gone the first process of decomposition, shook and shuddered, and a thrill ran through the whole of her miserable and worn-out frame. A few minutes elapsed before her veil was removed; and when it was, the most ghastly face which I have ever observed was disclosed. Her eyes were quite closed, and the eyelids shrunken as if by the touch of death. The lips were like ashes, and remained open and without movement. Her breathing was scarcely perceptible, and as her head lay on her shoulder, her long black hair fell dishevelled, and added to the general character of disordered horror which was expressed in her demeanour. Now that she was produced, she seemed little calculated to be of any use. Mr. Doherty repeatedly addressed himself to her, and entreated her to answer. She seemed unconscious even of the sound of his voice. At length, however, with the aid of water, which was applied to her mouth, and thrown in repeated aspersions over her face, she was in some degree restored, and was able to breathe a few words. An interval of minutes elapsed between every question and answer. Her voice was so low as to be scarcely audible, and was rather an inarticulate whisper, than the utterance of any connected sentence. She was, with a great deal to do, conducted by the examiner through some of the preliminary incidents, and at last was brought to the scene in the grove where the murderers were assembled. It remained that she should recognise the prisoners. Unless this were done, nothing would have been accomplished. The rod with which culprits are identified was put into her hand, and she was desired to stand up, to turn to the dock, and to declare whether she saw in court, any of the men whom she had seen in the grove on the day of the murder. For a considerable time she could not be got to rise from her seat; and when she did, and stood up after a great effort over herself, before she had turned round, but while the rod was trembling in her hand, another extraordinary incident took place. Walsh, one of the prisoners at the bar, cried out with the most vehement gesture,- “O God! you are going to murder me! I'll not stand here to be murdered, for I'm downright murdered, God help me!" This cry, uttered by a man almost frenzied with excitation, drew the attention of the whole Court to the prisoner; and the Judge inquired of him of what he complained. Walsh then stated with more composure, that it was unfair, while there was nobody in the dock but Lacy and himself, to desire Kate Costello to look at him, for that he was marked out to her where he stood. This was a very just observation, and Judge Moore immediately ordered that other prisoners should be brought from the gaol into the dock, and that Walsh should be shown to Kate Costello in the midst of a crowd. The gaol was at a considerable distance, and a good deal of time was consumed in complying with the directions of the Judge. Kate Costello sank down again upon her chair, and in the interval before the arrival of the other prisoners we engaged in conjectures as to the likelihood of Walsh being identified. She had never seen him, except at the grove, and it was possible that she might not remember him. In that event his life was safe. At last the other prisoners were introduced into the dock. The sound of their fetters as they entered the Court, and the grounding of the soldiers' muskets on the pavement, struck me. It was now four o'clock in the morning; the candles were almost wasted to their sockets, and a dim and uncertain light was diffused through the court. Haggardness sat upon the spectators, and yet no weariness or exhaustion appeared. The frightful interest of the scene preserved the mind from fatigue. The dock was crowded with malefactors, and brought as they were in order that guilt of all kinds should be confused and blended, they exhibited a most singular spectacle. This assemblage of human beings laden with chains was, perhaps, more melancholy from the contrast which they presented between their condition and their aspect. Even the pale light which glimmered through the court did not prevent their cheeks from looking ruddy and healthful. They had been awakened in their lonely cells in order to be produced, and, as they were not aware of the object of arraying them together, there was some surprise mixed with fear in their looks. I could not help whispering to myself as I surveyed

