YESTERDAY IN IRELAND*.

WE, that is in our individual and singular capacity, have always been the forwardest in upholding the striking merits of To-day in. Ireland. When others have been fascinated by the romance of the O'Hara Tales, by the wildness and fancy of the works of the au- thoress of the Wild Irish Girl, or by the truth and nature of the great inventor of the Castle Rackrent, WE have always maintained the utility, the reality, the patriotism of the one novel of the au- thor who has now gone a clay back in his titular almanack. These qualities are as visible in his present production as in his former one ; the author is, we believe, as faithful in his pictures as he was before ; but alas ! he copies from a copy. Unfortunate was the hour when the man who can catch the portrait of the living mass in its existing agitation, determined upon visiting the churchyard and the vault for the likenesses of men and things that left this shifting stage a century ago. We ought to remember the proverb of a " gift horse ;" but when a man, who once mounted us on a hunter that knew the country and feared no fence, now helps us on to a pad pony, whose merit is that of simply going steadily, in spite of proverbs the reflection will occur, that there is a differ- ence in beasts. Our readers will perceive that our meaning is.

* Yesterday in Ireland, By the Author of To-day in Ireland. 3 Vols. Loudon Colburn. this—we should have been more than glad of these volumes from any one butthe father of that most incomparable magistrate, the Rev. Mr. Crossthwaite. The truth is, that this author is not merely an inventor of character, a conceiver of incidents, a recorder of events—he is also a satirist, But why satirize past centuries ? the satirist is out of place among the tombs. Thus it is, that in the work before us we miss that raciness, that fresh and juicy flavour which smacks of life, and earnestness which speaks to our interests, our feelings, our prejudices, and our hopes. The author of To-day in Ireland drew from the world in which he has stirred: the au- thor of Yesterday in Ireland has patched up a history from his reading, his travelling, and his reflections. It is true that we may say the same of the writer of the Croppys, and the Battle of the Boyne; but against him it is no matter of accusation : that able person never conceives so vigorously as when he is set free front all the trammels of time and place ; whereas the author of To-day in Ireland is chiefly admirable in selecting from every-day local oc- currences, and giving them a philosophical point : he is one who sees and smiles, not one who dreams and raves however admirably; he is not enthusiastic, but he is perspicacious ; not inventive, but shrewd ; not witty, but true. These distinctive characteristics, the writer still maintains in his present adventure ; but all must see how narrowed is the sphere of such a person when he transfers the scene from the era, of to-day's dinner to one at which his great- grandfather became himself a meal for`the restless consumers of mortal remains. All that a clever fellow, a stanch patriot, and enlightened citizen, could do for the past, he has done ; in addition to which there is one grand circumstance in his favour, the extra- ordinary seasonableness of this domestic sketch of Ireland. It might have been supposed, that to the author alone had his Grace the Premier—he who is par excellence " the Duke"—communi- cated his determination of making this session the epoch of Catholic emancipation. The first of the two tales included in these volumes might be called two stages of the Catholic question, or memoirs of affairs in Ireland in 1713 and in 1798. Fiction was never ap- plied to a nobler purpose than that of instructing the world in a country's wrongs, or in suggesting patriotic remedies for a suffer- ing nation. Great and powerful, useful and noble, is the applica- tion which has lately been made of the humble novel, the mere tickler of idleness, the last resource of ennui, the poor imitator of humanity, the despised marble-backed molecule of the circulating library, now that it has been employed in exhibiting the working of great national questions in their details. He or she who first led the way in this great application of a literary power, may be classed with him who first taught us how to turn the idle vapour of bubbling water to the most gigantic and at the same time the most manageable of physical forces. The French philosopher may spend his ingenuity in showing that his DE CAIN or his PAPIN preceded the well-founded pretensions of our WORCESTER and NEwcomEN in the invention of the steam-engine ; but which of them ever applied the power of fiction to remedy the grievances of

a nation ? Who but an Irishman ever showed the folly or the in- justice of the senate-house, by carrying its members into the cottage, and to the very hearths of the people; all the time guiding his readers along such pleasant paths that they cry out, Is this a pil- grimage for learning, or an excursion for delight? It was reserved for the writers of this most extraordinary of countries to teach wisdom by works of imagination—to discuss their rights in ro- mances, and to laugh and wheedle the world into good-humour with their legitimate claims. It was said, " Let me write the ballads, they who will may write the laws :" but now it must be written that the Irish Novelist, in innumerable volumes, is more peaceful (certainly more agreeable) than the Statutes at Large. This is one more triumph of the press—of publication ; it is another lesson of the schoolmaster : it is the pedagogue in his parlour, the tree of knowledge whose fruit is not only pleasant to the sight, but agree- able to the palate. Let us not, however, in the general good, fin-- get the particular example of excellence. Few have contributed more essential service to the cause than the former work of the present author ; and though, as a work of art, the present tales may be deemed inferior, they possess sufficient merit to claim a wide and extended circulation.

