There is no need to particularise the chairs and tables any further, nor

to say what sort of conversation and claret we had; nor to set down the

dishes served at dinner. If an Irish gentleman does not give you a more

hearty welcome than an Englishman, at least he has a more hearty manner

of welcoming you; and while the latter reserves his fun and humour (if

he possess those qualities) for his particular friends, the former is

ready to laugh and talk his best with all the world, and give way

entirely to his mood. And it would be a good opportunity here for a man

who is clever at philosophising to expound various theories upon the

modes of hospitality practised in various parts of Europe. In a couple

of hours’ talk, an Englishman will give you his notions on trade,

politics, the crops: the last run with the hounds, or the weather: it

requires a long sitting, and a bottle of wine at the least, to induce

him to laugh cordially, or to speak unreservedly; and if you joke with

him before you know him, he will assuredly set you down as a low

impertinent fellow. In two hours, and over a pipe, a German will be

quite ready to let loose the easy floodgates of his sentiment, and

confide to you many of the secrets of his soft heart. In two hours a

Frenchman will say a hundred and twenty smart, witty, brilliant, false

things, and will care for you as much then as he would if you saw him

every day for twenty years--that is, not one single straw; and in two

hours an Irishman will have allowed his jovial humour to unbutton, and

gambolled and frolicked to his heart’s content. Which of these, putting

_Monsieur_ out of the question, will stand by his friend with the most

constancy, and maintain his steady wish to serve him? That is a question

which the Englishman (and I think with a little of his ordinary cool

assumption) is disposed to decide in his own favour; but it is clear

that for a stranger the Irish ways are the pleasantest, for here he is

at once made happy and at home, or at ease rather; for home is a strong

word, and implies much more than any stranger can expect, or even desire

to claim.

Nothing could be more delightful to witness than the evident affection

which the children bore to one another and to their parents, and the

cheerfulness and happiness of their family parties. The father of one

lad went with a party of his friends and family on a pleasure party, in

a handsome coach-and-four. The little fellow sate on the coach-box and

played with the whip very wistfully for some time: the sun was shining,

the horses came out in bright harness, with glistening coats; one of the

girls brought a geranium to stick in papa’s button-hole, who was to

drive. But although there was room in the coach, and though papa said he

should go if he liked, and though the lad longed to go--as who

wouldn’t--he jumped off the box and said he would not go: mamma would

like him to stop at home and keep his sister company; and so down he

went like a hero. Does this story appear trivial to any one who reads

this? If so, he is a pompous fellow, whose opinion is not worth the

having; or he has no children of his own; or he has forgotten the day

when he was a child himself; or he has never repented of the surly

selfishness with which he treated brothers and sisters, after the habit

of young English gentlemen.

‘That’s a list that uncle keeps of his children,’ said the same young

fellow, seeing his uncle reading a paper; and to understand this joke,

it must be remembered that the children of the gentleman called uncle

came into the breakfast-room by half-dozens. ‘That’s a _rum_ fellow,’

said the eldest of these latter to me, as his father went out of the

room, evidently thinking his papa was the greatest wit and wonder in the

whole world. And a great merit, as it appeared to me, on the part of

these worthy parents was, that they consented not only to make, but to

take jokes from their young ones; nor was the parental authority in the

least weakened by this kind familiar intercourse.

A word with regard to the ladies so far. Those I have seen appear to the

full as well educated and refined, and far more frank and cordial, than

the generality of the fair creatures on the other side of the Channel. I

have not heard anything about poetry, to be sure, and in only one house

have seen an album; but I have heard some capital music, of an excellent

family sort--that sort which is used, namely, to set young people

dancing, which they have done merrily for some nights. In respect of

drinking, among the gentry, teetotalism does not, thank Heaven! as yet

appear to prevail; but although the claret has been invariably good,

there has been no improper use of it[22]. Let all English be recommended

to be very careful of whisky, which experience teaches to be a very

deleterious drink. Natives say that it is wholesome, and may be

sometimes seen to use it with impunity; but the whisky-fever is

naturally more fatal to strangers than inhabitants of the country; and

whereas an Irishman will sometimes imbibe a half-dozen tumblers of the

poison, two glasses will often be found sufficient to cause headaches,

heartburns, and fevers to a person newly arrived in the country. The

said whisky is always to be had for the asking, but is not produced at

the bettermost sort of tables.

Before setting out on our second day’s journey, we had time to accompany

the well-pleased owner of H---- town over some of his fields and

out-premises. Nor can there be a pleasanter sight to owner or stranger.

Mr. P---- farms four hundred acres of land about his house; and employs

on this estate no less than a hundred and ten persons. He says there is

full work for every one of them; and to see the elaborate state of

cultivation in which the land was, it is easy to understand how such an

agricultural regiment were employed. The estate is like a well-ordered

garden--we walked into a huge field of potatoes, and the landlord made

us remark that there was not a single weed between the furrows; and the

whole formed a vast flower-bed of a score of acres. Every bit of land up

to the hedge-side was fertilised and full of produce: the space left for

the plough having afterwards been gone over, and yielding its fullest

proportion of ‘fruit.’ In a turnip-field were a score or more of women

and children, who were marching through the ridges, removing the young

plants where two or three had grown together, and leaving only the most

healthy. Every individual root in the field was thus the object of

culture; and the owner said that this extreme cultivation answered his

purpose, and that the employment of all these hands (the women and

children earn 6d. and 8d. a day all the year round), which gained him

some reputation as a philanthropist, brought him profit as a farmer too;

for his crops were the best that land could produce. He has further the

advantage of a large stock for manure, and does everything for the land

which art can do.

Here we saw several experiments in manuring. An acre of turnips prepared

with bone-dust; another with ‘Murray’s Composition,’ whereof I do not

pretend to know the ingredients; another with a new manure called guano.

As far as turnips and a first year’s crop went, the guano carried the

day. The plants on the guano acre looked to be three weeks in advance of

their neighbours, and were extremely plentiful and healthy. I went to

see this field two months after the above passage was written: the guano

acre still kept the lead; the bone-dust ran guano very hard; and

composition was clearly distanced.

Behind the house is a fine village of corn and hay ricks, and a street

of outbuildings, where all the work of the farm is prepared. Here were

numerous people coming with pails for buttermilk, which the good-natured

landlord made over to them. A score of men or more were busied about the

place; some at a grindstone, others at a forge--other fellows busied in

the cart-houses and stables, all of which were as neatly kept as in the

best farm in England. A little farther on was a flower-garden, a

kitchen-garden, a hothouse just building, a kennel of fine pointers and

setters;--indeed a noble feature of country neatness, thrift, and

plenty.

We went into the cottages and gardens of several of Mr. P----‘s

labourers, which were all so neat, that I could not help fancying they

were pet cottages erected under the landlord’s own superintendence, and

ornamented to his order. But he declared that it was not so; that the

only benefit his labourers got from him was constant work, and a house

rent-free; and that the neatness of the gardens and dwellings was of

their own doing. By making them a present of the house, he said, he made

them a present of the pig and live stock, with which almost every Irish

cotter pays his rent, so that each workman could have a bit of meat for

his support;--would that all labourers in the empire had as much! With

regard to the neatness of the houses, the best way to ensure this, he

said, was for the master constantly to visit them--to awaken as much

emulation as he could amongst the cottagers, so that each should make

his place as good as his neighbour’s--and to take them good-humouredly

to task if they failed in the requisite care.

And so this pleasant day’s visit ended. A more practical person would

have seen, no doubt, and understood much more than a mere citizen could,

whose pursuits have been very different from those noble and useful ones

here spoken of. But a man has no call to be a judge of turnips or live

stock, in order to admire such an establishment as this, and heartily to

appreciate the excellence of it. There are some happy organisations in

the world which possess the great virtue of _prosperity_. It implies

cheerfulness, simplicity, shrewdness, perseverance, honesty, good

health. See how, before the good-humoured resolution of such characters,

ill-luck gives way, and fortune assumes their own smiling complexion!

Such men grow rich without driving a single hard bargain; their

condition being to make others prosper along with themselves. Thus, his

very charity, another informant tells me, is one of the causes of my

host’s good fortune. He might have three pounds a year from each of

forty cottages, but instead prefers a hundred healthy workmen; or he

might have a fourth of the number of workmen, and a farm yielding a

produce proportionately less; but instead of saving the money of their

wages, prefers a farm the produce of which, as I have heard from a

gentleman whom I take to be good authority, is unequalled elsewhere.

Besides the cottages, we visited a pretty school, where children of an

exceeding smallness were at their work,--the children of the Catholic

peasantry. The few Protestants of the district do not attend the

national school, nor learn their alphabet or their multiplication table

in company with their little Roman Catholic brethren. The clergyman, who

lives hard by the gate of H---- town, in his communication with his

parishioners cannot fail to see how much misery is relieved and how much

good is done by his neighbour; but though the two gentlemen are on good

terms, the clergyman will not break bread with his Catholic

fellow-Christian. There can be no harm, I hope, in mentioning this fact,

as it is rather a public than a private matter; and, unfortunately, it

is only a stranger that is surprised by such a circumstance, which is

quite familiar to residents of the country. There are Catholic inns and

Protestant inns in the towns; Catholic coaches and Protestant coaches on

the roads; nay, in the North, I have since heard of a High Church coach

and a Low Church coach adopted by travelling Christians of either party.

[Illustration]

CHAPTER III

FROM CARLOW TO WATERFORD

The next morning being fixed for the commencement of our journey towards

Waterford, a carriage made its appearance in due time before the

hall-door: an amateur stage-coach, with four fine horses, that were to

carry us to Cork. The crew of the ‘drag,’ for the present, consisted of

two young ladies, and two who will not be old, please Heaven! for these

thirty years; three gentlemen, whose collected weights might amount to

fifty-four stone; and one of smaller proportions, being as yet only

twelve years old: to these were added a couple of grooms and a

lady’s-maid. Subsequently we took in a dozen or so more passengers, who

did not seem in the slightest degree to inconvenience the coach or the

horses; and thus was formed a tolerably numerous and merry party. The

governor took the reins, with his geranium in his button-hole, and the

place on the box was quarrelled for without ceasing, and taken by turns.

Our day’s journey lay through a country more picturesque, though by no

means so prosperous and well-cultivated as the district through which we

had passed on our drive from Dublin. This trip carried us through the

county of Carlow and the town of that name: a wretched place enough,

with a fine court-house, and a couple of fine churches; the Protestant

church, a noble structure; and the Catholic cathedral, said to be built

after some Continental model. The Catholics point to the structure with

considerable pride: it was the first, I believe, of the many handsome

cathedrals for their worship which have been built of late years in

this country by the noble contributions of the poor man’s penny, and by

the untiring energies and sacrifices of the clergy. Bishop Doyle, the

founder of the church, has the place of honour within it; nor, perhaps,

did any Christian pastor ever merit the affection of his flock more than

that great and high-minded man. He was the best champion the Catholic

Church and cause ever had in Ireland; in learning, and admirable

kindness and virtue, the best example to the clergy of his religion: and

if the country is now filled with schools, where the humblest peasant in

it can have the benefit of a liberal and wholesome education, it owes

this great boon mainly to his noble exertions, and to the spirit which

they awakened.

As for the architecture of the cathedral, I do not fancy a professional

man would find much to praise in it: it seems to me overloaded with

ornaments, nor were its innumerable spires and pinnacles the more

pleasing to the eye because some of them were off the perpendicular. The

interior is quite plain, not to say bare and unfinished. Many of the

chapels in the country that I have since seen are in a similar

condition; for when the walls are once raised, the enthusiasm of the

subscribers to the building seems somewhat characteristically to grow

cool, and you enter at a porch that would suit a palace, with an

interior scarcely more decorated than a barn. A wide large floor, some

confession-boxes against the blank walls here and there, with some

humble pictures at the ‘stations,’ and the statue, under a mean canopy

of red woollen stuff, were the chief furniture of the cathedral.

The severe homely features of the good bishop were not very favourable

subjects for Mr. Hogan’s chisel; but a figure of prostrate, weeping

Ireland, kneeling by the prelate’s side, and for whom he is imploring

protection, has much beauty. In the chapels of Dublin and Cork some of

this artist’s works may be seen, and his countrymen are exceedingly

proud of him.

Connected with the Catholic cathedral is a large tumbledown-looking

divinity college: there are upwards of a hundred students here, and the

college is licensed to give degrees in arts as well as divinity; at

least so the officer of the church said, as he showed us the place

through the bars of the sacristy-windows, in which apartment may be seen

sundry crosses, a pastoral letter of Dr. Doyle, and a number of

ecclesiastical vestments formed of laces, poplins, and velvets,

handsomely laced with gold. There is a convent by the side of the

cathedral, and, of course, a parcel of beggars all about, and indeed all

over the town, profuse in their prayers and invocations of the Lord, and

whining flatteries of the persons whom they address. One wretched old

tottering hag began whining the Lord’s Prayer as a proof of her

sincerity, and blundered in the very midst of it, and left us

thoroughly disgusted after the very first sentence.

