showed such a determination to defend the city to the last, that the Scottish leaders deemed it prudent not to risk the delay or failure of a siege. They broke up their camp and directed their course to Naas, stopping on their way four days at Leixlip.' On this visit of Robert Bruce to Leixlip, Moore observes: "Nor is it a slight addition to the interest of that romantic spot, to be able to fancy that the heroic Bruce, surrounded by his companions in arms, had once stood beside its beautiful waterfall, and wandered, perhaps, through its green glen."

66

"He

Gerald, the 8th Earl of Kildare, on the occasion of his marriage to his second wife, Dame Elizabeth Saint John, in 1496, received from King Henry the Seventh, for himself his wife and their lawful heirs, the manor and lordship of Leixlip, with the appurtenances.3 He was called "the Great Earl," and not without some show of reason, for, with faults not a few, there were great lines of character in him. was," says Campion, "a mighty made man, full of honor and courage." The Ormonde of that day was, of course, his great adversary. How much there is in blood! Of this Ormonde, Campion says, "He was secret and drifty, of much moderation in speech." The whole character of his descendant, James, Duke of Ormonde, is in that short sentence. Campion's character of the Earl of Kildare is the very opposite. "Kildare," he says, was open and passionable, in his moode desperate, both of word and deede, of the English well-beloved, a good justicier, a warrior incomparable, towards the nobles that he favoured not somewhat headlong and unrulie." Being charged before Henry the Seventh for burning the Church of Cashel, he suddenly confessed the fact, and dashing out a wicked oath, "quoth he, I would never have done it, had it not beene told me that the Archbishop was within. And because the Archbishop was one of his busiest accusers there present, merrily laught the king at the plaineness of the man, to see him alledge that intent for excuse, which most of all did aggravate his fault. The last article against him they conceived in these tearmes, "finally, all Ireland cannot rule this Earle." "No (quoth the king) then in good faith shall this Earle rule all Ireland." And so the man who was cited to England, to face his accusers,

1 "Annals of Ireland," p. 171.

216 History of Ireland," vol. iii., p. 63.

3 Patent and close Rolls, temp. Hen. VIII.

standing before the king with his life in his hand, returned to Ireland Lord Lieutenant, and was soon after made a Knight of the Garter.

The 8th Earl of Kildare was, as stated above, twice married. By his first wife, Alison, daughter of Sir Rowland Eustace, of Harristown, in the county of Kildare, he had issue one son (a Gerald of course) and six daughters; this Gerald became in due course 9th Earl of Kildare. The Lady Alison died of grief on the 22nd of November, 1495, during her husband's confinement in England. By his second wife, the 8th Earl had seven sons and no daughter, Dame Elizabeth outlived her husband, and on her death Leixlip descended to her sons in succession. The eldest and second eldest having died young, this property was in possession of Sir James, her third son, at the time of the rebellion of his nephew, Silken Thomas, who was son to the ninth earl, then in England, having been summoned thither by the king to answer sundry accusations which were made against him. By an Act of Resumption, 28th of Henry VIII., A.D. 1536, the manor and lordship of Leixlip was taken from the Fitzgeralds, and vested in the king, "for that," says the Act," the blood of the Geraldines is corrupted towards the crown of England." This, of course, refers to the rebellion of Silken Thomas. At the critical time of Silken Thomas's rebellion, Lord Leonard Gray, son of the Marquis of Dorset, was sent over as Commander of the Army and Marshal of Ireland. Silken Thomas lost his allies one by one, and the suppression of the rebellion was effected without difficulty. Thus deserted, he gave himself up to Lord Leonard Gray, confessed his offence, threw blame on his advisers, and prayed that his life might be spared. The Irish annalists assert that he received a promise of his life from Gray; but the king was furious. that any terms were made with him, had him seized on his way to Windsor, and committed to the Tower. Henry further ordered Lord Gray to arrest the five uncles of Silken Thomas, three of whom had, from the first, discountenanced the proceedings of their nephew. This did not save them; they were attainted by the Irish Parliament, and conveyed to London, where the five uncles, together with their nephew, were executed at Tyburn, on the 3rd of February, 1537, by which act of savage slaughter the house of Geraldine was all but extinguished.

What a passing shadow is man! There yet stands the castle in which the "Dame Elizabeth," with the conscious

joy of a mother's heart, saw her boys grow up around her full of health and promise; there are the grounds over which they so often careered and gamboled; there is the old historic Salmon Leap, the Saltus Salmonis of Giraldus, at which they must have, "full many a time and oft," stood, with eager gaze, watching the fish in their efforts. to ascend the cataract; there are still the Rye and the Liffey mingling their placid waters as of old: but the sons of the Lady Elizabeth, where are they?-long, long ago returned to the bosom of another mother, the victims of a ruthless tyrant, far more deserving of being executed at Tyburn than they were; their names and their sorrows hidden away in the archives of far-off history.1

