The first persons we saw at the gate of the place were four buxom

lasses, in blue jackets and petticoats, who were giggling and laughing

as gaily as so many young heiresses of a thousand a year, and who had a

colour in their cheeks that any lady of Almack’s might envy. They were

cleaning pails and carrying in water from a green court or playground in

front of the house, which some of the able-bodied men of the place were

busy in enclosing. Passing through the large entrance of the house, a

nondescript Gothic building, we came to a court divided by a road and

two low walls: the right enclosure is devoted to the boys of the

establishment, of whom there were about fifty at play--boys more healthy

or happy it is impossible to see. Separated from them is the nursery;

and here were seventy or eighty young children, a shrill clack of happy

voices leading the way to the door where they were to be found. Boys and

children had a comfortable little uniform, and shoes were furnished for

all; though the authorities did not seem particularly severe in

enforcing the wearing of the shoes, which most of the young persons left

behind them.

In spite of all the _Times’s_ in the world, the place was a happy one.

It is kept with a neatness and comfort to which, until his entrance into

the union-house, the Irish peasant must perforce have been a stranger.

All the rooms and passages are white, well scoured, and airy; all the

windows are glazed; all the beds have a good store of blankets and

sheets. In the women’s dormitories there lay several infirm persons, not

ill enough for the infirmary, and glad of the society of the common

room. In one of the men’s sleeping-rooms we found a score of old

grey-coated men sitting round another who was reading prayers to them;

and outside the place we found a woman starving in rags, as she had been

ragged and starving for years; her husband was wounded, and lay in his

house upon straw; her children were ill with a fever; she had neither

meat, nor physic, nor clothing, nor fresh air, nor warmth for

them;--and she preferred to starve on rather than enter the house.

The last of our agricultural excursions was to the fair of Castledermot,

celebrated for the show of cattle to be seen there, and attended by the

farmers and gentry of the neighbouring counties. Long before reaching

the place we met troops of cattle coming from it--stock of a beautiful

kind, for the most part large, sleek, white, long-backed, most of the

larger animals being bound for England. There was very near as fine a

show in the pastures along the road, which lies across a light green

country with plenty of trees to ornament the landscape, and some neat

cottages along the roadside.

At the turnpike of Castledermot the droves of cattle met us by scores no

longer, but by hundreds, and the long street of the place was thronged

with oxen, sheep, and horses, and with those who wished to see, to sell,

or to buy. The squires were altogether in a cluster at the

police-houses; the owners of the horses rode up and down, showing the

best paces of their brutes; among whom you might see Paddy, in his

ragged frieze-coat, seated on his donkey’s bare rump, and proposing him

for sale. I think I saw a score of this humble though useful breed that

were brought for sale to the fair. ‘I can sell him,’ says one fellow,

with a pompous air, ‘wid his tackle or widout.’ He was looking as grave

over the negotiation as if it had been for a thousand pounds. Besides

the donkeys, of course there was plenty of poultry, and there were pigs

without number, shrieking, and struggling, and pushing hither and

thither among the crowd, rebellious to the straw-rope. It was a fine

thing to see one huge grunter, and the manner in which he was landed

into a cart. The cart was let down on an easy inclined plane to tempt

him; two men ascending, urged him by the forelegs, other two entreated

him by the tail. At length, when more than half of his body had been

coaxed upon the cart, it was suddenly whisked up, causing the animal

thereby to fall forward; a parting shove sent him altogether into the

cart, the two gentlemen inside jump out, and the monster is left to ride

home.

The farmers, as usual, were talking of the tariff, predicting ruin to

themselves, as farmers will, on account of the decreasing price of

stock, and the consequent fall of grain. Perhaps the person most to be

pitied is the poor pig-proprietor yonder: it is his rent which he is

carrying through the market, squeaking at the end of the straw-rope, and

Sir Robert’s bill adds insolvency to that poor fellow’s misery.

This was the last of the sights which the kind owner of H---- town had

invited me into his country to see; and I think they were among the most

pleasing I witnessed in Ireland. Rich and poor were working friendlily

together; priest and parson were alike interested in these honest,

homely, agricultural festivals; not a word was said about hereditary

bondage and English tyranny; and one did not much regret the absence of

those patriotic topics of conversation. If but for the sake of the

change, it was pleasant to pass a few days with people among whom there

was no quarrelling; no furious denunciations against Popery on the part

of the Protestants, and no tirades against the parsons from their bitter

and scornful opponents of the other creed.

Next Sunday, in the county Meath, in a quiet old church lying amongst

meadows and fine old stately avenues of trees, and for the benefit of a

congregation of some thirty persons, I heard for the space of an hour

and twenty minutes some thorough Protestant doctrine, and the Popish

superstitions properly belaboured. Does it strengthen a man in his own

creed to hear his neighbour’s belief abused? One would imagine so; for

though abuse converts nobody, yet many of our pastors think they are not

doing their duty by their own fold unless they fling stones at the flock

in the next field, and have, for the honour of the service, a match at

cudgelling with the shepherd. Our shepherd to-day was of this pugnacious

sort.

The Meath landscape, if not varied and picturesque, is extremely rich

and pleasant; and we took some drives along the banks of the Boyne, to

the noble park of Slane (still sacred to the memory of George IV., who

actually condescended to pass some days there), and to Trim, of which

the name occurs so often in Swift’s Journals, and where stands an

enormous old castle that was inhabited by Prince John. It was taken from

him by an Irish chief, our guide said; and from the Irish chief it was

taken by Oliver Cromwell. O’Thuselah was the Irish chief’s name no

doubt.

Here, too, stands, in the midst of one of the most wretched towns in

Ireland, a pillar erected in honour of the Duke of Wellington by the

gentry of his native county. His birthplace, Dangan, lies not far off.

And as we saw the hero’s statue, a flight of birds had hovered about it:

there was one on each epaulette and two on his marshal’s staff; and,

besides these wonders, we saw a certain number of beggars; and a madman,

who was walking round a mound and preaching a sermon on grace; and a

little child’s funeral came passing through the dismal town, the only

stirring thing in it (the coffin was laid on a one-horse country car--a

little deal box, in which the poor child lay--and a great troop of

people followed the humble procession); and the innkeeper, who had

caught a few stray gentlefolk in a town where travellers must be rare,

and in his inn, which is more gaunt and miserable than the town itself,

and which is by no means rendered more cheerful because sundry

theological works are left for the rare frequenters in the coffee-room.

The innkeeper brought in a bill which would have been worthy of Long’s,

and which was paid with much grumbling on both sides.

It would not be a bad rule for the traveller in Ireland to avoid those

inns where theological works are left in the coffee-room. He is pretty

sure to be made to pay very dearly for these religious privileges.

We waited for the coach at the beautiful lodge and gate of Annsbrook;

and one of the sons of the house coming up, invited us to look at the

domain, which is as pretty and neatly ordered as--as any in England. It

is hard to use this comparison so often, and must make Irish hearers

angry. Can’t one see a neat house and grounds without instantly thinking

that they are worthy of the sister country; and implying, in our cool

way, its superiority everywhere else? Walking in this gentleman’s

grounds, I told him, in the simplicity of my heart, that the

neighbouring country was like Warwickshire, and the grounds as good as

any English park. Is it the fact that English grounds _are_ superior, or

only that Englishmen are disposed to consider them so?

A pretty little twining river, called the Nanny’s Water, runs through

the Park: there is a legend about that, as about other places. Once upon

a time (ten thousand years ago), St. Patrick being thirsty as he passed

by this country, came to the house of an old woman, of whom he asked a

drink of milk. The old woman brought it to his reverence with the best

of welcomes, and----here it is a great mercy that the Belfast mail

comes up, whereby the reader is spared the rest of the history.

The Belfast mail had only to carry us five miles to Drogheda, but, in

revenge, it made us pay three shillings for the five miles; and again,

by way of compensation, it carried us over five miles of a country that

was worth, at least, five shillings to see--not romantic or especially

beautiful, but having the best of all beauty--a quiet, smiling,

prosperous, unassuming, _work-day_ look, that in views and landscapes

most good judges admire. Hard by Nanny’s Water, we came to Duleek

Bridge, where, I was told, stands an old residence of the De Bath

family, who were, moreover, builders of the picturesque old Bridge.

It leads over a wide green common, which puts one in mind of Eng---- (a

plague on it, there is the comparison again!), and at the end of the

common lies the village among trees: a beautiful and peaceful sight. In

the background there was a tall, ivy-covered old tower, looking noble

and imposing, but a ruin and useless--then there was a church, and next

to it a chapel--the very same sun was shining upon both. The chapel and

church were connected by a farmyard, and a score of golden ricks were in

the background, the churches in unison, and the people (typified by the

corn-ricks) flourishing at the feet of both--may one ever hope to see

the day in Ireland when this little landscape allegory shall find a

general application?

For some way, after leaving Duleek, the road and the country round

continue to wear the agreeable cheerful look just now lauded. You pass

by a house where James II. is said to have slept the night before the

Battle of the Boyne (he took care to sleep far enough off on the night

after), and also by an old red-brick hall, standing at the end of an old

chace or terrace-avenue, that runs for about a mile down to the house,

and finishes at a moat towards the road. But as the coach arrives near

Drogheda, and in the boulevards of that town, all resemblance to England

is lost. Up hill and down, we pass low rows of filthy cabins in dirty

undulations. Parents are at the cabin-doors dressing the hair of ragged

children; shockheads of girls peer out from the black circumference of

smoke, and children inconceivably filthy, yell wildly and vociferously

as the coach passes by. One little ragged savage rushed furiously up the

hill, speculating upon permission to put on the drag-chain at

descending, and hoping for a halfpenny reward. He put on the chain, but

the guard did not give a halfpenny. I flung him one, and the boy rushed

wildly after the carriage, holding it up with joy. ‘The man inside has

given me one,’ says he, holding it up exultingly to the guard. I flung

out another (by-the-bye, and without any prejudice, the halfpence in

Ireland _are_ smaller than those of England), but when the child got

this halfpenny, small as it was, it seemed to overpower him--the little

man’s look of gratitude was worth a great deal more than the biggest

penny ever struck.