It was market-day in the town, which is tolerably full of poor-looking

shops, the streets being thronged with donkey-carts, and people eager to

barter their small wares. Here and there were picture-stalls, with huge

hideous coloured engravings of the Saints; and indeed the objects of

barter upon the banks of the clear bright river Barrow, seemed scarcely

to be of more value than the articles which change hands, as one reads

of, in a town of African huts and traders on the banks of the Quarra.

Perhaps the very bustle and cheerfulness of the people served only, to a

Londoner’s eyes, to make it look the more miserable. It seems as if they

had no _right_ to be eager about such a parcel of wretched rags and

trifles as were exposed to sale.

There are some old towers of a castle here, looking finely from the

river; and near the town is a grand modern residence belonging to

Colonel Bruen, with an oak-park on one side of the road, and a deer-park

on the other. These retainers of the Colonel’s lay, in their rushy green

enclosures, in great numbers and seemingly in flourishing condition.

The road from Carlow to Leighlin Bridge is exceedingly beautiful: noble

purple hills rising on either side, and the broad silver Barrow flowing

through rich meadows of that astonishing verdure which is only to be

seen in this country. Here and there was a country-house, or a tall mill

by a stream-side: but the latter buildings were for the most part empty,

the gaunt windows gaping without glass, and their great wheels idle.

Leighlin Bridge, lying up and down a hill by the river, contains a

considerable number of pompous-looking warehouses, that looked for the

most part to be doing no more business than the mills on the Carlow

road, but stood by the roadside staring at the coach, as it were, and

basking in the sun, swaggering, idle, insolvent, and out-at-elbows.

There are one or two very pretty, modest, comfortable-looking

country-places about Leighlin Bridge, and on the road thence to a

miserable village called the Royal Oak, a beggarly sort of bustling

place.

Here stands a dilapidated hotel and posting-house: and indeed on every

road, as yet, I have been astonished at the great movement and

stir;--the old coaches being invariably crammed, cars jingling about

equally full, and no want of gentlemen’s carriages to exercise the

horses of the Royal Oak and similar establishments. In the time of the

rebellion, the landlord of this Royal Oak, a great character in those

parts, was a fierce United Irishman. One day it happened that Sir John

Anderson came to the inn, and was eager for horses on. The landlord,

who knew Sir John to be a Tory, vowed and swore he had no horses; that

the judges had the last going to Kilkenny; that the yeomanry had carried

off the best of them; that he could not give a horse for love or money.

‘Poor Lord Edward!’ said Sir John, sinking down in a chair, and clasping

his hands, ‘my poor dear misguided friend, and must you die for the loss

of a few hours and the want of a pair of horses?’

‘Lord _What_?’ says the landlord.

‘Lord Edward Fitzgerald,’ replied Sir John. ‘The Government has seized

his papers, and got scent of his hiding-place; if I can’t get to him

before two hours, Sirr will have him.’

‘My dear Sir John,’ cried the landlord, ‘it’s not two horses but it’s

eight I’ll give you, and may the judges go hang for me! Here, Larry!

Tim! First and second pair for Sir John Anderson; and long life to you,

Sir John, and the Lord reward you for your good deed this day.’

Sir John, my informant told me, had invented this predicament of Lord

Edward’s in order to get the horses; and by way of corroborating the

whole story, pointed out an old chaise which stood at the inn-door with

its window broken, a great crevice in the panel, some little wretches

crawling underneath the wheels, and two huge blackguards lolling against

the pole,--‘and that,’ says he, ‘is no doubt the very postchaise Sir

John Anderson had.’ It certainly looked ancient enough.

Of course, as we stopped for a moment in the place, troops of slatternly

ruffianly-looking fellows assembled round the carriage, dirty heads

peeped out of all the dirty windows, beggars came forward with a joke

and a prayer, and troops of children raised their shouts and halloos. I

confess, with regard to the beggars, that I have never yet had the

slightest sentiment of compassion for the very oldest or dirtiest of

them, or been inclined to give them a penny: they come crawling round

you with lying prayers and loathsome compliments, that make the stomach

turn; they do not even disguise that they are lies; for, refuse them,

and the wretches turn off with a laugh and a joke, a miserable grinning

cynicism that creates distrust and indifference, and must be, one would

think, the very best way to close the purse, not to open it, for objects

so unworthy.

How do all these people live? one can’t help wondering;--these

multifarious vagabonds, without work or workhouse, or means of

subsistence? The Irish Poor Law Report says that there are twelve

hundred thousand people in Ireland--a sixth of the population--who have

no means of livelihood but charity, and whom the State, or individual

members of it, must maintain. How _can_ the State support such an

enormous burthen; or the twelve hundred thousand be supported? What a

strange history it would be, could one but get it true,--that of the

manner in which a score of these beggars have maintained themselves for

a fortnight past!

Soon after quitting the Royal Oak our road branches off to the

hospitable house where our party, consisting of a dozen persons, was to

be housed and fed for the night. Fancy the look which an English

gentleman of moderate means would assume, at being called on to receive

such a company! A pretty road of a couple of miles, thickly grown with

ash and oak trees, under which the hats of coach-passengers suffered

some danger, leads to the house of D----. A young son of the house, on a

white pony, was on the look-out, and great cheering and shouting took

place among the young people as we came in sight.

Trotting away by the carriage-side, he brought us through a gate with a

pretty avenue of trees leading to the pleasure-grounds of the house--a

handsome building commanding noble views of river, mountains, and

plantations. Our entertainer only rents the place; so I may say, without

any imputation against him, that the house was by no means so handsome

within as without,--not that the want of finish in the interior made our

party the less merry, or the host’s entertainment less hearty and

cordial.

The gentleman who built and owns the house, like many other proprietors

in Ireland, found his mansion too expensive for his means, and has

relinquished it. I asked what his income might be, and no wonder that he

was compelled to resign his house; which a man with four times the

income in England would scarcely venture to inhabit. There were numerous

sitting-rooms below; a large suite of rooms above, in which our large

party, with their servants, disappeared without any seeming

inconvenience, and which already accommodated a family of at least a

dozen persons and a numerous train of domestics. There was a great

courtyard, surrounded by capital offices, with stabling and coach-houses

sufficient for a half-dozen of country gentlemen. An English squire of

ten thousand a year might live in such a place--the original owner, I am

told, had not many more hundreds.

Our host has wisely turned the chief part of the pleasure-ground round

the house into a farm; nor did the land look a bit the worse, as I

thought, for having rich crops of potatoes growing in place of grass,

and fine plots of waving wheat and barley. The care, skill, and neatness

everywhere exhibited, and the immense luxuriance of the crops, could not

fail to strike even a cockney; and one of our party, a very well-known

practical farmer, told me that there was at least five hundred pounds’

worth of produce upon the little estate of some sixty acres, of which

only five-and-twenty were under the plough.

As at H---- town, on the previous day, several men and women appeared

sauntering in the grounds, and as the master came up asked for work, or

sixpence, or told a story of want. There are lodge-gates at both ends of

the demesne; but it appears the good-natured practice of the country

admits a beggar as well as any other visitor. To a couple our landlord

gave money, to another a little job of work; another he sent roughly out

of the premises: and I could judge thus what a continual tax upon the

Irish gentleman these travelling paupers must be, of whom his ground is

never free.

[Illustration]

There, loitering about the stables and outhouses, were several people

who seemed to have acquired a sort of right to be there: women and

children who had a claim upon the buttermilk; men who did an odd job now

and then; loose hangers-on of the family: and in the lodging-houses and

inns I have entered, the same sort of ragged vassals are to be found; in

a house however poor, you are sure to see some poorer dependant who is

a stranger, taking a meal of potatoes in the kitchen; a Tim or Mike

loitering hard by, ready to run on a message, or carry a bag. This is

written, for instance, at a lodging over a shop in Cork. There sits in

the shop a poor old fellow quite past work, but who totters up and down

stairs to the lodgers, and does what little he can for his easily-won

bread. There is another fellow outside who is sure to make his bow to

anybody issuing from the lodging, and ask if his honour wants an errand

done? Neither class of such dependants exist with us. What housekeeper

in London is there will feed an old man of seventy that’s good for

nothing, or encourage such a disreputable hanger-on as yonder shuffling,

smiling cad?

Nor did Mr. M----‘s ‘irregulars’ disappear with the day; for when,

after a great deal of merriment, and kind happy dancing and romping of

young people, the fineness of the night suggested the propriety of

smoking a certain cigar (it is never more acceptable than at that

season), the young squire voted that we should adjourn to the stables

for the purpose, where accordingly the cigars were discussed. There were

still the inevitable half-dozen hangers-on: one came grinning with a

lantern, all nature being in universal blackness except his grinning

face; another ran obsequiously to the stables to show a favourite

mare--I think it was a mare--though it may have been a mule, and your

humble servant not much the wiser. The cloths were taken off; the

fellows with the candles crowded about; and the young squire bade me

admire the beauty of her fore-leg, which I did with the greatest

possible gravity. ‘Did you ever see such a fore-leg as that in your

life?’ says the young squire, and further discoursed upon the horse’s

points, the amateur grooms joining in chorus.

There was another young squire of our party, a pleasant gentlemanlike

young fellow, who danced as prettily as any Frenchman, and who had

ridden over from a neighbouring house: as I went to bed, the two lads

were arguing whether young Squire B---- should go home or stay at D----

that night. There was a bed for him--there was a bed for everybody, it

seemed, and a kind welcome too. How different was all this to the ways

of a severe English house!

Next morning the whole of our merry party assembled round a long, jovial

breakfast-table, stored with all sorts of good things; and the biggest

and jovialest man of all, who had just come in fresh from a walk in the

fields, and vowed that he was as hungry as a hunter, and was cutting

some slices out of an inviting ham on the side-table, suddenly let fall

his knife and fork with dismay. ‘Sure, John, don’t you know it’s

Friday?’ cried a lady from the table; and back John came with a most

lugubrious queer look on his jolly face, and fell to work upon bread and

butter, as resigned as possible, amidst no small laughter, as may be

well imagined. On this I was bound, as a Protestant, to eat a large

slice of pork, and discharged that duty nobly, and with much

self-sacrifice.

The famous ‘drag’ which had brought us so far seemed to be as hospitable

and elastic as the house which we now left, for the coach accommodated,

inside and out, a considerable party from the house, and we took our

road leisurely, in a cloudless, scorching day, towards Waterford. The

first place we passed through was the little town of Gowran, near which

is a grand, well-ordered park, belonging to Lord Clifden, and where his

mother resides, with whose beautiful face, in Lawrence’s pictures, every

reader must be familiar. The kind English lady has done the greatest

good in the neighbourhood, it is said, and the little town bears marks

of her beneficence, in its neatness, prettiness, and order. Close by the

church there are the ruins of a fine old abbey here, and a still finer

one a few miles on, at Thomastown, most picturesquely situated amidst

trees and meadow, on the river Nore. The place within, however, is dirty

and ruinous--the same wretched suburbs, the same squalid congregation of

beggarly loungers, that are to be seen elsewhere. The monastic ruin is

very fine, and the road hence to Thomastown rich with varied cultivation

and beautiful verdure, pretty gentlemen’s mansions shining among the

trees on either side of the way. There was one place along this rich

tract that looked very strange and ghastly--a huge old pair of gate

pillars, flanked by a ruinous lodge, and a wide road winding for a mile

up a hill. There had been a park once, but all the trees were gone;

thistles were growing in the yellow sickly land, and rank thin grass on

the road. Far away you saw in this desolate tract a ruin of a house:

many a butt of claret has been emptied there, no doubt, and many a merry

party come out with hound and horn. But what strikes the Englishman with

wonder is not so much, perhaps, that an owner of the place should have

been ruined and a spendthrift, as that the land should lie there useless

ever since. If one is not successful with us another man will be, or

another will try, at least. Here lies useless a great capital of

hundreds of acres of land; barren, where the commonest effort might make

it productive, and looking as if for a quarter of a century past no soul

ever looked or cared for it. You might travel five hundred miles through

England and not see such a spectacle.

A short distance from Thomastown is another abbey; and presently, after

passing through the village of Knocktopher, we came to a posting-place

called Ballyhale, of the _moral_ aspect of which the following scrap

taken in the place will give a notion.

A dirty, old, contented, decrepit idler was lolling in the sun at a

shop-door, and hundreds of the population of the dirty, old, decrepit,

contented place were employed in the like way. A dozen of boys were

playing at pitch-and-toss; other male and female beggars were sitting on

a wall looking into a stream; scores of ragamuffins, of course, round

the carriage; and beggars galore at the door of the little alehouse or

hotel. A gentleman’s carriage changed horses as we were baiting here. It

was a rich sight to see the cattle, and the way of starting them:

‘Halloo! Yoop, Hoop!’ a dozen of ragged ostlers and amateurs running by

the side of the miserable old horses, the postillion shrieking, yelling,

and belabouring them with his whip. Down goes one horse among the

new-laid stones; the postillion has him up with a cut of the whip and a

curse, and takes advantage of the start caused by the stumble to get the

brute into a gallop, and to go down the hill. ‘I know it for a fact,’ a

gentleman of our party says, ‘that no horses _ever_ got out of Ballyhale

without an accident of some kind.’

[Illustration]

‘Will your honour like to come and see a big pig?’ here asked a man of

the above gentleman, well known as a great farmer and breeder. We all

went to see the big pig, not very fat as yet, but, upon my word, it is

as big as a pony. The country round is, it appears, famous for the

breeding of such, especially a district called the Welsh mountains,

through which we had to pass on our road to Waterford.

