• ‘The Land System of Ireland’ [Chap. IV], in Oxford Essays: Contributed by Members of the University (London : John W. Parker and Son [1856]), vi, folio, 311, [1]pp., 22cm.
• An Analytical Summary of the Law of Easements (Dublin : Edward Ponsonby 1869), vii, 51pp.
  Letters on the Land Question of Ireland (London 1870) [With map.]
  “Thoughts on the Irish Land Act and Land System”, in Contemporary Review (London 1884), 15pp. [unnum.]
  The Land System of Ireland (Dublin : Hodges, Figgins & Co, 1888), 101pp. [‘reprinted from the Law Quarterly Review of April 1887 and Jan. 1888’: Preface].
  The Irish Land Purchase Bill and Land Question [19th Century British Pamphs.] (Manchester Guardian 1890), 52pp.

• Ireland, 1494-1868 [Cambridge Historical Ser.] (Cambridge UP 1898), 372pp. [Bibl. pp.[355]-65].
• Ireland 1798-1898 (London: A. D. Innes & Co. 1898) [see details].

• The Campaign of 1870-1, rep. from The Times (London : R. Bentley & Son 1871), xi, 291pp. [with maps.]
• The French Revolution and First Empire (London & NY: Longmans, Green, and Co. 1874); Do. As The French Revolution and First Empire, an historical sketch, by William O’Connor Morris; with an appendix upon the bibliography of the subject and a course of study by Andrew D. White (NY: Scribner, Armstrong & Co. [1875?]), xxvii, [1], 306pp., [2] folded lvs. of pls.
  
• Great Commanders of Modern Times and The Campaign of 1815 (London & Calcutta : W.H. Allen & Co. 1891), vi, 364pp., ill. [see details].
  
• Moltke: A Biographical and Critical Study (London: Ward and Downey 1893), 419pp. [With 8 portraits, maps, and plans of battlefields inlc. Frontispiece; maps
  
• Napoleon: Warrior and Ruler, and the Military Supremacy of Revolutionary France [Heroes of the Nations,  8] (NY: Putnam 1894), xvii, 433pp., ill.
  Hannibal, Soldier, Statesman, Patriot: and The Crisis of the Struggle between Carthage and Rome [Ser.: Heroes of the Nations, 20] (NY: G.P. Putnam’s Sons 1897), xvi, 376pp., [see details].

• Memories and Thoughts of a Life (London 1895), 412pp. [see details].

[On land-rent:] ‘Mr. Gladstone, despite brave words to the contrary, seems to have thought, I have said, that these movements were agrarian in the main, not of a rebellious kind; he tried, at least, to encounter them by an agrarian measure, for he evidently had litde faith in “coercion.” He passed beyond the Land Act of 1870, which he had ostentatiously declared final, and hurried through Parliament, in 1881, an enactment of quite a different type, which created a revolution in the Irish land system. The Land Act of 1881, supplemented afterwards, as we have seen, by that of 1887— this last the work of a Conservative Government — forms with the old Act of 1870, itself amended, the present code of Irish agrarian reform, and whatever may be the judgment expressed as to its effects on the rights of Irish landlords, it has given the occupier of the soil in Ireland rights which he never expected thirty years ago, and which, I have remarked, has made his tenure most beneficial to him. I must glance again at the leading principles of a measure which has simply transformed the relations [341] of landlord and tenant in Ireland, although I have already referred to them. In order completely to establish the rights the occupier might possess in the land he was practically made a joint-owner of it, and the position of the landlord was reduced to little beyond that of a receiver of rent The joint-ownership of the tenant was nominally to continue for fifteen years only, but it was really to be a perpetual estate; and that no encroachment could be made on it, the rent of the landlord was to be settled by the State, either by the tribunals selected by it, the County Courts and the Land Commission, with the Sub-Commissioners dependent on it, or through agreements carefully checked. The rent was made capable of readjustment at successive periods of fifteen years, and it was specially provided that in taking an account, rent was not to be charged on improvements made by the tenant on the holding he tilled, so that his joint-ownership should be further secured.

