designing men, who afterwards richly profitted by this madness of the many. Amongst other matters they represented the Irish as not entitled to the common rights of humanity; that, in fact, like Nebuchodonozor, they partook of the nature of the beasts of the field, having natural hoofs and horns like their master, the devil; and that a tail was no uncommon appendage to an Irishman's breech. The present generation will hardly believe, that stories like these were then received with implicit credit in England. In the poem of Hudibras we are told that
——tails by nature sure were meant
As well as beards, for ornament.
To this passage there occurs, in Nash's edition of that poem, the following note. "At Cashel, in the County of Tipperary, in Carrick Patrick church, (the cathedral on the rock of Cashel,) stormed by Lord Inchiquin in the civil wars, there were near 700 put to the sword, and none saved but the Mayor's wife and his son. Among the slain of the Irish were found, when stripped, divers that had tails near a quarter of a yard long. Forty soldiers, who were eye-witnesses, testified the same upon their oaths."—It is to be regretted that the names of these forty eye-witnesses were not given, as it is not unlikely but some of them might be traced among the famous ghost depositions of 1641, now carefully preserved in Trinity College, Dublin. Their evidence, however, with respect to the tails had all the effect that was proposed. It was as firmly believed by the vulgar English of that day, as Johanna Southcot's Shiloh is expected by many of the same class at the present. Accordingly in the very year (1647) in which Cashel was stormed, a book was published in London, which ran through several editions, recommending the indiscriminate murder of the Irish, without mercy. The following extract from this horrid book has few parellels among the most sanguinary records of mankind.—"These Irish, anciently called Anthopophagi,