This is a curious country to see, and has curious inhabitants: for

twenty miles there is no gentleman’s house: gentlemen dare not live

there. The place was originally tenanted by a clan of Welshes; hence its

name; and they maintain themselves in their occupancy of the farms in

Tipperary fashion, by simply putting a ball into the body of any man who

would come to take a farm over any one of them. Some of the crops in the

fields of the Welsh country seemed very good, and the fields well

tilled; but it is common to see, by the side of one field that is well

cultivated, another that is absolutely barren; and the whole tract is

extremely wretched. Appropriate histories and reminiscences accompany

the traveller; at a chapel near Mullinavat is the spot where sixteen

policemen were murdered in the tithe campaign; farther on you come to a

limekiln, where the guard of a mail-coach was seized and _roasted

alive_. I saw here the first hedge-school I have seen; a crowd of

half-savage-looking lads and girls looked up from their studies in the

ditch, their college or lecture-room being in a mud cabin hard by.

And likewise, in the midst of this wild tract, a fellow met us who was

trudging the road with a fish-basket over his shoulder, and who stopped

the coach, hailing two of the gentlemen in it by name, both of whom

seemed to be much amused by his humour. He was a handsome rogue, a

poacher, or salmon-taker, by profession, and presently poured out such a

flood of oaths, and made such a monstrous display of grinning wit and

blackguardism, as I have never heard equalled by the best Billingsgate

practitioner, and as it would be more than useless to attempt to

describe. Blessings, jokes, and curses trolled off the rascal’s lips

with a volubility which caused his Irish audience to shout with

laughter, but which were quite beyond a cockney. It was a humour so

purely national as to be understood by none but natives, I should think.

I recollect the same feeling of perplexity while sitting, the only

Englishman, in a company of jocular Scotchmen. They bandied about puns,

jokes, imitations, and applauded with shrieks of laughter what, I

confess, appeared to me the most abominable dulness--nor was the

salmon-taker’s jocularity any better. I think it rather served to

frighten than to amuse; and I am not sure but that I looked out for a

band of jocular cut-throats of his sort, to come up at a given guffaw,

and playfully rob us all round. However, he went away quite peaceably,

calling down for the party the benediction of a great number of saints,

who must have been somewhat ashamed to be addressed by such a rascal.

Presently we caught sight of the valley through which the Suire flows,

and descended the hill towards it, and went over the thundering old

wooden bridge to Waterford.

CHAPTER IV

FROM WATERFORD TO CORK

The view of the town, from the bridge and the heights above it, is very

imposing; as is the river both ways. Very large vessels sail up almost

to the doors of the houses, and the quays are flanked by tall red

warehouses, that look at a little distance as if a world of business

might be doing within them. But as you get into the place, not a soul is

there to greet you except the usual society of beggars, and a sailor or

two, or a green-coated policeman sauntering down the broad pavement. We

drove up to the Coach Inn, a huge, handsome, dirty building, of which

the discomforts have been pathetically described elsewhere. The landlord

is a gentleman and considerable horse-proprietor, and though a perfectly

well-bred, active, and intelligent man, far too much of a gentleman to

play the host well: at least as an Englishman understands that

character.

Opposite the town is a tower of questionable antiquity and undeniable

ugliness; for though the inscription says it was built in the year one

thousand and something, the same document adds that it was rebuilt in

1819--to either of which dates the traveller is thus welcomed. The quays

stretch for a considerable distance along the river, poor

patched-windowed, mouldy-looking shops forming the basement-story of

most of the houses. We went into one, a jeweller’s, to make a

purchase--it might have been of a gold watch for anything the owner

knew; but he was talking with a friend in his back-parlour, gave us a

look as we entered, allowed us to stand some minutes in the empty shop,

and at length to walk out without being served. In another shop a boy

was lolling behind a counter, but could not say whether the articles we

wanted were to be had; turned out a heap of drawers, and could not find

them; and finally went for the master, who could not come. True

commercial independence, and an easy way enough of life.

In one of the streets leading from the quay is a large, dingy Catholic

chapel, of some pretensions within; but, as usual, there had been a

failure for want of money, and the front of the chapel was unfinished,

presenting the butt-end of a portico, and walls on which the stone

coating was to be laid. But a much finer ornament to the church than any

of the questionable gewgaws which adorned the ceiling was the piety,

stern, simple, and unaffected, of the people within. Their whole soul

seemed to be in their prayers, as rich and poor knelt indifferently on

the flags. There is of course an Episcopal cathedral, well and neatly

kept, and a handsome Bishop’s palace: near it was a convent of nuns, and

a little chapel-bell clinking melodiously. I was prepared to fancy

something romantic of the place; but as we passed the convent gate, a

shoeless slattern of a maid opened the door--the most dirty and

unpoetical of housemaids.

Assizes were held in the town, and we ascended to the court-house

through a steep street, a sort of rag-fair, but more villainous and

miserable than any rag-fair in St. Giles’s: the houses and stock of the

Seven Dials look as if they belonged to capitalists when compared with

the scarecrow wretchedness of the goods here hung out for sale. Who

wanted to buy such things? I wondered. One would have thought that the

most part of the articles had passed the possibility of barter for

money, even out of the reach of the half-farthings coined of late. All

the street was lined with wretched hucksters and their merchandise of

gooseberries, green apples, children’s dirty cakes, cheap crockeries,

brushes, and tin-ware; among which objects the people were swarming

about busily. Before the court is a wide street, where a similar market

was held, with a vast number of donkey-carts urged hither and thither,

and great shrieking, chattering, and bustle. It is five hundred years

ago since a poet who accompanied Richard II. in his voyage hither spoke

of ‘_Watreforde ou moult vilaine et orde y sont la gente_.’ They don’t

seem to be much changed now, but remain faithful to their ancient

habits.

About the court-house swarms of beggars of course were collected, varied

by personages of a better sort: grey-coated farmers, and women with

their picturesque blue cloaks, who had trudged in from the country

probably. The court-house is as beggarly and ruinous as the rest of the

neighbourhood; smart-looking policemen kept order about it, and looked

very hard at me as I ventured to take a sketch.

The figures as I saw them were thus disposed. The man in the dock, the

policeman seated easily above him, the woman looking down from a

gallery. The man was accused of stealing a sack of wool, and, having no

counsel, made for himself as adroit a defence as any one of the

councillors (they are without robes or wigs here, by the way) could have

made for him. He had been seen examining a certain sack of wool in a

coffee-shop at Dungarvan, and next day was caught sight of in Waterford

Market, standing under an archway from the rain, with the sack by his

side.

[Illustration]

‘Wasn’t there twenty other people under the arch?’ said he to a witness,

a noble-looking beautiful girl--the girl was obliged to own there were.

‘Did you see me touch the wool, or stand nearer to it than a dozen of

the dacent people there?’ and the girl confessed she had not. ‘And this

it is, my lord,’ says he to the bench; ‘they attack me because I’m poor

and ragged, but they never think of charging the crime on a rich

farmer.’

But alas for the defence! another witness saw the prisoner with his legs

round the sack, and being about to charge him with the theft, the

prisoner fled into the arms of a policeman, to whom his first words

were, ‘I know nothing about the sack.’ So, as the sack had been stolen,

as he had been seen handling it four minutes before it was stolen, and

holding it for sale the day after, it was concluded that Patrick Malony

had stolen the sack, and he was accommodated with eighteen months

accordingly.

In another case we had a woman and her child on the table; and others

followed, in the judgment of which it was impossible not to admire the

extreme leniency, acuteness, and sensibility of the judge presiding,

Chief Justice Pennefather:--the man against whom all the Liberals in

Ireland, and every one else who has read his charge too, must be angry,

for the ferocity of his charge against a Belfast newspaper editor. It

seems as if no parties here will be dispassionate when they get to a

party question, and that natural kindness has no claim, when Whig and

Tory come into collision.

[Illustration]

The juryman is here placed on a table instead of a witness-box; nor was

there much further peculiarity to remark, except in the dirt of the

court, the absence of the barristerial wig and gown, and the great

coolness with which a fellow who seemed a sort of clerk, usher, and

Irish interpreter to the court, recommended a prisoner, who was making

rather a long defence, to be quiet. I asked him why the man might not

have his say. ‘Sure,’ says he, ‘he’s said all he has to say, and there’s

no use in any more.’ But there was no use in attempting to convince Mr.

Usher that the prisoner was best judge on this point; in fact the poor

devil shut his mouth at the admonition, and was found guilty with

perfect justice.

A considerable poorhouse has been erected at Waterford, but the beggars

of the place as yet prefer their liberty, and less certain means of

gaining support. We asked one who was calling down all the blessings of

all the saints and angels upon us, and telling a most piteous tale of

poverty, why she did not go to the poorhouse. The woman’s look at once

changed from a sentimental whine to a grin. ‘Dey owe two hundred pounds

at dat house,’ said she, ‘and faith, an honest woman can’t go dere;’

with which wonderful reason ought not the most squeamish to be content?

* * * * *

After describing, as accurately as words may, the features of a

landscape, and stating that such a mountain was to the left, and such a

river or town to the right, and putting down the situations and names of

the villages, and the bearings of the roads, it has no doubt struck the

reader of books of travels that the writer has not given him the

slightest idea of the country, and that he would have been just as wise

without perusing the letterpress landscape through which he has toiled.

It will be as well then, under such circumstances, to spare the public

any lengthened description of the road from Waterford to Dungarvan;

which was the road we took, followed by benedictions delivered gratis

from the beggar-hood of the former city. Not very far from it you see

the dark plantations of the magnificent domain of Curraghmore, and pass

through a country blue, hilly, and bare, except where gentlemen’s seats

appear with their ornaments of wood. Presently, after leaving Waterford,

we came to a certain town called Kilmacthomas, of which all the

information I have to give is, that it is situated upon a hill and

river, and that you may change horses there. The road was covered with

carts of seaweed, which the people were bringing for manure from the

shore some four miles distant; and beyond Kilmacthomas we beheld the

Cummeragh Mountains, ‘often named in maps the Nennavoulagh,’ either of

which names the reader may select at pleasure.

Thence we came to ‘Cushcam,’ at which village be it known that the

turnpike-man kept the drag a very long time waiting. ‘I think the fellow

must be writing a book,’ said the coachman, with a most severe look of

drollery at a cockney tourist, who tried, under the circumstances, to

blush, and not to laugh. I wish I could relate or remember half the mad

jokes that flew about among the jolly Irish crew on the top of the

coach, and which would have made a journey through the Desert jovial.

When the ‘pike-man had finished his composition (that of a

turnpike-ticket, which he had to fill), we drove on to Dungarvan; the

two parts of which town, separated by the river Colligan, have been

joined by a causeway three hundred yards along, and a bridge erected at

an enormous outlay by the Duke of Devonshire. In former times, before

his Grace spent his eighty thousand pounds upon the causeway, this wide

estuary was called ‘Dungarvan Prospect,’ because the ladies of the

country, walking over the river at low water, took off their shoes and

stockings (such as had them), and tucking up their clothes,

exhibited,--what I have never seen, and cannot, therefore, be expected

to describe. A large and handsome Catholic chapel, a square with some

pretensions to regularity of building, a very neat and comfortable inn,

and beggars and idlers still more numerous than at Waterford, were what

we had leisure to remark in half an hour’s stroll through the town.

Near the prettily situated village of Cappoquin is the Trappist house of

Mount Meilleraie, of which we could only see the pinnacles. The brethren

were presented some years since with a barren mountain, which they have

cultivated most successfully. They have among themselves workmen to

supply all their frugal wants, ghostly tailors and shoemakers, spiritual

gardeners and bakers, working in silence, and serving Heaven after

their way. If this reverend community, for fear of the opportunity of

sinful talk, choose to hold their tongues, the next thing will be to cut

them out altogether, and so render the danger impossible--if, being men

of education and intelligence, they incline to turn butchers and

cobblers, and smother their intellects by base and hard menial labour,

who knows but one day a sect may be more pious still, and rejecting even

butchery and bakery, as savouring too much of worldly convenience and

pride, take to a wild-beast life at once? Let us concede that suffering,

and mental and bodily debasement, are the things most agreeable to

Heaven, and there is no knowing where such piety may stop. I was very

glad we had not time to see the grovelling place; and as for seeing

shoes made or fields tilled by reverend amateurs, we can find cobblers

and ploughboys to do the work better.

By the way, the Quakers have set up in Ireland a sort of monkery of

their own. Not far from Carlow we met a couple of cars drawn by white

horses, and holding white Quakers and Quakeresses, in white hats,

clothes, shoes, with wild maniacal-looking faces, bumping along the

road. Let us hope that we may soon get a community of Fakeers and

howling Dervises into the country. It would be a refreshing thing to see

such ghostly men in one’s travels, standing at the corners of roads, and

praising the Lord by standing on one leg, or cutting and hacking

themselves with knives like the prophets of Baal. Is it not as pious for

a man to deprive himself of his leg as of his tongue, and to disfigure

his body with the gashes of a knife, as with the hideous white raiment

of the illuminated Quakers?

