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INTRODUCTORY REMARKS.

HISTORY IN GENERAL, AND THE CASE OF IRELAND IN PARTICULAR.

"HISTORY is the essence of innumerable biographies;" so saith Carlyle. The truth of this is probably never more manifest than in the chronicle of a revolutionary struggle; or, as exhibited in the annals of a people constantly engaged in an agitation to effect the supremacy of a national will as the ruling trust of the governing power.

In such movements, the leading spirits, the popular rulerswhich does not always mean the actual rulers-the men who are appointed to, or take the helm, are those who enjoy the largest amount of confidence, and whose acts are assented to in a sufficiently palpable manner, by masses of their fellow-menwho exhibit in their persons, by their skill, courage, and determination, the wants and wishes of the multitude-whom the multitude, by an individuality of opinion, identify as holding and pronouncing their desires and ideas, and as shaping the latter into an argumentative tangibility. These men so placed

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are, therefore, not so much the leaders as they are the followers of the people. They may indicate the wants of the people, or dictate measures for their redress; but without the necessity in the first place, there would be no indication or dictation. As they thus measure, or administrate for, the populace, they are the essence of it, and their lives fill the history of the times.

So is it; the life of Tell is the history of the liberation of Switzerland. The lives of Rienzi and Tomas Anniello unfold more of the glory, intrigues, fickleness, and fate of Italy, in their times, than if the chronicles of the Colonna, Orsini, Guelph, Ghibelline, and a score of such, were lingering on the lips of the four winds of heaven. How much of European history is there not due to Luther; and in a later day, how much is there not centered on, and absorbed by Napoleon. In Columbus's life, as in a Banquo mirror, the startled muse of history beheld a new inspiration, an almost bewildering occupation-an extending cavalcade of events and men; and in George Washington's biography we peruse the history of American Independence.

The spirit of the MAN of the day, is the history of all those of whom he is the centre; for in him are centered all their hopes and fears.

From the creation of the world to the present time, mark each mighty epoch: come over those beacons as you would steppingstones in an unfordable stream-come over them steadily, and observe the indentations made by the stream of time, and you have passed through the brain of centuries, and grasped the history of the world.

History is the cable by which Time fastens the thoughts and actions of his particular eras to their proper moorings. If of the time gone by, it is the golden or iron link with the present; and

if of the present, it is the monument which Truth piles up to the nobleness, worth, heroisin, or genius of the era-it is the golden recompense of the day, or the black warning for the future, and its study must ever form one of the most intellectual resources of, and attractive influences on man. If true to its province, it shall include all provinces of literature. It shall present all the amusement and interest of fiction; for the romantic realities of one thousand brains in their strife with the world, present more startling incidents and conflicting scenes than the imagination of one brain could ever produce. It shall combine all the charm and instruction of biography; for it is nothing more or less than a picking of the grains from the chaff-the raising of a good and stately edifice from the choice materials of a thousand indifferent mansions. It shall be full of the grandeur of epic verse; for the record of everything noble in man, or extensive and beautiful in nature, is hallowed with poetry. The feeling, identification, and appreciation, is poetry, whether it be dashed off in rugged prose, or meted out in syllables harmonious. Poetry is not a jingle, fighting through eight or ten syllables of a line, like a bell tolling in a church-tower, at the end of the rope that pulls it, but it is the thought to explain which it is there. When the bell tolls a death-knell, we do not think of the means by which it is rung, or how far it is from the ground. There is poetry in it then. We identify ourselves with its purpose—we unconsciously thrill, chilly, at its unearthly tone. The very ivy leaves on the belfry tremble suspiciously, unlike their gay flutter on a marriage morn. The tombstones, which every day looked mere blocks of marble, now are dis-entombed portions of that which is beneath, come up to tell their pedigrees to the new-comer. There, then, is the poetry, the feeling, the identification; and there is not a

living thing but which, truly appreciated, contains more poetry than ever Ossian thought or Shakspere wrote.

Upon these general principles, and under their influences, the present volume has been written.

The eras of which it treats are illustrated by their leading ideas, which, in turn, are illustrated by the men who either combined those ideas on paper, or fought for them in the field. The work is a history, if being the condensed" essence of innumerable biographies" can make it one; but on the other hand, it is, more properly speaking, a series of historical essays, in so far as the Author, while giving the facts which make history, has taken representative men whose lives, he believes, were at once the consequence of the bad government of the day, and of the movements set on foot to either correct its evils, or overturn it altogether-and through and by them has given pictures of the respective periods.

The views of character, and critical and political deductions given throughout the book, of course present the writer's estimate of men and movements; based on the facts stated, and guided by the principles which he believes to be true and just, and alone of vital importance to the subject under notice.

Believing that either of two things should be adopted by Irishmen to chalk out a Republican line, and walk it, or to give up agitation altogether; and having adopted the first course, the Author has consistently condemned those who have wasted the energies of the people by directing a means without the manliness of either.

Irishmen must come out in the broad daylight, or sit passive in abysmal night. The twilight only creates fantasies that em barrass, and induces a stealthiness that makes cowards. It

produces physical and moral trepidation, under the influence of which minor things receive a shadowy importance, and major ones expand to such a fearful extent as to only inspire hopelessness and groping despair.

This twilight of the people is the morning glory of the politician. His is the voice that sounds in the darkness. While they pay him for seeing the light, the people forget they are groping in dismay. He toils in their cavernous gloom, as the fabled gnomes grope for gold and precious stones in the darkness of mid-earth. Like the diamonds, the people do not know, nor cannot see, their own brightness-a very brightness by which both are made manifest to politician and gnome.

These politicians have "laughed and grown fat" for years, while in exact ratio with the clamor they raised about making the country fit to live in, have the people, haggard and miserable, wended their weary steps away from it, a walking commentary on "agitation."

The writer believes the whole career of O'Connell to have been-to use the mildest term-a brilliant error. His teaching was all wrong, and productive of nothing but Repeal rent and petitions. He constantly charged the British Government with greater enormities, both in character and number, against his country, than a Jefferson could condense into a dozen Declarations of Independence; but even "a decent respect for the opinion of mankind" could neither drive his body, nor philosophize his mind into such a position as that by which "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" are won.

It comes to this-if Jefferson was right, O'Connell was wrong. They are as opposite as day and night. Their principles are irreconcilable. Either must be wrong, both cannot be right. If

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