them, "what a noble and fine race of men are here, and how much have they to answer for, who, by degrading, have demoralised such a people!" The desire of Walsh having been complied with, the witness was called upon a second time to place the rod upon his head. She rose again, and turned round, holding the fatal index in her hand. There was a deep silence through the court; the face of Walsh exhibited the most intense anxiety, as the eyes of Kate Costello rested upon the place where he stood. She appeared at first not to recognise him, and the rod hung loosely in her hand. I thought, as I saw her eyes traversing the assemblage of malefactors, that she either did not know him, or would affect not to remember him. At last, however, she raised the rod, and stretched it forth, but, before it was laid on the devoted head, a female voice exclaimed, "Oh, Kate!" This cry, which issued from the crowd, and was probably the exclamation of some relative of the Keoghs, whose destiny depended on that of Walsh, thrilled the witness to the core. She felt the adjuration in the very recesses of her being. After a shudder, she collected herself again, and advanced again towards the dock. She raised the rod a second time, and having laid it on the head of Walsh, who gave himself up as lost the moment it touched him, she sank back into her chair. The feeling which had filled the heart of every spectator here found a vent, and a deep murmur was heard through the whole court, mingled with sounds of stifled execration from the mass of the people in the background. Lacy also was identified; and here it may be said that the trial closed. Walsh, who, while he entertained any hope, had been almost convulsed with agitation, resumed his original composure. He took no farther interest in the proceeding, except when his landlord gave him a high character for integrity and good conduct; and this commendation he seemed rather to consider as a sort of bequest which he should leave to his kindred, than as the means of saving his life. It is unnecessary almost to add, that the prisoners were found guilty.

Kate Costello, whose evidence was of such importance to the Crown, had acted as a species of menial in the house of old John Keogh, but was a near relation of her master. It is not uncommon among the lower orders to introduce some dependent relative into the family, who goes through offices of utility which are quite free from degradation, and is at the same time treated, to a great extent, as an equal. Kate Costello sat down with old Jack Keogh and his sons at their meals, and was accounted one of themselves. The most implicit trust was placed in her; and on one of the assassins observ ing "that Kate Costello could hang them all," another observed, “ that there was no fear of Kate." Nor would Kate ever have betrayed the men who had placed their confidence in her from any mercenary motives. Fitzgerald had stated that she had been at "the Grove" in the morning of the day on which the murder was committed, and that she could confirm his testimony. She was in consequence arrested, and was told that she should be hanged unless she disclosed the truth. Terror extorted from her the reyealments which were turned to such account. When examined as a witness on the trial of Lacy and of Walsh, her agitation did not arise from any regard for them, but from her consciousness that if they were convicted her own relatives and benefactors must share in their fate. The trial of Patrick and John Keogh came on upon Saturday the 5th of April, some days after the conviction of Lacy and of Walsh, who had been executed in the interval. The trial of the Keoghs was postponed at the instance of the prisoners, but it was understood that the Crown had no objection to the delay, as great difficulty was supposed to have arisen in persuading Kate Costello to give completion to the useful work in which she had engaged. It was said that the friends of the Keoghs had got access to her, and that she had refused to come forward against "her people." It was also rumoured that she had entertained an attachment for John Keogh, and although he had wronged her, and she had suffered severe detriment from their criminal connexion, that she loved him still, and would not take his life away. There was, therefore, enough of doubt incidental to the trial of the Keoghs to give it the interest