While these reflections were going on, the beautiful Blackwater river

suddenly opened before us, and driving along it for three miles through

some of the most beautiful, rich country ever seen, we came to Lismore.

Nothing can be certainly more magnificent than this drive. Parks and

rocks covered with the grandest foliage; rich handsome seats of

gentlemen in the midst of fair lawns, and beautiful bright plantations

and shrubberies; and at the end, the graceful spire of Lismore church,

the prettiest I have seen in, or, I think, out of Ireland. Nor in any

country that I have visited have I seen a view more noble--it is too

rich and peaceful to be what is called romantic, but lofty, large, and

_generous_, if the term may be used; the river and banks as fine as the

Rhine; the castle not as large, but as noble and picturesque as Warwick.

As you pass the bridge, the banks stretch away on either side in amazing

verdure, and the castle-walks remind one somewhat of the dear old

terrace of St. Germains, with its groves, and long grave avenues of

trees.

The salmon-fishery of the Blackwater is let, as I hear, for a thousand a

year. In the evening, however, we saw some gentlemen who are likely to

curtail the profits of the farmer of the fishery--a company of ragged

boys, to wit--whose occupation, it appears, is to poach. These young

fellows were all lolling over the bridge, as the moon rose rather

mistily, and pretended to be deeply enamoured of the view of the river.

They answered the questions of one of our party with the utmost

innocence and openness, and one would have supposed the lads were so

many Arcadians, but for the arrival of an old woman, who suddenly coming

up among them poured out, upon one and all, a volley of curses, both

deep and loud, saying that perdition would be their portion, and calling

them ‘shchamers’ at least a hundred times. Much to my wonder, the young

men did not reply to the voluble old lady for some time, who then told

us the cause of her anger. She had a son,--‘Look at him there, the

villain.’ The lad was standing, looking very unhappy. ‘His father,

that’s now dead, paid a fistful of money to bind him ‘prentice at

Dungarvan: but these shchamers followed him there; made him break his

indentures, and go poaching and thieving and shchaming with them.’ The

poor old woman shook her hands in the air, and shouted at the top of her

deep voice; there was something very touching in her grotesque sorrow,

nor did the lads make light of it at all, contenting themselves with a

surly growl, or an oath, if directly appealed to by the poor creature.

So, cursing and raging, the woman went away. The son, a lad of fourteen,

evidently the fag of the big bullies round about him, stood dismally

away from them, his head sunk down. I went up and asked him, ‘Was that

his mother?’ He said, ‘Yes.’ ‘Was she good and kind to him when he was

at home?’ He said, ‘Oh yes.’ ‘Why not come back to her?’ I asked him;

but he said ‘he couldn’t.’ Whereupon I took his arm, and tried to lead

him away by main force; but he said, ‘Thank you, sir, but I can’t go

back,’ and released his arm. We stood on the bridge some minutes longer,

looking at the view; but the boy, though he kept away from his comrades,

would not come. I wonder what they have done together, that the poor boy

is past going home? The place seemed to be so quiet and beautiful, and

far away from London, that I thought crime couldn’t have reached it; and

yet, here it lurks somewhere among six boys of sixteen, each with a

stain in his heart, and some black history to tell. The poor widow’s

yonder was the only family about which I had a chance of knowing

anything in this remote place; nay, in all Ireland; and, God help us,

hers was a sad lot!--A husband gone dead,--an only child gone to ruin.

It is awful to think that there are eight millions of stories to be

told in this island. Seven million nine hundred and ninety-nine thousand

nine hundred and ninety-eight more lives that I, and all brother

cockneys, know nothing about. Well, please God, they are not all like

this.

That day, I heard _another_ history. A little old disreputable man in

tatters, with a huge steeple of a hat, came shambling down the street,

one among the five hundred blackguards there. A fellow standing under

the sun portico (a sort of swaggering, chattering, cringing _touter_,

and master of ceremonies to the gutter) told us something with regard to

the old disreputable man. His son had been hanged the day before at

Clonmel, for one of the Tipperary murders. That blackguard in our eyes

instantly looked quite different from all other blackguards--I saw him

gesticulating at the corner of a street, and watched him with wonderful

interest.

The church with the handsome spire, that looks so graceful among the

trees, is a cathedral church, and one of the neatest-kept and prettiest

edifices I have seen in Ireland. In the old graveyard Protestants and

Catholics lie together--that is, not together; for each has a side of

the ground, where they sleep, and, so occupied, do not quarrel. The sun

was shining down upon the brilliant grass--and I don’t think the shadows

of the Protestant graves were any longer or shorter than those of the

Catholics. Is it the right or the left side of the graveyard which is

nearest heaven, I wonder? Look, the sun shines upon both alike, ‘and the

blue sky bends over all.’

Raleigh’s house is approached by a grave old avenue, and well-kept wall,

such as is rare in this country; and the court of the castle within has

the solid, comfortable, quiet look, equally rare. It is like one of our

colleges at Oxford: there is a side of the quadrangle with pretty

ivy-covered gables; another part of the square is more modern; and by

the main body of the castle is a small chapel exceedingly picturesque.

The interior is neat and in excellent order; but it was unluckily done

up some thirty years ago (as I imagine from the style), before our

architects had learned Gothic, and all the ornamental work is

consequently quite ugly and out of keeping. The church has probably been

arranged by the same hand. In the castle are some plainly furnished

chambers, one or two good pictures, and a couple of oriel windows, the

views from which up and down the river are exceedingly lovely. You hear

praises of the Duke of Devonshire as a landlord wherever you go among

his vast estates; it is a pity that, with such a noble residence as

this, and with such a wonderful country round about it, his Grace should

not inhabit it more.

Of the road from Lismore to Fermoy it does not behove me to say much,

for a pelting rain came on very soon after we quitted the former place,

and accompanied us almost without ceasing to Fermoy. Here we had a

glimpse of a bridge across the Blackwater, which we had skirted in our

journey from Lismore. Now enveloped in mist and cloud--now spanned by a

rainbow, at another time basking in sunshine, Nature attired the

charming prospect for us in a score of different ways; and it appeared

before us like a coquettish beauty who was trying what dress in her

wardrobe might most become her. At Fermoy we saw a vast barrack, and an

overgrown inn, where, however, good fare was provided; and thence

hastening came by Rathcormack, and Watergrass Hill, famous for the

residence of Father Prout, whom my friend, the Rev. Francis Sylvester,

has made immortal; from which descending we arrived at the beautiful

wooded village of Glanmire, with its mills and steeples, and streams,

and neat school-houses, and pleasant country residences. This brings us

down upon the superb stream which leads from the sea to Cork.

The view for three miles on both sides is magnificently beautiful. Fine

gardens, and parks, and villas cover the shore on each bank; the river

is full of brisk craft moving to the city or out to sea; and the city

finely ends the view, rising upon two hills on either side of the

stream. I do not know a town to which there is an entrance more

beautiful, commodious, and stately.

Passing by numberless handsome lodges, and, nearer the city, many

terraces in neat order, the road conducts us near a large tract of some

hundred acres which have been reclaimed from the sea, and are destined

to form a park and pleasure-ground for the citizens of Cork. In the

river, and up to the bridge, some hundreds of ships were lying; and a

fleet of steamboats opposite the handsome house of the St. George’s

Steam Packet Company. A church stands prettily on the hill above it,

surrounded by a number of new habitations very neat and white. On the

road is a handsome Roman Catholic chapel, or a chapel which will be

handsome so soon as the necessary funds are raised to complete it. But,

as at Waterford, the chapel has been commenced, and the money has

failed, and the fine portico which is to decorate it one day, as yet

only exists on the architect’s paper. St. Patrick’s Bridge, over which

we pass, is a pretty building; and Patrick Street, the main street of

the town, has an air of business and cheerfulness, and looks densely

thronged.

As the carriage drove up to those neat, comfortable, and extensive

lodgings which Mrs. MacO’Boy has to let, a magnificent mob was formed

round the vehicle, and we had an opportunity of at once making

acquaintance with some of the dirtiest rascally faces that all Ireland

presents. Besides these professional rogues and beggars, who make a

point to attend on all vehicles, everybody else seemed to stop too, to

see that wonder, a coach and four horses. People issued from their

shops, heads appeared at windows. I have seen the Queen pass in state in

London, and not bring together a crowd near so great as that which

assembled in the busiest street of the second city of the kingdom, just

to look at a green coach and four bay horses. Have they nothing else to

do?--or is it that they _will_ do nothing but stare, swagger, and be

idle in the streets?

CHAPTER V

CORK--THE AGRICULTURAL SHOW--FATHER MATHEW

A man has no need to be an agriculturalist in order to take a warm

interest in the success of the Irish Agricultural Society, and to see

what vast good may result from it to the country. The National Education

scheme--a noble and liberal one, at least as far as a stranger can see,

which might have united the Irish people, and brought peace into this

most distracted of all countries--failed unhappily of one of its

greatest ends. The Protestant clergy have always treated the plan with

bitter hostility: and I do believe, in withdrawing from it, have struck

the greatest blow to themselves as a body, and to their own influence in

the country, which has been dealt to them for many a year. Rich,

charitable, pious, well educated, to be found in every parish in

Ireland, had they chosen to fraternise with the people and the plan,

they might have directed the educational movement; they might have

attained the influence which is now given over entirely to the priest;

and when the present generation, educated in the National Schools, were

grown up to manhood, they might have had an interest in almost every man

in Ireland. Are they as pious, and more polished, and better educated

than their neighbours the priests? There is no doubt of it; and by

constant communion with the people they would have gained all the

benefits of the comparison, and advanced the interests of their religion

far more than now they can hope to do. Look at the National School:

throughout the country it is commonly by the chapel side--it is a

Catholic school, directed and fostered by the priest; and as no people

are more eager for learning, more apt to receive it, or more grateful

for kindness than the Irish, he gets all the gratitude of the scholars

who flock to the school, and all the future influence over them, which

naturally and justly comes to him. The Protestant wants to better the

condition of these people; he says that the woes of the country are

owing to its prevalent religion; and in order to carry his plans of

amelioration into effect, he obstinately refuses to hold communion with

those whom he is desirous to convert to what he believes are sounder

principles and purer doctrines. The clergyman will reply, that points of

principle prevented him: with this fatal doctrinal objection, it is not

of course the province of a layman to meddle; but this is clear, that

the parson might have had an influence over the country, and he would

not; that he might have rendered the Catholic population friendly to

him, and he would not; but, instead, has added one cause of estrangement

and hostility more to the many which already existed against him. This

is one of the attempts at union in Ireland, and one can’t but think with

the deepest regret and sorrow of its failure.

Mr. O’Connell and his friends set going another scheme for advancing the

prosperity of the country,--the notable project of home manufactures,

and of a coalition against foreign importation. This was a union

certainly, but a union of a different sort to that noble and peaceful

one which the National Education Board proposed. It was to punish

England, while it pretended to secure the independence of Ireland, by

shutting out our manufactures from the Irish markets; which were one day

or other, it was presumed, to be filled by native produce. Large bodies

of tradesmen and private persons in Dublin and other towns in Ireland

associated together, vowing to purchase no articles of ordinary

consumption or usage but what were manufactured in the country. This

bigoted old-world scheme of restriction--not much more liberal than

Swing’s crusade against the threshing-machines or the coalitions in

England against machinery--failed, as it deserved to do. For the benefit

of a few tradesmen, who might find their account in selling at dear

rates their clumsy and imperfect manufactures, it was found impossible

to tax a people that are already poor enough; nor did the party take

into account the cleverness of the merchants across sea, who were by no

means disposed to let go their Irish customers. The famous Irish frieze

uniform which was to distinguish these patriots, and which Mr. O’Connell

lauded so loudly and so simply, came over made at half-price from Leeds

and Glasgow, and was retailed as real Irish by many worthies who had

been first to join the union. You may still see shops here and there

with their pompous announcement of ‘Irish Manufactures’; but the scheme

is long gone to ruin--it could not stand against the vast force of

English and Scotch capital and machinery, any more than the Ulster

spinning-wheel against the huge factories and steam-engines which one

may see about Belfast.

The scheme of the Agricultural Society is a much more feasible one; and

if, please God, it can be carried out, likely to give not only

prosperity to the country, but union likewise in a great degree. As yet,

Protestants and Catholics concerned in it have worked well together; and

it is a blessing to see them meet upon _any_ ground without heartburning

and quarrelling. Last year, Mr. Purcell, who is well known in Ireland as

the principal mail-coach contractor for the country,--who himself

employs more workmen in Dublin than perhaps any other person there, and

has also more land under cultivation than most of the great landed

proprietors in the country,--wrote a letter to the newspapers, giving

his notions of the fallacy of the exclusive-dealing system, and pointing

out at the same time how he considered the country might be

benefited--by agricultural improvement, namely. He spoke of the

neglected state of the country, and its amazing natural fertility; and,

for the benefit of all, called upon the landlords and landholders to use

their interest and develop its vast agricultural resources. Manufactures

are at best but of slow growth, and demand not only time but capital;

meanwhile, until the habits of the people should grow to be such as to

render manufactures feasible, there was a great neglected treasure,

lying under their feet, which might be the source of prosperity to all.

