barbarous lives,'--promising rent and service for
their lands. 'The past was wiped out. Confiscation on the one hand,
and rebellion on the other, were to be heard of no more. A clean page
was turned.' Even the Catholic bishops were tractable, and the viceroy
got 'good and honest juries in Cork, and with their help twenty-four
malefactors were honourably condemned and hanged.' Enjoying an ovation
as he passed on to Limerick and Galway, he found many grievances to be
redressed--'plenty of burnings, rapes, murders, besides such spoil
in goods and cattle as in number might be counted infinite, and in
quantity innumerable.'

Sir William Drury was appointed president of Munster; and he was
determined that in his case the magistrate should not bear the sword
in vain. Going round the counties as an itinerant judge, he gleaned
the malefactors Sidney had left, and hanged forty-three of them
in Cork. One he pressed to death for declining to plead to his
indictment. Two M'Sweenys, from Kerry, were drawn and quartered. At
Limerick he hanged forty-two, and at Kilkenny thirty-six, among which
he said were 'some good ones,' as a sportsman might say, bagging his
game. He had a difficulty with 'a blackamoor and two witches,' against
whom he found no statute of the realm, so he dispatched them 'by
natural law.' Although Jeffreys, at the Bloody Assizes, did not come
near Drury, the latter found it necessary to apologise to the English
Government for the paucity of his victims, saying, 'I have chosen
rather with the snail tenderly to creep, than with the hare swiftly to
run.' With the Government in Ireland, as Mr. Froude has well remarked,
'the gallows is the only preacher of righteousness.'

But the gallows was far too slow, as an instrument of reform and
civilisation, for Malby, president of Connaught; and as modern
evictors in that province and elsewhere have chosen Christmas as the
most appropriate season for pulling down dwellings, extinguishing
domestic fires, and unhousing women and children, so Malby chose the
same blessed season for his 'improvements' in 1576. It is such a model
for dealing with the Fenians and tenants on the Tory plan, that I
transcribe his own report, which Mr. Froude has found among the Irish
MSS. 'At Christmas,' he wrote, 'I marched into their territory, and
finding courteous dealing with them had like to have cut my throat,
I thought good to take another course; and so with determination _to
consume them wi