the Boyne and Aghrim the Revolution had triumphed in Ireland, he was made one of the Lords Justices by William, his high character, as we may suppose, having pointed him out as fit for the office. In this capacity he affixed his name to the celebrated capitulation of Limerick; and, unlike most of the statesmen of the day, he insisted earnestly that the faith of England was pledged to observe the terms of the treaty, and expressed deep regret at the violation of it. Having been appointed Chancellor of Ireland, he threw all his influence on the side of a policy of mercy to the vanquished nation; and he steadily opposed the fierce zealots who clamoured for measures of general extermination. Mr. O'Flanagan's volumes contain letters of much interest hitherto unpublished, which illustrate the sentiments of the parties which determined Irish politics at this juncture; and it is gratifying to find that Sir Charles Porter invariably was an advocate of clemency. It is significant, and is an additional proof of the character of a ruler who at heart scorned the fanaticism of his Irish adherents, that William endeavoured on such occasions to support his Irish Chancellor, who, however, did not escape impeachment at the instance of the extreme Protestant faction. Sir Charles Porter died in 1697; we shall not say with Lord Clarendon that he was one of the two honest lawyers we have 'known;' but he was one of the purest and noblest characters that adorn the judicial annals of Ireland.

We can only briefly notice the Lives' of the other Chancellors of this era. Mr. O'Flanagan feebly tries to vindicate the reputation of the notorious Fitton, who held the office during the short period of Catholic ascendency under Tyrconnel, to be succeeded by a terrible retribution. That this personage was of ancient lineage and was tolerated by the Irish Bar while the English bowed down to Scroggs and Jeffreys, will hardly get over the indisputable facts that he was charged with subornation-of forgery-and was raised to the judicial Bench from a gaol. An eminent lawyer, Richard Freeman, whose Reports are still occasionally quoted, and who owed to James his first rise in life, was Chancellor of Ireland in 1707; but he resigned the Seals three years afterwards, and there is nothing remarkable in his career. The same may be said of Lord Chancellor Methuen, better known as the negotiator of the Treaty with Portugal, which still bears his name, than as a politician and Judge in Ireland, and of Sir Constantine Phipps, ancestor through five descents of the distinguished nobleman who was first enabled to carry out the policy of discouraging Irish Orangeism inaugurated by Lord Wellesley

Sir Constantine was a friend of Swift, who paints his character in agreeable colours; and he seems to have endeavoured to mitigate the fury of the excessive Protestant faction at the Castle; but little is known of him except that he held the Seals from 1710 to 1714, and that at the accession of George I. he, with other Tories, was removed from office.

By far the most remarkable character of this age was Sir Richard Cox, a man of extraordinary versatility of parts, who truly made the world his oyster,' and whose career curiously illustrates the freaks of fortune in Ireland in that generation. Young Cox sprang from an Anglo-Irish family, settled for some time in the neighbourhood of Bandon, long known as the 'Derry of the south of Ireland,' and the very Mecca of Munster Protestantism. He began life as a country attorney; but having aspired to the honours of the Bar, he attained the rank of Recorder of Kinsale, and Chairman of Quarter Sessions in the county of Cork, about 1680 or 1681. Like many of his race, he was compelled to fly at the outbreak of the Popish revolution commenced under the auspices of Tyrconnel; and it is not improbable that his judicial charges, which savoured strongly of Puritan zeal, may have exposed him to considerable danger. He found a refuge at Bristol, and there formed an intimacy with Sir Robert Southwell-a loyal adherent of William III., whose visit to his host is still among the traditions of the noble seat of King's Weston-and from this retreat he published a bitter philippic against Popery and the Irish race, which still has a place in some libraries. The friendship of Southwell or the fame of this work introduced the author to the Prince of Orange, and Recorder Cox is next seen in the camp of the Anglo-Dutch army in the capacity of a kind of military secretary. He did good service the day before the Boyne in suggesting with much presence of mind a ruse to discover the strength of the enemy; and after the battle he composed the King's Declaration' to the citizens of Dublin. He acquitted himself so well in this task that William observed, 'Do not alter a word;' and for a series of similar services he was appointed at the termination of the war to the double but not incongruous offices, considering the then condition of Ireland, of Judge of the Court of Common Pleas and Military Governor of the Cork District. In 1693 he was one of the Commissioners of Forfeited Estates; and ten years afterwards, having in the meantime filled the highest place in his own Court, he was raised to the rank of Chancellor of Ireland. In this capacity he sedulously promoted, as might indeed have been expected from him, the worst enactments of the Penal

Code; yet it is but just to add that, like Porter, he had on previous occasions contended for the obligatory force of the Treaty of Limerick. Sir Richard Cox is said to have displayed great ability as an Equity Judge; but, however this may have been, he found leisure to cultivate his taste for letters, and while Lord Chancellor, he wrote a philosophical treatise of some merit, and a series of acrimonious pamphlets filled with Calvinism and elaborate denunciations of Popery and the barbarous Irish.' It was the fortune of this singular character to fill almost every office in the land; he resigned the Seals in 1707, but was made Lord Chief Justice in 1710, having triumphantly passed through the ordeal of an impeachment. Sir Richard Cox lived until 1733, long enough to witness the secure establishment of Protestant ascendency in Church and State, and retaining, it is said, to the last his antipathy towards the 'idolatrous nation.' He undoubtedly was a man of great mental powers; but it is significant of the difference between the state of England and Ireland in that time, that one who was half a soldier, half a lawyer, and altogether a bitter fanatic, should have held the dignity in the sister country which in ours was adorned by Lord Somers, a contemporary of very dissimilar character.

