children of Oliver's soldiers could not speak a word of English, as they had followed, in so many cases, the speech, as well as religion, of their mothers. Few made so jealous a provision for the religion of their descendants as that Sir Jerome Alexander, an English judge in Ireland, who left his estate to his daughter, but made the gift void in the event of her marrying an Irishman, were he archbishop, bishop, baronet, knight, esquire, or gentleman of Irish extraction or descent.

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The adventurers were next satisfied and planted down beside the soldiers in the ten counties; but as they did not come to the country till six years after the former had settled, the old Irish proprietors had, in many cases, continued to occupy the lands with the connivance of the soldiers, and it was with difficulty that they got their allotted portions into their hands. came the more difficult project of replanting Ireland. The country was divided into three districts-one to be a pure Irish plantation-Connaught; another, to be a pure English plantation--Leinster, or the Five Counties,' to be made up of English Protestants and exiled Bohemians, Vaudois, Netherlanders, and New Englanders, who had suffered for their religion; and another to be a mixed plantation, in the central parts of the country, consisting of English masters and landlords, with permission to take such Irish tenants and servants as were without the rule of transplantation, but all were to be taught the English language, and to be instructed by Protestant ministers, as well as to abandon their Irish names of Teig and Dermot and the like for the corresponding English names, and drop the O' and Mc so characteristic of nationality. The Government had reserved to themselves all forfeited property in the cities and boroughs, and thus paid off debts of 10,0007. to Liverpool and Gloucester, whose corporations were to plant the deserted and almost ruined towns with English Protestants. Galway was especially recommended by the commissioners as a port of importance; but now, as Mr. Prendergast remarks,That town, once frequented by ships with cargoes of French and Spanish wines, to supply the wassailings of the O'Neills, the O'Donnels, the O'Garas, and the O'Kanes, her marble palaces handed over to strangers, and her gallant 'sons and dark-eyed daughters banished, remains for 200 years a ruin her splendid port empty and her "hungry air," in 1862, becomes the mock of the official stranger.'

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This is the history of the Cromwellian Settlement of Ireland. Mr. Prendergast occupies the closing chapters of his book in describing the efforts made to destroy Three Troublesome 'Beasts,' which sorely marred the peace and prosperity of the

planters. We have three beasts to destroy,' said Major Morgan, an Irish member of Parliament, that lay burthens upon us. The first is the wolf, on whom we lay five pounds a head if a dog, and ten pounds if a bitch. The second beast is a 'priest, on whose head we lay ten pounds-if he be eminent, 'more. The third beast is a Tory, on whose head, if he be a 'public Tory, we lay twenty pounds, and fifty shillings on a private Tory. Your money cannot catch them; the Irish bring them in; brothers and cousins cut one another's throats." It would have been very satisfactory if Mr. Prendergast, who undertook to write the history of the Cromwellian Settlement, had given us some account of its political and social consequences; for an event of such moment, remarkable for the magnitude and multiplicity of its changes, could not but exercise a very important and lasting influence upon the fortunes of subsequent generations. Ireland, convulsed from its deepest foundations, resembled one of those islands of southern climes upheaved from the bottom of the sea, which, pregnant with volcanic seed, produces new lands of tropical fertility and luxuriance. It is remarkable, therefore, that the country shot up at once into marvellous prosperity. It is not from the volume before us, but from Macaulay's History of England,' that we learn this information: Strange to say, under that iron rule, the conquered country began to wear an outward face of prosperity. Districts, which had recently been as wild as those where the first white settlers of Connecticut were contending ' with the red men, were in a few years transformed into the likeness of Kent and Norfolk. New buildings, roads, and 'plantations were everywhere seen. The rent of estates rose fast; and soon the English landowners began to complain that they were met in every market by the products of Ireland, ' and to clamour for protecting laws.' Mr. Prendergast might have sketched for us the splendid plans that Cromwell had designed for promoting the higher education of the country, not only by reforming the abuses of the Dublin University, but by establishing a second collegiate institution near the metropolis; and he might have given us some hint of the generous provision that was made for the support of religious teachers, by appointing 130 Independent and Baptist preachers at the public charge, to minister in the towns and cities of the North and South, in addition to those of other denominations whom he left undisturbed in their parishes. But the author is silent upon every point that can reflect the least credit or honour upon the memory of the great Protector. It is worthy of remark that this Cromwellian plantation, though devised and

executed on a far larger scale than the Scottish plantation of Ulster, which was nearly contemporary, failed as signally as the other succeeded in achieving the objects of the projectors; for, though it left Leinster-the seat of the pure plantation-at once the most prosperous and the most Protestant of the three southern provinces, it did not found a thriving community like that of Ulster, which, though taking root in the bleakest part of the country, could turn its natural resources to such noble account, and create an emporium of manufacturing activity and commercial enterprise, which has always been the envy and the admiration of the South.

