had made an end of
Shane--which is now farther off than ever it was. Never before durst
Scot or Irishman look on Englishmen in plain or wood since I was here;
and now Shane, in a plain three miles away from any wood, and where I
would have asked of God to have had him, hath, with 120 horse, and a
few Scots and galloglasse, _scarce half in numbers_, charged our whole
army, and by the cowardice of one wretch whom I hold dear to me as
my own brother, was like in one hour to have left not one man of that
army alive, and after to have taken me and the rest at Armagh. The
fame of the English army, so hardly gotten, is now vanished, and I,
wretched and dishonoured, by the vileness of other men's deeds.'

This is real history that Mr. Froude has given us. It places the
actors before us, enables us to discern their characters, tells us
who they are and what they have done. It shows also the value and
the necessity of documentary evidence for establishing the truth
of history. How different from the vague, uncertain, shadowy
representations derived from oral tradition, or mere reports,
though contemporary, circulated from mouth to mouth, and exaggerated
according to the interests of one party or the other. Let us for
illustration compare Mr. Froude's vivid picture of this battle, so
disastrous to the English, with the account given of the same event by
the Annalists called the Four Masters. These writers had taken great
pains to collect the most authentic records of the various Irish
tribes from the invasion by Henry II. to the period of which we
are writing. They were intensely Irish, and of course glad of any
opportunity of recording events creditable to the valour of their
countrymen. They lived in Donegal, under the protection of O'Donel,
but they showed themselves quite willing to do full justice to his
great rival O'Neill. The presence of the lord deputy, the Earl of
Ormond, and other great men at Armagh, with a select English army,
would naturally have roused their attention, and when that army was
encountered and vanquished in the open field by the Irish general, we
should have expected that the details of such a glorious event would
have been collected with the greatest care from the accounts of
eye-witnesses. The bards and historiographers should have been on the
alert to do justice to their country on so great an occasion. They
were on the spot, they were beside the victors, and they had no excuse
whatever for ignoran