“Black Rent,” indeed, began to take the form of a regularly recognized tribute; O’Neill receiving L40 a year from the county of Louth, O’Connor of Offaly, L60 from the county of Meath, and others in like proportion.  In despair of any assistance from England some of the colonists formed themselves into a fraternity which they called the “Brotherhood of St. George,” consisting of some thirteen gentlemen of the Pale with a hundred archers and a handful of horsemen under them.

The Irish Government continued to pass Act after Act, each more and more ferocious as it became more and more ineffective.  Colonists were now empowered to take and behead any natives whom they found marauding, or whom they even suspected of any such intention.  All friendly dealing with natives was to be punished as felony.  All who failed to shave their upper lip at least once a fortnight were to be imprisoned and their goods seized.  Englishmen who married Irish women were to be accounted guilty of high treason, and hung, drawn, and quartered at the convenience of the viceroy.  Such feeble ferocity tells its own tale.  Like some angry shrew the unhappy executive was getting louder and shriller the less its denunciations were attended to.

XVIII.

THE DEEPEST DEPTHS.

The most salient fact in Irish history is perhaps its monotony.  If that statement is a bull it is one that must be forgiven for the sake of the truth it conveys.  Year after year, decade after decade, century after century, we seem to go swimming slowly and wearily on through a vague sea of confusion and disorder; of brutal deeds and yet more brutal retaliations; of misgovernment and anarchy; of a confusion so penetrating and all-persuasive that the mind fairly refuses to grapple with it.  Even killing—­exciting as an incident—­becomes monotonous when it is continued ad infinitum, and no other occurrence ever comes to vary its tediousness.  Campion the Elizabethan historian, whose few pages are a perfect magazine of verbal quaintness, apologizes in the preface to his “lovyng reader, for that from the time of Cambrensis to that of Henry VIII.” he is obliged to make short work of his intermediate periods; “because that nothing is therein orderly written, and that the same is time beyond any man’s memory, wherefore I scramble forward with such records as could be sought up, and am enforced to be the briefer.”

“Scrambling forward” is, indeed, exactly what describes the process.  We, too, must be content “to be the briefer,” and to “scramble forward” across these intermediate and comparatively eventless periods in order to reach what lies beyond.  The age of the Wars of the Roses is one of great gloom and confusion in England; in Ireland it is an all but complete blank.  What intermittent interest in its affairs had been awakened on the other side of the channel had all but wholly died away in that protracted