Page:Studies in Irish History, 1649-1775 (1903).djvu/266

Sarsfield that left Ireland leaderless. We do not speak of the later names, Lord Edward, Wolfe Tone, Emmet,—and the list goes on to within living memory—whose forlorn hope was quenched almost before it kindled. These men belong to a separate category. They were—and this is no time to discuss their justification—rebels against an established order; Sarsfield was in reality the last of those who strove against its establishment; who fought for Ireland against England more or less on equal terms.

His life history is curiously foreshadowed by almost the only incidents recorded of his private career. We find him fighting in two duels. In the first he challenged Lord Grey for some words which conveyed an imputation on all Irish Catholics, though the occasion of them was no finer a personage than a poor lout of an "Irish giant" at Bartholomew Fair. In the other, fighting merely as a second in some one else's quarrel, he was run through the body by a Mr. Kirk. From first to last Sarsfield showed himself, in private as in public war, loyal, chivalrous and unlucky.

The precise year of his birth is not known; he was about ten years old at the Restoration. He came of an old Norman family of the Pale, but there was a strong, perhaps even a virulent, admixture of the pure Celt in him, for his mother 254