of uncertainty; and, however fatal the omen which the conviction of their brother conspirators held out, still it was supposed that Kate Costello would recoil from her terrible task. The Court was as much crowded as it had been on the first trial, upon the morning on which the two Keoghs were put at the bar. They were more immediate agents in the assassination. It had been in a great measure planned, as well as executed by them; and there was a farther circumstance of aggravation in their having been in habits of intimacy with the deceased. When placed at the bar, their appearance struck every spectator as in strange anomaly with their misdeeds. They both seemed to be farmers of the most respectable class, Patrick, the younger, was perfectly well clad. He had a blue coat and white waistcoat, of the best materials used by the peasantry: a black silk-handkerchief was carefully knotted on his neck. He was lower in stature, and of less athletic proportions than his brother John, but had a more determined and resolute physiognomy. He looked alert, quick, and active. The other was of gigantic stature, and of immense width of shoulder and strength of limb. He rose beyond every man in court, and towered in the dock. His dress was not as neatly arranged as his brother's, and his neck was without covering, which served to exhibit the hugeness of his proportions. He looked in the vigour of powerful manhood. His face was ruddy and blooming, and was quite destitute of all darkness and malevolence of expression. There was perhaps too much fulness about the lips, and some traces of savageness, as well as of voluptuousness, might have been detected by a minute physiognomist in their exuberance; but the bright blue of his mild and intelligent eyes counterbalanced this evil indication. The aspect of these two young men was greatly calculated to excite interest; but there was another object in court which was even more deserving of attention. On the left hand of his two sons, and just near the youngest of them, sat an old man, whose head was covered with a profusion of grey hairs, and who, although evidently greatly advanced in years, was of a hale and healthful aspect. I did not notice him at first, but in the course of the trial, the glare which his eye gradually acquired, and the passing of all colour from his cheek, as the fate of his sons grew to certainty, drew my observation, and I learned on inquiry, what I had readily conjectured, that he was the father of the prisoners at the bar. He did not utter a word during the fifteen or sixteen hours that he remained in attendance upon the dreadful scene which was going on before him. The appearance of Kate Costello herself, whom he had fostered, fed, and cherished, scarcely seemed to move him from his terrible tranquillity. She was, as on the former occasion, the pivot of the whole case. The anticipations that she would not give evidence “against her own flesh and blood" were wholly groundless, for on her second exhibition as a witness she enacted her part with much more firmness and determination. She had before kept her eyes almost closed, but she now opened and fixed them upon the Counsel, and exhibited great quickness and shrewdness in their expression, and watched the cross-examination with great wariness and dexterity. I was greatly surprised at this change, and can only refer it to the spirit of determination which her passage of the first difficulty on the former trial had produced. The first step in blood had been taken, and she trod more firmly in taking the second. Whatever may have been the cause, she certainly exhibited little compunction in bringing her cousins to justice, and laid the rod on the head of her relative and supposed paramour without remorse. At an early hour on Sunday morning the verdict of guilty was brought in. The prisoners at the bar received it without surprise, but turned deadly pale. The change in John Keogh was more manifest, as in the morning of Saturday he stood blooming with health at the bar, and was now as white as a shroud. The Judge told them that as it was the morning of Easter Sunday, (which is commemorative of the resurrection of the dead,) he should not then pronounce sentence upon them. They cried out "A long day, a long day, my lord!" and at the same time begged that their bodies might be given to their father. This prayer was uttered with a sound resembling the wail of

an Irish funeral, and accompanied with a most pathetic gesture. They both swung themselves with a sort of oscillation up and down, with their heads thrown back, striking their hands, with the fingers half closed, against their breasts, in the manner which Roman Catholics use in saying "The Confiteor." The reference which they made to their father drew my attention to the miserable old man. Two persons, friends of his, had attended him in court, and when his sons, after having been found guilty, were about to be removed, he was lifted on the table, on which he was with difficulty sustained, and was brought near to the dock. He wanted to embrace John Keogh, and stretched out his arms towards him. The latter, whose manliness now forsook him, leaned over the iron spikes to his full length, got the old man into his bosom, and while his tears ran down his face, pressed him long and closely to his heart. They were at length separated, and the sons were removed to the cells appointed for the condemned. The Judge left the bench, and the court was gradually cleared. Still the father of the prisoners remained between his two attendants almost insensible. He was almost the last to depart. I followed him out. It was a dark and stormy night. The wind beat full against the miserable wretch, and made him totter as he went along. His attendants were addressing to him some words of consolation connected with religion, (for these people are, with all their crimes, not destitute of religious impressions,) but the old man only answered them with his moans. He said nothing articulate, but during all the way to the obscure cellar into which they led him, continued moaning as he went. It was not, I trust, a mere love of the excitement which arises from the contemplation of scenes in which the passions are brought out, that made me watch this scene of human misery. I may say without affectation, that I was (as who would not have been?) profoundly moved by what I saw ; and when I beheld this forlorn and desolate man descend into his wretched abode, which was lighted by a feeble candle, and saw him fall upon his knees in helplessness, while his attendants gave way to sorrow, I could not restrain my own tears.

The scenes of misery did not stop here. Old John Russel pleaded guilty. He had two sons, lads of fifteen or sixteen, and, in the hope of saving them, acknowledged his crime at the bar; "Let them," he said, in the gaol where I saw him, "let them put me on the trap if they like, but let them spare the boys."