We have now reached a series of Chancellors who held office during the most melancholy and disastrous period of the history of Ireland. The short-lived triumph of the Catholic cause in 1686-88 had been followed by the Boyne and Aghrim, and Catholic Ireland was reduced by the conquerors to complete subjection. The ascendency of the Protestant colony which, though often interrupted by wild risings, had been growing more secure, was absolute and unquestioned; and the prostrate nation lay helpless in the chains of a degrading bondage. The descendants of Elizabethan and Cromwellian settlers were owners of five-sixths of the soil, and formed a tyrannical aristocracy of sect; the children of the ancient proprietors were either exiles in foreign lands or vegetated in thraldom on the estates of which their ancestors had been masters; the people formed a despised peasantry, already multiplying in swarms of pauperism. This state of society was stereotyped as it were upon the face of the country by that terrible Code which had for its objects the perpetuation of Protestant domination, the abasement of the real Irish people, and the separation into distinct castes of the races and creeds which common justice would have even yet fused into one nationality. The Penal Laws not only secured every office in the State to the favoured faith; not only threw the whole weight of the

Government into the scale of a Puritan oligarchy; not only outlawed a nation to give a faction a monopoly of power and the privilege of doing wrong; not only persecuted the religion and outraged the conscience of Catholic Ireland; they cor rupted and injured the whole body politic, and, in their aim at depriving the Catholics of the means of ever rising again, they endeavoured to prevent them from accumulating wealth, tried to destroy their family relations, and sanctioned an inquisition of the vilest kind into their most private and domestic arrangements. The enactments by which it was sought to annul the marriages of Protestant and Catholic persons, to rob the Catholic parent of his estate and tempt his son to an interested conversion, to forbid Catholics to purchase land, and to encourage a brood of base spies to make a Protestant discovery' of their transactions, are monuments of intolerable wrong; and it is strange that such atrocious training did not ruin the moral sense of the community. In this state of things Government, though firm and settled, was a mere system of oppression; and through that watchful Nemesis which attends wrong, the very interest for the benefit of which this system of iniquity was planned, suffered permanently and seriously from the consequences. The Protestant colony, cut off from the nation, became the dependent garrison of England; its legislature was feeble, corrupt, and worthless; and it grew into a type of society, coarse, domineering, wasteful, and reckless, which had little in common with a real aristocracy.

Such, feebly depicted by Mr. O'Flanagan, was the condition of Ireland during the generation that followed the accession of the House of Hanover. The Chancellors of this period reflected the character of the Government and the sentiments of the dominant party in the State, and, however differing, have a family likeness. They were personages of ability and repute; indeed Lord Midleton was a great lawyer, and in his own way a very honest politician; Lord Chancellor West was a capable judge; and Lords Wyndham and Jocelyn filled their offices with commendable dignity. But they were without exception Englishmen the executive of the mother-country being unwilling to intrust a place of political importance to mere colonists, and the feelings of the Irish Bar on the subject being not considered worthy of a thought; in the disputes which occasionally arose between the Government and the Protestant oligarchy, they invariably maintained what was described in the slang of the day the English interest.' They were in fact the associates and partners of such prelates as Boulter and Stone, the real rulers of Ireland at this period;

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and whether there was a question of the supremacy of the English over the Irish Courts, or of the dependency of the colonial Irish legislature, or of the unlimited power of the Crown in Ireland, they upheld the pretensions of the sovereign State. As a set-off, however, they vindicated the privileges of the dominant caste against the injured and degraded nation, and, indeed, contributed not a little to rivet the chains of Protestant ascendency. It fell to the lot of these Chancellors to administer the worst parts of the Penal Code-those which struck at the peace of Catholic families, forbade the acquisition of land by Catholics, and encouraged discoveries' of such purchases; and unquestionably judges who entertained natural aversion to such statutes could easily have softened their rigour. But, one and all, these exponents of Equity pressed the Code to its most extreme limits; and, viewed in the light of modern ideas, some of their decisions appear monstrous. Mr. O'Flanagan gives a few instances of these odious interpretations of law, but he has not been happy in his selection, and a more complete and significant list will be found in Howard's Popery Cases.' An Equity student of the present day will be surprised to learn that, according to the doctrines of these Irish Chancellors, even an outlaw could be a Protestant dis'coverer'; that purchases of lands for valuable consideration without notice of the original defect, gave no title if at any time, however remote, a Papist purchased; that a trustee could repudiate his trust in order to become a discoverer'; that, to cause a forfeiture against a Papist, a trust of lands need not have been declared in a written instrument; that, in a word, settled principles of jurisprudence, and even the provisions of important statutes, were set at naught that a penal code of the most harsh kind should have free scope. Yet more suggestive than the letter of these judgments is the spirit which, as it were, breathes through them, and which proves what, in that age, must have been the perversion of thought in this matter. find nowhere a touch of sympathy with the sufferers from these inhuman decrees; we are often reminded that the Penal Laws are in the strictest sense remedial'; and, indeed, in one case, it was coolly asserted that a Papist had no right to complain, because the law would not assume the existence of such an obnoxious person!

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We e can only glance at the history of Ireland, connected in any way with our subject, during the generation after 1760. Our readers know how public spirit, fostered by the writings of Lucas and others, developed itself in the Protestant colony; how an agitation gradually sprang up for its emancipation