The first tale is called " Commahon :" the mra is placed soon after the peace of Utrecht, at a time when the close of I he reign

of Queen Anne was daily expected, and hopes began to be san- guinely entertained that her death would be the signal of the re- turn of the Stuarts. At this juncture, Roger O'Mahon, who Nut retired from his native land after the treaty of Limerick, and taken

service in France, returns to his native country and his friends. He has risen to rank and eminence in a foreign land, and is little

prepared for the state of political degradation to which he finds his

Catholic countrymen reduced. It will be seen that this situation is aptly conceived for displaying to the reader the real condition of

an old Irish family at this period of the history of Ireland. Major O'Mahon not only brings back with him the independence and the pride of a well-born Irishman, but also the well-founded self-es- timation of a brave soldier, who has been prized and admired in

the first court of Europe. The chef de bataillon, Roger 0-Mahon, is soon made sensible of the difference between an Irishman in

France and a Catholic in Ireland. He brings over his favourite

charger, a spirited grey Arabian, which he names St. Gris : he has not been many hours in Ireland before a wretched attorney, M'Crosky, offers hint five pounds fur it,— a price which it seems the statutes oblige him to take, no Catholic being allowed to keep a horse above that value, This, however, is but a smaU specimen

of the vexation to which Catholics were then subjected : the his- tory of the family of Corramahon expounds them The " Northerns of 98 " is a partial history of the Irish rebellion of that year. Theobald Winter is another Theobald Wolfe Tone: the character is well conceived, well-supported, and the historical groundwork is conducted with spirit and talent. The mob is partly hanged and partly pardoned, the chiefs are partly quartered and partly banished, and all is quiet, We shall give a specimen of these interesting episodes from the dark history of the Green Island.

THE DEATH OF M'CROSKY, THE ATTORNEY. -A relapsarian heir-at-law having made his recantation one evening by torch-light, the assembled witnesses arc charged by a troop of \Villiamites. A Magistrate's son, one kit Burton, is killed ; and M'Crosky, the attorney magistrate, is taken prisoner, in the character of a spy, by Click (More, a Rapparce chieftain, and carried up to the Mountain Boys; where he meets his fate after a manner that reminds us of Morris, the unfortunate spy in Rob Roy.

"As the morning dawned upon the throng around the Hermit's well (the scene of the fray), Ulick and his followers prepared to take their departure for some position farther in the mountains, more remote and defensible than the valley. Roger O'Mahon and sister Susan had gone southward, and Gana (the relapsarian) was despatched to Corramahon to warn his father of the hostile irruption of the Wiiliamites, their having witnessed most probably the ceremony of his relapse, which joined with the heir of Palestine's (Kit Burton) having met his fate, would infallibly bring down ruin and the extreme of persecution on the O'Malions.

In his retreat, Ulick brought off not only his captive M'Crosky, but the bodies of his dead enemies. Their way lay through a wild and desolate region, intersected with rock and bog, mountainous, but not on that scale and heightthat could he saideven to approach the sublime. There was little or no wood either, nothing more than stunt copse and furze, calculated to screen the rabbit and hare, not man. No forest or greenwood shade was here to shelter this Irish Robin Hood and his gang. Its green hills were, however, thinly tenanted with flocks of sheep and shepherds : the idle and pastoral life, so bepraised in poetry, proving here, as still in the Calabrias, the best nursery for robbers, for men of rapine and of crime. . . . M'Crosky made the journey blind -folded, manacled, and borne in a kish, which, hangins.' on one side of a mountain garron, was balanced by another on the other side, which contained the body of Kit Burton. The attorney was full of awful fears and forebodings, well acquainted as he was with the diabolical and proverbial cruelty of thick O'More. His alarm was brought to the utmost, when on a sudden he felt himself immersed in water. His head, however, was raised above the boggy element, for such he experienced it ; and as his guards seem to be immersed as well as himself, M`Crosky knew that guards

were crossing one of those impervious bog-passes which formed the security of their country to O'More's people, or else that from some suspicious appearance at a distance, his captors had plunged themselves to the neck, in order to escape being perceived.

