With the issue of the Wexford volume the Irish Manuscripts Commission has completed its publication of the portion of the Civil Survey which has survived in the Quit Rent Office copies. We have been promised a supplementary volume, which is to contain a copy of the survey of the barony of Louth, discovered among the Ormonde manuscripts, and the barony boundary descriptions preserved in the Annesley Books of Survey and Distribution. To these might perhaps be added some extracts from the Civil Survey of Carlow and Kilkenny, which are in the Ormonde manuscripts.

The Irish executive during the nineteenth century resembled the imperial double-headed eagle, or even occasionally Cerberus. For the control of the Irish administration was shared between the lord lieutenant and the chief secretary. Of course, theoretically the latter was merely the assistant of the former. In fact they formed a (frequently uneasy) partnership, and, as will be shown, throughout the century the chief secretary's political importance tended to increase largely at the expense of his nominal superior, though admittedly the exact balance of power between the two offices tended to, fluctuate in accordance with the personalities of their holders. Finally, in the absence from Ireland of the chief secretary, a strong undersecretary could exercise power out of proportion to his place in the administrative hierarchy.

The magna carta of the Irish system of national education, established in 1831, was what came to be known as ‘ the Stanley letter ’, addressed on 31 October 1831 by the Right Honourable Edward G. Stanley, chief secretary for Ireland, to the duke of Leinster, president of the board of seven commissioners appointed by the government to administer the system.

The letters which follow are concerned with conditions on, and with the management of, an estate in, county Leitrim in the early years of the nineteenth century. They form part of a body of correspondence now belonging to Dr Patrick Logan of Poole Sanatorium, near Middlesborough, and I am grateful to him for permission to quote from and to use the originals of these letters. My attention was first drawn to the documents by Professor T. W. Moody of Trinity College Dublin, when he received copies of them through Professor Séamus Delargy from the late Mr J. J. Mahon, who lived near Drumshambo, and was keenly interested in the history of county Leitrim. Mr Mahon died towards the end of 1952 and since then I have received much help in tracing the whereabouts of the originals from his son-in-law Mr P. J. Brennan, from Dr Joseph Logan, from Mr M. J. Molloy and from Very Rev. John Canon Pinkman, P.P., V.F.; I wish to record my thanks to all of these.

The eight letters printed below consist of seven written to, and one written by, Edmund Dwyer Gray, M.P., editor and proprietor of the Freeman's Journal and an influential member of the Irish parliamentary party. They relate to the inner history of the by-election for Galway city held in February 1886. These letters, with ten others of historical interest unrelated to the Galway group, were given in 1904 by Gray's son, also named Edmund Dwyer, to Charles Tenison, who passed them on to his brother, Alfred Tenison Collins. Collins, then secretary of the Hibernian Bank, was one of the most eminent figures in Irish banking when he retired in 1937. He died in 1945 in his 93rd year. Deeply interested in the history of the home-rule movement, with which, in his business capacity, he had close contacts, he had contemplated writing a life of Parnell, and appears to have collected material for that purpose, of which the Gray letters alone have survived. They were placed at my disposal through the kindness of his daughter, Mrs James Boydell, who has since presented them to the library of Trinity College.