Passing over some other interesting events in the life of Leixlip Castle, we come to the encamping of the Confederate army along the Liffey, between that place and Lucan, in November, 1646, which army consisted of about 16,000 foot and 1,600 horse. It was under the command of Preston, who was general of the Leinster forces, and of the famous Owen Roe O'Neill, who commanded the Ulster men. There was no commander-in-chief-a fatal error; but one which could not be remedied on account of the jealousies existing between the generals, Ormonde was in Dublin; Digby, the king's secretary and trusted minister, was with Preston in Leixlip Castle, where that commander had had fixed his head-quarters; and Clanrickarde was was constantly passing and re-passing between the two places, carrying on a correspondence of which O'Neill and the Nuncio (who was in O'Neill's camp) were kept in almost complete ignorance. Some proposals were being made to the Confederate Catholics, whilst Digby was endeavouring to detach Preston from them altogether. To create division and promote delay were the two great objects Ormonde had in view, who was, at the very time, in treaty with commissioners from the English Parliament, with the view of giving up Dublin to them, which he very soon after carried into effect.2 A black treason it was for him to give up the capital of Ireland to the enemies of the king, his master, who were in open

1 The seven sons of the eighth Earl of Kildare and the Lady Elizabeth Saint John were:-Henry, who died in 1516; Thomas, who died in 1530; and Sir James, Oliver, Richard, Sir John, and Walter, the five who suffered at Tyburn.

2 The terms of surrender were ratified between Ormonde and the commissioners on the 23rd of the same month of November.

rebellion against him, and who beheaded him not long after. But he did it rather than grant adequate concessions to the Catholics, who were always loyal to the king, but, on account of their religion, hateful to Ormonde, who had been a Catholic himself for the first fifteen years of his life, and was then the only Protestant of his family. O'Neill, feeling he was surrounded by enemies instead of friends, and having reason to believe there was some deep plot preparing against him, broke up his camp, threw a temporary bridge of such timber as he could find across the Liffey at Leixlip, and retired into Meath.

And thus ended the once formidable design on Dublin, which was almost certain to succeed only for the incurable dissensions of the Confederate generals.

It remains for me to say a word about the Salmon Leap itself, which is the most attractive object in the neighbourhood I have been writing about. The name Leixlip is made up of two Scandinavian words Lar and hlaup (sometimes written löp), and is literally rendered into English by the words Salmon Leap. It is again literally rendered into Latin by Saltus Salmonis, which words were usually abbreviated in documents by Salt. Salm., the first syllable of each, and sometimes by Salt only; and thus the Salmon Leap gives their name to the baronies of North and South Salt. Itself is in the barony of North Salt. Again, it was the inland boundary of the Scandinavian kingdom of Dublin, which was a kind of Danish Pale, like the English Pale of later times, and extended coastwise from Arklow to the little river Delvin, above Skerries, on the north, and along the Liffey, "as far as the salmon swims up the stream," that is, to the Salmon Leap at Leixlip. This territory, or Pale, was called the Duflinarskiri, to study the correct pronunciation of which word, I here beg to give the reader some breathing time.'

JOHN CANON O'ROURKE.

'See Haliday's "Scandinavian Kingdom of Dublin," edited by J. P. Prendergast, Barrister-at-Law.

TEMPERANCE IN THE "SUMMA."

N these days when so much that is intemperate is spoken and written on what is called the Temperance Question, it may be well for us to know how this matter has been treated by the wisest and weightiest of Catholic theologians, St. Thomas Aquinas. As all theological students know, there is scarcely an important theological disputation in which the words of the Angelic Doctor are not quoted in support of each side. I daresay this will be the case in the matter before us. Teetotallers and antiteetotallers may find equal satisfaction in these pages. I have written them, not in favour of the Total Abstinence cause which I have so much at heart, but with an honest desire to put in handy shape, and in, as far as may be, popular form, the opinion of one who, besides being a Saint of God and the Angel of the Schools, is commended to us with such unusual warmth by our present Holy Father, Leo XIII., as pre-eminently our teacher and guide amid the perils, intellectual and moral, of this age.

It is not wonderful that, in the "Summa," out of six hundred questions" divided into some three thousand "articles," temperance should find a place, together with its specific form, sobriety, and its contrary vice, drunkenness. St. Thomas was not only a profound thinker, but also a most eloquent and popular preacher. What he wrote, in stiff, scholastic phrase, in the "Summa," he must often have clad in all the beauty of rhetorical form and figure in the pulpit, and oftener still in the simplicity and earnest directness with which a saint would preach God's truth to the poor. To the "Summa" then, the preacher may confidently turn for matter for his sermons both to great and lowly; and if these pages in any way encourage a brother priest to go to that pure fountain when he would feed his flock, and to substitute those clear, crystal waters for the muddy streams below-if these pages do that they will have done much. In a warm heart the semina rerum of the "Summa" will soon spring up, and bear, as they did with St. Thomas, both flower and fruit.

It is

I.-Well, to come to the matter of temperance. treated in the 141st question of the secunda secundæ of the "Summa." The " question " is divided into eight "Articles." 1° In the first, after three objections against its being a virtue at all, since it puts a restraint upon the natural