I have already indicated the objections to this scheme in principle; it is unnecessary to refer again to them. The measure swept away wholesale the rights of landlords; deprived them of the interest they should have in their lands, and had a direct tendency to make absenteeism worse, and to starve legitimate expenditure on every estate in Ireland. The settlement, too, of rents by the State was a novel and most dangerous project, certain to lead to discontent and trouble, and the exemption of improvements from any charge for rent would evidently be a source of [342] falsehood and fraud, and would greatly and unjustly embarrass landlords. These objections experience has shown were well founded, and the Legislature, it must be said besides, has reduced still further any power and influence which may have remained to the landed gentry, almost effaced as this was before, and has isolated them, perhaps, even more than was the case previously. The Irish landlord has been made little more than the possessor of a rent; while he is still separated from his dependents by the old divisions, he has at present scarcely any interest in them. (pp.340-42.)

[...]

This system, besides, should be abolished for special as well as for general reasons. The settlement of rent through the agency of the State has not occupied the County Courts much; it has chiefly been worked out by the Sub-Commissioners as instruments of the main Land Commission. I have little to complain myself, I have said, of the Sub-Commissioners who adjusted my rents; and I do not doubt that, on the whole, they have tried to do full justice. But it [344] seems tolerably certain that in settling rents they have not considered the effects of waste done by the tenant. I noticed this in my own case; and this omission has been a wrong to the landlord. It has worked down rent iniquitously in a host of instances. These tribunals, too, are of little weight. Their members hold their places at will, and depend on the Administration of the day, and, what is most important, they have a direct interest, in order to prolong their tenure of office, to cut down rents, and in this way to multiply applications to fix them. The SubCommissioners, in a word, are not courts to command confidence in this grave matter, and whatever may be the views of tenantis, Irish landlords, as a class, are dissatisfied with them, though I fully admit that satisfactory results are difficult in the extreme in this whole province.

Another important reason for doing away with the present system of settling rents is to be found in a fact of the politics of the day. An alliance, I have said, has been formed between the Government now in office and the Irish members who abandoned Mr. Parnell; and measures of injustice to Irish landlords have either been brought in or are plainly intended. The present arrangements for fixing rents, with the litigation and ill-will they cause, with their costliness and vexation, and, above all, with their provisions as to tenants’ improvements, afford a leverage of no litde power to further those schemes of agrarian wrong which the Irish part of this alliance, at least, has’ ever and persistently kept in sight. [345] I have long ago thought over the means of lessening or removing these grave ills; my views, published in the Law Quarterly Review and in the Manchester Guardian in 1890-91, attracted considerable attention at the time. The plan I propose is not original; it is founded on lines laid down many years ago by John Stuart Mill on the Irish land question. Taking the basis of Irish land tenure as settled, I suggest that the whole machinery for fixing rents, whether through a tribunal or by agreement, should be abolished without delay; that the periodical readjusting of rents should cease, and that the present law as to the exemption from rent of improvements made by tenants should be repealed. The ground having been thus cleared, I think that the tenant should be given a perpetual and definite estate in the land, and that the landlord should possess a perpetual rent, with the few other privileges he still enjoys — that is, the tenant should be nearly an “out and out” owner, and the landlord nearly a mere rent-charger. In order to determine the difficult question of the amount of the perpetual rent, I would intrust this duty to the Land Commission, which should have a large discretion in this matter, and should make use of all available means, from the Government valuations, to valuers on the spot, and the process should be effected once for all and be final. [1.]

1. Dissatisfied persons should of course have a right of appeal, the machinery for which could be provided.

I would not allow the tenant’s ownership to be destroyed by eviction in [346] any event, but in the case of default in payment of the perpetual rent and in a few other specified cases, the owner of the rent — ^that is, the former landlord — should have the power of making his debtor bankrupt, and therefore of selling the land for his claim, any surplus going, of course, to the bankrupt.

Unquestionably objections may be made to this plan, but the advantages of it greatly preponderate. The position of the tenant would at last be made that of nearly a real owner of the land if a joint-owner in some respects, and he would be freed from the danger and loss of eviction. The position of the landlord would be that of the owner of a rent and of some other rights, almost the position he holds at present; but his rent would be better secured than it is now, and he would not be forced to evict in the event of default in payment Both landlord and tenant would not be harassed with the costly, the vexatious, and mischievous trouble inseparable from the present system of settling rents; litigation and sources of illwill would disappear, the interests of both in the land would be permanently defined, and the landlord would be freed from the grave perils that now surround him from many sides. There is no reason to doubt that the Land Commission, composed of able and impartial men, would succeed in arranging the perpetual rent, if not with perfect accuracy, still with an approach to justice; and if it be urged that, in the existing state of agriculture and its apparent prospects, the charge of the perpetual rent might become too onerous, the [347] answer is that some risk must be run, and that the advantage of ownership must be set against it. The substitution of bankruptcy for eviction, in the case of the non-payment of the rent, is a benefit to all interests involved; it is unnecessary to enlarge on the subject Finally, it is not impossible, when the causes of dislike and discontent in landed relations should have been diminished by these means, that the classes settled on the land in Ireland might become more friendly than they have ever been, though, bearing in mind the profound divisicms between them, it would not be wise to be too hopeful. (pp.340-47.)

