Some were schooled in duplicity, and under the ermine, or under the privy councillor's robe, carried fierce hearts, benumbed by mendicancy and seared by shame.

But the first flash of their country's liberty would see them ranged at that country's side, repaying with the fiercest hate the beggar crumbs which England had flung from the fragments of her overloaded table.

It is true enough that a long course of corruption, beginning with the perjured peer and ending with the tidewaiter, had created a class of conditional loyalists, with nine-tenths of which the condition is always unfulfilled; while, in its very fulfilment, the other one-tenth has found but bitterness, the "sauce piquante" of their daily bread.

But as a general rule, such a thing as a pure Irish loyalist does not exist.

Its possible existence presupposes an absurdity in nature.