As the Sub-sheriff's teeth chattered with cold and terror, and muttered supplications escaped from betwixt them, Click comforted him by ob. serving :-

' Don't fear, Master Sub ; you'll die a dry death yet, I promise you, and may be, a high one." " Sure you won't he hard upon me, Master thick," replied M`Crosky; " I'll pay an honest man's raraom." "That I defy thee to do. But thou shalt pay a rogue's." " Name it : and be rasonable, O'More, my heart I am a poor parch- ment scribbler."

"Thou hast hanged a score of O'More's stoutest followers."

" "Ayres in the way of trade then, and without malice, I'll swear. Loose mes and I'll lay this feud ; take upon myself the blame of breaking upon the merriment of your patron, and place a bag of one hundred gold pieces under the flag-stone at the cast corner of Catherlogh Castle. Hear me, O'More! I never brake word with brother."

" Brother ! Out upon thee, thou renegade pettifogger !" said the Ran- ree.

" Nay, thou seckest money and life-blood from the Orangeitcs with thy skein and pistol, Ulick, as I du with quill and parchment. We are of a trade: I claim fraternity."

" Claim it with Nit Norton, that dangles there opposite thee. He has been thy gossip ; and ye shall be still more intimate."

" Illick, you will not kill me. My father was thy father's comrade."

" I will nut kill thee," said the Rapparee; and the promise comforted the trembling captive ; though, had he seen the grim smile with which it was accompanied, his fear would not have given way so readily to con- fidence.

They had by this time emerged from the bog. flick ordered the ban- dage to be removed from the eyes of the sub .sheriff, and the latter per- ceived that the party took their course up a mountain that rose from the swamp ; the only eminence in the region worthy of the name of mountain. And the circumstance of its being alone and unrivalled, gave it fully, in majesty of appearance, whatever it night want in reality of height. Its sides were clothed with underwootl, and the summit, which was rocky, was formed into a kind of recess, called, as many mountain tops in Ire- land are called, by the name of the eagle's nest. Ilitherward with diffi- culty, 'and by a winding-path, the Rapparees wended, spending at least two hours in the ascent ; the object of such a journey, and such a path being inexplicable to M'Crosky. until approachincsp the summit he per- ceived the whole circumjacent region perceptible to the view, so that no invading force could march across it without having its motions fully betrayed.

lore they paused. At a sign from Ulick, M'Crosky was made to de- scend, was unbound, and surrounded by the gang. They proceeded to strip from him the habiliments that he had borrowed from his comrade, clement, on the preceding night. The execution of this order wound up the terrors of the poor attorney to the highest pitch.

" You will not kill me, O'More, you will nut kill inc ! I have your promise."

" And I will keep it. Do you take me for the mecutioner of my region ? or think you, I would sully my blame with your black-heart's blood ""

" No : von will he merciful ?"

" Rill he, think you, he merciful ? Plead to him."

" Who, where ?" cried the terrified Sub-sheriff, peering forth whither the finger of tlle Itapparce pointed, but without being able to perceive

yre wont to he sharp-sighted. Mark you not a bird that wheels r seals i and round ? That scream came from it. Sweet, was it not? And now it has alit."

It seemed an animal of the vulture tribe, of voice and features as si- nister as would become an executioner, for so Ulick termed it. " He and his race," continued the Rapparee, " are and have been from old time the hereditary avengers of our tribe. These false years of peace have been hungry ones to them as to us ; yet they are faithful, and forsake not their old haunts. But now the Orangemen are about to invade O'More's country, they shall have carrion." This mystification was needless in Ulick, for his victim was almost in- sensible from terror. The Rapparee saw that lie could no longer draw out or refine by words the punishment he meditated. He therefore bid his followers dispatch ; and their doing of his behest was speedy. They stripped the ill-starred M'Crosky, then placed upright the body of his guardian patron, young Burton, and bound with cord and wythe to- gether the living and the dead, the former rending the air with prayers and clamour. The Rapparees were inexorable; the bodies were flung down in that lofty recess, exposed to the birds of prey that haunted it, and about to blanch ere long with their bones the spot that their bodies now covered.

Their task finished, IJlick and his men descended the mountain, making merry with the distant groans and agony of their victim ; and as they turned the base of a rock to continue their descent on the other side, Ulick marked and pointed out to his followers the dark expanded wing of the bird of prey hurrying to his repast.