IF you go down from Dublin by the wonderful coast-line or through the beautiful country inland which runs by the base of the mountains, you will come upon beautiful scenery, and find a population not at all characteristically Irish. The beauty of Wicklow, its wonderful woods, its deep glens, its placid waters, its glorious mountains, is only less than the beauty of Killarney, which is an earthly paradise. But in Wicklow, in Wexford, in Waterford, the people’s blood is mixed. Sometimes it is Celt upon Celt, the Welsh Celt upon the Irish. There are charming people in Wicklow and Wexford and Waterford, but to those counties belongs also what I call the cynical Irishman—the Irishman without charm of manner, the “independent” Irishman, who will not take off his hat to rank or age or sex; yet he is Irish enough in the core of him. And Wicklow and Wexford, with Kildare and part of Meath, were the scenes of the Rebellion in 1798. Perhaps the memory of those days helps to make the Irishman of the south-east corner of Ireland what he is, and that is often something very unlike the gracious Irishman of the South and West. He has his resentments. I have heard an Irishman say: “A Wexford man will never look at a Tipperary man, because Tipperary didn’t rise in the Rebellion.” The Rebellion, which was hatched in the North by Ulster Presbyterians, broke out, after all, in Wexford, and on a religious, and a Catholic, cause of quarrel. There could have been nothing farther from the thoughts of the leaders of the united Irishmen than to make a religious war, but that was what the Rebellion of 1798 turned out to be—a religious war; a war between Catholic and Protestant, precipitated not by English intriguers, say those who know well, but by outrageous insults to the Catholic altars, led in many cases by priests on the rebel side, foredoomed to failure in spite of the desperate courage of the peasantry who for a time swept all before them. One always thinks of Wexford and the Rebellion simultaneously. It was a time of cynical contrasts. Think of the poor peasants, maddened by outrages to their altars, led by their priests, carrying on the Rebellion planned by Protestants of the North—by leaders deeply imbued with the French revolutionary spirit, which was certainly not Christian! Think of the Western peasants, when Humbert and his men landed at Killala, hailing those good comrades of the Revolution as fellow-Catholics, coming to meet them decked out in religious emblems! One of the strangest and most cynical of these contrasts was the fact that while the peasant army fought desperately at New Ross, where they all but carried the day, on the other side of the Barrow River men were ploughing peacefully in their fields, because it was Wexford that was up and not their county. I suppose it is the clan system which differentiates Irishmen by their counties and their towns. Dublin is heterogeneous, perhaps. It has, at all events, few distinguishing characteristics, whereas Cork and Waterford men are as widely apart almost as though they were of different nationalities; and both are agreed in despising Dublin, although Dublin has made history in the last hundred years—national history—more than either.

The men who were the first begetters of the Rebellion, and the men who saved Ireland for the English Crown, were alike men of Anglo-Irish blood. The Rebellion was put down by the Irish yeomanry, as English statesmen had to acknowledge, however little they liked the methods of their allies. The yeomanry did not make war with rose-water, any more than they precipitated the Rebellion by gentle methods. It is a bloody and brutal chapter of Irish history, and the memories of it accounted for the religious animosities which I remember in my youth, which are fading out as the memories of the Rebellion are fading. The year 1798 has ceased to be a landmark in Irish life. When I was a child, there yet lived people who could tell at first hand or second hand of the terrible happenings of those days. People used to say, fixing an age: “He was born the year of the Rebellion.” Now all that has passed away. Even in those times it was becoming more customary to date events by the year of the Big Wind, 1839. Now, with the establishment of parish registers—which did not come in in Ireland till the sixties—and the spread of newspapers and cheap knowledge generally, such landmarks are no longer required; and the Big Wind of 1903 has wiped out the memory of its predecessor.

In the mountains of Wicklow the insurgents of those days found their refuges and their fastnesses and their graves. I remember having seen somewhere near Roundwood, in the Wicklow Mountains, in the midst of a ploughed field a long strip of greenest grass covering the grave of many rebels. The plough had gone round it ever since then, but not a sod of it had been turned up; it had remained inviolate.

A great deal of Irish history gathers round the Rebellion—the Rebellion, the Irish yet call it, as though there had never been any other. The men who made it were literary men, in a more vital sense than the men of ‘48, who were also literary. Two books of that day stand out pre-eminently—Lord Edward Fitzgerald’s “Life and Letters,” edited by Thomas Moore, and the Journal of Theobald Wolfe Tone. Lord Edward had an exquisite style. His letters are the frank revelation of a beautiful and gallant and innocent mind and heart. Without deliberation, without knowledge, his family letters achieved the highest art. They are immortal, imperishable things.

Then Tone’s Journal is as remarkable a human document. Tone swaggers through these pages better than any hero of romance. Life, after all, is the greatest artist, and one does not say, “Here is a true Dumas hero! Here is a true Stevenson hero!” For Life is better than her children.

Nearly all the United Irish leaders left memoirs or journals behind them. There was, perhaps, something of the self-consciousness of the French Revolution in this keeping a journal in the face of battle. Anyhow, we are grateful to Holt, to Teeling, to Cloney, for keeping alive for us those days and those men.

In Lady Sarah Napier’s letters you also get most vivid glimpses of the Rebellion—as, indeed, you do in the letters of the whole Leinster family. Mary Ledbetter, that gentle Quakeress, of Ballitore, has told her experiences of the Rebellion in Kildare; there is Bishop Stock’s Narrative of the French landing at Killala and those days in which he entertained willy-nilly the French leaders and found them the most considerate of guests. In fact, there is a whole library of Rebellion literature.

I ask pardon for treating Wicklow and Wexford as though they were the theatre of ‘98, and nothing more; but, indeed, in the story of Wexford the Rebellion stands up like White Mountain and Mount Leinster, and one finds little else to say.