Page:History of England (Froude) Vol 10.djvu/620

 6oo REIGN OF ELIZABETH. [CH. 62. Lord Fitzmaurice and the Earl of Clancarty came to stay in Dublin with their ladies, ' in all their bravery/ while Trollope was there. The full dress of an Irish nobleman of the period, as he describes it, was a russet mantle, a hat, a leather jerkin, a pair of hose, and a pair of brogues, the whole equipment ' not worth a noble/ 'My lord and my lady/ with men-servants, women- servants, pages, horsemen, and all, slept in a single room, ' not so good as many a hogscote in Eng- land/ l When they rose in the morning they shook their ears, and went their ways without any serving of God, or other making of them ready.' The common people, says the same authority, ' ate flesh if they could steal it/ if not, they lived on shamrock and carrion ' with butter too loathsome to describe.' ' They never served God or went to church.' The churches being roofless, they had perhaps no opportunity. They had no religion, and no manners, 'but were in all things more barbarous and beastlike than any other people/ The population 'was not half a quarter that of Eng- land/ * yet was perpetually on the edge of starvation, though ' the soil was naturally as fertile as any in the world.' The only policy for England in Trollope's opinion was evidently to exterminate the native Irish altogether. ' No governor shall do good here/ he said, 'except he shew himself a Tamerlane. If hell were open, and all the evil spirits abroad, they could never be worse than these Irish rogues rather dogs, and 1 England cannot have contained I Trollope's guess therefore gives Tre- at this time more than five millions. | land about 600,000.