He pointed out the superior methods of husbandry employed in Scotland

and England, and the great results obtained upon soils naturally much

poorer; and, taking the Highland Society for an example, the

establishment of which had done so much for the prosperity of Scotland,

he proposed the formation in Ireland of a similar association.

The letter made an extraordinary sensation throughout the country.

Noblemen and gentry of all sides took it up; and numbers of these wrote

to Mr. Purcell, and gave him their cordial adhesion to the plan. A

meeting was held, and the Society formed: subscriptions were set on

foot, headed by the Lord-Lieutenant (Fortescue) and the Duke of

Leinster, each with a donation of £200; and the trustees had soon £5000

at their disposal; with, besides, an annual revenue of £1000. The

subscribed capital is funded; and political subjects strictly excluded.

The Society has a show yearly in one of the principal towns of Ireland;

it corresponds with the various local agricultural associations

throughout the country; encourages the formation of new ones; and

distributes prizes and rewards. It has further in contemplation to

establish a large Agricultural School for farmers’ sons; and has formed

in Dublin an Agricultural Bazaar and Museum.

* * * * *

It was the first meeting of the Society which we were come to see at

Cork. Will it be able to carry its excellent intentions into effect?

Will the present enthusiasm of its founders and members continue? Will

one political party or another get the upper hand in it? One can’t help

thinking of these points with some anxiety--of the latter especially: as

yet, happily, the clergy of either side have kept aloof, and the union

seems pretty cordial and sincere.

There are in Cork, as no doubt in every town of Ireland sufficiently

considerable to support a plurality of hotels, some especially devoted

to the Conservative and Liberal parties. Two dinners were to be given _à

propos_ of the Agricultural Meeting; and in order to conciliate all

parties, it was determined that the Tory landlord should find the cheap

ten-shilling dinner for one thousand, the Whig landlord the genteel

guinea dinner for a few select hundreds.

I wish Mr. Cuff, of the Freemasons’ Tavern, could have been at Cork to

take a lesson from the latter gentleman; for he would have seen that

there are means of having not merely enough to eat, but enough of the

very best, for the sum of a guinea; that persons can have not only wine,

but good wine; and, if inclined (as some topers are on great occasions)

to pass to another bottle,--a second, a third, or a fifteenth bottle for

what I know, is very much at their service. It was a fine sight to see

Mr. MacDowall presiding over an ice-well, and extracting the bottles of

champagne. With what calmness he did it! How the corks popped, and the

liquor fizzed, and the agriculturalists drank the bumpers off! And how

good the wine was too--the greatest merit of all! Mr. MacDowall did

credit to his liberal politics by his liberal dinner.

‘Sir,’ says a waiter whom I had asked for currant-jelly for the

haunch--(there were a dozen such smoking on various parts of the

table--think of that, Mr. Cuff!)--‘Sir,’ says the waiter, ‘there’s no

jelly, but I’ve brought you _some very fine lobster-sauce_.’ I think

this was the most remarkable speech of the evening, not excepting that

of my Lord Bernard, who, to three hundred gentlemen more or less

connected with farming, had actually the audacity to quote the words of

the great agricultural poet of Rome--

‘O fortunatos nimium sua si,’ et cætera.

How long are our statesmen in England to continue to back their opinions

by the Latin Grammar? Are the Irish agriculturalists so _very_ happy,

if they did but know it--at least those out of doors? Well, those within

were jolly enough. Champagne and claret, turbot and haunch, are gifts of

the _justissima tellus_, with which few husbandmen will be disposed to

quarrel;--no more let us quarrel either with eloquence after dinner.

If the Liberal landlord had shown his principles in his dinner, the

Conservative certainly showed his; by conserving as much profit as

possible for himself. We sat down one thousand to some two hundred and

fifty cold joints of meat. Every man was treated with a pint of wine,

and very bad too, so that there was the less cause to grumble because

more was not served. Those agriculturalists who had a mind to drink

whisky-and-water had to pay extra for their punch. Nay, after shouting

in vain for half an hour to a waiter for some cold water, the unhappy

writer could only get it by promising a shilling. The sum was paid on

delivery of the article; but as everybody round was thirsty too, I got

but a glassful from the decanter, which only served to make me long for

more. The waiter (the rascal!) promised more, but never came near us

afterwards: he had got his shilling, and so he left us in a hot room,

surrounded by a thousand hot fellow-creatures, one of them making a dry

speech. The agriculturalists were not on this occasion _nimium

fortunati_.

To have heard a nobleman, however, who discoursed the meeting, you would

have fancied that we were the luckiest mortals under the broiling July

sun. He said he could conceive nothing more delightful than to see, ‘on

proper occasions’--(mind, _on proper occasions_!)--‘the landlord mixing

with his tenantry; and to look around him at a scene like this, and see

_the condescension_ with which the gentry mingled with the farmers!’

Prodigious condescension truly! This neat speech seemed to me an

oratoric slap on the face to about nine hundred and seventy persons

present; and being one of the latter, I began to hiss by way of

acknowledgment of the compliment, and hoped that a strong party would

have destroyed the harmony of the evening, and done likewise. But not

one hereditary bondsman would join in the compliment--and they were

quite right too. The old lord who talked about condescension is one of

the greatest and kindest landlords in Ireland. If he thinks he

condescends by doing his duty and mixing with men as good as himself,

the fault lies with the latter. Why are they so ready to go down on

their knees to my lord? A man can’t help ‘condescending’ to another who

will persist in kissing his shoestrings. They respect rank in

England--the people seem almost to adore it here.

As an instance of the intense veneration for lords which distinguishes

this county of Cork, I may mention what occurred afterwards. The members

of the Cork Society gave a dinner to their guests of the Irish

Agricultural Association. The founder of the latter, as Lord Downshire

stated, was Mr. Purcell: and as it was agreed on all hands that the

Society so founded was likely to prove of the greatest benefit to the

country, one might have supposed that any compliment paid to it might

have been paid to it through its founder. Not so. The Society asked the

lords to dine, and Mr. Purcell to meet the lords.

After the grand dinner came a grand ball, which was indeed one of the

gayest and prettiest sights ever seen; nor was it the less agreeable,

because the ladies of the city mixed with the ladies from the country,

and vied with them in grace and beauty. The charming gaiety and

frankness of the Irish ladies have been noted and admired by every

foreigner who has had the good fortune to mingle in their society; and I

hope it is not detracting from the merit of the upper classes to say

that the lower are not a whit less pleasing. I never saw in any country

such a general grace of manner and _ladyhood_. In the midst of their

gaiety, too, it must be remembered that they are the chastest of women,

and that no country in Europe can boast of such a general purity.

In regard of the Munster ladies, I had the pleasure to be present at two

or three evening parties at Cork, and must say that they seem to excel

the English ladies not only in wit and vivacity, but in the still more

important article of the toilette. They are as well dressed as

Frenchwomen, and incomparably handsomer; and if ever this book reaches a

thirtieth edition, and I can find out better words to express

admiration, they shall be inserted here. Among the ladies’

accomplishments, I may mention that I have heard in two or three private

families such fine music as is rarely to be met with out of a capital.

In one house we had a supper and songs afterwards, in the old honest

fashion. Time was in Ireland when the custom was a common one; but the

world grows languid as it grows genteel; and I fancy it requires more

than ordinary spirit and courage now for a good old gentleman, at the

head of his kind family table, to strike up a good old family song.

The delightful old gentleman who sung the song here mentioned could not

help talking of the temperance movement with a sort of regret, and said

that all the fun had gone out of Ireland since Father Mathew banished

the whisky from it. Indeed, any stranger going amongst the people can

perceive that they are now anything but gay. I have seen a great number

of crowds and meetings of people in all parts of Ireland, and found them

all gloomy. There is nothing like the merry-making one reads of in the

Irish novels. Lever and Maxwell must be taken as chroniclers of the old

times--the pleasant but wrong old times--for which one can’t help having

an antiquarian fondness.

On the day we arrived at Cork, and as the passengers descended from ‘the

drag,’ a stout, handsome, honest-looking man, of some two-and-forty

years, was passing by, and received a number of bows from the crowd

around. It was

[Illustration: Theobald Mathew]

with whose face a thousand little print-shop windows had already

rendered me familiar. He shook hands with the master of the carriage

very cordially, and just as cordially with the master’s coachman, a

disciple of temperance, as at least half Ireland is at present. The day

after the famous dinner at MacDowall’s, some of us came down rather

late, perhaps in consequence of the events of the night before (I think

it was Lord Bernard’s quotation from Virgil, or else the absence of the

currant-jelly for the venison, that occasioned a slight headache among

some of us, and an extreme longing for soda-water),--and there was the

Apostle of Temperance seated at the table drinking tea. Some of us felt

a little ashamed of ourselves, and did not like to ask somehow for the

soda-water in such an awful presence as that. Besides, it would have

been a confession to a Catholic priest, and, as a Protestant, I am above

it.

The world likes to know how a great man appears even to a _valet de

chambre_, and I suppose it is one’s vanity that is flattered in such

rare company to find the great man quite as unassuming as the very

smallest personage present; and so like to other mortals, that we would

not know him to be a great man at all, did we not know his name, and

what he had done. There is nothing remarkable in Mr. Mathew’s manner,

except that it is exceedingly simple, hearty, and manly, and that he

does not wear the downcast, demure look which, I know not why, certainly

characterises the chief part of the gentlemen of his profession. Whence

comes that general scowl which darkens the faces of the Irish

priesthood? I have met a score of these reverend gentlemen in the

country, and not one of them seemed to look or speak frankly, except Mr.

Mathew and a couple more. He is almost the only man, too, that I have

met in Ireland, who, in speaking of public matters, did not talk as a

partisan. With the state of the country, of landlord, tenant, and

peasantry, he seemed to be most curiously and intimately acquainted;

speaking of their wants, differences, and the means of bettering them,

with the minutest practical knowledge. And it was impossible in hearing

him to know, but from previous acquaintance with his character, whether

he was Whig or Tory, Catholic or Protestant. Why does not Government

make a Privy Councillor of him?--that is, if he would honour the Right

Honourable body by taking a seat amongst them. His knowledge of the

people is prodigious, and their confidence in him as great; and what a

touching attachment that is which these poor fellows show to any one who

has their cause at heart--even to any one who says he has!

Avoiding all political questions, no man seems more eager than he for

the practical improvement of this country. Leases and rents, farming

improvements, reading societies, music societies--he was full of these,

and of his schemes of temperance above all. He never misses a chance of

making a convert, and has his hand ready and a pledge in his pocket for

sick or poor. One of his disciples in a livery-coat came into the room

with a tray--Mr. Mathew recognised him and shook him by the hand

directly; so he did with the strangers who were presented to him; and

not with a courtly popularity-hunting air, but, as it seemed, from sheer

hearty kindness, and a desire to do every one good.

When breakfast was done--(he took but one cup of tea, and says that,

from having been a great consumer of tea and refreshing liquids before,

a small cup of tea, and one glass of water at dinner, now serve him for

his day’s beverage)--he took the ladies of our party to see his

burying-ground--a new and handsome cemetery, lying a little way out of

the town, and where, thank God! Protestants and Catholics may lie

together, without clergymen quarrelling over their coffins.

It is a handsome piece of ground, and was formerly a botanic garden; but

the funds failed for that undertaking, as they have for a thousand other

public enterprises in this poor disunited country; and so it has been

converted into a _hortus siccus_ for us mortals. There is already a

pretty large collection. In the midst is a place for Mathew

himself--honour to him living or dead! Meanwhile, numerous stately

monuments have been built, flowers planted here and there over dear

remains, and the garden in which they lie is rich, green, and beautiful.

Here is a fine statue, by Hogan, of a weeping genius that broods over

the tomb of an honest merchant and clothier of the city. He took a

liking to the artist, his fellow-townsman, and ordered his own monument,

and had the gratification to see it arrive from Rome a few weeks before

his death. A prettier thing even than the statue is the tomb of a little

boy, which has been shut in by a large and curious _grille_ of

ironwork. The father worked it, a blacksmith, whose darling the child

was, and he spent three years in hammering out this mausoleum. It is the

beautiful story of the pot of ointment told again at the poor

blacksmith’s anvil; and who can but like him for placing this fine

gilded cage over the body of his poor little one? Presently you come to

a Frenchwoman’s tomb, with a French epitaph, by a French husband, and a

pot of artificial flowers in a niche--a wig, and a pot of rouge, as it

were, just to make the dead look passably well. It is _his_ manner of

showing his sympathy for an immortal soul that has passed away. The poor

may be buried here for nothing; and here, too, once more THANK GOD! each

may rest without priests or parsons scowling hell-fire at his neighbour

unconscious under the grass.

CHAPTER VI

CORK--THE URSULINE CONVENT

There is a large Ursuline convent at Blackrock, near Cork, and a lady

who had been educated there was kind enough to invite me to join a party

to visit the place. Was not this a great privilege for a heretic? I have

peeped into convent chapels abroad, and occasionally caught glimpses of

a white veil or black gown; but to see the pious ladies in their own

retreat was quite a novelty--much more exciting than the exhibition of

Long Horns and Short Horns by which we had to pass on our road to

Blackrock.

