that he bought it from Mrs. Mary Kelly, widow of William Kelly, who was Clerk to Sir Stephen Rice, Chief Baron of the Exchequer under King James the Second. A committee which was appointed to examine the manuscript found it to be authentic, and they recommended that Dugan should be compensated with a sum not exceeding £200.

This incident is of some historical importance also. The saying is attributed to Rice that he would drive a coach and six horses through the Act of Settlement,' which was passed in the reign of Charles the Second, legalizing the Cromwellian confiscation of most of the lands of the Catholic Irish and Anglo-Irish who took part in the Catholic Rebellion of 1642, or sided with Charles the First in the subsequent struggle with the English Parliament. One of the great purposes of the famous Catholic Parliament of 1689, opened in person by James the Second-after he was deposed by his English subjects and the Crown transferred to William, Prince of Orange-was the uprooting of this Settlement; and as Rice took a prominent part in the judicial part of the work, he may have borrowed, for his guidance, the official record of the second Irish Parliament of the First Charles, in which the national disturbance originated. Rice survived until 1715. His last public appearance continues the story of Irish wrong and oppression. He was selected by the leading Catholics who survived the Jacobite war to plead at the Bar of the House of Commons on February 22, 1703; and at the Bar of the House of Lords on February 28, against the Bill 'to prevent the further growth of Popery' (2 Anne, chap. 6), and to plead also for the carrying out of the treaty entered into at the capitulation of Limerick-the last place to hold out for the Stuart king-which was intended to secure to the Catholics religious toleration and security of property, under the new order of things. Rice pleaded in vain. The Treaty of Limerick was outrageously violated by the passing of the Penal Laws.

Volume VIII of the Reports of the Historical Manuscripts Commission, published in 1913, contains an account of another remarkable discovery of the manuscript Journal of the House of Lords for part of the same period-16401641-in a collection of papers made in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries by the first three Viscounts Molesworth, of the Irish peerage. This manuscript Journal contains a number of passages, amounting to more than

4,000 words in the aggregate, which are not to be found in the printed Journal, nor in the rough original notebook --made presumably by the Clerk of the Parliaments (Clerk of the House of Lords), and preserved in the Public Record Office of Ireland-from which the Journal as printed was copied. In a few cases, where the passage omitted was not of very great length, it was found in the Record Office notebook, but had been so carefully scored out as to be almost illegible. I have no doubt that the volume under notice was intended also to serve as a notebook, from which the Journals were afterwards to be copied in a fuller and permanent form, and proves, I think, that the practice which prevails to-day in both Houses of the Imperial Parliament, of keeping two minute books of the proceedings for the sake of greater accuracy, prevailed also in the Irish Parliament.

One very important discrepancy between this manuscript Journal and the printed Journal is pointed out by Mr. D. A. Chart, who made the report on the subject of the document to the Historical Manuscripts Commission. While the printed Journal makes no mention of any sitting of the House of Lords on March 5, 1641, the manuscript Journal records a rather stormy meeting on that day, the proceedings of which, 'owing,' says Mr. Chart, presumably, to the abstraction from the Irish Record Office copy of the leaf showing the change of date,' are confused in the printed Journal with the proceedings of the previous day. Mr. Chart makes the interesting comment on the omissions and suppressions that they were done by some one who took the Royalist view of the burning political questions of the time-the liberty of Parliament and the punishment of Strafford and his associates.

Thus [he says] when the judges are called in by the Lords to advise whether an Irish Parliament can continue to sit on the death of the Lord Deputy, pending the arrival of a new governor, the official copy is found to omit several of the bolder statements made on this subject, which the copy in these manuscripts gives in detail. Again, when the Lord Chancellor is accused of treason, the Record Office copy omits passages of great length and importance, which are here given in full.

Mr. Chart also suggests that

seeing that the suppressed passages nearly all contain matter either obnoxious to the Lord Chancellor (as in the case of the judge's opinions) or reflecting on his character (as in the accusation of treason), and that he probably had custody of, or access to, the official copies of the Journals,

it seems likely that the changes made in the official copy were due either to his action or to that of some fervent Restoration loyalist; and that the volume may possibly have come into the possession of the Molesworths by the marriage of Edward Bolton, probably a descendant of Sir Richard Bolton, the accused Lord Chancellor, with Lettice Molesworth about 1720.

The Journals of the English Parliament have been valuably supplemented by several private diaries kept by members at various periods for their own amusement or information, which, published long afterwards, supply incidents and speeches, not to be found in the more formal official records. In the case of Ireland there is only one diary of the kind, and that happens to be the very earliest document now extant of the nature of a Journal of the Irish Parliament. It is the diary of the Elizabethan Parliament of 1568, kept by John Hooker, alias Vowell, the English antiquary. Hooker came to Ireland as solicitor to Sir Peter Carew, the soldier and adventurer, and particularly for the purpose of supporting his patron's claim that certain extensive estates in Munster and Leinster rightly belonged to one of his ancestors. He remained in Ireland, and was returned to Parliament, as a burgess of the borough of Athenry. For the guidance of the Irish House of Commons he drew up a report on the procedure at Westminster, which will be found in The Ancient Parliaments of Ireland, a work by Lord Mountmorres, published in 1792. Of greater historical interest still is Hooker's diary of the daily proceedings of the Parliament, summoned by Sir Henry Sidney, as Lord Deputy, which sat in Dublin from January 17 to February 23, 1568. The diary is printed in Essays relating to Ireland (1909), by C. Litton Falkiner, from a manuscript in the Cambridge University Library.

