The Plantation of Ireland: Or a Review of the Origin and History of Her Earlier Colonial Settlements

Excerpt from The Plantation of Ireland: Or a Review of the Origin and History of Her Earlier Colonial Settlements

As in the case of individuals, so in that of national communities, a vast proportion of the earlier circumstances or events in relation to their history resemble in effect the physical feelings of pleasure or of pain, which no sooner cease sensibly to influence than they begin gradually to fade out of the recollection, and come at length to be no more remembered. The product, and topic or thought, of the passing hour, events such as these, equally as in the case of the units of time or of the phenomena of the seasons or months in the physical calendar, are remarkable at least for their fugitiveness - each successively disappearing to give way to another, which is destined itself to be not more abiding than the rest. Here fluctuations of motive or feeling perform the principal part in the ever-changing drama. The realities of previous observation or experience are lost sight of or obscured in the incitements incident to the actual present. Characters and scenes by which, in other and more favourable circumstances, the imagination and memory might have been more or less enduringly impressed, speedily lose their uncertain hold and disappear. Indeed, whatever the ultimate effect, in relation to the formation or moulding of national character, of ideal memories thus grounded - and in this respect it can scarcely be viewed as a negative power, impotent of result - of their proneness, practically at least, to early forgetfulness there can be no doubt. The relics of conscious thought, they come thus to number among the party-complexioned "alms" which Time imperiously as sedulously gleans but to consign to the limbo of a hopeless oblivion.

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