Voltaire, in his Century of Louis XIV., made his reflection on the Irish soldier out of his limited knowledge of the Williamite war in Ireland.  He says, “The Irish, whom we have seen such good soldiers in France and Spain, have always fought poorly at home”!  They had not fought poorly at home.  It took four hundred years of English effort to complete, merely on its face, the conquest of Ireland, and all of that long sweep of the sword of Time was a time of battle.  The Irish were fought with every appliance of war, backed by the riches of a prospering, strongly organized country, and impelled persistently by the greed of land and love of mastery; but there was not a mountain pass in Ireland, not a square mile of plain, not a river-ford, scarce a hill that had not been piled high with English dead in that four hundred years at the hands of the Irish wielders of sword and spear and pike.

The Irish had not made their environment or their natures, and no power on earth could change them.  Over greater England had swept the Romans, the Jutes, the Saxons, the Angles, the Norsemen, and the Normans.  All found lodgment and all went to the making of England.  Well, one might say, it had been for Ireland if she had developed that assimilating power which made her successive conquerors in process of time the feeders of her greatness, but the Irish would not and could not.  Instead, they developed the pride of race that no momentary defeat could down.  They became inured to battle and dreamt of battle when the peace of an hour was given them.  When the four kings of Ireland were feasted in Dublin by King Richard II. of England, an English chronicler remarked, “Never were men of ruder manners”; but neither the silken array and golden glitter of Richard’s peripatetic court nor the brave display of his thousand knights and thirty thousand archers filled them with longing for the one or fear of the other.  They went back to their Irish hills and plains and fastnesses as obstinately Irish as ever.

They fought well at home, if unfortunately, the wonder being that they continued to fight.  The heavens and the earth seemed combined against them.

II.—­THE FIGHTING RACE ABROAD.

We next see Irish soldiers fighting abroad.  The blood they had shed so freely for the Stuarts at the Boyne, at Athlone, at Aughrim, at Limerick was in vain.  The king of France, if he sent armies to Ireland, demanded Irish troops in return.  The transports that brought the French regiments over in May, 1690, took back over five thousand officers and men from Ireland, who formed the first Irish Brigade in the service of France.  This, remember, was before the battle of the Boyne.  The men were formed on their arrival in France into three regiments, those of Mountcashel, O’Brien, and Dillon, named after their commanders, and were sent to Savoy.  The French aid to James in Ireland helped best in giving confidence to the raw Irish levies, but it