THE SCOT IN ULSTER

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ness to relieve the gloom. The men which this race of Scotsmen has produced are worthy of the parent stock; the contribution which this branch of the Scottish nation has made to the progress of civilisation proves that it has not forgotten the old ideals; the portion of Ireland which these Scotsmen hold is so prosperous and contented that it permits our statesmen to forget that it is a part of that most "distressful" country.

Our story opens in the days when the world was young to the nations who had embraced the Reformation; for they to whom it had been given to see that new vision of God, conceived also a new ideal of life. Then all things seemed possible to men of daring, because the old limits in both the physical and the moral worlds had been found to be but the invention of man, and the universe was to be, for all time coming, limitless. It was the world in which Shakespeare and Bacon had grown up; in which Spenser had sung of love and purity; in which Sidney had acted his gallant part, and died his chivalrous death; in which William the Silent, and Knox, and Cecil had toiled that we might live in freedom and light. It was an age in which single men with strangely inadequate means dared great deeds, which read to us now like fables; when a young adventurer set sail from Plymouth in a ship little bigger than a big herring-boat, and waged war against the greatest monarch in the world, and plun-...continue reading »

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Page 4

The Scot in Ulster:
Sketch of the History of the Scottish Population of Ulster

by John Harrison

1888