for here Hoche with a fleet aimed to land in 1796, and here half of his fleet actually arrived, with no one to oppose them. Hoche was then at the pinnacle of his power and fame, an idealist of the early Republican movement, consumed with that real passion for spreading freedom which Napoleon was destined to replace by a very different conception. But Hoche and half of the ships were tempest-driven far out of their course, and it was Grouchy, the slow mover, the man of hesitations, who reached the goal, and, having reached it, failed to act. History hinges on odd chances. Humbert's achievements, two years later, with a mere handful of men, when England had an army in Ireland, put it beyond dispute that Grouchy, even with what he had, could have set on foot a movement that would have driven English power out of Ireland at least for a time: and Wellington himself has told how great a part in breaking down the power of France, from those conflicts in the Peninsula on to the climax of Waterloo, was borne by the unemancipated Catholic Irish peasants, who formed the very bone and sinew of the British line.

It may well be that all was for the best in the best possible of worlds: that it was best that Ireland, instead of freeing herself with the help of Republican France, should help greatly to deliver Europe from the menace of Imperial France—and hand it over to the tender mercies of the Holy Alliance. Yet it needs the faith of Voltaire's philosopher to believe that anything could have been worse for Ireland than the historic evolution which she was actually fated to undergo.

Beyond Bantry is Glengarriff, of which Thackeray wrote that "such a bay, were it lying upon English shores, would be a world's wonder". I have only seen it off the deck of a steamer, away in a smother of cloud; but everyone confirms Thackeray. Castletown Beare, farther west on the north shore of Bantry Bay, I have seen, and the Castle of Dunboy, where was the seat of the O'Sullivan Beare, lord of this region, from which after the rout at Kinsale he and his people fled in a body, marching north amid dreadful privations till they crossed the Shannon and ultimately reached some protection in Ulster. But O'Sullivan's fighting men were left in the Castle under their captain MacGeoghegan, who prolonged resistance to the point of desperation against Carew's artillery. Mortally wounded at last, he succumbed in an attempt to reach the magazine to blow all, assailants and defenders, sky high. It would have been better for the garrison had he succeeded, since Carew hanged every man of them. There is the ruin to-day, breached and battered, standing in a grove of ilex on a very beautiful promontory.

That Castle of Dunboy gave its name to Froude's famous romance The Two Chiefs of Dunboy—a romance founded on historic fact—perhaps not more coloured in the telling than in the same author's volumes on the history of Ireland. For here in this peninsula between Bantry Bay and the Kenmare River, which was the special hold of the O'Sullivans, clan loyalty and the clan name did not die out. Here as elsewhere, English settlers were brought in as lords of the land, with enormous power over the native Irish, whose loyalty still held to the representative of their old chiefs. The O'Sullivans were chiefs now principally in the extensive smuggling operations—and let it be remembered that under the laws made by England to crush out Irish trade, contraband was almost the one outlet for Irish commerce. If Irishmen wanted to export the wool of their sheep, the hides of their cattle, the meat that they salted, all this traffic was by law forbidden. Such laws make smuggling necessary and beneficent, and the O'Sullivans on the south of the Kenmare River, like the O'Connells on its northern shore, brought in their cargoes of wine, tobacco, silks, and laces, and sent back ships laden with wool. With those cargoes went out too that other contraband, the supply of officers and men for the Irish brigade. The English landlord-settler was the representative of English law, and between him and the O'Sullivans conflict was certain. In 1754, Murtagh Oge O'Sullivan shot the Puxley of that day. Law was moved to great efforts, and two months later the O'Sullivan was surrounded in his house at the village of Eyeries, and, after a desperate resistance, driven out of it by fire: he tried to cut his way out but was shot down in escaping. That was a great day for the law, and they towed O'Sullivan's body by a rope at the stern of a king's ship to Cork, where they cut his head off and spiked it over the city gate.

ENTRANCE TO CORK HARBOUR

Irish memory keeps vividly the detail of such events, and you can find men in that district to tell you the whole as if it had happened yesterday. I heard it all, though at secondhand, on a sail from the Kenmare River to Bantry, one night when the sea was all fire, and the mackerel shoals dashing this way and that, made flashes like a Catherine wheel, and porpoises or dolphins following them left long trails of light on the surface with sudden sparkles wherever the great fish came up to roll. Out to sea was the recurring flash of the Bull Light, for which ships steer on their way from America; and though there was no moon I could still distinguish this huge island rock, and its neighbour the Cow. The Calf, where the light used to be, is lower, and lies close in by Dursey Island—in that year much talked of, for a party of police who had crossed to collect rents from the few islanders, were effectively marooned, as the boat they had chartered left them, and every other craft was suddenly spirited away.

I think, perhaps, that night was lovelier on the Kenmare River—under a sky ablaze with stars—than even the days of sun had been; but nothing else in Ireland is so perfect, to my fancy, as this long, narrow sea lough between the two mountainous peninsulas, and having inland of it the full vista of those higher mountains which encircle Killarney's lakes.

On the Kenmare shore of the southern peninsula is Lord Lansdowne's famous seat, Derreen, set among rivers and lakes, and backed with mountains. Derreen means the little oak grove, and as Mr. Cooke well observes in his Murray, the native wooding here escaped "the general destruction" of the forest trees to feed the iron furnaces of Sir William Petty, ancestor of the Lansdowne family. Most of the woods of Ireland—and Munster was covered with timber in Elizabeth's reign—were ruthlessly squandered in this way, during the first century of English occupation, by grantees or purchasers of confiscated land, whose one idea was a savage exploitation of what could immediately be cashed. However, let it be said that Petty's successors, coming into great part of the Desmond inheritance, and adopting the Desmond name, Fitzmaurice, took high place among that Irish nobility of the latter type. They were not absentees but landowners with some sense of what was owing to their estates, and with a sentiment to the country from which they drew their revenues, which is best evidenced by their close friendship with Maria Edgeworth and Thomas Moore. Yet it was always at Bowood, in Wiltshire, that Miss Edgeworth and Moore knew the great Whig statesman and his belongings: neither the poet nor the novelist ever penetrated to Derreen.

Had they done so, they might have learnt more than ever either of them came to realize about the greatest Irishman of