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.