The three miles’ ride is very pretty. As far as Nature goes, she has

done her best for the neighbourhood; and the noble hills on the opposite

coast of the river, studded with innumerable pretty villas, and

garnished with fine trees and meadows, the river itself dark blue under

a brilliant cloudless heaven, and lively with its multiplicity of gay

craft, accompany the traveller along the road; except here and there

where the view is shut out by fine avenues of trees, a beggarly row of

cottages, or a villa wall. Rows of dirty cabins, and smart bankers’

country-houses, meet one at every turn; nor do the latter want for fine

names, you may be sure. The Irish grandiloquence displays itself finely

in the invention of such; and, to the great inconvenience, I should

think, of the postman, the names of the houses appear to change with the

tenants: for I saw many old houses with new placards in front, setting

forth the _last_ title of the house.

I had the box of the carriage (a smart vehicle that would have done

credit to the ring), and found the gentleman by my side very

communicative. He named the owners of the pretty mansions and lawns

visible on the other side of the river: they appear almost all to be

merchants, who have made their fortunes in the city. In the like manner,

though the air of the town is extremely fresh and pure to a pair of

London lungs, the Cork shopkeeper is not satisfied with it, but

contrives for himself a place (with an euphonious name, no doubt) in the

suburbs of the city. These stretch to a great extent along the

beautiful, liberal-looking banks of the stream.

I asked the man about the Temperance, and whether he was a temperance

man? He replied by pulling a medal out of his waistcoat pocket, saying

that he always carried it about with him for fear of temptation. He said

that he took the pledge two years ago, before which time, as he

confessed, he had been a sad sinner in the way of drink. ‘I used to

take,’ said he, ‘from eighteen to twenty glasses of whisky a day; I was

always at the drink; I’d be often up all night at the public; I was

turned away by my present master on account of it;’--and all of a sudden

he resolved to break off. I asked him whether he had not at first

experienced ill-health from the suddenness of the change in his habits:

but he said--and let all persons meditating a conversion from liquor

remember the fact--that the abstinence never affected him in the least,

but that he went on growing better and better in health every day,

stronger and more able of mind and body.

The man was a Catholic, and in speaking of the numerous places of

worship along the road as we passed, I’m sorry to confess, dealt some

rude cuts with his whip regarding the Protestants. Coachman as he was,

the fellow’s remarks seemed to be correct; for it appears that the

religious world of Cork is of so excessively enlightened a kind, that

one church will not content one pious person; but that, on the contrary,

they will be at Church of a morning, at Independent Church of an

afternoon, at a Darbyite congregation of an evening, and so on,

gathering excitement or information from all sources by which they could

come at it. Is not this the case? are not some of the ultra-serious as

eager after a new preacher, as the ultra-worldly for a new dancer? don’t

they talk and gossip about him as much? Though theology from the

coach-box is rather questionable (after all, the man was just as much

authorised to propound his notions as many a fellow from an amateur

pulpit), yet he certainly had the right here, as far as his charge

against certain Protestants went.

The reasoning from it was quite obvious, and I’m sure was in the man’s

mind, though he did not utter it, as we drove by this time into the

convent gate. ‘Here,’ says coachman, ‘is _our_ church. _I_ don’t drive

my master and mistress from church to chapel, from chapel to

conventicle, hunting after new preachers every Sabbath. I bring them

every Sunday and set them down at the same place, where they know that

everything they hear _must_ be right. Their fathers have done the same

thing before them; and the young ladies and gentlemen will come here

too; and all the new-fangled doctors and teachers may go roaring through

the land, and still here we come regularly, not caring a whit for the

vagaries of others, knowing that we ourselves are in the real old right

original way.’

I am sure this was what the fellow meant by his sneer at the

Protestants, and their gadding from one doctrine to another; but there

was no call and no time to have a battle with him, as by this time we

had entered a large lawn covered with haycocks, and prettily, as I

think, ornamented with a border of blossoming potatoes, and drove up to

the front door of the convent. It is a huge old square house, with many

windows, having probably been some flaunting squire’s residence; but the

nuns have taken off somewhat from its rakish look, by flinging out a

couple of wings, with chapels, or buildings like chapels, at either end.

A large, lofty, clean, trim hall was open to a flight of steps, and we

found a young lady in the hall, playing, instead of a pious

sonata--which I vainly thought was the practice in such godly seminaries

of learning--that abominable rattling piece of music called ‘La

Violette,’ which it has been my lot to hear executed by other young

ladies; and which (with its like) has always appeared to me to be

constructed upon this simple fashion--to take a tune, and then, as it

were, to fling it down and upstairs. As soon as the young lady playing

‘The Violet’ saw us, she quitted the hall and retired to an inner

apartment, where she resumed that delectable piece at her leisure.

Indeed, there were pianos all over the educational part of the house.

We were shown into a gay parlour (where hangs a pretty drawing

representing the melancholy old convent which the Sisters previously

inhabited in Cork), and presently Sister No. Two-Eight made her

appearance--a pretty and graceful lady, thus attired.

‘’Tis the prettiest nun of the whole house,’ whispered the lady who had

been educated at the convent; and I must own that, slim, gentle, and

pretty as this young lady was, and calculated, with her kind smiling

face and little figure, to frighten no one in the world, a great

six-foot Protestant could not help looking at her with a little tremble.

I have never been in a nun’s company before; I’m afraid of such--I don’t

care to own--in their black mysterious robes and awful veils. As priests

in gorgeous vestments, and little rosy incense-boys in red, bob their

heads and knees up and down before altars, or clatter silver pots full

of smoking odours, I feel I don’t know what sort of thrill and secret

creeping terror. Here I was, in a room with a real live nun, pretty and

pale--I wonder has she any of her sisterhood immured in _oubliettes_

down below: is her poor little, weak, delicate body scarred all over

with scourgings, iron collars, hair shirts? What has she had for dinner

to-day?--as we passed the refectory there was a faint sort of vapid

nunlike vegetable smell, speaking of fasts and wooden platters; and I

could picture to myself silent sisters eating their meal--a grim old

yellow one in the reading-desk, croaking out an extract from a sermon

for their edification.

[Illustration]

But is it policy, or hypocrisy, or reality? These nuns affect extreme

happiness and content with their condition; a smiling beatitude, which

they insist belongs peculiarly to them, and about which the only

doubtful point is the manner in which it is produced before strangers.

Young ladies educated in convents have often mentioned this fact, how

the nuns persist in declaring and proving to them their own extreme

enjoyment of life.

Were all the smiles of that kind-looking Sister Two-Eight perfectly

sincere? Whenever she spoke her face was lighted up with one. She seemed

perfectly radiant with happiness, tripping lightly before us, and

distributing kind compliments to each, which made me in a very few

minutes forget the introductory fright which her poor little presence

had occasioned.

She took us through the hall (where was the vegetable savour before

mentioned), and showed us the contrivance by which the name of Two-Eight

was ascertained. Each nun has a number, or a combination of numbers,

prefixed to her name; and a bell is pulled a corresponding number of

times, by which each sister knows when she is wanted. Poor souls! are

they always on the look-out for that bell, that the ringing of it should

be supposed infallibly to awaken their attention?

From the hall the sister conducted us through ranges of apartments, and

I had almost said avenues of pianofortes, whence here and there a

startled pensioner would rise, _hinnuleo similis_, at our approach,

seeking a _pavidam matrem_, in the person of a demure old stout mother

hard by. We were taken through a hall decorated with series of pictures

of Pope Pius VI.,--wonderful adventures, truly, in the life of the

gentle old man. In one, you see him gracefully receiving a Prince and

Princess of Russia (tremendous incident!). The Prince has a pigtail, the

Princess powder and a train, the Pope a---- but never mind, we shall

never get through the house at this rate.

Passing through Pope Pius’s gallery, we came into a long, clean, lofty

passage, with many little doors on each side; and here I confess my

heart began to thump again. These were the doors of the cells of the

Sisters. Bon Dieu! and is it possible that I shall see a nun’s cell? Do

I not recollect the nun’s cell in _The Monk_, or in _The Romance of the

Forest_? or, if not there, at any rate in a thousand noble romances,

read in early days of half-holiday perhaps--romances at twopence a

volume.

Come in, in the name of the saints! Here is the cell. I took off my hat

and examined the little room with much curious wonder and reverence.

There was an iron bed, with comfortable curtains of green serge. There

was a little clothes-chest of yellow wood, neatly cleaned, and a wooden

chair beside it, and a desk on the chest, and about six pictures on the

wall,--little religious pictures: a saint with gilt paper round him; the

Virgin showing on her breast a bleeding heart, with a sword run through

it; and other sad little subjects, calculated to make the inmate of the

cell think of the sufferings of the saints and martyrs of the Church.

Then there was a little crucifix, and a wax candle on a ledge; and here

was the place where the poor black-veiled things were to pass their

lives for ever!

After having seen a couple of these little cells, we left the corridors

in which they were, and were conducted, with a sort of pride on the

nun’s part, I thought, into the grand room of the convent--a parlour

with pictures of saints and a gay paper, and a series of small fineries,

such only as women very idle know how to make. There were some portraits

in the room, one an atrocious daub of an ugly old woman, surrounded by

children still more hideous. Somebody had told the poor nun that this

was a fine thing, and she believed it--Heaven bless her!--quite

implicitly; nor is the picture of the ugly old Canadian woman the first

reputation that has been made this way.

Then from the fine parlour we went to the museum. I don’t know how we

should be curious of such trifles; but the chronicling of small-beer is

the main business of life--people only differing, as Tom Moore wisely

says in one of his best poems, about their own peculiar tap. The poor

nuns’ little collection of gimcracks was displayed in great state; there

were spars in one drawer; and I think a Chinese shoe and some Indian

wares in another; and some medals of the Popes, and a couple of score of

coins; and a clean glass case, full of antique works of French theology

of the distant period of Louis XV., to judge by the bindings--and this

formed the main part of the museum. ‘The chief objects were gathered

together by a single nun,’ said the sister with a look of wonder, and

she went prattling on, and leading us hither and thither, like a child

showing her toys.

What strange mixture of pity and pleasure is it which comes over you

sometimes when a child takes you by the hand, and leads you up solemnly

to some little treasure of its own--a feather, or a string of glass

beads? I declare I have often looked at such with more delight than at

diamonds; and felt the same sort of soft wonder examining the nuns’

little treasure-chamber. There was something touching in the very

poverty of it;--had it been finer it would not have been half so good.

And now we had seen all the wonders of the house but the chapel, and

thither we were conducted; all the ladies of our party kneeling down as

they entered the building, and saying a short prayer.

This, as I am on sentimental confessions, I must own affected me too. It

was a very pretty and tender sight. I should have liked to kneel down

too, but was ashamed; our northern usages not encouraging--among men at

least--that sort of abandonment of dignity. Do any of us dare to sing

psalms at church? and don’t we look with rather a sneer at a man who

does?

The chapel had nothing remarkable in it except a very good organ, as I

was told; for we were allowed only to see the exterior of that

instrument, our pious guide with much pleasure removing an oil-cloth

which covered the mahogany. At one side of the altar is a long high

_grille_, through which you see a hall, where the nuns have their

stalls, and sit in chapel time; and beyond this hall is another small

chapel, with a couple of altars, and one beautiful print in one of

them--a German Holy Family--a prim, mystical, tender piece, just

befitting the place.

In the _grille_ is a little wicket and a ledge before it. It is to this

wicket that women are brought to kneel; and a bishop is in the chapel on

the other side, and takes their hands in his, and receives their vows. I

had never seen the like before, and own that I felt a sort of shudder at

looking at the place. There rest the girl’s knees as she offers herself

up, and forswears the sacred affections which God gave her; there she

kneels and denies for ever the beautiful duties of her being:--no tender

maternal yearnings, no gentle attachments are to be had for her or from

her--there she kneels and commits suicide upon her heart. O honest

Martin Luther! thank God, you came to pull that infernal, wicked,

unnatural altar down--that cursed Paganism! Let people, solitary, worn

out by sorrow or oppressed with extreme remorse, retire to such places:

fly and beat your breasts in caverns and wildernesses, O women, if you

will, but be Magdalens first. It is shameful that any young girl, with

any vocation however seemingly strong, should be allowed to bury herself

in this small tomb of a few acres. Look at yonder nun--pretty, smiling,

graceful, and young--what has God’s world done to _her_, that she should

run from it, or she done to the world, that she should avoid it? What

call has she to give up all her duties and affections; and would she not

be best serving God with a husband at her side, and a child on her knee?

The sights in the house having been seen, the nun led us through the

grounds and gardens. There was the hay in front, a fine yellow cornfield

at the back of the house, and a large, melancholy-looking

kitchen-garden; in all of which places the nuns, for certain hours in

the day, are allowed to take recreation. ‘The nuns here are allowed to

amuse themselves more than ours at New Hall,’ said a little girl who is

educated at that English Convent: ‘do you know that here the nuns may

make hay?’ What a privilege is this! We saw none of the black sisterhood

availing themselves of it, however: the hay was neatly piled into cocks

and ready for housing; so the poor souls must wait until next year

before they can enjoy this blessed sport once more.