The town itself, which I had three-quarters of an hour to ramble

through, is smoky, dirty, and lively. There was a great bustle in the

black main street, and several good shops, though some of the houses

were in a half state of ruin, and battered shutters closed many of the

windows, where formerly had been ‘Emporiums,’ ‘Repositories,’ and other

grandly-titled abodes of small commerce. Exhortations to repeal were

liberally plastered on the blackened walls, proclaiming some past or

promised visit of the great agitator. From the bridge is a good bustling

spectacle of the river and the craft; the quays were grimy with the

discharge of the coal-vessels that lay alongside them; the warehouses

were not less black; the seamen and porters loitering on the quay were

as swarthy as those of Puddledock; numerous factories and chimneys were

vomiting huge clouds of black smoke: the commerce of the town is stated

by the Guide-book to be considerable, and increasing of late years. Of

one part of its manufactures every traveller must speak with

gratitude--of the ale namely, which is as good as the best brewed in the

sister kingdom. Drogheda ale is to be drunk all over Ireland in the

bottled state: candour calls for the acknowledgment that it is equally

praiseworthy in draught. And while satisfying himself of this fact, the

philosophic observer cannot but ask why ale should not be as good

elsewhere as at Drogheda; is the water of the Boyne the only water in

Ireland whereof ale can be made?

Above the river and craft, and the smoky quays of the town, the hills

rise abruptly, up which innumerable cabins clamber. On one of them, by a

church, is a round tower or fort, with a flag; the church is the

successor of one battered down by Cromwell in 1649, in his frightful

siege of the place. The place of one of his batteries is still marked

outside the town, and known as ‘Cromwell’s Mount’; here he ‘made the

breach assaultable, and, by the help of God, stormed it.’ He chose the

strongest point of the defence for his attack.

After being twice beaten back, by the divine assistance he was enabled

to succeed in a third assault: he ‘knocked on the head’ all the officers

of the garrison; he gave orders that none of the men should be spared.

‘I think,’ says he, ‘that night we put to the sword two thousand men,

and one hundred of them having taken possession of St. Peter’s steeple

and a round tower next the gate, called St. Sunday’s, I ordered the

steeple of St. Peter’s to be fired, when one in the flames was heard to

say, “God confound me, I burn, I burn!”’ The Lord General’s history of

‘this great mercy vouchsafed to us’ concludes with appropriate religious

reflections: and prays Mr. Speaker of the House of Commons to remember

that ‘it is good that God alone have all the glory.’ Is not the

recollection of this butchery almost enough to make an Irishman turn

rebel?

When troops march over the bridge, a young friend of mine (whom I

shrewdly suspect to be an Orangeman in his heart) told me that their

bands play the ‘Boyne Water.’ Here is another legend of defeat for the

Irishman to muse upon; and here it was, too, that King Richard II.

received the homage of four Irish kings, who flung their skenes or

daggers at his feet and knelt to him, and were wonder-stricken by the

riches of his tents and the garments of his knights and ladies. I think

it is in Lingard that the story is told; and the antiquarian has no

doubt seen that beautiful old manuscript at the British Museum where

these yellow-mantled warriors are seen riding down to the king, splendid

in his forked beard, and peaked shoes, and long, dangling, scalloped

sleeves, and embroidered gown.

The Boyne winds picturesquely round two sides of the town, and,

following it, we came to the Linen Hall,--in the days of the linen

manufacture a place of note, now the place where Mr. O’Connell harangues

the people,--but all the windows of the house were barricaded when we

passed it, and of linen or any other sort of merchandise there seemed to

be none. Three boys were running past it with a mouse tied to a string,

and a dog galloping after: two little children were paddling down the

street, one saying to the other, ‘_Once I had a halfpenny_, and bought

apples with it.’ The barges were lying lazily on the river, on the

opposite side of which was a wood of a gentleman’s domain, over which

the rooks were cawing, and by the shore were some ruins, where ‘Mr. Ball

once had his kennel of hounds’--touching reminiscence of former

prosperity!

There is a very large and ugly Roman Catholic chapel in the town, and a

smaller one of better construction; it was so crowded, however, although

on a week-day, that we could not pass beyond the chapel-yard; where were

great crowds of people, some praying, some talking, some buying and

selling. There were two or three stalls in the yard, such as one sees

near Continental churches, presided over by old women, with a store of

little brass crucifixes, beads, books, and bénitiers for the faithful to

purchase. The church is large and commodious within, and looks (not like

all other churches in Ireland) as if it were frequented. There is a

hideous stone monument in the churchyard representing two corpses half

rotted away;--time or neglect had battered away the inscription, nor

could we see the dates of some older tombstones in the ground, which

were mouldering away in the midst of nettles and rank grass on the wall.

By a large public school of some reputation, where a hundred boys are

educated (my young guide the Orangeman was one of them; he related with

much glee how, on one of the Liberator’s visits, a schoolfellow had

waved a blue and orange flag from the window and cried, ‘King William

for ever, and to hell with the Pope!’), there is a fine old gate leading

to the river, and in excellent preservation, in spite of time and Oliver

Cromwell. It is a good specimen of Irish architecture. By this time that

exceedingly slow coach, the Newry Lark, had arrived at that exceedingly

filthy inn where the mail had dropped us an hour before. An enormous

Englishman was holding a vain combat of wit with a brawny grinning

beggar-woman at the door. ‘There’s a _clever_ gentleman,’ says the

beggar-woman; ‘sure he’ll give me something.’ ‘How much should you

like?’ says the Englishman, with playful jocularity. ‘Musha,’ says she,

‘many a _littler_ man nor you has given me a shilling.’ The coach drives

away; the lady had clearly the best of the joking-match: but I did not

see, for all that, that the Englishman gave her a single farthing.

From Castle Bellingham--as famous for ale as Drogheda, and remarkable

likewise for a still better thing than ale, an excellent resident

proprietress, whose fine park lies by the road, and by whose care and

taste the village has been rendered one of the most neat and elegant I

have yet seen in Ireland--the road to Dundalk is exceedingly

picturesque, and the traveller has the pleasure of feasting his eye with

the noble line of Mourn Mountains, which rise before him while he

journeys over a level country for several miles. The Newry Lark, to be

sure, disdained to take advantage of the easy roads to accelerate its

movements in any way; but the aspect of the country is so pleasant that

one can afford to loiter over it. The fields were yellow with the

stubble of the corn, which in this, one of the chief corn counties of

Ireland, had just been cut down; and a long straggling line of neat

farmhouses and cottages runs almost the whole way from Castle Bellingham

to Dundalk. For nearly a couple of miles of the distance the road runs

along the picturesque flat called Lurgan Green; and gentlemen’s

residences and parks are numerous along the road, and one seems to have

come amongst a new race of people, so trim are the cottages, so neat the

gates and hedges, in this peaceful smiling district. The people, too,

show signs of the general prosperity. A National school had just

dismissed its female scholars as we passed through Dunlar; and though

the children had most of them bare feet, their clothes were good and

clean, their faces rosy and bright, and their long hair as shiny and as

nicely combed as young ladies’ need to be. Numerous old castles and

towers stand on the road here and there; and long before we entered

Dundalk we had a sight of a huge factory-chimney in the town, and of the

dazzling white walls of the Roman Catholic church lately erected there.

The cabin-suburb is not great, and the entrance to the town is much

adorned by the Hospital--a handsome Elizabethan building--and a row of

houses of a similar architectural style, which lie on the left of the

traveller.

CHAPTER XXVI

DUNDALK

The stranger can’t fail to be struck with the look of Dundalk, as he has

been with the villages and country leading to it, when contrasted with

places in the south and west of Ireland. The coach stopped at a

cheerful-looking _Place_, of which almost the only dilapidated mansion

was the old inn at which it discharged us, and which did not hold out

much prospect of comfort. But in justice to the King’s Arms, it must be

said that good beds and dinners are to be obtained there by voyagers;

and if they choose to arrive on days when his Grace the Most Reverend

the Lord Archbishop of Armagh and R.C. Primate of Ireland is dining with

his clergy, the house of course is crowded, and the waiters, and the boy

who carries in the potatoes, a little hurried and flustered. When their

reverences were gone, the laity were served; and I have no doubt, from

the leg of a duck which I got, that the breast and wings must have been

very tender.

Meanwhile, the walk was pleasant through the bustling little town. A

grave old church, with a tall copper spire, defends one end of the main

street; and a little way from the inn is the superb new chapel, which

the architect, Mr. Duff, has copied from King’s College Chapel in

Cambridge. The ornamental part of the interior is not yet completed; but

the area of the chapel is spacious and noble, and three handsome altars

of scagliola (or some composition resembling marble) have been erected

of handsome and suitable form. When, by the aid of further

subscriptions, the church shall be completed, it will be one of the

handsomest places of worship the Roman Catholics possess in this

country. Opposite the chapel stands a neat low black building--the gaol;

in the middle of the building, and over the doorway, is an ominous

balcony and window, with an iron beam overhead. Each end of the beam is

ornamented with a grinning iron skull! Is this the hanging-place? and do

these grinning cast-iron skulls facetiously explain the business for

which the beam is there? For shame! for shame! Such disgusting emblems

ought no longer to disgrace a Christian land. If kill we must, let us do

so with as much despatch and decency as possible,--not brazen out our

misdeeds and perpetuate them in this frightful satiric way.

