as been too little noticed, and which is
the key to much that has been thought mysterious in the history of those
times.

Between English Jacobitism and Irish Jacobitism there was nothing in
common. The English Jacobite was animated by a strong enthusiasm for the
family of Stuart; and in his zeal for the interests of that family he
too often forgot the interests of the state. Victory, peace, prosperity,
seemed evils to the stanch nonjuror of our island if they tended to make
usurpation popular and permanent. Defeat, bankruptcy, famine, invasion,
were, in his view, public blessings, if they increased the chance of
a restoration. He would rather have seen his country the last of the
nations under James the Second or James the Third, than the mistress of
the sea, the umpire between contending potentates, the seat of arts, the
hive of industry, under a prince of the House of Nassau or of Brunswick.

The sentiments of the Irish Jacobite were very different, and, it must
in candour be acknowledged, were of a nobler character. The fallen
dynasty was nothing to him. He had not, like a Cheshire or Shropshire
cavalier, been taught from his cradle to consider loyalty to that
dynasty as the first duty of a Christian and a gentleman. All his family
traditions, all the lessons taught him by his foster mother and by his
priests, had been of a very different tendency. He had been brought up
to regard the foreign sovereigns of his native land with the feeling
with which the Jew regarded Caesar, with which the Scot regarded Edward
the First, with which the Castilian regarded Joseph Buonaparte, with
which the Pole regards the Autocrat of the Russias. It was the boast of
the highborn Milesian that, from the twelfth century to the seventeenth,
every generation of his family had been in arms against the English
crown. His remote ancestors had contended with Fitzstephen and De Burgh.
His greatgrandfather had cloven down the soldiers of Elizabeth in the
battle of the Blackwater. His grandfather had conspired with O'Donnel
against James the First. His father had fought under Sir Phelim O'Neill
against Charles the First. The confiscation of the family estate had
been ratified by an Act of Charles the Second. No Puritan, who had been
cited before the High Commission by Laud, who had charged under Cromwell
at Naseby, who had been prosecuted under the Conventicle Act, and who
had been in hiding on account of the Rye House Plot, bore less affection