To the English and Scotch lords and gentlemen who had accompanied him from Brest, the island in which they sojourned was merely a stepping stone by which they were to reach Great Britain.
They were still as much exiles as when they were at Saint Germains; and indeed they thought Saint Germains a far more pleasant place of exile than Dublin Castle.

They had no sympathy with the native population of the remote and half barbarous region to which a strange chance had led them.

Nay, they were bound by common extraction and by common language to that colony which it was the chief object of the native population to root out.

They had indeed, like the great body of their countrymen, always regarded the aboriginal Irish with very unjust contempt, as inferior to other European nations, not only in acquired knowledge, but in natural intelligence and courage; as born Gibeonites who had been liberally treated, in being permitted to hew wood and to draw water for a wiser and mightier people.

These politicians also thought,--and here they were undoubtedly in the right,--that, if their master's object was to recover the throne of England, it would be madness in him to give himself up to the guidance of the O's and the Macs who regarded England with mortal enmity.