A far better cast-iron emblem stands over a handsome shop in the place

hard by--a plough namely, which figures over the factory of Mr.

Shekelton, whose industry and skill seem to have brought the greatest

benefit to his fellow-townsmen, of whom he employs numbers in his

foundries and workshops. This gentleman was kind enough to show me

through his manufactories, where all sorts of iron-works are made, from

a steam-engine to a door-key; and I saw everything to admire, and a vast

deal more than I could understand, in the busy, cheerful, orderly,

bustling, clanging place. Steam-boilers were hammered here; and pins

made by a hundred busy hands in a manufactory above. There was the

engine-room, where the monster was whirring his ceaseless wheels and

directing the whole operations of the factory, fanning the forges,

turning the drills, blasting into the pipes of the smelting-houses: he

had a house to himself, from which his orders issued to the different

establishments round about. One machine was quite awful to me, a gentle

cockney, not used to such things--it was an iron-devourer, a wretch with

huge jaws and a narrow mouth, ever opening and shutting, opening and

shutting. You put a half-inch iron plate between his jaws, and they shut

not a whit slower or quicker than before, and bit through the iron as if

it were a sheet of paper. Below the monster’s mouth was a punch that

performed its duties with similar dreadful calmness, going on its rising

and falling.

I was so lucky as to have an introduction to the Vicar of Dundalk, which

that gentleman’s kind and generous nature interpreted into a claim for

unlimited hospitality; and he was good enough to consider himself bound

not only to receive me, but to give up previous engagements abroad in

order to do so. I need not say that it afforded me sincere pleasure to

witness, for a couple of days, his labours among his people; and indeed

it was a delightful occupation to watch both flock and pastor. The world

is a wicked, selfish, abominable place, as the parson tells us; but his

reverence comes out of his pulpit and gives the flattest contradiction

to his doctrine, busying himself with kind actions from morning till

night, denying to himself, generous to others, preaching the truth to

young and old, clothing the naked, feeding the hungry, consoling the

wretched, and giving hope to the sick;--and I do not mean to say that

this sort of life is led by the Vicar of Dundalk merely, but do firmly

believe that it is the life of the great majority of the Protestant and

Roman Catholic clergy of the country. There will be no breach of

confidence, I hope, in publishing here the journal of a couple of days

spent with one of these reverend gentlemen, and telling some readers, as

idle and profitless as the writer, what the clergyman’s peaceful labours

are.

In the first place, we set out to visit the church--the comfortable

copper-spired old edifice that was noticed two pages back. It stands in

a green churchyard of its own, very neat and trimly kept, with an old

row of trees that were dropping their red leaves upon a flock of vaults

and tombstones below. The building being much injured by flame and time,

some hundred years back, was repaired, enlarged, and ornamented--as

churches in those days were ornamented--and has consequently lost a good

deal of its Gothic character. There is a great mixture, therefore, of

old style and new style and no style; but, with all this, the church is

one of the most commodious and best appointed I have seen in Ireland.

The vicar held a council with a builder regarding some ornaments for the

roof of the church, which is, as it should be, a great object for his

care and architectural taste, and on which he has spent a very large sum

of money. To these expenses he is, in a manner bound, for the living is

a considerable one, its income being no less than two hundred and fifty

pounds a year; out of which he has merely to maintain a couple of

curates and a clerk and sexton, to contribute largely towards schools

and hospitals, and relieve a few scores of pensioners of his own who are

fitting objects of private bounty.

We went from the church to a school, which has been long a favourite

resort of the good vicar’s: indeed, to judge from the schoolmaster’s

books, his attendance there is almost daily--and the number of the

scholars some two hundred. The number was considerably greater until the

schools of the Educational Board were established, when the Roman

Catholic clergymen withdrew many of their young people from Mr.

Thackeray’s establishment.

We found a large room with sixty or seventy boys at work; in an upper

chamber were a considerable number of girls, with their teachers, two

modest and pretty young women; but the favourite resort of the vicar was

evidently the Infant School,--and no wonder: it is impossible to witness

a more beautiful or touching sight.

Eighty of these little people, healthy, clean, and rosy--some in smart

gowns and shoes and stockings, some with patched pinafores and little

bare pink feet--sate upon a half-dozen low benches, and were singing, at

the top of their fourscore fresh voices, a song when we entered. All the

voices were hushed as the vicar came in, and a great bobbing and

curtseying took place; whilst a hundred and sixty innocent eyes turned

awfully towards the clergyman, who tried to look as unconcerned as

possible, and began to make his little ones a speech. ‘I have brought,’

says he, ‘a gentleman from England, who has heard of my little children

and their school, and hopes he will carry away a good account of it.

Now, you know, we must all do our best to be kind and civil to

strangers: what can we do here for this gentleman that he would

like?--do you think he would like a song?’

_All the Children._--‘We’ll sing to him!’

Then the schoolmistress, coming forward, sang the first words of a hymn,

which at once eighty little voices took up, or near eighty--for some of

the little things were too young to sing yet, and all they could do was

to beat the measure with little red hands as the others sang. It was a

hymn about heaven, with a chorus of ‘Will not that be joyful, joyful?’

and one of the verses beginning ‘Little children, too, are there.’ Some

of my fair readers (if I have the honour to find such) who have been

present at similar tender charming concerts, know the hymn, no doubt. It

was the first time I had ever heard it; and I do not care to own that it

brought tears to my eyes, though it is ill to parade such kind of

sentiment in print. But I think I will never, while I live, forget that

little chorus, nor would any man who has ever loved a child or lost one.

God bless you, O little happy singers! What a noble and useful life is

his, who, in place of seeking wealth or honour, devotes his life to such

a service as this! And all through our country, thank God! in quiet

humble corners that busy citizens and men of the world never hear of,

there are thousands of such men employed in such holy pursuits, with no

reward beyond that which the fulfilment of duty brings them. Most of

these children were Roman Catholics. At this tender age the priests do

not care to separate them from their little Protestant brethren: and no

wonder. He must be a child-murdering Herod who would find the heart to

do so.

After the hymn, the children went through a little scripture catechism,

answering very correctly, and all in a breath, as the mistress put the

questions. Some of them were, of course, too young to understand the

words they uttered; but the answers are so simple that they cannot fail

to understand them before long; and they learn in spite of themselves.

The catechism being ended, another song was sung; and now the vicar (who

had been humming the chorus along with his young singers, and, in spite

of an awful and grave countenance, could not help showing his extreme

happiness) made another oration, in which he stated that the gentleman

from England was perfectly satisfied; that he would have a good report

of the Dundalk children to carry home with him; that the day was very

fine, and the schoolmistress would probably like to take a walk; and,

finally, would the young people give her a holiday? ‘As many,’

concluded he, ‘as will give the schoolmistress a holiday, hold up their

hands!’ This question was carried unanimously.

But I am bound to say, when the little people were told that as many as

_wouldn’t like_ a holiday were to hold up _their_ hands, all the little

hands went up again exactly as before: by which it may be concluded

either that the infants did not understand his reverence’s speech, or

that they were just as happy to stay at school as to go and play; and

the reader may adopt whichever of the reasons he inclines to. It is

probable that both are correct.

The little things are so fond of the school, the vicar told me as we

walked away from it, that on returning home they like nothing better

than to get a number of their companions who don’t go to school, and to

play at infant-school.

[Illustration]

They may be heard singing their hymns in the narrow alleys and humble

houses in which they dwell; and I was told of one dying who sang his

song of ‘Will not that be joyful, joyful?’ to his poor mother weeping at

his bedside, and promising her that they should meet where no parting

should be.

‘There was a child in the school,’ said the vicar, ‘whose father, a

Roman Catholic, was a carpenter by trade, a good workman, and earning a

considerable weekly sum, but neglecting his wife and children and

spending his earnings in drink. We have a song against drunkenness that

the infants sing; and one evening, going home, the child found her

father excited with liquor and ill-treating his wife. The little thing

forthwith interposed between them, told her father what she had heard at

school regarding the criminality of drunkenness and quarrelling, and

finished her little sermon with the hymn. The father was first amused,

then touched; and the end of it was that he kissed his wife, and asked

her to forgive him, hugged his child, and from that day would always

have her in his bed, made her sing to him morning and night, and forsook

his old haunts for the sake of his little companion.’

He was quite sober and prosperous for eight months; but the vicar at the

end of that time began to remark that the child looked ragged at school,

and passing by her mother’s house, saw the poor woman with a black eye.

‘If it was any one but your husband, Mrs. C----, who gave you that black

eye,’ says the vicar, ‘tell me; but if he did it, don’t say a word.’ The

woman was silent, and soon after, meeting her husband, the vicar took

him to task. ‘You were sober for eight months. Now tell me fairly,

C----,’ says he, ‘were you happier when you lived at home with your wife

and child, or are you more happy now?’ The man owned that he was much

happier formerly, and the end of the conversation was, that he promised

to go home once more and try the sober life again, and he went home and

succeeded.