[...]

[Conclusion:] The true student of History cannot hope that the deepseated and inveterate ills of Ireland will disappear, or even be greatly lessened by any policy for a considerable space of time. In 1844, at O’Connell’s trial, Shell uttered these fine and pathetic words — “Mad men that we are ... we precipitate ourselves on each other in that fierce encounter, in which our country, bleeding and lacerated, is trodden under foot; convert an island, which ought to [368] be the most fortunate in the sea, into a receptacle of misery and degradation; counteract the designs of Providence, and become conspirators against the beneficent intents of God.” [1] More than half a century has gone, and the old dissensions remain; the animosities of race and faith survive; Ireland has but just emerged from a kind of Servile War; her feuds and passions of class still live, if kept down by the power of the law; there is much that is sinister and vicious in her social order. Yet can any one feel surprised who has pondered over her annals, over that dreary tale of prolonged misgovernment, of anarchy and rebellion constantly breaking out, of conquest and confiscation of the very worst kind, of the fatal domination of caste and sect, of institutions, not beneficent, but essentially bad. Butler has said with truth that a life of repentance cannot do away with the consequences of sin in the past; the distempered frame of Irish society may, perhaps, never be restored to perfect health. Impartial History will not determine on which side the balance of wrong inclines, as she looks back at the succession of woes from which Ireland has suffered through long and dark centuries; if England and her rulers have been gravely to blame, let it not be forgotten what provocation they received, and how Ireland, over and over again, crossed their path at dangerous and great crises, and sealed her own doom by her wretched dissensions. For these things the Englishmen of this day are in no sense responsible, nor the Irishmen if they do not seek to revive evil memories which should be left in oblivion; but the deep traces of the past cannot be easily removed; they are engrained in the hearts, the thoughts, the feelings of millions; they will long cause discontent in Ireland, vague and ill-defined, but not the less real. They will assuredly not be effaced or lessened by destroying the Constitution of these realms, or flying from present to infinitely worse evils or yielding to a false revolutionary cry, and seeking in Home Rule that “Union of Hearts,” which is perhaps [369] the most senseless of all shibboleths; they will not be affected by creating in the Irish land a succession of new “interests” by means of confiscation, like the Anglo-Norman, the Elizabethan, and the Cromwellian, “interests” of the past, an evil policy which the experience of ages condemns. The statesman, really worthy of the name, must rely on the gradual but sure effects of legislation on sound principles, of administration sympathatic and just, above all, on Time moving with healing on its wings; the “Arch of Peace,” as the poet sang, will be yet formed over the troubled waters which at present flow between two divided peoples.

1. Report of O’Connell’s trial, p.304. The Bar and the bystanders rose in tumultuous applause.

[...] I have written this book, I trust, in the spirit in which it ought to be written, and -have taken the point of view which should be taken in considering the subject. I have endeavoured to ascertain the truth and to tell it fearlessly; to point out the correlation of cause and effect in the evolution of a melancholy, but most instructive history; to rise, when entering the field of politics, above the blinding dust of party conflicts; and to be strictly just in the conclusions I have formed as to men and things. But the greatest historical writers, when describing contemporaneous events, or those near their own times, have not been free from the prejudices and prepossessions caused by tradition [...]

