'A fairer land,' one of them said, 'the sun did never shine upon--pity to see it lying waste in the hands of traitors.' Mr.Froude, who deals more justly by the Irish in his last volumes, replies: 'Yet it was by those traitors that the woods whose beauty they so admired had been planted and fostered.

Irish hands, unaided by English art or English wealth, had built Muckross and Innisfallen and Aghadoe, and had raised the castles on whose walls the modern poet watched the splendour of the sunset.' [Footnote 1: Carew Papers; Froude, vol.xi.

p.225.] Ormond was the arch-destroyer of his countrymen.

In a report of his services he stated that in this one year 1580, he had put to the sword 'forty-six captains and leaders, with 800 notorious traitors and malefactors, _and above_ 4,000 other people.'[1] In that year the great Desmond wrote to Philip of Spain that he was a homeless wanderer.

'Every town, castle, village, farm-house belonging to him or his people had been destroyed.