‘But the Irish have no philosophical historian’ was the taunt of David Hume, and so of course enlightened Irishmen of the eighteenth century were determined to have one. A great European audience awaited any thoughtful, elegant and dignified history like Hume’s of England andRobertson’s of Scotland. An indispensable mark of the ‘philosophical historian’ was that he could rise above religious partisanship, as Hume, Voltaire, and Robertson seemed to do; but for eighteenth-century Irishmen this required an enormous effort of mind and feeling—Irish society was still drastically rent by its religious antagonisms. Protestants wrote histories that were alive with catholic rebellions and massacres; they justified the penal laws as necessary protection against an unforgivably and ineradicably rebellious people. Catholics wrote histories to protest against the penal laws; they laboured to show that the rebellions and massacres were really provoked by protestants and that most past troubles were caused either by the protestants themselves or by the unfortunate division of the country, by law, into two hostile bodies.

The assessment of the contribution of Garrett Hugh FitzGerald to the search for an antidote to potato blight, as put forward by Mr T. P. O’Neill in his article on the scientific investigation of the potato failure of 1845—6, needs to be revised, if only to do justice to Robert Kane.

FitzGerald wrote to a local newspaper on 9 March 1846, suggesting, as a result of experiments he had made in search of a cure for potato blight, that seed potatoes should be steeped before planting in a solution of bluestone (copper sulphate). In February and March of the same year he wrote two letters on the subject to the chief secretary for Ireland. These letters were forwarded for consideration to the relief commission, of which Robert Kane was the scientific member.

Dr Lyons’s admirable study of the downfall of Parnell, recently published, has raised once again the question of the relations between Joseph Chamberlain and the Irish leader and more particularly of the part alleged to have been played by Chamberlain in bringing about the latter’s ruin. Like the late Henry Harrison, who devoted so many eloquent pages to this subject, Dr Lyons had to write without access to Chamberlain’s own papers, which, however, do not contain, so far as I am aware, anything that is at variance with his main conclusions. Nevertheless, they do containcertain letters, which are not mentioned in J.L. Garvin’s Life of Joseph Chamberlain and which supplement Dr Lyons’s account.

On 23 January 1869 Gladstone visited Queen Victoria at Osborne and presented two papers relating to the proposed disestablishment of the Church of Ireland, ‘one of them on the general policy and effect of the measure, the other a dry recital of the purport of what would be the leading clauses of a bill’. The memorandum here presented is the former of these papers. Two copies of it are known, one in the Royal Archives at Windsor (D 25/6), the other among the Gladstone papers in the British Museum (Add. MS 44757, ff. 72-96v). The copy at Windsor is in Gladstone’s own hand, that in the British Museum is presumably the work of a secretary, though the hand has not been identified. Apart from insignificant variations, mainly in punctuation, the two copies are identical. That which follows is the version in the Royal Archives and is printed by gracious permission of Her Majesty the Queen. The paragraph-arrangement of the original hasbeen preserved, but the punctuation and use of capitals have been standardised according to the practice of this journal.