I prize candour and frankness; and at the risk of the charge of egotism, shall say a word as to what these associations have been in my own instance. I belong to a family which, on both its sides, has been true to the political faith of Henry Grattan; I am naturally, therefore, what is still called an Irish Liberal. Two, at least, of my kinsfolk voted against the Union in the Irish Parliament; one — Sir John Newport — I remember him when in extreme old age — was one of the last and ablest of the Chancellors of the Irish Exchequer, and resented the financial treatment of Ireland from 1800 onwards. Except when at school, or at Oxford, I was brought up in youth in the class of the Irish landed gentry, especially in that of its old Catholic Houses; I am myself an Irish landlord, who have, for half a century, managed an ancestral estate, the wreck of a great inheritance lost through conquest and confiscation. I have listened to Plunket, Bushe, and Maria Edgeworth, and knew those eminent personages, as a boy can know the old; I have heard O’Connell in what he called The Conciliation Hall, and in the House of Commons; I have often conversed with survivors of the Rebellion of 1798, whether of the victorious or the vanquished party, and with a few aged members of the Irish Parliament. In later life I have been more or less intimate with leading men of the Irish Bar and Bench from 1854 to the present time, and with many Irish politicians of mark, especially with several of the independent gentlemen who opposed Mr. Gladstone’s measures of Irish finance; and in a long forensic and judicial career I have become familiar with the ideas, the sentiments, the ways, the tendencies of my fellow countrymen of all sorts and conditions. I have been acquainted, but only slightly, with three or four Lords-Lieutenant and Chief Secretaries of Ireland, and with a -very few British statesmen; but I have not had the advantage of knowing [vii] from a personal side what have been their views on Irish political and social questions. Parnell I never saw, and had no knowledge of chiefs of the Land and the National Leagues; possibly, for that very reason, I have done less justice to the motives of these men than they deserve. For the rest, if I am an Irish landlord, I have not had my rental practically reduced by Mr. Gladstone’s Land Act of 1881; and I have censured the administration of that mischievous agrarian law, an administration, for the faults of which its original agents are chiefly responsible, not on personal, but on public grounds only. I may add that, for many years, I have been a student of Irish History, particularly of the history of the Irish Land system; nearly thirty years ago I investigated at length, and on the spot, the subject of Irish land tenure for the Times; and the Letters I then wrote, appearing as they did in that great organ of public opinion, attracted much attention at the time, and contributed not a little to the passing of the Irish Land Act of 1870. These various associations have, as a matter of course, affected the statements I have made and the judgments I have pronounced in these pages. (pp.v-vii.)

As for secondary sources of information, these are ample, but of very unequal value. For the history of Ireland down to the Union there is nothing to compare to Mr. Lecky’s History of England in the Eighteenth Century; the volumes on Irish affairs have been published separately. Froude’s The English in Ireland contains a spirited account of the Rebellion of 1798; but this is a bad book, full of inaccuracies, and written in a spirit offensive to Irishmen. Gordon’s History of the Rebellion is a fair and impartial narrative; the reader should be warned against the passionate partisanship of Musgrave, Maxwell, and other Orange writers. Plowden’s History of Ireland is dull and diffuse, but gives some useful information on events [x] from 1782 to 1800-1. I may also refer to the Irish chapters of Mr. Massey’s History of England, to Madden’s United Irishmen, to McNevins’ Precis of Irish History, and to Ingram’s History of the Irish Union, a bit of clever but false paradox. There is no consecutive or complete history of Ireland since the Union; but a large collection of historical and quasi-historical books of different degrees of merit may be mentioned. Plowden’s second work only goes down to 1810; it represents the ideas of a loyal Irish Catholic bitterly disappointed by Pitt. The History of Ireland from the Treaty of Limerick to 1851, by John Mitchell [sic for Mitchel], expresses the views of a Presbyterian rebel, but is not without value. Wyse’s History of the Catholic Association is a fair narrative, rather out of sympathy with O’Connell. I pass by O’Connell’s Ireland and the Irish, a book unworthy of such a man; but the Reports of the Repeal Association and the Essays on the Repeal of the Union and the Spirit” and the “Voice” of the Nation, embodying the views of the-Young Ireland party, are instructive, and abound in interest. Two Centuries of Irish History, from 1691 to 1870, edited by Mr. Bryce, is an able performance from the point of view of English Radicalism since 1886. Mr. Barry O’Brien’s Fifty Years of Concessions to Ireland and Irish Wrongs and English Remedies are elaborate works, full of research from the point of view of a powerful and moderate advocate of Home Rule. The Young Ireland, the Four Years of Irish History, and the League of the North and South, by Sir Gavan Duffy; the New Ireland, by A. M. Sullivan; and The Parnell Movement, by Mr. T. P. O’Connor, M.P., almost complete an account of Ireland during the last half century, as this is made up by Irish “Nationalists”; and to these works may be added passages from Mr. McCarthy’s History of Our Own Times; Irish chapters from recent histories of England; Miss Lawless’s slight sketch of Ireland in the Story of the Nation Series; and Ireland since the Union, by Mr. J. H. McCarthy.

