, justice, or wisdom from a class of men
first abased by many years of oppression, and then maddened by the
joy of a sudden deliverance, and armed with irresistible power. The
representatives of the Irish nation were, with few exceptions, rude
and ignorant. They had lived in a state of constant irritation. With
aristocratical sentiments they had been in a servile position. With the
highest pride of blood, they had been exposed to daily affronts, such as
might well have roused the choler of the humblest plebeian. In sight of
the fields and castles which they regarded as their own, they had been
glad to be invited by a peasant to partake of his whey and his potatoes.
Those violent emotions of hatred and cupidity which the situation of the
native gentleman could scarcely fail to call forth appeared to him under
the specious guise of patriotism and piety. For his enemies were the
enemies of his nation; and the same tyranny which had robbed him of his
patrimony had robbed his Church of vast wealth bestowed on her by
the devotion of an earlier age. How was power likely to be used by
an uneducated and inexperienced man, agitated by strong desires and
resentments which he mistook for sacred duties? And, when two or three
hundred such men were brought together in one assembly, what was to be
expected but that the passions which each had long nursed in silence
would be at once matured into fearful vigour by the influence of
sympathy?

Between James and his parliament there was little in common, except
hatred of the Protestant religion. He was an Englishman. Superstition
had not utterly extinguished all national feeling in his mind; and he
could not but be displeased by the malevolence with which his Celtic
supporters regarded the race from which he sprang. The range of his
intellectual vision was small. Yet it was impossible that, having
reigned in England, and looking constantly forward to the day when he
should reign in England once more, he should not take a wider view of
politics than was taken by men who had no objects out of Ireland. The
few Irish Protestants who still adhered to him, and the British nobles,
both Protestant and Roman Catholic, who had followed him into exile,
implored him to restrain the violence of the rapacious and vindictive
senate which he had convoked. They with peculiar earnestness implored
him not to consent to the repeal of the Act of Settlement. On what
security, they asked, could any man invest hi