Standish O'Grady; selected essays and passages

152 STANDISH O GRADY
Kinsale. But its atmosphere, unlike that of any modern
book treating of the times, is the atmosphere of the age ;
in every sentence we breathe the air of actualities, face to
face with real and actual men, can almost hear them speak,
and feel around us the play of the passions and the working
of ideas and purposes so characteristic of that age, so
foreign to our own. Such an experience must bring
enlightenment. Pacuta Hibernia once well read is
certain to produce a lasting effect upon the mind of the
reader. The book deals with the stormy conclusion
of a stormy century, the lurid sunset of one of the wildest
epochs in our history.
Whence arose those cruel throes and unexampled con-
vulsions, that agony of bloodshed, of wars and massacre,
and ruthless devastation, extending with hardly a break
over a lapse of time which embraced three generations
of men ? In iiyz the high king of all Ireland, the petty
kings and the Church accepted Henry II. as their lord.
Thenceforward for some two centuries the kings of
England governed Ireland, so far as the feudal system,
modified here by Irish manners and customs, permitted
a country to be governed by its acknowledged ruler.
This state of things, owing to a variety of causes, chiefly
the terrible confusions wrought in Ireland by the two
Bruces, Robert and Edward, was interrupted in the four-
teenth century, and the authority of the kings of England
as lords of Ireland reduced to the narrow dimensions of
what is known as the„Eale.
Outside that small straggling
and ever-shifting area the whole country was governed
by independent Norman-Irish nobles and by Irish chief-