should be barricaded by an iron plate; an advice which was actually taken by some. There were instances, in which the lower part of houses were furnished with ball-proof shutters, and a month's provisions of salted meat and biscuits actually laid in and this in a city garrisoned by 10,000 military, and protected by 2,000 police,-a city, too, in which, we verily believe, the whole strength of the disaffected could not have mustered 500 stand of arms of every kind and description, and in which, unquestionably, the revolution, if it had come, would have fled in utter dismay before the charge of a single squadron of dragoons.

The existence of the danger was credited, not unnaturally, on the faith of the intimations from Lord Clarendon, Upon what testimony his Excellency believed in it, a hint has never been vouchsafed. That he did really believe in it, it is scarcely possible to doubt. The strange events of a single night establish, perhaps, the sincerity of his fears.

Upon the night, we think, of the 20th of April, while everything in the city seemed tranquil, near the hour of midnight, some few of the inhabitants of the city were startled by messages from the Castle, desiring them to be on their guard.

The military in the different little fortresses were called, at a moment's notice, to arms. The artillerymen at the house of the Royal Dublin Society stood for some hours beside their field-pieces, loaded with grapeshot, and their port-fires lighted. The preconcerted signal of a rocket, sent up from the Castle, brought up by a special train in a few minutes, from a man-of-war lying in Kingstown harbour, her marines and her seamen. The rebellion, however, did not come. The streets were frequented only by the ordinary stragglers of the night; and in the morning the sun rose upon the good city of Dublin as tranquil and as peaceful as it had been when it set. The citizens, indeed, who were not in Lord Clarendon's secret of the rebellion, never knew until morning that anything unusual had occurred.

We complete the picture of the period, when we say, that about the same time applications were made to the Orange Lodges of Dublin for their aid in support of "law and order." Arms were provided for them by some person who was good-natured enough to spend £600 out of his own pocket in the pur

chase.

Their addresses were courted, received, and acknowledged; and their leaders were admitted to confidential interviews with the Lord Lieutenant, while the certificate of the Master of an Orange Lodge was recognised as a passport for the importation of arms by the police authorities.

This article has already occupied far too much space to permit us now to complete our sketch of the dealings of the Government with the Orangemen, and with Ireland, during the period of which we write. We must pause in our history until another month, when we hope to complete the portion we are now compelled to hurry over, of the early part of 1848.

It is, to our mind, impossible to justify the policy Lord Clarendon then pursued. If his object was to create a rebellion that he might have the merit of putting it down, he pursued that object with some dexterity. If his policy was to terrify the Conservative portion of Irish society into an adhesion to him as their only protector against anarchy, it was, we admit, eminently successful for the time. If he desired to break up, in the alarms and the terrors of an anticipated insurrection, that growing union of Irishmen-to crush that rising spirit of nationality which he had, for himself and his party, every reason to dread-he managed his tactics with skill. But if we are to try his conduct by any of the tests that determine the policy of a wise statesman, or an honest governor, we must pronounce it wofully deficient.

We have stated our opinion as to the course which ought to have been adopted the very moment that any person dared openly to preach rebellion to the Queen. It is the duty of the Government to crush insurrection in the outset. They cannot deal with their own subjects as they would with enemies in war, and watch and wait until they entrap them into the defile, where they are to be destroyed. Had the treason of the United Irishman been promptly suppressed, the country would have been spared the disparaging spectacle to monarchy of a contest between an individual and the Viceroy; law would have escaped the opprobrium of a statute enacted to crush a solitary writer; and men, now in exile in a penal settlement, would be still in their country, we verily believe, loyal subjects of their Queen.