For the Constitutional History of Ireland [xi] reference may be made to the chapter on Ireland in Hallam’s Constitutional History; but more especially to Ball’s Irish Legislative Systems, an elaborate and excellent description of the Irish Parliament from the earliest times to 1800-1, and also of the proceedings relating to the Union. The admirable treatises of Professor Dicey, England’s Case against Home Rule, A Leap in the Dark, and The Verdict are essays that belong to Constitutional History; they should be read, and have never been answered. As regards the Ecclesiastical History of Ireland, Mant’s work may be consulted; but Ball’s Reformed Church of Ireland, which carries the narrative down to the Disestablishment Act of 1869, is a much better book. Brenan’s Ecclesiastical History describes the fortunes of the Catholic Church of Ireland from remote antiquity to Catholic Emancipation. Reid’s and Killen’s works relate to the Irish Presbyterian Church; and on both these subjects there are other publications of more or less merit. Books on Irish Education in this century are abundant, I shall only mention two, written from opposite points of view, Education in Ireland, by Mr. Godkin; and The Irish University Question, by Archbishop Walsh. In addition to more elaborate works, there is also a host of essays and tracts, one of great merit by Butt, and several also very good by the O’Conor Don and others. The economic and social condition of Ireland during the last century and a half has been thoroughly explored and illustrated by a series of careful and intelligent writers. For the period between the American War and the Peace of 1815 — a period of supreme importance — the celebrated Tour of Arthur Young, and the elaborate Account of Ireland, by Edward Wakefield, are by far the best narratives; these are standard works of great merit; but many similar publications of the time are valuable; and special reference may be made to an excellent account of the old Irish land system by Mr. Lecky in the 27th chapter of his History of England in the Eighteenth Century. Works of this class written in more recent times are less [xii] frequent; but the Irish Disturbances of Sir G. Lewis, published in 1836, is a well-informed essay; The Irish Crisis, by Sir C. Trevelyan contains a good account of the Famine; the History of the Great Irish Famine, by the Rev. J. O’Rourke, and the Irish Landlord since the Revolution, by the Rev. P. Lavelle illustrate the ill-will and the passions engendered by that catastrophe; the Letters on the Condition of Ireland, by Mr. Campbell Foster, republished from the Times are well worth reading; and the Ireland, Industrial, Political, and Social of Mr. J. N. Murphy is a fair description of the Ireland of 1868-70.

The Irish Land Question has, within the last forty years, given birth to a literature of its own; I may refer to the Emigration and the Tenure of Irish Land, by Lord Dufferin, to the Irish Land Question of John Stuart Mill; to the Irish People and the Irish Land of Butt; to Judge Longfield’s essay on the Irish Land in Systems of Land Tenure; to the Irish Land, an excellent little book by the late Sir George Campbell; and to my own Letters on the Land Question of Ireland, republished from the Times. There have been many attacks; I have never seen a defence of the Irish agrarian legislation of 1881-96. Mr. Lecky’s Democracy and Liberty (vol. i. chap. 2), criticises it as it deserves. The Ireland of Lord Grey is an able, but hostile review of Mr. Gladstone’s Irish legislation since 1868; and Irish Nationalism, by the Duke of Argyll, and New Views on Ireland, by Lord Russell of Killowen, an Irishman, the present head of the Common Law of England, as the late Lord Cairns, an Irishman, was a head of English Equity, may be studied with advantage. French literature abounds in works and essays on Ireland; the writings of De Beaumont and of M. de-Laveleye are of real merit.

 This period is fruitful in biographies of Irishmen [...]’

