investigated the various depositories of English state papers, whether in the British Museum, the Bodleian, Trinity College, Dublin, and other Libraries, or in the various departments of the State Paper Offices in which papers connected with Ireland are likely to be found. The progress which has been made, and continues to be made in the useful work of calendaring the contents of these offices will much facilitate this investigation. But besides the public departments, there are yet many other quarters which may well deserve a searching examination. In explaining the contrast which the copiousness of Oliver Plunket's Roman correspondence presents to the scantiness and often the complete absence of all record which characterises other periods which are known to have been equally eventful, we rested mainly upon the circumstances of Dr. Plunket's life antecedent to his mission into Ireland, and on the close relations with Rome which he had formed during his early career and continued to maintain to the very end of his life. Few of the prelates had enjoyed the same advantages as regards relations with Rome. During what remained of the seventeenth and the greater part of the eighteenth century the Irish Prelacy was largely supplied from the schools of France, of Spain, and of the Low Countries; and abstracting from the duties of official intercourse, those particular relations, arising from early intercourse, which these prelates may be supposed to have formed, would have been rather with the countries in which they were educated, than with Rome, the second home of Oliver Plunket. It is not unnatural, in the case of French, Spanish, or Belgian students, to look for communications to Louvain, to Paris, to Salamanca, to Seville, similar to those which the Roman student and professor addressed to his old friends and colleagues; and although most of the records of such intercourse must unhappily be given up as irrecoverably lost, it is by no means impossible that in such depositories as the Burgundian Library at Brussels, the archives of Simancas* in Spain, and even the state * Since the above was written we have learned with sincere pleasure that the Master of the Rolls has added one more to the many obligations which he has conferred on the historical literahaa of the country, by obtaining the permission of the Spanish was ment for the calendaring of so many of the state papers tureared as regard the history of these countries. Govern mancas at paper archives of the French capital, many precious memorials may still be recoverable. In like manner, as many of our Bishops were members of the Dominican, the Franciscan, the Augustinian, or other Orders, we are not without hope that among the neglected papers of some of the great houses of these Orders, it may be possible to eke out our scanty store of historical materials, the more precious to us, because of their very meagreness and fragmentary character. If we find explorers as zealous, as skilful, as persevering, and as able as Dr. Moran, we cannot despair of sucWe trust that his memoir of Oliver Plunket is but the first instalment of a long series. And, as the first fruit, we shall look anxiously for the promised volume of Appendix of Documents which he promises, in illustration of this valuable Memoir. ART. IX.-The Sisters; Inisfail; and other Poems. By Aubrey de Vere. London: Longman and Co. 1861. THE and of Dr. Moran's Life of simultaneous appearance of Mr. Aubrey de Vere's Oliver Plunket, is a circumstance which we cannot help thinking of happy augury for the future of Irish History. It is not merely that the publication of two works of so high merit is in itself an indication of more than ordinary literary activity in Ireland; nor even that both these works give promise of new vitality in the long neglected field of our national history. It is rather that both these writers, although separated from each other most widely in subject, in manner, in plan, in all that could ordinarily constitute an element of resemblance, are yet animated by a common spirit, tend in their several ways to a common purpose, and, while they differ in almost every detail as to the treatment even of what they treat in common, yet regard all from the same point of view, an only in so far as it illustrates what is, in the mind ofonthe one great moral truth which underlies the elligence ough insight 13 face of the history of Ireland. Nothing, in truth, could, in a literary point of view, be more opposite than the characters of the two works, or of the schools to which they belong. The one deals entirely with facts, the other with the theories which these facts involve. The one is mainly concerned with events, the other with their moral or poetical interpretation. The one, in a word, builds up the skeleton of the national history; the other clothes it with form and imbues it with vitality. But both in their several tasks, have the same standing ground; both regard it from one common point of view. And thus the material framework of facts which the one builds up is but the outward form of that inner and animating principle which is the ideal of the other. To both alike the national history of Ireland has but one meaning--the history of the national religion of Ireland. The period, for example, over which the life of Oliver Plunket extends, comprises a succession of political changes in themselves exceedingly important, and involv ing consequences the influence of which has been felt in the history of most European nations even to the present day-the dethronement and execution of Charles I., the Commonwealth, the Restoration, the alternations of political party by which it was secured, and which culminated in the Revolution. Yet it is true to say that in the genuine history of Ireland these events have no place, or only a