The vicar continued to hear good accounts of him; but passing one day by

his house he saw the wife there looking very sad. Had her husband

relapsed?--No, he was dead, she said--dead of the cholera; but he had

been sober ever since his last conversation with the clergyman, and had

done his duty to his family up to the time of his death. ‘I said to the

woman,’ said the good old clergyman, in a grave low voice, ‘your husband

is gone now to the place where, according to his conduct here, his

eternal reward will be assigned him; and let us be thankful to think

what a different position he occupies now, to that which he must have

held had not his little girl been the means, under God, of converting

him.’

Our next walk was to the County Hospital, the handsome edifice which

ornaments the Drogheda entrance of the town, and which I had remarked on

my arrival. Concerning this hospital, the governors were, when I passed

through Dundalk, in a state of no small agitation; for a gentleman by

the name of----, who, from being an apothecary’s assistant in the place,

had gone forth as a sort of amateur inspector of hospitals throughout

Ireland, had thought fit to censure their extravagance in erecting the

new building, stating that the old one was fully sufficient to hold

fifty patients, and that the public money might consequently have been

spared. Mr.----‘s plan for the better maintenance of them in general

is, that commissioners should be appointed to direct them, and not

county gentlemen as heretofore; the discussion of which question does

not need to be carried on in this humble work.

My guide, who is one of the governors of the new hospital, conducted me,

in the first place, to the old one--a small dirty house in a damp and

low situation, with but three rooms to accommodate patients, and these

evidently not fit to hold fifty, or even fifteen patients. The new

hospital is one of the handsomest buildings of the size and kind in

Ireland; an ornament to the town, as the angry commissioner stated, but

not after all a building of undue cost, for the expense of its erection

was but £3000, and the sick of the county are far better accommodated in

it than in the damp and unwholesome tenement regretted by the eccentric

commissioner.

An English architect, Mr. Smith, of Hertford, designed and completed the

edifice; strange to say, only exceeding his estimates by the sum of

three-and-sixpence, as the worthy governor of the hospital with great

triumph told me. The building is certainly a wonder of cheapness, and,

what is more, so complete for the purpose for which it was intended, and

so handsome in appearance, that the architect’s name deserves to be

published by all who hear it; and if any country newspaper editors

should notice this volume, they are requested to make the fact known.

The house is provided with every convenience for men and women, with all

the appurtenances of baths, water, gas, airy wards, and a garden for

convalescents; and below, a dispensary, a handsome board-room, kitchen,

and matron’s apartments, etc.--indeed, a noble requiring a house for a

large establishment need not desire a handsomer one than this, at its

moderate price of £3000. The beauty of this building has, as is almost

always the case, created emulation, and a terrace in the same taste has

been raised in the neighbourhood of the hospital.

From the Hospital we bent our steps to the Institution; of which place I

give below the rules, and a copy of the course of study, and the

dietary: leaving English parents to consider the fact, that their

children can be educated at this place for _thirteen pounds a year_. Nor

is there anything in the establishment savouring of the Dotheboys

Hall.[30] I never saw, in any public school in England, sixty cleaner,

smarter, more gentlemanlike boys than were here at work. The upper

class had been at work on Euclid as we came in, and were set, by way of

amusing the stranger, to perform a sum of compound interest of

diabolical complication, which, with its algebraic and arithmetic

solution, was handed up to me by three or four of the pupils; and I

strove to look as wise as I possibly could. Then they went through

questions of mental arithmetic with astonishing correctness and

facility; and finding from the master that classics were not taught in

the school, I took occasion to lament this circumstance, saying, with a

knowing air, that I would like to have examined the lads in a Greek

play.

Classics, then, these young fellows do not get. Meat they get but twice

a week. Let English parents bear this fact in mind; but that the lads

are healthy and happy, anybody who sees them can have no question;

furthermore, they are well instructed in a sound practical

education--history, geography, mathematics, religion. What a place to

know of would this be for many a poor half-pay officer, where he may put

his children in all confidence that they will be well cared for and

soundly educated! Why have we not State Schools in England, where, for

the prime cost--for a sum which never need exceed for a young boy’s

maintenance £25 a year--our children might be brought up? We are

establishing National Schools for the labourer; why not give education

to the sons of the poor gentry--the clergyman whose pittance is small,

and would still give his son the benefit of a public education--the

artist--the officer--the merchant’s office-clerk, the literary man? What

a benefit might be conferred upon all of us if honest Charter Schools

could be established for our children, and where it would be impossible

for Squeers to make a profit![31]

Our next day’s journey led us, by half-past ten o’clock, to the ancient

town of Louth, a little poor village now, but a great seat of learning

and piety, it is said, formerly, where there stood a university and

abbeys, and where St. Patrick worked wonders. Here my kind friend, the

rector, was called upon to marry a smart sergeant of police to a pretty

lass, one of the few Protestants who attend his church; and, the

ceremony over, we were invited to the house of the bride’s father hard

by, where the clergyman was bound to cut the cake, and drink a glass of

wine to the health of the new-married couple. There was evidently to be

a dance and some merriment in the course of the evening; for the good

mother of the bride (Oh, blessed is he who has a good mother-in-law!)

was busy at a huge fire in the little kitchen, and along the road we met

various parties of neatly-dressed people, and several of the sergeant’s

comrades, who were hastening to the wedding. The mistress of the

rector’s darling Infant School was one of the bridesmaids: consequently

the little ones had a holiday.

But he was not to be disappointed of his Infant School in this manner;

so, mounting the car again, with a fresh horse, we went a very pretty

drive of three miles to the snug lone schoolhouse of Glyde-farm--near a

handsome park, I believe of the same name, where the proprietor is

building a mansion of the Tudor order.

The pretty scene of Dundalk was here played over again; the children

sang their little hymns, the good old clergyman joined delighted in the

chorus, the holiday was given, and the little hands held up, and I

looked at more clean bright faces and little rosy feet--the scene need

not be repeated in print, but I can understand what pleasure a man must

take in the daily witnessing of it, and in the growth of these little

plants, which are set and tended by his care. As we returned to Louth, a

woman met us with a curtsey and expressed her sorrow that she had been

obliged to withdraw her daughter from one of the rector’s schools, which

the child was vexed at leaving too. But the orders of the priest were

peremptory; and who can say they were unjust? The priest, on his side,

was only enforcing the rule which the parson maintains as his:--the

latter will not permit his young flock to be educated except upon

certain principles and by certain teachers; the former has his own

scruples unfortunately also--and so that noble and brotherly scheme of

National Education falls to the ground. In Louth, the National School

was standing by the side of the priest’s chapel--it is so almost

everywhere throughout Ireland; the Protestants have rejected, on very

good motives doubtless, the chance of union which the Education Board

gave them--be it so: if the children of either sect be educated apart,

so that they _be_ educated, the education scheme will have produced its

good, and the union will come afterwards.

The church at Louth stands boldly upon a hill looking down on the

village, and has nothing remarkable in it but neatness, except the

monument of a former rector, Dr. Little, which attracts the spectator’s

attention from the extreme inappropriateness of the motto on the coat of

arms of the reverend defunct. It looks rather unorthodox to read in a

Christian temple, where a man’s bones have the honour to lie, and where,

if anywhere, humility is requisite--that there is _multum in parvo_, ‘a

great deal in Little.’ O Little, in life you were not much, and lo! you

are less now; why should filial piety engrave that pert pun upon your

monument, to cause people to laugh in a place where they ought to be

grave? The defunct doctor built a very handsome rectory-house, with a

set of stables that would be useful to a nobleman, but are rather too

commodious for a peaceful rector who does not ride to hounds; and it was

in Little’s time, I believe, that the church was removed from the old

abbey, where it formerly stood, to its present proud position on the

hill.

The abbey is a fine ruin, the windows of a good style, the tracings of

carvings on many of them; but a great number of stones and ornaments

were removed formerly to build farm-buildings withal, and the place is

now as rank and ruinous as the generality of Irish burying-places seem

to be. Skulls lie in clusters amongst nettle-beds by the abbey-walls;

graves are only partially covered with rude stones; a fresh coffin was

lying broken in pieces within the abbey; and the surgeon of the

dispensary hard by might procure subjects here, almost without

grave-breaking. Hard by the abbey is a building of which I beg leave to

offer the following interesting sketch:--

[Illustration]

The legend in the country goes that the place was built for the

accommodation of Saint ‘Murtogh,’ who lying down to sleep here in the

open fields, not having any place to house under, found to his surprise,

on waking in the morning, the above edifice, which the angels had built.

The angelic architecture, it will be seen, is of rather a rude kind; and

the village antiquary, who takes a pride in showing the place, says that

the building was erected _two thousand years ago_. In the handsome

grounds of the rectory is another spot visited by popular tradition--a

fairy’s ring: a regular mound of some thirty feet in height, flat and

even on the top, and provided with a winding path for the

foot-passenger to ascend. Some trees grew on the mound, one of which was

removed in order to make the walk. But the country-people cried out

loudly at this desecration, and vowed that the ‘little people’ had

quitted the country side for ever in consequence.

While walking in the town, a woman meets the rector with a number of

curtseys and compliments, and vows that ‘tis your reverence is the

friend of the poor, and may the Lord preserve you to us, and lady; and

having poured out blessings innumerable, concludes by producing a paper

for her son that’s in trouble in England. The paper ran to the effect,

that ‘We, the undersigned, inhabitants of the parish of Louth, have

known Daniel Horgan ever since his youth, and can speak confidently as

to his integrity, piety, and good conduct.’ In fact, the paper stated

that Daniel Horgan was an honour to his country, and consequently quite

incapable of the crime of sack-stealing, I think, with which at present

he was charged and lay in prison in Durham Castle. The paper had, I

should think, come down to the poor mother from Durham, with a direction

ready written to despatch it back again when signed, and was evidently

the work of one of those benevolent individuals in assize-towns, who,

following the profession of the law, delight to extricate unhappy young

men of whose innocence (from various six-and-eightpenny motives) they

feel convinced. There stood the poor mother, as the rector examined the

document, with a huge wafer in her hand, ready to forward it so soon as

it was signed; for the truth is, that ‘We, the undersigned,’ were as yet

merely imaginary.