‘The Union, even as a Protestant Union, was a badly designed and very imperfect measure. It only merged the Irish in the Imperial Parliament; Ireland continued to be a distinct realm. In Foster’s words, the Union left us “every appendage of a kingdom, except what constitutes the essence of independence, a resident Parliament; a separate state, a separate establishment, a separate exchequer, [57] separate debt, separate courts, separate laws, the LordLieutenant and the Castle remained.” The evil consequences have been made only too manifest; but this was an insignificant part of the defects of the Treaty. The Union left Catholic Ireland out of its scope, that is more than three-fourths of the Irish community; it made no provision for the commutation of the tithes, or for the endowment of the Catholic priesthood — the first being the avowed policy of Pitt, the second actually promised a few months before; and though one of the articles pointed to a change in the oaths that prevented Catholics from entering Parliament, Catholic Emancipation, as was intended, was not referred to. The Irish Catholics, therefore, were directly wronged; as to the most important branch of their claims, they were left to rely on the hints or promises of Pitt, on the faith of which they had pronounced for the Union, with what consequences was soon to be seen; and a measure, which ought to have done justice to all Ireland, if it was really to be a great message of peace, was, as to the chief part of Ireland, stamped with injustice.’ (pp.56-57.)

“The present state of the Irish land system, and the failure of “Land Purchase,” on voluntary lines, to effect rapidly a large transfer of the Irish land, have produced a demand, not without support, for what is called the “compulsory purchase,” of all the estates of the Irish landlords, and for placing their tenants in their room as owners. It might be enough to say that this policy is not possible, and will be always rejected by the general taxpayer. In whatever degree the Land Commission carries out the object of cutting down rent, the rented land of Ireland has never been valued at less than;^i 50,000,000 by fair judges; it is still probably worth;^2oo,ooo,ooo; does any one suppose that Parliament would vote a sum equal, perhaps, to the ransom France paid to Germany, in order to make Irish tenants possessors of their farms? This policy, nevertheless, could it be accomplished, would be unnatural, disastrous, and, in no doubtful sense, infamous. A volume on this subject might well be written; I have only space for a very few sentences. Ireland is a land of a low watershed, of great sluggish rivers, of immense marshes and plains, of small towns widely apart from each other; peasant ownership, on an extensive scale, could never flourish under such conditions. The process of “compulsory purchase” as proposed, means turning the tenant class of Ireland into owners everywhere, through what, I repeat, is morally a bribe; these men would [355] be “rocked and dandled into their possessions” by the State, the “grantees of a confiscation,” wholesale and unjust; it is contrary to the very nature of things, that such a body of proprietors could become a loyal population of thrifty freeholders, could, in a reasonable sense, be prosperous.

Let it not be forgotten that this is the very scheme put forward by the Land and the National Leagues; Parnell, who understood Ireland, always insisted that the general transfer of the Irish land to its occupants would only make them more “patriotic “ than before, that is better instruments to effect his ends; and peasant owners thus artificially made would assuredly be wasteful, extravagant, and not industrious. They would, as a corresponding class is already doing, subdivide, sublet, and encumber their lands as a rule; middleman tenures would grow up over whole counties; large parts of Ireland would return to the state in which they were before 1845-7. This would be inevitable from the simple circumstance that these peasant owners would pay the State less than a natural rent; it would be as certain as that water runs down a hill; it would fall in with, and stimulate inveterate tendencies. What, too, would be the necessary results of the universal and forcible expropriation of the Irish landed gentry? In the Southern Provinces of Ireland, at least, they form the best elements of civilisation and progress; are these to be blotted out and to perish? An Irish Local Government Bill will soon become law; every one who knows Ireland must be aware — the leaders of the Land and the National Leagues form no exception — that it cannot be conducted with success, without the Irish landlords, who, as Grand Jurors, are the only class which has had any experience in County Government. “Compulsory Purchase,” besides, is simply robbery; no confiscation of the same kind has been effected in modern Europe, not even in the France of the Reign of Terror; is Ireland once more to be made the victim of what she suffered in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, for the results of wholesale spoliation do not vary?”

Ftn.: It has been assumed by the advocates of compulsory purchase hat the Irish landed gentry, after having been deprived of their rented lands, would live at home on their demesnes, and be available for local duties and County Administration. This is in the highest degree improbable: after a treatment which, in the words of Burke, would have “made them displumed, degraded, metamorphosed, unfeathered, two-legged things,” they would almost certainly leave Ireland.” (pp.354-55.)

Ftn.: “It has never been known in the memory of man,” wrote Swift (Life by Craik, p.139), “that an Irish tenant ever told the truth to his landlord. ... If they paid you but a peppercorn a year they would be readier to ask abatement than to offer an advance.” This class has left descendants.” (pp.355-56.)