Turning into a narrow gate with the nun at our head, we found ourselves

in a little green quiet enclosure--it was the burial-ground of the

convent. The poor things know the places where they are to lie: she who

was with us talked smilingly of being stretched there one day, and

pointed out the resting-place of a favourite old sister who had died

three months back, and been buried in the very midst of the little

ground. And here they come to live and die. The gates are open, but they

never go out. All their world lies in a dozen acres of ground; and they

sacrifice their lives in early youth, many of them passing from the

grave upstairs in the house to the one scarcely narrower in the

churchyard here; and are seemingly not unhappy.

I came out of the place quite sick; and looking before me,--there, thank

God! was the blue spire of Monkstown church soaring up into the free

sky--a river in front rolling away to the sea--liberty, sunshine, all

sorts of glad life and motion round about: and I couldn’t but thank

Heaven for it, and the Being whose service is freedom, and who has given

us affections that we may use them--not smother and kill them; and a

noble world to live in, that we may admire it and Him who made it--not

shrink from it, as though we dared not live there, but must turn our

backs upon it and its bountiful Provider.

And in conclusion, if that most cold-blooded and precise of all

personages, the respectable and respected English reader, may feel

disposed to sneer at the above sentimental homily, or to fancy that it

has been written for effect--let him go and see a convent for himself. I

declare I think for my part that we have as much right to permit

Sutteeism in India as to allow women in the United Kingdom to take these

wicked vows, or Catholic Bishops to receive them; and that Government

has as good a right to interpose in such cases, as the police has to

prevent a man from hanging himself, or the doctor to refuse a glass of

prussic acid to any one who may have a wish to go out of the world.

CHAPTER VII

CORK

Amidst the bustle and gaieties of the Agricultural Meeting, the

working-day aspect of the city was not to be judged of: but I passed a

fortnight in the place afterwards, during which time it settled down to

its calm and usual condition. The flashy French and plated-goods shops,

which made a show for the occasion of the meeting, disappeared; you were

no longer crowded and jostled by smart male and female dandies in

walking down Patrick Street or the Mall; the poor little theatre had

scarcely a soul in its bare benches: I went once, but the dreadful

brass-band of a dragoon regiment blew me out of doors. This music could

be heard much more pleasantly at some distance off in the street.

One sees in this country many a grand and tall iron gate leading into a

very shabby field covered with thistles; and the simile of the gate

will in some degree apply to this famous city of Cork,--which is

certainly not a city of palaces, but of which the outlets are

magnificent. That towards Killarney leads by the Lee, the old Avenue of

Mardyke, and the rich green pastures stretching down to the river; and

as you pass by the portico of the county gaol, as fine and as glancing

as a palace, you see the wooded heights on the other side of the fair

stream, crowded with a thousand pretty villas and terraces, presenting

every image of comfort and prosperity. The entrance from Cove has been

mentioned before; nor is it easy to find anywhere a nobler, grander, and

more cheerful scene.

Along the quays up to St. Patrick’s Bridge there is a certain bustle.

Some forty ships may be lying at anchor along the walls of the quay; and

its pavements are covered with goods of various merchandise: here a

cargo of hides; yonder a company of soldiers, their kits, and their

Dollies, who are taking leave of the redcoats at the steamer’s side.

Then you shall see a fine, squeaking, shrieking drove of pigs embarking

by the same conveyance, and insinuated into the steamer by all sorts of

coaxing, threatening, and wheedling. Seamen are singing and yeehoing on

board; grimy colliers smoking at the liquor-shops along the quay; and as

for the bridge--there is a crowd of idlers on _that_, you may be sure,

sprawling over the balustrade for ever and ever, with long ragged coats,

steeple-hats, and stumpy doodeens.

Then along the coal-quay you may see a clump of jingle-drivers, who have

all a word for your honour; and in Patrick Street, at three o’clock,

when ‘The Rakes of Mallow’ gets under weigh (a cracked old coach with

the paint rubbed off, some smart horses, and an exceedingly dingy

harness)--at three o’clock, you will be sure to see at least forty

persons waiting to witness the departure of the said coach; so that the

neighbourhood of the inn has an air of some bustle.

At the other extremity of the town, if it be assize time, you will see

some five hundred persons squatting in the Court-house, or buzzing and

talking within; the rest of the respectable quarter of the city is

pretty free from anything like bustle. There is no more life in Patrick

Street than in Russell Square of a sunshiny day; and as for the Mall, it

is as lonely as the chief street of a German Residenz.

I have mentioned the respectable quarter of the city--for there are

quarters in it swarming with life, but of such a frightful kind as no

pen need care to describe; alleys where the odours and rags and darkness

are so hideous, that one runs frightened away from them. In some of

them, they say, not the policeman, only the priest, can penetrate. I

asked a Roman Catholic clergyman of the city to take me into some of

these haunts, but he refused very justly; and indeed a man may be quite

satisfied with what he can see in the mere outskirts of the districts,

without caring to penetrate farther. Not far from the quays is an open

space where the poor hold a market or bazaar. Here is liveliness and

business enough: ragged women chattering and crying their beggarly

wares; ragged boys gloating over dirty apple-and pie-stalls; fish

frying, and raw and stinking; clothes-booths, where you might buy a

wardrobe for scarecrows; old nails, hoops, bottles, and marine-wares;

old battered furniture, that has been sold against starvation. In the

streets round about this place, on a sunshiny day, all the black gaping

windows and mouldy steps are covered with squatting lazy figures--women,

with bare breasts, nursing babies, and leering a joke as you pass

by--ragged children paddling everywhere. It is but two minutes’ walk out

of Patrick Street, where you come upon a fine flashy shop of plated

goods, or a grand French emporium of dolls, walking-sticks, carpet-bags,

and perfumery. The markets hard by have a rough, old-fashioned, cheerful

look; it’s a comfort after the misery to hear a red butcher’s wife

crying after you to buy an honest piece of meat.

The poorhouse, newly established, cannot hold a fifth part of the

poverty of this great town; the richer inhabitants are untiring in their

charities, and the Catholic clergyman before mentioned took me to see a

delivery of rice, at which he presides every day until the potatoes

shall come in. This market, over which he presides so kindly, is held in

an old bankrupt warehouse, and the rice is sold considerably under the

prime cost to hundreds of struggling applicants who come when lucky

enough to have wherewithal to pay.

That the city contains much wealth is evidenced by the number of

handsome villas round about it, where the rich merchants dwell; but the

warehouses of the wealthy provision-merchants make no show to the

stranger walking the streets; and of the retail shops, if some are

spacious and handsome, most look as if too big for the business carried

on within. The want of ready money was quite curious. In three of the

principal shops I purchased articles, and tendered a pound in

exchange--not one of them had silver enough; and as for a five-pound

note, which I presented at one of the topping booksellers, his boy went

round to various places in vain, and finally set forth to the bank,

where change was got. In another small shop I offered half-a-crown to

pay for a sixpenny article--it was all the same. ‘Tim,’ says the good

woman, ‘run out in a hurry and fetch the gentleman change.’ Two of the

shopmen, seeing an Englishman, were very particular to tell me in what

years they themselves had been in London. It seemed a merit in these

gentlemen’s eyes to have once dwelt in that city; and I see in the

papers continually ladies advertising as governesses, and specifying

particularly that they are ‘English ladies.’

I received six £5 post-office orders; I called four times on as many

different days at the Post Office before the capital could be

forthcoming, getting on the third application £20 (after making a great

clamour, and vowing that such things were unheard of in England), and on

the fourth call the remaining £10. I saw poor people, who may have come

from the country with their orders, refused payment of an order of some

40s.; and a gentleman who tendered a pound note in payment of a foreign

letter, told to ‘leave his letter and pay some other time.’ Such things

could not take place in the hundred-and-second city in England; and as I

do not pretend to doctrinise at all, I leave the reader to draw his own

deductions with regard to the commercial condition and prosperity of the

second city in Ireland.

Half a dozen of the public buildings I saw were spacious and shabby

beyond all cockney belief. Adjoining the Imperial Hotel is a great,

large, handsome, desolate reading-room, which was founded by a body of

Cork merchants and tradesmen, and is the very picture of decay. Not

Palmyra--not the Russell Institution in Great Coram Street--present more

melancholy appearances of faded greatness. Opposite this is another

institution, called the Cork Library, where there are plenty of books

and plenty of kindness to the stranger; but the shabbiness and faded

splendour of the place are quite painful. There are three handsome

Catholic churches commenced of late years; not one of them is complete:

two want their porticoes; the other is not more than thirty feet from

the ground; and according to the architectural plan was to rise as high

as a cathedral. There is an institution, with a fair library of

scientific works, a museum, and a drawing-school with a supply of casts.

The place is in yet more dismal condition than the library. The plasters

are spoiled incurably for want of a sixpenny feather-brush; the dust

lies on the walls, and nobody seems to heed it. Two shillings a year

would have repaired much of the evil which has happened to this

institution; and it is folly to talk of inward dissensions and political

differences as causing the ruin of such institutions. Kings or laws

don’t cause or cure dust and cobwebs; but indolence leaves them to

accumulate, and imprudence will not calculate its income, and vanity

exaggerates its own powers, and the fault is laid upon that tyrant of a

sister kingdom. The whole country is filled with such failures;

swaggering beginnings that could not be carried through; grand

enterprises begun dashingly, and ending in shabby compromises or

downright ruin.

I have said something in praise of the manners of the Cork ladies: in

regard of the gentlemen, a stranger too must remark the extraordinary

degree of literary taste and talent amongst them, and the wit and

vivacity of their conversation. The love for literature seems to an

Englishman doubly curious. What, generally speaking, do a company of

grave gentlemen and ladies in Baker Street know about it? Who ever reads

books in the City, or how often does one hear them talked about at a

Club? The Cork citizens are the most book-loving men I ever met. The

town has sent to England a number of literary men, of reputation too,

and is not a little proud of their fame. Everybody seemed to know what

Maginn was doing, and that Father Prout had a third volume ready, and

what was Mr. Croker’s last article in the _Quarterly_. The young clerks

and shopmen seemed as much _au fait_ as their employers, and many is the

conversation I heard about the merits of this writer or that--Dickens,

Ainsworth, Lover, Lever.

I think, in walking the streets, and looking at the ragged urchins

crowding there, every Englishman must remark that the superiority of

intelligence is here, and not with us. I never saw such a collection of

bright-eyed, wild, clever, eager faces. Mr. Maclise has carried away a

number of them in his memory; and the lovers of his admirable pictures

will find more than one Munster countenance under a helmet in company of

Macbeth, or in a slashed doublet alongside of Prince Hamlet, or in the

very midst of Spain in company with Signor Gil Blas. Gil Blas himself

came from Cork, and not from Oviedo.

I listened to two boys almost in rags: they were lolling over the quay

balustrade, and talking about _one of the Ptolemys!_ and talking very

well too. One of them had been reading in Rollin, and was detailing his

information with a great deal of eloquence and fire. Another day,

walking in the Mardyke, I followed three boys, not half so well dressed

as London errand-boys: one was telling the other about Captain Ross’s

voyages, and spoke with as much brightness and intelligence as the

best-read gentleman’s son in England could do. He was as much of a

gentleman, too, the ragged young student; his manner as good, though

perhaps more eager and emphatic; his language was extremely rich, too,

and eloquent. Does the reader remember his school-days, when half a

dozen lads in the bedrooms took it by turns to tell stories? how poor

the language generally was, and how exceedingly poor the imagination!

Both of those ragged Irish lads had the making of gentlemen, scholars,

orators, in them. _À propos_ of love of reading, let me mention here a

Dublin story. Dr. Lever, the celebrated author of _Harry Lorrequer_,

went into Dycer’s stables to buy a horse. The groom who brought the

animal out, directly he heard who the gentleman was, came out and

touched his cap, and pointed to a little book in his pocket in a pink

cover. ‘_I can’t do without it, sir_,’ says the man. It was _Harry

Lorrequer_. I wonder does any one of Mr. Rymell’s grooms take in

_Pickwick_, or would they have any curiosity to see Mr. Dickens, should

he pass that way?

The Corkagians are eager for a Munster University; asking for, and

having a very good right to, the same privilege which has been granted

to the chief city of the north of Ireland. It would not fail of being a

great benefit to the city and to the country too, which would have no

need to go so far as Dublin for a school of letters and medicine; nor,

Whig and Catholic for the most part, to attend a Tory and Protestant

University. The establishing of an open college in Munster would bring

much popularity to any Ministry that should accord such a boon. People

would cry out ‘Popery and Infidelity,’ doubtless, as they did when the

London University was established; as the same party in Spain would cry

out, ‘Atheism and Heresy.’ But the time, thank God! is gone by in

England when it was necessary to legislate for _them_; and Sir Robert

Peel, in giving his adherence to the National Education scheme, has

sanctioned the principle of which this so much longed-for college would

only be a consequence.

The medical charities and hospitals are said to be very well arranged,

and the medical men of far more than ordinary skill. Other public

institutions are no less excellent. I was taken over the Lunatic Asylum,

where everything was conducted with admirable comfort, cleanliness, and

kindness; and as for the county gaol, it is so neat, spacious, and

comfortable, that we can only pray to see every cottager in the country

as cleanly, well lodged, and well fed as the convicts are. They get a

pound of bread and a pint of milk twice a day: there must be millions of

people in this wretched country, to whom such food would be a luxury

that their utmost labours can never by possibility procure for them; and

in going over this admirable institution, where everybody is cleanly,

healthy, and well clad, I could not but think of the rags and filth of

the horrid starvation market before mentioned; so that the prison seemed

almost a sort of premium for vice. But the people like their freedom,

such as it is, and prefer to starve and be ragged as they list. They

will not go to the poorhouses, except at the greatest extremity, and

leave them on the slightest chance of existence elsewhere.

