"I had thought, among a people so imaginative as the Irish, to have seen
some touch of fancy in dress, if ever so poor--a bit of ribbon on the
women's caps, or a jaunty cock of the 'boy's' tile, or his jacket or coat
worn shapely and with an air. But dirty cloaks, ribbonless caps,
uncombed hair, and not even a little straw taken from the cart and put
under them when they sat on the dirty side-walk, were universal symptoms
that left no room for belief in the existence of any vanity whatsoever in
the women; many of them of an age, too, when such fancies are supposed to
be universal to the sex. The men could scarce be less ornamental in their
exteriors; but the dirty sugar-loaf hat, with a shapeless rim, and a
twine around it to hold a pipe; the coat thrown over the shoulders, with
the sleeves hanging behind; the shoes mended by a wisp of straw stuffed
into the holes, and their faces and bare breasts nearly as dirty as their
feet, were alike the uniform of old and young. Still those who were not
bargaining were laughing, and even in our flourishing canter through the
market I had time to make up my mind, that if they had taken a farewell
of vanity, they had not of fun."
Again we say, men of Belfast, what think you of that? Did you ever see
yourselves in this manner? If so, we must say that it is more than we
ever did, though we have spent many a gay week in your noble, thriving,
and most industrious town. "Neither a bit of ribbon on the women's caps,
nor a jaunty cock of the boy's tile;" no, "but the dirty sugar-loaf hat,
with a shapeless rim, and a twine round it to hold a pipe; and the shoes
mended by a wisp of straw stuffed into the holes," &c. This certainly
flogs; and we must look more attentively to the Belfastians in future.
Mr Willis proceeds to the hotel called the Donegal Arms, which he allows
is a handsome house, in a broad and handsome street; and then he adds,
"But I could not help pointing out to my companion the line of soiled
polish at the height of a man's shoulder on every wall and doorpost
within sight, showing, with the plainness of a high-water mark, the
average height as well as the prevailing habit of the people. We
certainly have not yet found time to acquire _that_ polish in America
[most civilized people!]; and if we must wait till the working classes
find time to lean, it will be a century or two at least before we can
show as polished an hotel as the Donegal Arms at Belfast, or (at that
particular line above the side walk) as polished a city altogether." Such
is Mr Willis's description of the Gresham's Hotel of Belfast, a house
which we had foolishly thought was remarkable for its cleanliness, order,
and good accommodation. Of course he got a miserable dinner of
"unornamented chops and potatoes," after which he proceeded to visit the
lions of Belfast. But we cannot follow him in all his wanderings, though
he tells us many things that are not a little amusing, as, for instance,
that the houses have a _noseless_ and flattened aspect; that he saw
Dubufe's pictures of Adam and Eve, and sagaciously remarks how curious
it is to observe how particularly clean they are (that is, Adam and Eve)
before they sinned, and how very dingy after--being dirtied by their
fall; and, what was very agreeable to him, the exhibitor of the pictures
actually called him by name, having remembered seeing the great penciller
in America! After having read the advertisements stuck on every wall, of
"vessels bound to New York," and having "_done_ that end of the town," he
returned towards the inn. He then sallied out again to _do_ the other
end, and tells us with great satisfaction of a successful petty larceny
of a very sentimental kind which he achieved in the Botanical
Gardens--namely, plucking a _heart's-ease_, as an expressive remembrance
of his visit--"in spite of a cautionary placard, and the keeper standing
under the porch and looking on." After this feat he returned to the inn,
and very wisely went to bed. "A bare-footed damsel, with very pink
heels"--recollect, reader, that this was in the Donegal Arms--"was
'My grim chamberlain,
Who lighted me to bed:'
and in some fear of oversleeping the hour for the coach in the morning, I
reiterated, and 'sealed with a silver token,' my request to be waked at
six. Fortunately for a person who possesses Sancho's 'alacrity at sleep,'
the noise of a coach rattling over the pavement woke me just in time to
save my coffee and my place. I returned to my chamber the moment before
mounting the coach for something I had forgotten, and as the clock was
striking _eight_, the faithful damsel knocked at my door and informed me
that it was _past six_."
