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James II Tyrconnell, on whom the discontented in Ireland had long looked as their protector, was appointed to the vacant post; a man whose faults have been extravagantly magnified by historians hostile to his race and creed, but whose character had been formed in the corrupt school of Shaftesbury and Sunderland, and who carried to supreme power a mind ulcerated by a long train of inexpiable wrongs, national, religious and personal.

To frame an impartial narrative of this nobleman's administration is by no means an easy task. The most important events of Lord Clarendon's viceroyalty are known to us through the letters of the viceroy; and we are thus enabled to check the misrepresentations of partisan writers by the confidential correspondence of a very competent, though somewhat biassed, witness. We possess no documents of equal authority relating to the administration of his successor; and the historian is henceforth compelled to rely upon a mass of pamphlets written by men inflamed with national and sectarian hatred and published at a time of unparalleled political excitement, in a distant country, under the supervision of a hostile government.

One work of this class, more elaborate and pretentious than the rest, deserves, from the 140