CHAPTER IX.

FIRST REBELLION.

IN our road to Mayo, we were often upon ground ren. dered memorable, not only by historical events, but more recently by the disastrous scenes of the rebellion, by its horrors or its calamities. On reaching Westport House, we found ourselves in situations and a neighborhood which had become the very centre of the final military operations, those which succeeded to the main rebellion; and which, to the people of England, and still more to the people of the continent, had offered a character of interest wanting to the inartificial movements of Father Roche and Bagenal Harvey.

In the year 1798, there were two great popular insurrections in Ireland. It is usual to talk of the Irish rebellion, as though there had been one rebellion and no more; but it must satisfy the reader of the inaccuracy pervading the common reports of this period, when he hears that there were two separate rebellions, separate in time, separate in space, separate by the character of their events, and separate even as regarded their proximate causes. The first of these arose in the vernal part of summer, and wasted its fury upon the county of Wexford, in the centre of the kingdom. The second arose in

The autumn, and was confined entirely to the western prov ince of Connaught. Each, resting (it is true) upon causes ultimately the same, had yet its own separate occasiong and excitements; for the first arose upon a premature explosion from a secret society of most subtle organization ; and the second upon the encouragement of a French invasion. And each of these insurrections had its own separate leaders and its own local agents. The first, though precipitated into action by fortunate discoveries on the part of the government, had been anxiously preconcerted for three years. The second was an unpremeditated effort, called forth by a most ill-timed, and also ill-concerted, foreign invasion. The general predisposing causes to rebellion were doubtless the same in both cases but the exciting causes of the moment were different in each. And, finally, they were divided by a complete interval of two months.

One very remarkable feature there was, however, in which these two separate rebellions of 1798 coincided; and that was, the narrow range, as to time, within which each ran its course. Neither of them outran the limits of one lunar month. It is a fact, however startling, that each, though a perfect civil war in all its proportions, frequent in warlike incident, and the former rich in tragedy, passed through all the stages of growth, maturity, and final extinction within one single revolution of the moon. For all the rebel movements, subsequent to the morning of Vinegar Hill, are to be viewed not at all in the light of manœuvres made in the spirit of military hope, but in the light of final struggles for self-preservation made in the spirit of absolute despair, as regarded the original purposes of the war, or, indeed, as regarded any purposes whatever beyond that of instant safety. The solitary object contemplated was, to reach some district lonely

enough, and with elbow room enough, for quiet, unmolested dispersion.

A few pages will recapitulate these two civil wars. I begin with the first. The war of American separation touched and quickened the dry bones that lay waiting as it were for life through the west of Christendom. The year 1782 brought that war to its winding up; and the same year it was that called forth Grattan and the Irish volunteers. These volunteers came forward as allies of England against French and Spanish invasion; but once embattled, what should hinder them from detecting a flaw in their commission, and reading it as valid against England herself? In that sense they did read it. That Ireland had seen her own case dimly reflected in that of America, and that such a reference was stirring through the national mind, appears from a remarkable fact in the history of the year which followed. In 1783, a haughty petition was addressed to the throne, on behalf of the Roman Catholics, by an association that arrogated to itself the style and title of a congress. No man could suppose that a designation so ominously significant had been chosen by accident; and by the English government it was received, as it was meant, for an insult and a menace. What came next? The French revolution. All flesh moved under that inspiration. Fast and rank now began to germinate the seed sown for the ten years preceding in Ireland; too fast and too rankly for the policy that suited her situation. Concealment or delay, compromise or temporizing, would not have been brooked, at this moment, by the fiery temperament of Ireland, had it not been through the extraordinary composition of that secret society into which the management of her affairs now began to devolve. In the year 1792, as we are told, commenced, and in 1795 was finished, the famous association of United

Irishmen. By these terms, commenced and finished, we are to understand, not the purposes or the arrangements of their conspiracy against the existing government, but that network of organization, delicate as lace for ladies, and strong as the harness of artillery horses, which now enmeshed almost every province of Ireland, knitting the strength of her peasantry into unity and disposable divisions. This, it seems, was completed in 1795. In a complete history of these times, no one chapter would deserve so ample an investigation as this subtile web of association, rising upon a large base, expanding in proportion to the extent of the particular county, and by intermediate links ascending to some unknown apex; all so graduated, and in such nice interdependency, as to secure the instantaneous propagation upwards and downwards, laterally or obliquely, of any impulse whatever; and yet so effectually shrouded, that nobody knew more than the two or three individual agents in immediate juxtaposition with himself, by whom he communicated with those above his head or below his feet. This organization, in fact, of the United Irishmen, combined the best features, as to skill, of the two most elaborate and most successful of all secret societies recorded in history; one of which went before the Irish Society by centuries, and one followed it after an interval of five-and-twenty years. These two are the FehmGericht, or court of ban and extermination, which, having taken its rise in Westphalia, is usually called the secret Tribunal of Westphalia, and which reached its full development in the fourteenth century. The other is the Hellenistic Hetaria, (* Etαıọiα)—a society which, passing for one of pure literary dilettanti, under the secret countenance of the late Capo d'Istria, (then a confidential minister of the czar,) did actually succeed so far in hoaxing the cabinets of Europe, that one third of European kings put down

their names, and gave their aid, as conspirators against the Sultan of Turkey, whilst credulously supposing themselves honorary correspondents of a learned body for reviving the arts and literature of Athens. These two I call the most successful of all secret societies, because both were arrayed against the existing administrations throughout the entire lands upon which they sought to operate. The German society disowned the legal authorities as too weak for the ends of justice, and succeeded in bringing the cognizance of crimes within its own secret yet consecrated usurpation. The Grecian society made the existing powers the final object of its hostility; lived unarmed amongst the very oppressors whose throats it had dedicated to the sabre; and, in a very few years, saw its purpose accomplished.

The society of United Irishmen combined the best parts in the organization of both these secret fraternities, and obtained their advantages. The society prospered in defiance of the government; nor would the government, though armed with all the powers of the Dublin police and of state thunder, have succeeded in mastering this society, but, on the contrary, the society would assuredly have surprised and mastered the government, had it not been undermined by the perfidy of a confidential brother. One instrument for dispersing knowledge, employed by the United Irishmen, is worth mentioning, as it is applicable to any cause, and may be used with much greater effect in an age when every body is taught to read. They printed newspapers on a single side of the sheet, which were thus fitted for being placarded against the walls. This expedient had probably been suggested by Paris, where such newspapers were often placarded, and generally for the bloodiest purposes. But Louvet, in his " Memoirs," mentions one conducted by himself on better principles: it was printed at the public