or Greece. Men who
live in New York, London, or Paris must be singularly retentive of
passion to keep up even their own hatreds, not to speak of the hatreds
of their ancestors. But it is alike the bane and blessing of lives spent
in retirement and monotony to retain impressions for years, and live in
the past almost more vividly than in the tame and uninteresting present.
Ireland, at all events, has had nothing to divert her from her old
traditions; and there is probably no man, woman, or child of Celtic race
living in the country in whose mind a certain "historical element,"
compounded strangely of truth and falsehood, does not occupy a place
such as no analogous impression takes in the thought of an ordinary
Englishman or Frenchman. We shall endeavor in this paper to give a
little idea of the nature of these Irish traditions and feelings; and if
we succeed in doing so, we shall at the same time afford to our readers
a clew to some of the supposed mysteries of the recent outbreak of
Fenianism. In sober truth, Fenianism is not, to Anglo-Irish observers, a
startling apparition, an outburst of insane folly, an epidemic of
national hate, but, on the contrary, a most familiar phenomenon, the
mere appearance on the surface of what we always knew lay beneath,--an
endemic as natural to the soil as the ague and fever which haunt the
undrained bogs. Those who understand what Irishmen are always _thinking_
will find no difficulty in understanding also what things they
occasionally _do_.

The real wrongs inflicted by England upon Ireland are probably as bad as
ever disgraced the history of a conquest--in itself without excuse. Not
to speak of confiscations, and executions often taking the form of
murderous raids into suspected districts, there were laws passed one
after another, from the time of Edward I. even to the present century, a
collection of which would be a sad commentary on the boasted justice of
English Parliaments. Irishmen lay under disabilities, political, social,
and ecclesiastical, so severe and numerous that it really seems to have
been a question what they were expected to do _except_ to break some of
these arbitrary laws, and so incur some cruel penalty. Down to our own
century, and for the avowed purpose of injuring the only flourishing
trade of the country (that of linen), the English cotton and woollen
manufacturers procured the passing of acts better called destructive
than protective; and in sober truth, if