Did, however, any plan or plot of insurrection exist in the city of Dublin in the months of March and April, 1848? We have stated our reasons for entirely disbelieving that there did. If there did, there are reasons obvious enough which make it of paramount importance that the people of Ireland should know something of the history of a conspiracy so secret, so formidable, and so atrocious as that which then threatened Dublin with pillage and blood. But, if Lord Clarendon had real and just grounds for a belief in such a conspiracy-if he was not the willing dupe of informers-if he did not lend the ready ear of credence to every narrator of horrors-if he did not bid for the luxury of terror by rewards to every fabricator of the tale of conspiracy and plot-let us ask, how are we to reconcile his conduct with his bounden duty to his Sovereign and to Ireland? Let us assume that early in March he knew of a treasonable design, so formidable in strength as to demand that every public building, even our College, should be converted into a military redoubt-in what light does the Chief Governor appear? Not one single step is taken to break up that conspiracy; not an effort made to prevent its prosecution of its plots; not an attempt to expose its guilt to public indignation. Its leaders are left at large; its preparations are not interrupted. All the efforts of Government are directed to prepare for defeating insurrection: none for preventing it. Treasonable meetings and seditious speeches are permitted to excite the populace, whom cannon and grapeshot are prepared to mow down. Nay, if Lord Clarendon believed one-half of what he said-one-half of what his preparations indicated to be true, while he ensconced himself behind his barricades at the Castle, and sheltered the soldiers behind ball-proof shutters, he left the loyal and peaceable inhabitants

of the city exposed to the danger of being butchered by assassins, or to find such protection as they could obtain in the gun associations and circulars about iron plates upon their doors.

And while he professed to believe in the existence of a sanguinary and widespread conspiracy, with that crooked and underhand system which too much marks his policy-while he secretly armed the Orangemen, and gave an indirect sanction to the Conservative gun-clubs, he had not the courage or the manliness to appeal to the loyalty of the citizens, by calling out the militia, by enrolling a single corps of yeomanry, or sanctioning the formation of a single troop of volunteers.

If the country has even yet recovered from the fever into which it was thrown by his artful appeal to the mingled sensations of our loyalty and our fears, the government of Ireland, in March and April, 1848, will receive, on a calm review, the severest condemnation. That condemnation may be written in a few sentences. If he did not believe in the danger against which he appeared to guard, his conduct was a cruel cheat upon the generous and loyal feelings of the country. If he did believe in it, he ought instantly to have suppressed the conspiracy, and not contented himself with preparing to meet it in the conflict. The conspiracy never exploded, we believe, because it did not exist; but assuming it to exist, all the preparations of Government were only directed to meet it when it should break out in a sanguinary struggle in our streets. To secure the ultimate victory in that conflict-after what scenes of slaughter! he arranged his plans. But it was, we think now as we thought then, his bounden duty, in the beginning of March, to have stayed, with a strong hand, the progress of insurrection, and not merely laid his engines to extinguish it in blood.

Ir we look at the contour map of Europe in "Johnstone's Physical Atlas," we see a narrow strip of the lowest elevation extending from the Black Sea to the Baltic. It nowhere rises to the second line of elevation-more than 150 and less than 300 feet-above

the level of the sea. Turning to the geological map, we perceive that the same tract is overlaid with recent alluvial deposits, and has at some period, which, in comparison with the age of the world, may be called recent, been covered with the waters of the ocean. Central and southern Europe were certainly, at some definite time, an island, separated from another island of Scandinavia by a continuous strait. All this is apparent from the physical circumstances of the surface; but when we speak of geological epochs, we are so much in the habit of demanding ages and cycles of time for the fulfilment of even the minutest changes in the crust of the earth, that we recoil from the suggestion of Europe having been in this insular condition at any time since at least the universal deluge, with a kind of scientific horror. Nevertheless all antiquity preserves a constant tradition of a water communication between the Euxine and the Hyperborean seas, and it seems evident that not only was this the belief of Homer, but that it had been the tradition of the older bards who celebrated the Argonautic Expedition. It will probably surprise some of our readers to be told that such was the course of the voyage of Ulysses. In schools and

colleges the scene of the Odyssey is usually confined to the Mediterranean. But if one will take the trouble, of following the route as Homer himself indicates it, these limits will be found much too narrow. Suppose our hero at the isle of Circe, wherever that may have been:-and the reader is at liberty to suppose any point of departure he pleases outside the waters of the Levant. Ulysses has returned from the scene of his necromantic descent into hell. Classical tradition assigns this adventure to some part of the northern region of Gaul, about the mouths of the Rhine. Thus Claudian:

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