Historic Ulster. 73 



with the fortunes of any Royal or noble house, but it is not less 

 interesting. At Derry and at Enniskillen the new planters 

 proved effectually that they had come to stay. Belfast first 

 attracted notice in the year 1649, when no less a person than 

 John Milton wrote in a State paper of the inhabitants at 

 Belfast as a generation of Highland thieves and red shanks, 

 who from a ground not their own dare send defiance to the 

 sovereign magistracy of England. England had not heard the 

 last of Belfast. In that town the Society of United Irishmen 

 was founded, and in the rising in '98 a Belfastman died on the 

 scaffold for the cause of religious liberty. Henry Joy M'Cracken 

 and his colleagues might be honoured in their native town even 

 by those who were most opposed to revolutionary methods. 

 It was not as mere political malcontents they took the field, 

 but as opponents of the hateful penal system which in spite of 

 the Revolution of 1688 had oppressed Presbyterians as well as 

 Roman Catholics. At Derry and the Boyne the ascendancy of 

 one Protestant creed was assured, but in '98 the Presbyterians 

 of Belfast were champions not only for liberty of their own 

 Church, but for that to which they were most opposed in 

 doctrine. Reading the history of the Ulster planters in this 

 light, they showed themselves worthy descendants of the Scots 

 of Ulster, who had left their motherland so many hundred 

 years ago. They had never been far away, and they had 

 returned to unite their fortunes with those of Ireland, as dwellers 

 in the greatest and most prosperous of the provinces. 



I shall conclude with an allusion to an old legend which tells 

 how when St. Patrick preached at Tara a vision of the Knights 

 of the Red Branch appeared before him. Prominent among 

 them was a hero in a chariot. The saint demanded his name, 

 and the answer might be taken as expressing the proud position 

 of Ulster, for this phantom was her guardian genius, Cuchullin 

 — " I am he that was called the hound of UUa. I was not a 

 hound for herding cattle, but for the guarding of the borders of 

 territories, the defence of nations." 



Mr. W. H. Patterson — We have all listened with great 

 interest to Miss Milligen's very able paper. She has carried 



