These brief sketches of the lives of some of the daughters of Scotland and of Ireland illustrate the principal characteristics of the women of the Scotch-Irish race. Among all the nations of the world no women hold as high a place for pure morals and high courage. The spiritualizing effect of the profound religious feeling of these people—although in the form of their religious faith the Scotch and the Irish are for the most part so diametrically different—accounts in a large measure for their conservation of the facts and forces of the religious life. The soil of both Ireland and Scotland was bedewed for centuries with the tears of affliction and of persecution; the blood of martyrs who cheerfully laid down their lives at the dictates of religion and that highest social expression of the religious instinct, the noblest piety of the human race—patriotism. Out of all the oppression, rapacity, confiscation, which the two peoples experienced in different forms and different degrees, arose an unworldly ideal, a sense of the invisible realm. The sturdy Calvinist matron of the Scottish Highlands is no more religious, no more the product of the travails of her country, no more under the inspiration and exaltation of high principle, than her less fortunately placed sister of the Green Isle, whose religion is at the opposite extreme of the forms of Christian faith. The women of both peoples can point with tearful joy to the history of their sex as a scroll of fame and a record of noble achievement.
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
| SUBJECT | ARTIST | PAGE |
| Charles II, and Lady
Castlemaine, Duchess of Cleveland. Honi soit qui mal y pense. Dining in the fifteenth century. Audience to an ambassador. Mrs. Elizabeth Fry. Assassination of Rizzio. |
W. P. Frith, R. A. A. Chevalier Tayler. From a miniature of the period. Léon y Escosura. Mrs. E. M. Ward. E. Sieberdt. |
[Fronts.] [144] [200] [232] [344] [408] |