Mr Willis is a fortunate traveller. Often as we have stopped at the
Donegal Arms, we never had the good fortune to see the pink heels or bare
legs of a chambermaid; and the moral economy of the house must be greatly
changed also, when they allow the gentlemen to be called by the said
bare-legged damsels; a duty which, in our visits at it and all other
respectable hotels, always devolved on that useful personage called
Boots. We do not think, however, that this change of the system--leaving
the calling of the gentlemen to the chambermaids--would work well, except
in the case of American travellers. Still, however, as he says, he was in
time, and started off--no longer in St Patrick's track, but on King
William's route to the battle of the Boyne--and arrives in Drogheda to
dinner. He tells us that the country is very bare of wood, and then
proceeds in the following words to describe the habitations.
"But what shall I say of the _human habitations_ in this (so called) most
thriving and best-conditioned quarter of Ireland? If I had not seen every
second face at a hovel-door with a smile on it, and heard laughing and
begging in the same breath everywhere, I should think here were human
beings abandoned by their Maker. Many of the dwellings I saw upon the
roadside looked to me like the abodes of extinguished hope--forgotten
instincts--grovelling, despairing, nay, almost idiotic wretchedness. I
did not know there were such sights in the world. I did not know that men
and women, upright, and made in God's image, could live in styes, like
swine, _with_ swine--sitting, lying down, cooking and eating in such
filth as all brute animals, save the one 'unclean,' revolt from and
avoid. The extraordinary part of it, too, is, that it seems almost
altogether the result of choice. I scarce saw one hovel, the mud-floor of
which was not excavated several inches _below_ the ground-level without;
and as there is no sill, or raised threshold, there is no bar, I will not
say to the water, but to the liquid filth that oozes to its lower
reservoir within. A few miles from Drogheda, I pointed out to my
companions a woman sitting in a hovel at work, with the muddy water up to
her ancles, and an enormous hog scratching himself against her knee.
These disgusting animals were everywhere walking in and out of the hovels
at pleasure, jostling aside the half-naked children, or wallowing in the
wash, outside or in--the best-conditioned and most privileged inmates,
indeed, of every habitation. All this, of course, is matter of choice,
and so is the offal-heap, situated, in almost every instance, directly
before the door, and draining its putrid mass into the hollow, under the
peasant's table. Yet mirth _does_ live in these places--people _do_ smile
on you from these squalid abodes of wretchedness--the rose of health
_does_ show itself upon the cheeks of children, whose cradle is a
dung-heap, and whose play-fellows are hogs! And of the beings who live
thus, courage, wit, and quenchless love of liberty, are the undenied and
universal characteristics. Truly, that mysterious law of nature by which
corruption paints the rose and feeds the fragrant cup of the lily, is not
without its similitude! Who shall say what is clean, when the back of
the most loathsome of reptiles turns out, on examination, more beautiful
than the butterfly? Who shall say what extremes may not meet, when, amid
the filth of an Irish hovel, spring, like flowers, out of ordure, the
graces of a prince in his palace?"
All this, the reader will remark, was seen from the top of a stage-coach
on a drenching wet day! What wonderful powers of observation he must
have! The penciller next treats us to a song, descriptive of an Irish
cabin, which he tells us was sung for him by one of the most beautiful
women he saw in Ireland. His memorable arrival in Drogheda is thus
described:--
"As we drove into Drogheda, we entered a crowd, which I can only describe
as suggesting the idea of a miraculous advent of rags. It was market-day,
and the streets were so thronged that you could scarce see the pavement,
except under the feet of the horses; and the public square was a sea of
tatters. Here and all over Ireland I could but wonder where and how these
rent and frittered habiliments had gone through the preparatory stages of
wear and tear. There were no degrees--nothing above rags to be seen in
coat or petticoat, waistcoat or breeches, cloak or shirt. Even the hats
and shoes were in rags; not a whole covering, even of the coarsest
material, was to be detected on a thousand backs about us: nothing
shabby, nothing threadbare, nothing mended, except here and there a hole
in a beggar's coat, stuffed with straw. Who can give me the genealogy of
Irish rags? Who took the gloss from these coats, once broadcloth? who
wore them? who tore them? who sold them to the Jews? (for, by the way,
Irish rags are fine rags, seldom frieze or fustian). How came the tatters
of the entire world, in short, assembled in Ireland? for if, as it would
seem, they have all descended from the backs of gentlemen, the entire
world must contribute to maintain the supply."