James Stanihurst was appointed Speaker of this Parliament. Hooker relates that at one sitting 'great contention did grow' upon a motion by Sir Christopher Barnewall of Turvey, complaining that mayors and sheriffs had elected themselves to Parliament, that members had been returned for towns which had no charters, and especially that a number of Englysche '-as Hooker spells the modern English '-were disqualified from sitting as they were resident outside the towns and boroughs which they were chosen to represent. The matter was referred to the Lord Deputy. He decided that such sheriffs and mayors

as had returned themselves, and such burgesses as sat for towns that had no corporation 'sholde be dysmyssed out of the House,' but that the English non-resident members might syth there lawfully so. The Anglo-Irish in the Parliament were so dissatisfied with this judgment that they prolonged the contention. The whole House was then summoned before the Lord Deputy, who made a scolding speech and directed the Speaker to see punyshment to be donne upon such as dyd dysorder themselffes yn the House.'

Hooker says that the House of Commons was more like a bear-baiting of loose persons than an assembly of grave and wise men,' and he tried to conform it to the procedure and manners of Westminster. In his diary he relates how he got into trouble by making an oration in defence of the Royal prerogative and lecturing the AngloIrish members on their duty to the State. The speech 'was well lyked, but by some mysliked,' he says. Barnewall and others inveighed against it. Edmund Butler of Callan, being in a coller,' as Hooker explains, 'syde if these wordes had been spoken yn any other place than yn this House there be a great many here that they wolde rather have dyed than to have suffred it.' Hooker does not mention it, but I learn from other sources that the House broke up in confusion, and the Englishman, for his better protection, had to be conducted by a body of his friends to the house of Sir Peter Carew. It is gratifying to know that no harm befell him, for we are indebted to him for the sight he has given us of one of the earlier Irish Houses of Commons at work.

Having the passion of the true antiquary and historian for the preservation of documents that threw light upon the annals of a people, Hooker suggested that the Acts of Parliament then on the statute rolls should be printed, and, moreover, he guaranteed to pay the cost himself. In The Calendar of Irish State Papers for the years 1515-1574 may be seen the terms of the licence granted to Hooker by the Lord Deputy, the original of which was found in the Carew papers. It is dated March 20, 1568-9. It says that 'whereas divers Parliaments have been holden within Ireland, and divers statutes and Acts made in the same, which laws, not being hitherto put in print, have been altogether turned into oblivion,' a motion submitted by the Speaker of the House of Commons to have them

And

'imprinted' was agreed to by the Lord Deputy. forasmuch,' it says, as John Vowell, alias Hooker, gentleman, being one of the said assembly, has offered at his own charges to imprint all the said Statutes and Acts heretofore made, we grant him the sole privilege and licence to imprint the same for ten years next ensuing.' However, nothing appears to have been done to give effect to the patent granted to Hooker. The first collected edition of the Irish Statutes to be printed was brought out in 1621 by Richard Bolton, an English lawyer, who was the Lord Chancellor of Ireland in 1641.

The Acts of Parliament thereafter were printed as they were passed, but printed in such varying types and sizes of papers that in 1762 it was decided to produce them in a complete and uniform edition. The order was made by the Earl of Halifax, Lord Lieutenant, in reply to an address from the House of Lords, and the work, superintended by the Lord Chancellor and judges, was done by Hugh Boulter Primrose Grierson, his Majesty's printer general of the kingdom of Ireland.' This edition of the Irish Statutes ran to twenty volumes, folio, and contains the Acts from 1310, the third year of King Edward II, to the Union. The Acts were republished in one volume in 1885, under the authority of the Irish Government, and edited by W. F. Callinan, of the Irish Office, Westminster. But this edition is imperfect, several important Acts being excluded, apparently for the insufficient reason that they were subsequently repealed or superseded.

The Statutes afford much useful information in regard to the varying opinions of the Irish Parliament on political and social questions. But the great mine for exploration by the student who is specially interested in the human side of the legislature and its members lies in the thirtyeight volumes of the Journals of the Commons and the eight volumes of the Journals of the Lords. The Journals were compiled from minutes of the proceedings taken, day by day, by the clerks in both Houses. In the Lords there were the Clerk of the Parliaments' and his deputy; in the Commons there were the Clerk of the House,' the Clerkassistant, and the Clerk of the Journals and Records. They all had to take an oath to keep the secrets of the Parliament, and also to make true entry of all motions, orders, and resolutions. In each House the clerks sat at the table wearing wigs and gowns.

VOL. X-21