‘You don’t come to church,’ says the rector. ‘I know nothing of you or

your son: why don’t you go to the priest?’

‘Oh, your reverence, my son’s to be tried next Tuesday,’ whimpered the

woman; and then said the priest was not in the way, but as we had seen

him a few minutes before, recalled the assertion, and she confessed that

she _had_ been to the priest, and that he would not sign; and fell to

prayers, tears, and unbounded supplications to induce the rector to give

his signature. But that hard-hearted divine, stating that he had _not_

known Daniel Horgan from his youth upwards, that he could not certify as

to his honesty or dishonesty, enjoined the woman to make an attempt upon

the R.C. curate, to whose handwriting he would certify if need were.

The upshot of the matter was that the woman returned with a certificate

from the R.C. curate as to her son’s good behaviour while in the

village, and the rector certified that the handwriting was that of the

R.C. clergyman in question, and the woman popped her big red wafer into

the letter and went her way. Tuesday is passed long ere this: Mr.

Horgan’s guilt or innocence is long since clearly proved, and he

celebrates the latter in freedom, or expiates the former at the mill.

Indeed, I don’t know that there was any call to introduce his adventures

to the public, except, perhaps, it may be good to see how in this little

distant Irish village the blood of life is running. Here goes a happy

party to a marriage, and the parson prays a ‘God bless you!’ upon them,

and the world begins for them. Yonder lies a stall-fed rector in his

tomb, flaunting over his nothingness his pompous heraldic motto; and

yonder lie the fresh fragments of a nameless deal coffin, which any foot

may kick over. Presently you hear the clear voices of little children

praising God; and here comes a mother wringing her hands and asking for

succour for her lad, who was a child but the other day. Such _motus

animorum atque hoec certamina tanta_ are going on in an hour of an

October day in a little pinch of clay in the county Louth.

Perhaps--being in the moralising strain--the honest surgeon at the

dispensary might come in as an illustration. He inhabits a neat humble

house, a story higher than his neighbours’, but with a thatched roof. He

relieves a thousand patients yearly at the dispensary, he visits seven

hundred in the parish, he supplies the medicines gratis; and receiving

for these services the sum of about one hundred pounds yearly, some

county economists and calculators are loud against the extravagance of

his salary, and threaten his removal. All these individuals and their

histories we presently turn our backs upon, for, after all, dinner is at

five o’clock, and we have to see the new road to Dundalk, which the

county has lately been making.

Of this undertaking, which shows some skilful engineering--some gallant

cutting of rocks and hills, and filling of valleys, with a tall and

handsome stone bridge thrown across the river, and connecting the high

embankments on which the new road at that place is formed--I can say

little, except that it is a vast convenience to the county, and a great

credit to the surveyor and contractor too; for the latter, though a poor

man, and losing heavily by his bargain, has yet refused to mulct his

labourers of their wages; and, as cheerfully as he can, still pays them

their shilling a day.

CHAPTER XXVII

NEWRY, ARMAGH, BELFAST--FROM DUNDALK TO NEWRY

My kind host gave orders to the small ragged boy that drove the car to

take ‘particular care of the little gentleman’; and the car-boy,

grinning in appreciation of the joke, drove off at his best pace, and

landed his cargo at Newry, after a pleasant two hours’ drive. The

country for the most part is wild, but not gloomy--the mountains round

about are adorned with woods and gentlemen’s seats; and the car-boy

pointed out one hill--that of Slievegullion, which kept us company all

the way--as the highest hill in Ireland. Ignorant or deceiving car-boy!

I have seen a dozen hills, each the highest in Ireland, in my way

through the country, of which the inexorable Guide-book gives the

measurement and destroys the claim. Well, it was the tallest hill, in

the estimation of the car-boy; and in this respect the world is full of

car-boys. Has not every mother of a family a Slievegullion of a son,

who, according to her measurement, towers above all other sons? Is not

the patriot, who believes himself equal to three Frenchmen, a car-boy in

heart? There was a kind young creature, with a child in her lap, that

evidently held this notion. She paid the child a series of compliments,

which would have led one to fancy he was an angel from heaven at the

least; and her husband sate gravely by, very silent, with his arms round

a barometer.

Beyond these there were no incidents or characters of note, except an

old hostler that they said was ninety years old, and watered the horse

at a lone inn on the road. ‘Stop!’ cries this wonder of years and rags,

as the car, after considerable parley, got under weigh. The car-boy

pulled up, thinking a fresh passenger was coming out of the inn.

‘_Stop, till one of the gentlemen gives me something_,’ says the old

man, coming slowly up with us; which speech created a laugh, and got him

a penny: he received it without the least thankfulness, and went away

grumbling to his pail.

Newry is remarkable as being the only town I have seen which has no

cabin suburb: strange to say, the houses begin all at once, handsomely

coated and hatted with stone and slate; and if Dundalk was prosperous,

Newry is better still. Such a sight of neatness and comfort is

exceedingly welcome to an English traveller, who, moreover, finds

himself, after driving through a plain bustling clean street, landed at

a large plain comfortable inn, where business seems to be done, where

there are smart waiters to receive him, and a comfortable warm

coffee-room that bears no traces of dilapidation.

What the merits of the _cuisine_ may be I can’t say for the information

of travellers; a gentleman to whom I had brought a letter from Dundalk

taking care to provide me at his own table, accompanying me previously

to visit the lions of the town. A river divides it, and the counties of

Armagh and Down: the river runs into the sea at Carlingford Bay, and is

connected by a canal with Lough Neagh, and thus with the north of

Ireland. Steamers to Liverpool and Glasgow sail continually. There are

mills, foundries, and manufactories, of which the Guide-book will give

particulars; and the town of 13,000 inhabitants is the busiest and most

thriving that I have yet seen in Ireland.

Our first walk was to the church; a large and handsome building,

although built in the unlucky period when the Gothic style was coming

into vogue. Hence one must question the propriety of many of the

ornaments, though the whole is massive, well-finished, and stately. Near

the church stands the Roman Catholic chapel, a very fine building, the

work of the same architect, Mr. Duff, who erected the chapel at Dundalk;

but, like almost all other edifices of the kind in Ireland that I have

seen, the interior is quite unfinished, and already so dirty and

ruinous, that one would think a sort of genius for dilapidation must

have been exercised in order to bring it to its present condition. There

are tattered green-baize doors to enter at, a dirty clay floor, and

cracked plaster walls, with an injunction to the public not to spit on

the floor. Maynooth itself is scarcely more dreary. The architect’s

work, however, does him the highest credit: the interior of the church

is noble and simple in style; and one can’t but grieve to see a fine

work of art, that might have done good to the country, so defaced and

ruined as this is.

The Newry poorhouse is as neatly ordered and comfortable as any house,

public or private, in Ireland: the same look of health which was so

pleasant to see among the Naas children of the union-house, was to be

remarked here: the same care and comfort for the old people. Of

able-bodied there were but few in the house; it is in winter that there

are most applicants for this kind of relief; the sunshine attracts the

women out of the place, and the harvest relieves it of the men.

Cleanliness, the matron said, is more intolerable to most of the inmates

that any other regulation of the house; and instantly on quitting the

house they relapse into their darling dirt, and of course at their

periodical return are subject to the unavoidable initiatory lustration.

Newry has many comfortable and handsome public buildings; the streets

have a business-like look, the shops and people are not too poor, and

the southern grandiloquence is not shown here in the shape of fine words

for small wares. Even the beggars are not so numerous, I fancy, or so

coaxing and wheedling in their talk. Perhaps, too, among the gentry, the

same moral change may be remarked, and they seem more downright and

plain in their manner; but one must not pretend to speak of national

characteristics from such a small experience as a couple of evenings’

intercourse may give.

Although not equal in natural beauty to a hundred other routes which the

traveller takes in the south, the ride from Newry to Armagh is an

extremely pleasant one, on account of the undeniable increase of

prosperity which is visible through the country. Well-tilled fields,

neat farmhouses, well-dressed people, meet one everywhere, and people

and landscape alike have a plain, hearty, flourishing look.

The greater part of Armagh has the aspect of a good stout old English

town, although round about the steep on which the cathedral stands (the

Roman Catholics have taken possession of another hill, and are building

an opposition cathedral on this eminence) there are some decidedly Irish

streets, and that dismal combination of house and pig-sty which is so

common in Munster and Connaught.

But the main streets, though not fine, are bustling, substantial, and

prosperous; and a fine green has some old trees and some good houses,

and even handsome stately public buildings, round about it, that remind

one of a comfortable cathedral city across the water.

The cathedral service is more completely performed here than in any

English town, I think. The church is small, but extremely neat, fresh,

and handsome--almost too handsome; covered with spick-and-span gilding

and carved-work in the style of the thirteenth century; every pew as

smart and well-cushioned as my lord’s own seat in the country church;

and for the clergy and their chief, stalls and thrones quite curious for

their ornament and splendour. The Primate with his blue riband and badge

(to whom the two clergymen bow reverently as, passing between them, he

enters at the gate of the altar rail) looks like a noble Prince of the

Church; and I had heard enough of his magnificent charity and kindness

to look with reverence at his lofty handsome features.