subordinate place. The true scene of that history is far less the Council-Room of Dublin Castle, or the camp of the contending armies, even of those in which the Irish party was, however inadequately, represented, than the wild mountains or the lonely bogs in which the persecuted confessors of the faith and of the cause of Ireland found their precarious refuge. The enactinents and the wars of the time were really representatives of national interests only in so far as they were religious. The interest of the action, which turns but feebly upon the Ormonds or Ossorys of the political struggle, and which considers even the O'Mores and O'Neils far more as champions of religion than of country, has its true centre in the martyred bishops and priests of the Cromwellian era, or even in the less exciting picture of Oliver Plunket setting out as " Mr. Cox" on clandestine visitation of his diocese, or in the disguise ptain Brown," with sword, pistols, and military mancas ed as rege pallium to his brother prelate of Tuam! 01 Governas ment Mr. de Vere, too, has felt this truth very forcibly. In his idea of a "National Chronicle in verse," towards which the present volume is his first contribution, the fundamental element is religion. "A national chronicle in verse, he writes in his admirable preface, "would necessarily, so far as it was true to the spirit of history, include what may be called the Biography of a People-its interior as well as its exterior life. The annals of Ireland were stormy and strange after the lapse of those three golden centuries between her conversion to Christianity and the Danish inroads. But there were also great compensations-Religion:-natural ties so powerful that they long preserved a scheme of society almost patriarchal; an everbuoyant imagination; and the inspiring influences of outward nature on a temperament as susceptive as the heart was deep. After the storms had rolled by, there still remained a people and a religion. So long as its life is mainly from within, a people works out its destiny.' This idea he has fully realized. It is thoroughly congenial to his mind; and the vividness, the energy, and life-like reality which characterise many of the sketches in his charming collection, have forcibly reminded us of the saying popularly attributed to Plato, that poetry comes nearer to vital truth than history itself. Indeed, if the real function of the Poet be that of an interpreter; and if true poetry, as illustrative of individual life, feeling, and character, consist in the art of assuming a perfect identity with the individual feelings which it is sought to delineate, the historical poet can only be faithful to his calling by transferring himself entirely to the past, and imbuing himself thoroughly, not only with the manners, but with the thoughts, the sentiments, the whole moral atmosphere which belonged to it. And happily as regards these deeper and more tender religious sympathies of a nation, few men are more capable of understanding and appreciating them than Mr. Aubrey de Vere. The readers of his Picturesque Sketches in Greece and Turkey, can hardly fail to recollect his description of the ruins of the ancient Eleusis and Delphi. We hardly ever remember to have met, within a brief space, a more faithful appreciation of the profound analogies which subsist in the ancient religions between truth and fictionbetween the darkling guesses of the pagan intelligence and the Christian Revelation: a more thorough insight VOL. L.- No. C. 13 into those deep religious sympathies of the human heart which vindicate themselves even in the midst of its corruption, and which, however overlaid by ignorance and passion, may still be recognised in certain mysterious and, perhaps, by the mass, unobserved, analogies, which satisfy the more elevated human instincts, and preserve in despite of every influence, a secret harmony with man's higher and holier nature;-as, for example, the unfelt recognition of the Christian principle of the holiness of sorrow in the secret worship of Ceres mourning and seeking for the lost Proserpine; in the mystery of the broken earthen vessels and the wine poured out in oblation; in the forms and ceremonies of purification and initiation; and above all, in the special selection as the place for the celebration of this the highest and purest worship of the Greek Mythology, of the temple, common and indivisible, of those two divinities who, interpreted in their elemental or physical relations, signify Bread and Wine. Indeed this is, except in his very lightest efforts, the habitual tone of Mr. de Vere's mind; and it pervades even those of his works which have little direct bearing upon religion. His earliest poetry is marked by a profoundly religious spirit. In the natural order every object speaks to his mind in the language of religious symbolism. He rarely loses sight of the sentiment of his own sonnet: "A Presence that thou dreamest not of Is here concealed. From out the air-rock'd nest Of every leaf looks forth some dream divine. The grass thou treadest-the weeds are cyphered o'er Each branch is precious as that golden bough Hung by Eneas (ere he passed below) Upon the sable porch of Proserpine. And in the moral order, the same habit of thought seems to run through all his views and to colour all his conceptions. No one has traced more clearly in the social and intellectual characteristics of the paganism of Greece and Rome, these "broken fragments of the patriarchal revelation which preceded the Jewish religion;" the workings of that moral sense which can be seen in the records of almost every people, "running in a smaller circle parallel with Revelation." But it is in his treatment of professedly Irish subjects that he has thrown himself with the fullest unreserve into these views, which are even otherwise |