Page:Life and death of the Irish parliament.djvu/5



is very usual with historians or essayists, before introducing their readers to a certain period under review, to give a general outline of the period that preceded. Such a course has been found useful, if not necessary, for the appreciation of facts to be submitted to consideration. This utility or necessity is the more felt in proportion as the time which a writer takes up forms an epoch. Because, after all, a great deal, if not everything, depends on contrast. We think the present strange only because it differs from the past. Our estimate of what we have depends on the value of what we exchanged it for. One might naturally expect, then, from Mr. Whiteside, when giving an account of the origin of the Irish Parliament, that he would allude to the form of government it replaced. His readers not unreasonably expected that he would represent each of the petty kings of Ireland as so many petty tyrants, and the chief king as a monstrous despot, in order to increase our appreciation of English law. It was thought, if his knowledge of the ancient history of Ireland were not deep or accurate enough to serve for a description of its laws and form of government, that he would fall back on Tacitus’ account of the manners of the German barbarians, and apply the picture to the Irish. Or, if the picture required being pleasantly shaded off, and that he chanced to learn from Guizot, in his History of European Civilization, that states borrowed the idea of representative government from the Church, he might have placed the Irish, in their mode of legislation, merely a few removes from utter barbarism. Mr. Whiteside,