Will it be believed that the sermon lasted only for twenty minutes? Can

this be Ireland? I think this wonderful circumstance impressed me more

than any other with the difference between north and south, and, having

the Primate’s own countenance for the opinion, may confess a great

admiration for orthodoxy in this particular.

A beautiful monument to Archbishop Stuart, by Chantrey; a magnificent

stained window, containing the arms of the clergy of the diocese (in the

very midst of which I was glad to recognise the sober old family coat of

the kind and venerable Rector of Louth), and numberless carvings and

decorations, will please the lover of church architecture here. I must

confess, however, that in my idea the cathedral is quite too complete.

It is of the twelfth century, but not the least venerable. It is as neat

and trim as a lady’s drawing-room. It wants a hundred years at least to

cool the raw colour of the stones, and to dull the brightness of the

gilding; all which benefits, no doubt, time will bring to pass, and

future cockneys setting off from London Bridge after breakfast in an

aërial machine may come to hear the morning service here, and not remark

the faults which have struck a too susceptible tourist of the nineteenth

century.

Strolling round the town after service, I saw more decided signs that

Protestantism was there in the ascendant. I saw no less than three

different ladies on the prowl, dropping religious tracts at various

doors; and felt not a little ashamed to be seen by one of them getting

into a car with bag and baggage, being bound for Belfast.

* * * * *

The ride of ten miles from Armagh to Portadown was not the prettiest,

but one of the pleasantest drives I have had in Ireland; for the country

is well cultivated along the whole of the road, the trees in plenty, and

villages and neat houses always in sight. The little farms, with their

orchards and comfortable buildings, were as clean and trim as could be

wished; they are mostly of one story, with long thatched roofs and

shining windows, such as those that may be seen in Normandy and Picardy.

As it was Sunday evening, all the people seemed to be abroad, some

sauntering quietly down the roads--a pair of girls here and there pacing

leisurely in a field, a little group seated under the trees of an

orchard, which pretty adjunct to the farm is very common in this

district; and the crop of apples seemed this year to be extremely

plenty. The physiognomy of the people too has quite changed: the girls

have their hair neatly braided up, not loose over their faces as in the

south; and not only are bare feet very rare, and stockings extremely

neat and white, but I am sure I saw at least a dozen good silk gowns

upon the women along the road, and scarcely one which was not clean and

in good order. The men for the most part figured in jackets, caps, and

trousers, eschewing the old well of a hat which covers the popular head

at the other end of the island, the breeches, and the long, ill-made

tail-coat. The people’s faces are sharp and neat, not broad, lazy,

knowing-looking, like that of many a shambling Diogenes who may be seen

lounging before his cabin in Cork or Kerry. As for the cabins, they have

disappeared; and the houses of the people may rank decidedly as

cottages. The accent, too, is quite different; but this is hard to

describe in print. The people speak with a Scotch twang, and, as I

fancied, much more simply and to the point. A man gives you a downright

answer, without any grin, or joke, or attempt at flattery. To be sure,

these are rather early days to begin to judge of national

characteristics; and very likely the above distinctions have been drawn

after profoundly studying a Northern and a Southern waiter at the inn at

Armagh.

At any rate, it is clear that the towns are vastly improved, the

cottages and villages no less so; the people look active and

well-dressed; a sort of weight seems all at once to be taken from the

Englishman’s mind on entering the province, when he finds himself once

more looking upon comfort, and activity, and resolution. What is the

cause of this improvement? _Protestantism_ is, more than one

Church-of-England man said to me; but for Protestantism, would it not be

as well to read Scotchism?--meaning thrift, prudence, perseverance,

boldness, and common sense, with which qualities any body of men, of any

Christian denomination, would no doubt prosper.

The little brisk town of Portadown, with its comfortable unpretending

houses, its squares and market-place, its pretty quay with craft along

the river,--a steamer building on the dock, close to mills and

warehouses that look in a full state of prosperity,--was a pleasant

conclusion to this ten miles’ drive, that ended at the newly opened

railway-station. The distance hence to Belfast is twenty-five miles;

Lough Neagh may be seen at one point of the line, and the Guide-book

says that the station towns of Lurgan and Lisburn are extremely

picturesque; but it was night when I passed by them, and after a journey

of an hour and a quarter reached Belfast.

That city has been discovered by another eminent cockney traveller (for

though born in America, the dear old Bow-bell blood must run in the

veins of Mr. N. P. Willis), and I have met, in the periodical works of

the country, with repeated angry allusions to his description of

Belfast, the pink heels of the chambermaid who conducted him to bed

(what business had he to be looking at the young woman’s legs at all?),

and his wrath at the beggary of the town and the laziness of the

inhabitants, as marked by a line of dirt running along the walls, and

showing where they were in the habit of lolling.

These observations struck me as rather hard when applied to Belfast,

though possibly pink heels and beggary might be remarked in other cities

of the kingdom; but the town of Belfast seemed to me really to be as

neat, prosperous, and handsome a city as need be seen; and, with respect

to the inn, that in which I stayed, (Kearn’s) was as comfortable and

well-ordered an establishment as the most fastidious cockney can desire,

and with an advantage which some people perhaps do not care for, that

the dinners which cost seven shillings at London taverns are here served

for half a crown; but I must repeat here, in justice to the public, what

I stated to Mr. William the waiter, viz., that half a pint of port wine

_does_ contain more than two glasses--at least it does in happy, happy

England.... Only, to be sure, here the wine is good, whereas the port

wine in England is not port, but, for the most part, an abominable drink

of which it would be a mercy only to give us two glasses; which,

however, is clearly wandering from the subject in hand.

They call Belfast the Irish Liverpool: if people are for calling names,

it would be better to call it the Irish London at once--the chief city

of the kingdom, at any rate. It looks hearty, thriving, and prosperous,

as if it had money in its pockets and roast beef for dinner: it has no

pretensions to fashion, but looks mayhap better in its honest broadcloth

than _some people_ in their shabby brocade. The houses are as handsome

as at Dublin, with this advantage, that people seem to live in them.

They have no attempt at ornament for the most part, but are grave,

stout, red-brick edifices, laid out at four angles in orderly streets

and squares.

The stranger cannot fail to be struck (and haply a little frightened) by

the great number of meeting-houses that decorate the town, and give

evidence of great sermonising on Sundays. These buildings do not affect

the Gothic, like many of the meagre edifices of the Established and the

Roman Catholic churches, but have a physiognomy of their own--a

thick-set citizen look. Porticos have they, to be sure, and ornaments

Doric, Ionic, and what not; but the meeting-house peeps through all

these classical friezes and entablatures; and though one reads of

‘imitations of the Ionic Temple of Ilissus, near Athens,’ the classic

temple is made to assume a bluff, downright, Presbyterian air, which

would astonish the original builder, doubtless. The churches of the

Establishment are handsome and stately;--the Catholics are building a

brick cathedral, no doubt of the Tudor style. The present chapel,

flanked by the National Schools, is an exceedingly unprepossessing

building of the Strawberry Hill or Castle of Otranto Gothic; the keys

and mitre figuring in the centre--‘The cross-keys and night-cap,’ as a

hard-hearted Presbyterian called them to me, with his blunt humour.

The three churches are here pretty equally balanced--Presbyterians

25,000, Catholics 20,000, Episcopalians 17,000. Each party has two or

more newspaper organs; and the wars between them are dire and unceasing,

as the reader may imagine. For whereas, in other parts of Ireland where

Catholics and Episcopalians prevail, and the Presbyterian body is too

small, each party has but one opponent to belabour; here, the Ulster

politician, whatever may be his way of thinking, has the great advantage

of possessing two enemies on whom he may exercise his eloquence; and in

this triangular duel all do their duty nobly. Then there are

subdivisions of hostility. For the Church there is a High Church and a

Low Church journal; for the Liberals there is a Repeal journal and a

No-repeal journal. For the Presbyterians there are yet more varieties of

journalist opinion, of which it does not become a stranger to pass a

judgment. If the _Northern Whig_ says that the _Banner of Ulster_ ‘is a

polluted rag, which has hoisted the red banner of falsehood’ (which

elegant words may be found in the first-named journal of the 13th

October), let us be sure the _Banner_ has a compliment for the _Northern

Whig_ in return; if the Repeal _Vindicator_ and the priests attack the

Presbyterian journals and the Home Missions, the reverend gentlemen of

Geneva are quite as ready with the pen as their brethren of Rome, and

not much more scrupulous in their language than the laity. When I was in

Belfast, violent disputes were raging between Presbyterian and

Episcopalian Conservatives with regard to the Marriage Bill; between

Presbyterians and Catholics on the subject of the Home Missions; between

the Liberals and Conservatives, of course. ‘Thank God,’ for instance,

writes a Repeal journal, ‘that the honour and power _of Ireland_ are not

involved in the disgraceful Afghan war!’--a sentiment insinuating Repeal

and something more; disowning, not merely this or that ministry, but the

sovereign and her jurisdiction altogether. But details of these

quarrels, religious or political, can tend to edify but few readers out

of the country. Even in it, as there are some nine shades of

politico-religious differences, an observer pretending to impartiality

must necessarily displease eight parties, and almost certainly the whole

nine; and the reader who desires to judge the politics of Belfast must

study for himself. Nine journals, publishing four hundred numbers in a

year, each number containing about as much as an octavo volume: these,

and the back numbers of former years, sedulously read, will give the

student a notion of the subject in question. And then, after having read

the statements on either side, he must ascertain the truth of them, by

which time more labour of the same kind will have grown upon him, and he

will have attained a good old age.

