new invaders were among them,
who fought for an alien State, for an alien