But I shall not proceed farther in the detail of these dreadful incidents. There were many other trials at the assizes, in which terrible disclosures of barbarity took place. For three weeks the two Judges were unremittingly employed in trying cases of dreadful atrocity, and in almost every instance the perpetrators of crimes the most detestable, were persons whose general moral conduct stood in a wonderful contrast with their isolated acts of depravity. Almost every offence was connected with the great agrarian organisation which prevails through the country. It must be acknowledged that, terrible as the misdeeds of the Tipperary peasantry must upon all hands be admitted to be, yet, in general, there was none of the meanness and turpitude observable in their enormities which characterise the crimes that are disclosed at an English assize. There were scarcely any examples of murder committed for mere gain. It seemed to be a point of honour with the malefactors to take blood, and to spurn at money. Almost every offence was committed in carrying a system into effect, and the victims who were sacrificed were considered by their immolators as offered up, upon a justifiable principle of necessary extermination. These are assuredly important facts, and after having contemplated these moral phenomena, it becomes a duty to inquire into the causes from which these marvellous atrocities derive their origin. But before I proceed to suggest what I conceive to be the sources of a condition so disastrous, it is not inappropriate to inquire how long the lower orders in Ireland have been habituated to these terrible practices, and to look back to the period at which they may be considered to have had their origin. If these crimes were of a novel character, and had a

recent existence, that circumstance would afford strong grounds for concluding that temporary expedients, and the vigorous administration of the law applied to the suppression of local and ephemeral disturbances, would be of avail. But if we find that it is not now, or within these few years, that these symptoms of demoralisation have appeared, it is then reasonable to conclude that there must be some essential vice, some radical imperfection in the general system by which the country is governed, and it is necessary to ascertain what the extent and root of the evil is, before any effectual remedy can be discovered for its cure. This is a subject of paramount interest, and its importance will justify the writer of this article, after a detail of the extraordinary incidents which he has narrated, in taking a rapid retrospect of antecedent events, of which recent transactions may be reasonably accounted the perpetuation. In doing so, some coincidence may be found with what the writer may have observed elsewhere, but the fear of incurring the imputation either of tediousness or self-citation shall not deter him from references to what he conceives to be of great and momentous materiality. The first and leading feature in the disturbances and atrocities of Tipperary is, that they are of an old date, and have been for much more than half a century of uninterrupted continuance. Arthur Young travelled in Ireland in the years 1776, 1777, and 1778. His excellent book is entitled, "A Tour in Ireland, with general Observations on the Present State of that Kingdom." Although the professed object of Arthur Young in visiting Ireland was to ascertain the condition of its agriculture, and a great portion of his work turns upon that subject, yet he has also investigated its political condition, and pointed out what he conceived to be the chief evils by which the country was afflicted, and the mode of removing them. He adverts particularly to the state of the peasantry in the South of Ireland, and it is well worthy of remark that the outrages which are now in daily commission, were of exactly the same character as the atrocities which were perpetrated by the Whiteboys (as the insurgents were called) in 1760. "The Whiteboys," says Arthur Young, in p. 75. of the quarto edition, "began in Tipperary. It was a common practice with them to go in parties about the country, swearing many to be true to them, and forcing them to join by menaces, which they very often carried into execution. At last they set up to be general redressers of grievances-punished all obnoxious persons who advanced the value of lands, or held farms over their head; and, having taken the administration of justice into their own hands, were not very exact in the distribution of it. They forced masters to release their apprentices, carried off the daughters of rich farmers, ravished them into marriages, they levied sums of money on the middling and lower farmers, in order to support their cause, in defending prosecutions against them, and many of them subsisted without work, supported by these prosecutions. Sometimes they committed considerable robberies, breaking into houses and taking money under pretence of redressing grievances. In the course of these outrages they burned several houses, and destroyed the whole substance of those obnoxious to them. The barbarities they committed were shocking. One of their usual punishments, and by no means the most severe, was taking people out of their beds, carrying them naked in winter on horseback for some distance, and burying them up to their chin in a hole with briers, not forgetting to cut off one of their ears." Arthur Young goes on to say that the Government had not succeeded in discovering any radical cure. It will scarcely be disputed that the Whiteboyism of 1760 corresponds with that of 1828; and if, when Arthur Young wrote his valuable book, the Government had not discovered any “radical cure," it will scarcely be suggested that any remedy has since that time been devised. From the period at which these outrages commenced, the evil has continued in a rapidly progressive augmentation. Every expedient which legislative ingenuity could invent has been tried. All that the terrors of the law could accomplish, has been put into experiment without avail. Special commissioners and special delegations of counsel have been almost annually despatched into the disturbed districts, and crime appears to have only under