Amongst the poor, the Catholics and Presbyterians are said to go in a

pretty friendly manner to the National Schools; but among the

Presbyterians themselves it appears there are great differences and

quarrels, by which a fine institution, the Belfast Academy, seems to

have suffered considerably. It is almost the only building in this large

and substantial place that bears, to the stranger’s eye, an unprosperous

air. A vast building, standing fairly in the midst of a handsome green

and place, and with snug, comfortable red-brick streets stretching away

at neat right angles all around, the Presbyterian College looks handsome

enough at a short distance, but on a nearer view is found in a woful

state of dilapidation. It does not possess the supreme dirt and filth of

Maynooth--_that_ can but belong to one place, even in Ireland; but the

building is in a dismal state of unrepair, steps and windows broken,

doors and stairs battered. Of scholars I saw but a few, and these were

in the drawing academy. The fine arts do not appear as yet to flourish

in Belfast. The models from which the lads were copying were not good:

one was copying a bad copy of a drawing by Prout; one was colouring a

print. The ragged children in a German National School have better

models before them, and are made acquainted with truer principles of art

and beauty.

Hard by is the Belfast Museum, where an exhibition of pictures was in

preparation, under the patronage of the Belfast Art Union. Artists in

all parts of the kingdom had been invited to send their works, of which

the Union pays the carriage; and the porters and secretary were busy

unpacking cases, in which I recognised some of the works which had

before figured on the walls of the London Exhibition rooms.

The book-shops which I saw in this thriving town said much for the

religions disposition of the Belfast public: there were numerous

portraits of reverend gentlemen, and their works of every variety:--_The

Sinners’ Friend, The Watchman on the Tower, The Peep of Day, Sermons

delivered at Bethesda Chapel_, by so-and-so; with hundreds of the neat

little gilt books with bad prints, scriptural titles, and gilt edges,

that came from one or two serious publishing houses in London, and in

considerable numbers from the neighbouring Scotch shores. As for the

Theatre, with such a public the drama can be expected to find but

little favour; and the gentleman who accompanied me in my walk, and to

whom I am indebted for many kindnesses during my stay, said not only

that he had never been in the playhouse, but that he never heard of any

one going thither. I found out the place where the poor neglected

dramatic Muse of Ulster hid herself; and was of a party of six in the

boxes, the benches of the pit being dotted over with about a score more.

Well, it was a comfort to see that the gallery was quite full, and

exceedingly happy and noisy: they stamped, and stormed, and shouted, and

clapped, in a way that was pleasant to hear. One young god, between the

acts, favoured the public with a song--extremely ill sung, certainly,

but the intention was everything; and his brethren above stamped in

chorus with roars of delight.

As for the piece performed, it was a good old melodrama of the British

sort, inculcating a thorough detestation of vice and a warm sympathy

with suffering virtue. The serious are surely too hard upon poor

playgoers. We never for a moment allow rascality to triumph beyond a

certain part of the third act; we sympathise with the woes of young

lovers--her in ringlets and a Polish cap, him in tights and a Vandyke

collar; we abhor avarice or tyranny in the person of ‘the first old man’

with the white wig and red stockings, or of the villain with the roaring

voice and black whiskers; we applaud the honest wag (he is a good fellow

in spite of his cowardice) in his hearty jests at the tyrant before

mentioned; and feel a kindly sympathy with all mankind as the curtain

falls over all the characters in a group, of which successful love is

the happy centre. Reverend gentlemen in meeting-house and church, who

shout against the immoralities of this poor stage, and threaten all

playgoers with the fate which is awarded to unsuccessful plays, should

try and bear less hardly upon us.

An artist, who, in spite of the Art Union, can scarcely, I should think,

flourish in a place that seems devoted to preaching, politics, and

trade, has somehow found his way to this humble little theatre, and

decorated it with some exceedingly pretty scenery--almost the only

indication of a taste for the fine arts which I have found as yet in the

country.

A fine night-exhibition in the town is that of the huge spinning-mills

which surround it, and of which the thousand windows are lighted up at

nightfall, and may be seen from almost all quarters of the city.

A gentleman to whom I had brought an introduction good-naturedly left

his work to walk with me to one of these mills, and stated by whom he

had been introduced to me to the mill-proprietor, Mr. Mulholland.

_‘That_ recommendation,’ said Mr. Mulholland gallantly, ‘is welcome

anywhere.’ It was from my kind friend Mr. Lever. What a privilege some

men have, who can sit quietly in their studies and make friends all the

world over!

Here is the figure of a girl sketched in the place; there are nearly

five hundred girls employed in it. They work in huge long chambers,

lighted by numbers of windows, hot with steam, buzzing and humming with

hundreds of thousands of whirling wheels, that all take their motion

from a steam-engine which lives apart in a hot cast-iron temple of its

own, from which it communicates with the innumerable machines that the

five hundred girls preside over. They have seemingly but to take away

the work when done--the enormous monster in the cast-iron room does it

all. He cards the flax, and combs it, and spins it, and beats it, and

twists it; the five hundred girls stand by to feed him, or take the

material from him, when he has had his will of it. There is something

frightful in the vastness as in the minuteness of this power. Every

thread writhes and twirls as the steam-fate orders it,--every thread, of

which it would take a hundred to make the thickness of a hair.

[Illustration]

I have seldom, I think, seen more good looks than amongst the young

women employed in this place. They work for twelve hours daily, in rooms

of which the heat is intolerable to a stranger; but in spite of it they

looked gay, stout, and healthy; nor were their forms much concealed by

the very simple clothes they wear while in the mill.

The stranger will be struck by the good looks not only of these

spinsters, but of almost all the young women in the streets. I never saw

a town where so many women are to be met--so many and so pretty--with

and without bonnets, with good figures, in neat homely shawls and

dresses. The grisettes of Belfast are among the handsomest ornaments of

it; and as good, no doubt, and irreproachable in morals as their sisters

in the rest of Ireland.

Many of the merchants’ counting-houses are crowded in little

old-fashioned ‘entries,’ or courts, such as one sees about the Bank in

London. In and about these, and in the principal streets in the daytime,

is a great activity, and homely unpretending bustle. The men have a

business look too, and one sees very few flaunting dandies, as in

Dublin. The shopkeepers do not brag upon their signboards, or keep

‘emporiums,’ as elsewhere,--their places of business being for the most

part homely; though one may see some splendid shops, which are not to be

surpassed by London. The docks and quays are busy with their craft and

shipping, upon the beautiful borders of the Lough;--the large red

warehouses stretching along the shores, with ships loading, or

unloading, or building, hammers clanging, pitch-pots flaming and

boiling, seamen cheering in the ships, or lolling lazily on the shore.

The life and movement of a port here give the stranger plenty to admire

and observe. And nature has likewise done everything for the

place--surrounding it with picturesque hills and water;--for which

latter I must confess I was not very sorry to leave the town behind me,

and its mills, and its meeting-houses, and its commerce, and its

theologians, and its politicians.

[Illustration]

CHAPTER XXVIII

BELFAST TO THE CAUSEWAY

The Lough of Belfast has a reputation for beauty almost as great as that

of the Bay of Dublin; but though, on the day I left Belfast for Larne,

the morning was fine, and the sky clear and blue above, an envious mist

lay on the water, which hid all its beauties from the dozen of

passengers on the Larne coach. All we could see were ghostly-looking

silhouettes of ships gliding here and there through the clouds; and I am

sure the coachman’s remark was quite correct, that it was a pity the day

was so misty. I found myself, before I was aware, entrapped into a

theological controversy with two grave gentlemen outside the

coach--another fog, which did not subside much before we reached

Carrickfergus. The road from the Ulster capital to that little town

seemed meanwhile to be extremely lively; cars and omnibuses passed

thickly peopled. For some miles along the road is a string of handsome

country-houses, belonging to the rich citizens of the town; and we

passed by neat-looking churches and chapels, factories and rows of

cottages clustered round them, like villages of old at the foot of

feudal castles. Furthermore it was hard to see, for the mist which lay

on the water had enveloped the mountains too, and we only had a glimpse

or two of smiling comfortable fields and gardens.

Carrickfergus rejoices in a real romantic-looking castle jutting bravely

into the sea, and famous as a background for a picture. It is of use for

little else now, luckily, nor has it been put to any real warlike

purposes since the day when honest Thurot stormed, took, and evacuated

it. Let any romancer who is in want of a hero peruse the second volume,

or it may be the third, of the _Annual Register_, where the adventures

of that gallant fellow are related. He was a gentleman, a genius, and,

to crown all, a smuggler. He lived for some time in Ireland, and in

England, in disguise; he had love-passages and romantic adventures; he

landed a body of his countrymen on these shores, and died in the third

volume, after a battle gallantly fought on both sides, but in which

victory rested with the British arms. What can a novelist want more?

William III. also landed here; and as for the rest, ‘M’Skimin, the

accurate and laborious historian of the town, informs us that the

founding of the castle is lost in the depths of antiquity.’ It is

pleasant to give a little historic glance at a place as one passes

through. The above facts may be relied on as coming from Messrs. Curry’s

excellent new Guide-book, with the exception of the history of Mons.

Thurot, which is ‘private information,’ drawn years ago from the scarce

work previously mentioned. By the way, another excellent companion to

the traveller in Ireland is the collection of the _Irish Penny

Magazine_, which may be purchased for a guinea, and contains a mass of

information regarding the customs and places of the country. Willis’s

work is amusing, as everything is, written by that lively author, and

the engravings accompanying it as unfaithful as any ever made.