The reasons of this comparative failure are very obvious even to a cursory inquirer. The Cromwellian plantation was founded upon the ruthless proscription of a whole nation, and it is a well-known political axiom that no measures can ever finally succeed in which the interests of all classes are not in some way consulted. The Ulster plantation under James I., though founded on the confiscation of the lands of the old, quarrelling, rebellious chiefs, who had to abandon the country, did not displace the native Irish to the same extent as the Southern; for they had their place though an inferior onein the plan of settlement, and, as a matter of fact, they held directly 60,000 of the 300,000 acres available for plantation, while the majority of the British undertakers had Irish tenants settled on their newly-acquired properties. The lands, too, were generally vacant when the settlers arrived. Again, the Cromwellian officers, as we have already seen, by their eagerness to buy up the portions of the common soldiers, weakened, while they imagined they were strengthening their own position in the country, and thus hindered the formation of a sturdy middle-class; but the Ulster settlement, by strictly guarding the rights of the tenant-occupiers against the encroachments of their landlords, created a class of yeomen, with protection for industry and stimulus to enterprise, who laid the broad and lasting foundation of Northern prosperity. The Scotch settlers, too, brought their families into the country, and thus preserved their religious distinctness in the midst of surrounding Romanism; while most of the settlers of Cromwell, like those of England for many centuries, by neglecting this necessary provision, were obliged to intermarry with the natives, and were thus rapidly absorbed, in the course of a few generations, into the mass of the unenterprising, unimproving, Roman Catholic population. It is not to be forgotten, too, as affecting the Protestant character of the Northern province, that the early settlers had no difficulty in obtaining from

it was

Scotland the services of the most godly and zealous of its ministers, who remained in the country in spite of all the prelatic persecutions of after-times; while, on the other hand, a curious and melancholy circumstance, that most of the 130 Independent and Baptist ministers returned to England at the Restoration, on the withdrawal of their salaries, and left the Puritan settlers without any provision for their spiritual wants. No doubt, the restored Episcopacy, though obnoxious to the settlers, took the place in some measure of the fugitive divines of Cromwell; but many of these settlers after the Restoration answered but too faithfully to the description given of them by one who knew them well:-'I ' have hunted with them,' says he, I have diced with them, I have drunk with them, I have fought with them, but I have never prayed with them;' and another might well describe an Irish Protestant as a man who never went to church and hated a Papist. Is it strange, then, that such different fortunes attended the two great plantations of the seventeenth century?

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In closing this review, we cannot but congratulate the sistercountry upon its altered condition, since English legislation palsied the arm and broke the heart of local insolence and oppression. We rejoice in the spring-tide of general reason and substantial improvement which is rising and swelling all over the country; and though, in the Southern provinces, where there are no manufactures to employ the redundant population, the unsatisfactory state of the land question must, for some time to come, be a bar to agricultural progress, it cannot now be justly charged upon England that she governs less by the love of the many than by the power of the few, or that she sacrifices the interests of a noble and warm-hearted people to the caprices of power or the supremacy of an intolerant faction.

The prompt and complete success of the vigorous measures taken by the Government in the course of this autumn to expose and crush the Fenian association, has earned for Lord Wodehouse the respect and gratitude of all the educated classes in Ireland, and of the clergy of all denominations. Perhaps it is the first time that measures of repression taken by the Government have been heartily supported by the Irish nation. We hope this will be the last of these obsolete and abortive attempts at revolution, and that the ardent and patriotic youth of Ireland will learn that they have nothing to gain from secret societies or foreign intrigues, but that the future welfare of their country depends on a steady adherence to a liberal policy in obedience to the laws of the United Kingdom.

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ART. IX.-An Excursion in the Peloponnesus in the Year 1858. By the late Right Hon. Sir THOMAS WYSE, K.C.B., H.M.'s Minister Plenipotentiary at Athens from 1849 to 1862. Edited by his niece, WINIFREDE M. WYSE. With numerous illustrations. 2 vols. imp. 8vo. London: 1865. THE HERE are few portions of Southern Europe that have been more thoroughly explored, and more carefully described, than Greece. Not to speak of the valuable labours of Sir W. Gell, Dodwell, and other earlier travellers, the elaborate works of the late Colonel Leake are in themselves a perfect storehouse of information. As one of the most able of those who have trodden in his footsteps remarks, All are but gleaners after him. . . . His truthfulness, his sagacity, his diligence, and his learning, are above all praise.' The skill and sagacity with which he identified the sites of ancient cities, and seized at once the characteristic features of each peculiar locality, with a kind of intuitive perception, remind one of the coup d'œil of an able general, and were probably derived by him in part from early military training; but it is rarely indeed that such a power is combined with learning at once accurate and extensive, and with a calmness of judgment at least as rare in antiquarian pursuits as in others of a more exciting character. When we add to the writers already named the scientific labours of the French commission, and the elaborate survey of the Morea, made by them during the period of their occupation, with a view to the preparation of their great map of the country, as well as the works of a whole host of German savans, who, since the establishment of King Otho on the Hellenic throne, have investigated every corner of the country with their usual diligence-it may suffice here to mention the names of Ross, of Ulrichs, of Forchhammer and Curtius-most persons would naturally have supposed that there remained little for a fresh traveller to glean or to tell.

Yet these volumes prove that there was still ample scope for a very interesting book. The ancient sites had been indeed so carefully sought out, and for the most part so clearly identified, and the existing remains so fully and minutely described, that the mere passing visitor could scarcely hope to add anything to our antiquarian or topographical knowledge. But the surpassing interest of these researches in a land teeming at every step with ancient relics and ancient associations, had in most instances so absorbed the attention of travellers that they almost forgot to record their impressions.