to give, there was always a certain nobility
of tone and sentiment.' Nobility was scarcely necessary to induce
a statesman to revolt against the policy of Arnold. A little
Christianity, nay a slight touch of humanity, would have sufficed for
that purpose. Sussex was a nobleman, and considered himself, no
doubt, a very godly man, but everyone must admit that, in all heroic
qualities, he was incomparably beneath the uncultured Shane O'Neill,
while in baseness and wickedness he was not far behind his northern
foe, 'half wolf, half fox.' Cecil, however, was a man of a very
different stamp from Sussex. Evidently shocked at the prevailing
English notions about the value of Irish life, he wrote to Arnold:
'You be of that opinion which many wise men are of, from which I do
not dissent, being an Englishman; but being, as I am, a Christian man,
I am not without some perplexity, to enjoy of such cruelties.'

The work of reform, however, did not prove so easy a task. Arnold's
vigour was limited by his powers. The paymasters continued to cheat
the Government by false returns. The Government allowed the pay to
run in arrear, the soldiers revenged themselves by oppressing and
plundering the people; and 'so came to pass this wonderful phenomenon,
that _in O'Neill's country_ alone in Ireland--defended as it was from
attacks from without, and enriched with the plunder of the Pale--_were
the peasantry prosperous, or life or property secure_.' This fact
might suggest to the English historian that the evils of Ireland do
not all proceed from blood or race; and that the Saxon may be placed
in circumstances which make him as false, as dishonest, as lazy, as
disordered, as worthless as the Celt, and that even men of 'gentle
blood' may become as base as their most plebeian servants. Nor did
zeal for religious reformation redeem the defects of the Anglo-Irish
rulers. The Protestant bishops were chiefly agitated by the vestment
controversy. 'Adam Loftus, the titular primate, to whom,' says
Mr. Froude, 'sacked villages, ravished women, and famine-stricken
skeletons crawling about the fields, were matters of everyday
indifference, shook with terror at the mention of a surplice.' Robert
Daly wrote in anguish to Cecil, in dismay at the countenance to
'Papistry,' and at his own inability to prolong a persecution which he
had happily commenced. An abortive 'devise for the better government
of Ireland' gives us some insight into the condition of the pe