Page:History of England (Froude) Vol 7.djvu/550

< 3 o REIGN OF ELIZABETH. [CH. 46. age, 110 more neglect, or idleness, or profligacy. The bishops of the Church of Ireland were to be chosen among those who had risen from, the Irish schools through the Irish University. The masters of the grammar schools should teach the boys 'the New Testament, Paul's Epistles, and David's Psalms, in Latin, that they being infants might savour of the same in age, as an old cask doth of its first liquor/ In every parish from Cape Clear to the Giant's Causeway, there should be a true servant of God for a pastor, who would bring up the children born in the same in the knowledge of the Creeds, the Lord's Prayer, the Ten Commandments, and the Cate- chism ; * the children to be brought to the Bishop for confirmation at seven years of age, if they could repeat them, or else to be rejected by the Bishop for the time, with reproach to their parents.' 1 Here was an ideal Ireland, painted on the retina of some worthy English minister ; but the real Ireland was still the old place : as it was in the days of Brian Boroihme and the Danes, so it was in the days of Shan O'j^eil and Sir Nicholas Arnold ; and the Queen who was to found all these fine institutions cared chiefly to burden her exchequer no further in the vain effort to drain the black Irish morass fed as it was from the perennial fountains of Irish nature. The Pope might have been better contented with the condition of his children : yet he too had his grounds of disquiet, and was not wholly satisfied with Shan, or 1 Device for the better government of Ireland : Irish MSS. Rolls Hctise.