Walking away from this palace of a prison, you pass amidst all sorts of

delightful verdure, cheerful gardens, and broad green luscious pastures,

down to the beautiful river Lee. On one side the river shines away

towards the city with its towers and purple steeples; on the other it is

broken by little waterfalls, and bound in by blue hills, an old castle

towering in the distance, and innumerable parks and villas lying along

the pleasant wooded banks. How beautiful the scene is, how rich and how

happy! Yonder, in the old Mardyke Avenue, you hear the voices of a score

of children, and along the bright green meadows, where the cows are

feeding, the gentle shadows of the clouds go playing over the grass. Who

can look at such a charming scene but with a thankful swelling heart?

In the midst of your pleasure, three beggars have hobbled up, and are

howling supplications to the Lord. One is old and blind, and so diseased

and hideous, that straightway all the pleasure of the sight round about

vanishes from you--that livid ghastly face interposing between you and

it. And so it is throughout the south and west of Ireland; the traveller

is haunted by the face of the popular starvation. It is not the

exception, it is the condition of the people. In this fairest and

richest of countries, men are suffering and starving by millions. There

are thousands of them at this minute stretched in the sunshine at their

cabin doors with no work, scarcely any food, no hope seemingly. Strong

countrymen are lying in bed ‘_for the hunger_’--because a man lying on

his back does not need so much food as a person afoot. Many of them have

torn up the unripe potatoes from their little gardens, and to exist now

must look to winter, when they shall have to suffer starvation and cold

too. The epicurean, and traveller for pleasure, had better travel

anywhere than here; where there are miseries that one does not dare to

think of; where one is always feeling how helpless pity is, and how

hopeless relief, and is perpetually made ashamed of being happy.

* * * * *

I have just been strolling up a pretty little height called Grattan’s

Hill, that overlooks the town and the river, and where the artist that

comes Cork-wards may find many subjects for his pencil. There is a kind

of pleasure-ground at the top of this eminence--a broad walk that

draggles up to a ruined wall, with a ruined niche in it, and a battered

stone bench. On the side that shelves down to the water are some

beeches, and opposite them a row of houses from which you see one of the

prettiest prospects possible--the shining river with the craft along

the quays, and the busy city in the distance, the active little steamers

puffing away towards Cove, the farther bank crowned with rich woods, and

pleasant-looking country-houses,--perhaps they are tumbling, rickety,

and ruinous, as those houses close by us, but you can’t see the ruin

from here.

What a strange air of forlorn gaiety there is about the place!--the sky

itself seems as if it did not know whether to laugh or cry, so full is

it of clouds and sunshine. Little fat, ragged, smiling children are

clambering about the rocks, and sitting on mossy doorsteps, tending

other children yet smaller, fatter, and more dirty. ‘Stop till I get you

a posy’ (pronounced _pawawawsee_), cries one urchin to another. ‘Tell me

who is it ye love, Jooly,’ exclaims another, cuddling a red-faced infant

with a very dirty nose. More of the same race are perched about the

summer-house, and two wenches with large purple feet are flapping some

carpets in the air. It is a wonder the carpets will bear this kind of

treatment at all, and do not be off at once to mingle with the elements:

I never saw things that hung to life by such a frail thread.

This dismal pleasant place is a suburb of the second city in Ireland,

and one of the most beautiful spots about the town. What a prim,

bustling, active, green-railinged, tea-gardened, gravel-walked place

would it have been in the five-hundredth town in England!--but you see

the people can be quite as happy in the rags and without the paint, and

I hear a great deal more heartiness and affection from these children

than from their fat little brethren across the Channel.

If a man wanted to study ruins, here is a house close at hand, not forty

years old no doubt, but yet as completely gone to rack as Netley Abbey.

It is quite curious to study that house; and a pretty ruinous fabric of

improvidence, extravagance, happiness, and disaster may the imagination

build out of it! In the first place, the owners did not wait to finish

it before they went to inhabit it! This is written in just such another

place;--a handsome drawing-room with a good carpet, a lofty marble

mantelpiece, and no paper to the walls. The door is prettily painted

white and blue, and though not six weeks old, a great piece of the

woodwork is off already (Peggy uses it to prevent the door from banging

to); and there are some fine chinks in every one of the panels, by which

my neighbour may see all my doings.

A couple of score of years, and this house will be just like yonder

place on Grattan’s Hill.

Like a young prodigal, the house begins to use its constitution too

early; and when it should yet (in the shape of carpenters and painters)

have all its masters and guardians to watch and educate it, my house on

Grattan’s Hill must be a man at once, and enjoy all the privileges of

strong health! I would lay a guinea they were making punch in that house

before they could keep the rain out of it; that they had a dinner-party

and ball before the floors were firm or the wainscots painted, and a

fine tester-bed in the best room, where my lady might catch cold in

state, in the midst of yawning chimneys, creaking window-sashes, and

smoking plaster.

Now look at the door of the coach-house, with its first coat of paint

seen yet, and a variety of patches to keep the feeble barrier together.

The loft was arched once, but a great corner has tumbled at one end,

leaving a gash that unites the windows with the coach-house door.

Several of the arch-stones are removed, and the whole edifice is about

as rambling and disorderly as--as the arrangement of this book, say.

Very tall tufts of mouldy moss are on the drawing-room windows, with

long white heads of grass. As I am sketching this--_honk!_--a great lean

sow comes trampling through the slush within the courtyard, breaks down

the flimsy apparatus of rattling boards and stones which had passed for

the gate, and walks with her seven squeaking little ones to disport on

the grass on the hill.

The drawing-room of the tenement mentioned just now, with its pictures,

and pulleyless windows and lockless doors, was tenanted by a friend who

lodged there with a sick wife and a couple of little children; one of

whom was an infant in arms. It is not, however, the lodger, who is an

Englishman, but the kind landlady and her family who may well be

described here--for their like are hardly to be found on the other side

of the Channel. Mrs. Fagan is a young widow who has seen better days,

and that portrait over the grand mantelpiece is the picture of her

husband that is gone, a handsome young man, and well-to-do at one time

as a merchant. But the widow (she is as pretty, as ladylike, as kind,

and as neat as ever widow could be) has little left to live upon but the

rent of her lodgings and her furniture; of which we have seen the best

in the drawing-room.

She has three fine children of her own: there is Minny, and Katey, and

Patsey, and they occupy indifferently the dining-room on the

ground-floor or the kitchen opposite; where in the midst of a great

smoke sits an old nurse, by a copper of potatoes which is always

bubbling and full. Patsey swallows quantities of them, that’s clear--his

cheeks are as red and shining as apples, and when he roars, you are sure

that his lungs are in the finest condition. Next door to the kitchen is

the pantry, and there is a bucket full of the before-mentioned fruit,

and a grand service of china for dinner and dessert. The kind young

widow shows them with no little pride, and says with reason that there

are few lodging-houses in Cork that can match such china as that. They

are relics of the happy old times when Fagan kept his gig and horse,

doubtless, and had his friends to dine--the happy prosperous days which

she has exchanged for poverty and the sad black gown.

Patsey, Minny, and Katey have made friends with the little English

people upstairs; the elder of whom, in the course of a month, has as

fine a Munster brogue as ever trolled over the lips of any born

Corkagian. The old nurse carries out the whole united party to walk,

with the exception of the English baby, that jumps about in the arms of

a countrywoman of her own. That is, unless one of the four Miss Fagans

take her; for four of them there are, four _other_ Miss Fagans, from

eighteen downwards to fourteen:--handsome, fresh, lively, dancing,

bouncing girls. You may always see two or three of them smiling at the

parlour-window, and they laugh and turn away their heads when any young

fellow looks and admires them.

Now, it stands to reason that a young widow of five-and-twenty can’t be

the mother of four young ladies of eighteen downwards; and, if anybody

wants to know how they come to be living with the poor widow their

cousin, the answer is, they are on a visit. Peggy the maid says their

papa is a gentleman of property, and can ‘spend his eight hundred a

year.’

Why don’t they remain with the old gentleman, then, instead of

quartering on the poor young widow, who has her own little mouths to

feed? The reason is, the old gentleman has gone and _married his cook_;

and the daughters have quitted him in a body, refusing to sit down to

dinner with a person who ought by rights to be in the kitchen. The whole

family (the Fagans are of good family) take the quarrel up, and here are

the young people under shelter of the widow.

Four merrier, tender-hearted girls are not to be found in all Ireland;

and the only subject of contention amongst them is, which shall have the

English baby; they are nursing it, and singing to it, and dandling it by

turns all day long. When they are not singing to the baby, they are

singing to an old piano; such an old, wiry, jingling, wheezy piano! It

has plenty of work, playing jigs and song accompaniments between meals,

and acting as a sideboard at dinner. I am not sure that it is at rest at

night either; but have a shrewd suspicion that it is turned into a

four-post bed. And for the following reason:--

Every afternoon, at four o’clock, you see a tall old gentleman walking

leisurely to the house. He is dressed in a long greatcoat with huge

pockets, and in the huge pockets are sure to be some big apples for all

the children--the English child amongst the rest, and she generally has

the biggest one. At seven o’clock, you are sure to hear a deep voice

shouting ‘PAGGY!’ in an awful tone--it is the old gentleman calling for

his ‘materials’; which Peggy brings without any further ado; and a glass

of punch is made, no doubt, for everybody. Then the party separates: the

children and the old nurse have long since trampled upstairs; Peggy has

the kitchen for her sleeping-apartment; and the four young ladies make

it out somehow in the back drawing-room. As for the old gentleman, he

reposes in the parlour; and it must be somewhere about the piano, for

there is no furniture in the room except that, a table, a few old

chairs, a workbox, and a couple of albums.

The English girl’s father met her in the street one day, talking

confidentially with a tall old gentleman in a greatcoat. ‘Who’s your

friend?’ says the Englishman afterwards to the little girl. ‘Don’t you

know him, papa?’ said the child in the purest brogue. ‘Don’t you know

him?--THAT’S UNCLE JAMES!’ And so it was: in this kind, poor, generous,

barebacked house, the English child found a set of new relations; little

rosy brothers and sisters to play with, kind women to take the place of

the almost dying mother, a good old Uncle James to bring her home apples

and care for her--one and all ready to share their little pittance with

her, and to give her a place in their simple friendly hearts. God

Almighty bless the widow and her mite, and all the kind souls under her

roof!

How much goodness and generosity--how much purity, fine feeling--nay,

happiness--may dwell amongst the poor whom we have been just looking at!

Here, thank God, is an instance of this happy and cheerful poverty: and

it is good to look, when one can, at the heart that beats under the

threadbare coat, as well as the tattered old garment itself. Well,

please Heaven, some of those people whom we have been looking at are as

good, and not much less happy: but though they are accustomed to their

want, the stranger does not reconcile himself to it quickly; and I hope

no Irish reader will be offended at my speaking of this poverty, not

with scorn or ill-feeling, but with hearty sympathy and good-will.

* * * * *

One word more regarding the Widow Fagan’s house. When Peggy brought in

coals for the drawing-room fire, she carried them--in what do you think?

‘In a coal-scuttle, to be sure,’ says the English reader, down on you as

sharp as a needle.

No, you clever Englishman, it wasn’t a coal-scuttle.

‘Well, then, it was in a fire-shovel,’ says that brightest of wits,

guessing again.

No, it _wasn’t_ a fire-shovel, you heaven-born genius; and you might

guess from this until Mrs. Snooks called you up to coffee, and you would

never find out. It was in something which I have already described in

Mrs. Fagan’s pantry.

‘Oh, I have you now, it was the bucket where the potatoes were; the

thlatternly wetch!’ says Snooks.

Wrong again! Peggy brought up the coals--in a CHINA PLATE!

Snooks turns quite white with surprise, and almost chokes himself with

his port. ‘Well,’ says he, ‘of all the _wum_ countwith that I ever wead

of, hang me if Ireland ithn’t the _wummetht_. Coalth in a plate!

Mawyann, do you hear that? In Ireland they alwayth thend up their coalth

in a plate!’

CHAPTER VIII

FROM CORK TO BANTRY; WITH AN ACCOUNT OF THE CITY OF SKIBBEREEN

That light four-inside, four-horse coach, the ‘Skibbereen Perseverance,’

brought me fifty-two miles to-day, for the sum of three-and-sixpence,

through a country which is, as usual, somewhat difficult to describe. We

issued out of Cork by the western road, in which, as the Guide-book

says, there is something very imposing. ‘The magnificence of the county

court-house, the extent, solidity, and characteristic sternness of the

county gaol,’ were visible to us for a few minutes; when, turning away

southward from the pleasant banks of the stream, the road took us

towards Bandon, through a country that is bare and ragged-looking, but

yet green and pretty; and it always seems to me, like the people, to

look cheerful in spite of its wretchedness, or, more correctly, to look

tearful and cheerful at the same time.