Readers, such of you as have been in Drogheda, did you ever see any thing
like this? People of Drogheda, do you recognise yourselves in this
picture here drawn of you? We are sure you cannot. But he is not done
with you yet. He had been rather unlucky in the pursuit of his favourite
subjects for study in Belfast--namely, the beggars; but this
disappointment was atoned for in Drogheda. He describes them thus:--
"I had been rather surprised at the scarcity of beggars in Belfast, but
the beggary of Drogheda fully came up to the travellers' descriptions.
They were of every possible variety. At the first turn the coach made in
the town, we were very near running over a blind man, who knelt in the
liquid mud of the gutter (the calves of his legs quite covered by the
pool, and only his heels appearing above), and held up in his hands the
naked and footless stumps of a boy's legs. The child sat in a wooden box,
with his back against the man's breast, and ate away very unconcernedly
at a loaf of bread, while the blind exhibitor turned his face up to the
sky, and, waving the stumps slightly from side to side, kept up a
vociferation for charity that was heard above all the turmoil of the
market place. When we stopped to change horses, the entire population, as
deep as they could stand, at least with any chance of being heard, held
out their hands, and in every conceivable tone and mode of arresting the
attention, implored charity. The sight was awful: old age in shapes so
hideous, I should think the most horrible nightmare never had conceived.
The rain poured down upon their tangled and uncovered heads, seaming,
with its cleansing torrents, faces so hollow, so degraded in expression,
and, withal, so clotted with filth and neglect, that they seemed like
features of which the very owners had long lost, not only care, but
consciousness and remembrance; as if, in the horrors of want and idiotcy,
they had anticipated the corrupting apathy of the grave, and abandoned
every thing except the hunger which gnawed them into memory of existence.
The feeble blows and palsied fighting of these hag-like spectres for the
pence thrown to them from the coach, and the howling, harsh, and
unnatural voices in which they imprecated curses on each other in the
fury of the struggle, have left a remembrance in my mind, which deepens
immeasurably my fancied _nadir_ of human abandonment and degradation.
God's image so blasted, so defiled, so sunk below the beasts that perish,
I would not have believed was to be found in the same world with _hope_."
But we, and our readers too, have probably had enough of Mr Willis's
"Pencillings by the Way" in Ireland--pencillings which would seem to have
been sketched with a material to which he is apparently very partial,
namely, dirt. And now, in return for the favour which this gentleman and
his coadjutor have conferred upon us, by their exertions to enable us to
improve our acquaintance with ourselves, we shall communicate our own
opinion of them, and hope they will be equally benefited by the
knowledge. We think, then, that they are a pair of gentlemen who must
have a wonderfully good opinion of themselves, and that not altogether
without reason, inasmuch as they possess in common one quality, which
shall be nameless, but in which not even we, natives of the Emerald Isle
as we are, can pretend to compete with them. We do not think that there
are any two Irishmen living, who would travel into a foreign country to
represent its scenery like the one, or sketch the manners and
characteristics of its inhabitants like the other, and expect that they
should be rewarded by the purchase of their works by that people or in
that country. Mr Bartlett is but an indifferent artist, unacquainted even
with some of the rudiments of his art, who has acquired the trade-knack
of making pretty pictures by imitating the works of others, and by a
total disregard of the real features of the scenes which he undertakes to
depict. Mr Willis is a more accomplished sketcher in his line; and his
delineations might be of value, if his conceited ambition to produce
effect did not continually mar whatever intrinsic worth they might
otherwise possess; but as it is, he is little better than a pert and
flippant caricaturist. Neither one nor the other of these gentlemen, in
short, would seem qualified for the task which they have so daringly
undertaken; and we think it would have been well, if, before they
resolved upon going through with it, they had been mindful of the Eastern
proverb, "A lie, though it promise good, will do thee harm, and truth
will do thee good at the last." Applying this to ourselves as critics, we
feel in conclusion bound to acknowledge that the prints in this work,
considered as engravings, are deserving of the highest praise.