Meanwhile, asking pardon for this double digression, which has been

made while the guard-coachman is delivering his mail-bags--while the

landlady stands looking on in the sun, her hands folded a little below

the waist--while a company of tall burly troops from the castle has

passed by, ‘surrounded’ by a very mean, mealy-faced, uneasy-looking

little subaltern--while the poor, epileptic idiot of the town, wallowing

and grinning in the road, and snorting out supplications for a

halfpenny, has tottered away in possession of the coin;--meanwhile,

fresh horses are brought out, and the small boy who acts behind the

coach, makes an unequal and disagreeable tootooing on a horn kept to

warn sleepy carmen and celebrate triumphal entries into and exits from

cities. As the mist clears up, the country shows round about wild but

friendly; at one place we passed a village where a crowd of well-dressed

people were collected at an auction of farm-furniture, and many more

figures might be seen coming over the fields and issuing from the mist.

The owner of the carts and machines is going to emigrate to America.

Presently we come to the demesne of Red Hall, ‘through which is a pretty

drive of upwards of a mile in length: it contains a rocky glen, the bed

of a mountain stream--which is perfectly dry, except in winter--and the

woods about it are picturesque, and it is occasionally the resort of

summer-parties of pleasure.’ Nothing can be more just than the first

part of the description, and there is very little doubt that the latter

paragraph is equally faithful;--with which we come to Larne, a ‘most

thriving town,’ the same authority says, but a most dirty and

narrow-streeted and ill-built one. Some of the houses reminded one of

the south, as thus--

[Illustration]

A benevolent fellow-passenger said that the window was ‘a convanience’;

and here, after a drive of nineteen miles upon a comfortable coach, we

were transferred with the mail-bags to a comfortable car that makes the

journey to Ballycastle. There is no harm in saying that there was a very

pretty smiling buxom young lass for a travelling companion; and somehow,

to a lonely person, the landscape always looks prettier in such society.

The ‘Antrim coast road,’ which we now, after a few miles, begin to

follow, besides being one of the most noble and gallant works of art

that is to be seen in any country, is likewise a route highly

picturesque and romantic; the sea spreading wide before the spectator’s

eyes upon one side of the route;--the tall cliffs of limestone rising

abruptly above him on the other. There are in the map of Curry’s

Guide-book points indicating castle and abbey ruins in the vicinity of

Glenarm; and the little place looked so comfortable as we abruptly came

upon it round a rock, that I was glad to have an excuse for staying, and

felt an extreme curiosity with regard to the abbey and the castle.

The abbey only exists in the unromantic shape of a wall; the castle,

however, far from being a ruin, is an antique in the most complete

order--an old castle repaired so as to look like new, and increased by

modern wings, towers, gables, and terraces, so extremely old that the

whole forms a grand and imposing-looking baronial edifice, towering

above the little town which it seems to protect, and with which it is

connected by a bridge and a severe-looking armed tower and gate. In the

town is a town-house, with a campanile in the Italian taste, and a

school or chapel opposite, in the Early English; so that the inhabitants

can enjoy a considerable architectural variety. A grave-looking church,

with a beautiful steeple, stands amid some trees hard by a second

handsome bridge and the little quay; and here, too, was perched a poor

little wandering theatre (gallery 1d., pit 2d.), and proposing that

night to play ‘Bombastes Furioso, and the Comic Bally of Glenarm in an

Uproar.’ I heard the thumping of the drum in the evening; but, as at

Roundwood, nobody patronised the poor players: at nine o’clock there was

not a single taper lighted under their awning, and my heart (perhaps it

is too susceptible) bled for Fusbos.

The severe gate of the castle was opened by a kind, good-natured old

porteress, instead of a rough gallowglass with a battle-axe and yellow

shirt (more fitting guardian of so stern a postern), and the old dame

insisted upon my making an application to see the grounds of the castle,

which request was very kindly granted, and afforded a delightful

half-hour’s walk. The grounds are beautiful, and excellently kept; the

trees in their autumn livery of red, yellow, and brown, except some

stout ones that keep to their green summer clothes, and the laurels and

their like, who wear pretty much the same dress all the year round. The

birds were singing with most astonishing vehemence in the dark

glistening shrubberies; but the only sound in the walks was that of the

rakes pulling together the falling leaves. There was of these walks one

especially, flanked towards the river by a turreted wall covered with

ivy, and having on the one side a row of lime-trees that had turned

quite yellow, while opposite them was a green slope, and a quaint

terrace-stair, and a long range of fantastic gables, towers, and

chimneys;--there was, I say, one of these walks which Mr. Cattermole

would hit off with a few strokes of his gallant pencil, and which I

could fancy to be frequented by some of those long-trained, tender,

gentle-looking young beauties whom Mr. Stone loves to design. Here they

come talking of love in a tone that is between a sigh and a whisper,

and gliding in rustling shot silks over the fallen leaves.

There seemed to be a good deal of stir in the little port, where, says

the Guide-book, a couple of hundred vessels take in cargoes annually of

the produce of the district. Stone and lime are the chief articles

exported, of which the cliffs for miles give an unfailing supply; and,

as one travels the mountains at night, the kilns may be seen lighted up

in the lonely places, and flaring red in the darkness.

If the road from Larne to Glenarm is beautiful, the coast route from the

latter place to Cushendall is still more so; and, except peerless

Westport, I have seen nothing in Ireland so picturesque as this noble

line of coast-scenery. The new road, luckily, is not yet completed, and

the lover of natural beauties had better hasten to the spot in time,

ere, by flattening and improving the road, and leading it along the

sea-shore, half the magnificent prospects are shut out, now visible from

along the mountainous old road; which, according to the good old

fashion, gallantly takes all the hills in its course, disdaining to turn

them. At three miles’ distance, near the village of Cairlough, Glenarm

looks more beautiful than when you are close upon it; and, as the car

travels on to the stupendous Garron Head, the traveller, looking back,

has a view of the whole line of coast southward as far as Isle Magee,

with its bays and white villages, and tall precipitous cliffs, green,

white, and grey. Eyes left, you may look with wonder at the mountains

rising above, or presently at the pretty park and grounds of Drumnasole.

Here, near the woods of Nappan, which are dressed in ten thousand

colours--ash-leaves turned yellow, nut-trees red, birch-leaves brown,

lime-leaves speckled over with black spots (marks of a disease which

they will never get over)--stands a school-house that looks like a

French château, having probably been a villa in former days, and

discharges, as we pass, a cluster of fair-haired children that begin

running madly down the hill, their fair hair streaming behind them. Down

the hill goes the car madly too, and you wonder and bless your stars

that the horse does not fall, or crush the children that are running

before, or you that are sitting behind. Every now and then, at a trip of

the horse, a disguised lady’s-maid, with a canary-bird in her lap and a

vast anxiety about her best bonnet in the bandbox, begins to scream; at

which the car-boy grins, and rattles down the hill only the quicker. The

road, which almost always skirts the hillside, has been torn sheer

through the rock here and there; and immense work of levelling,

shovelling, picking, blasting, filling, is going on along the whole

line. As I was looking up a vast cliff, decorated with patches of green

here and there at its summit, and at its base, where the sea had beaten

until now, with long, thin, waving grass, that I told a grocer, my

neighbour, was like mermaids’ hair (though he did not in the least

coincide in the simile)--as I was looking up the hill, admiring two

goats that were browsing on a little patch of green, and two sheep

perched yet higher (I had never seen such agility in mutton)--as, I say

once more, I was looking at these phenomena, the grocer nudges me and

says, ‘_Look on to this side_--_that’s Scotland yon_,’ If ever this book

reaches a second edition, a sonnet shall be inserted in this place,

describing the author’s feelings on HIS FIRST VIEW OF SCOTLAND.

Meanwhile, the Scotch mountains remain undisturbed, looking blue and

solemn far away in the placid sea.

Rounding Garron Head, we come upon the inlet which is called Red Bay,

the shores and sides of which are of red clay, that has taken the place

of limestone, and towards which, between two noble ranges of mountains,

stretches a long green plain, forming, together with the hills that

protect it and the sea that washes it, one of the most beautiful

landscapes of this most beautiful country. A fair writer, whom the

Guide-book quotes, breaks out into strains of admiration in speaking of

this district; calls it ‘Switzerland in miniature,’ celebrates its

mountains of Glenariff and Lurgethan, and lauds, in terms of equal

admiration, the rivers, waterfalls, and other natural beauties that lie

within the glen.

The writer’s enthusiasm regarding this tract of country is quite

warranted, nor can any praise in admiration of it be too high; but alas!

in calling a place ‘Switzerland in miniature,’ do we describe it? In

joining together cataracts, valleys, rushing streams, and blue

mountains, with all the emphasis and picturesqueness of which type is

capable, we cannot get near to a copy of Nature’s sublime countenance;

and the writer can’t hope to describe such grand sights so as to make

them visible to the fireside reader, but can only, to the best of his

taste and experience, warn the future traveller where he may look out

for objects to admire. I think this sentiment has been repeated a score

of times in this journal; but it comes upon one at every new display of

beauty and magnificence, such as here the Almighty in His bounty has set

before us; and every such scene seems to warn one, that it is not made

to talk about too much, but to think of, and love, and be grateful for.

Rounding this beautiful bay and valley, we passed by some caves that

penetrate deep into the red rock, and are inhabited--one by a

blacksmith, whose forge was blazing in the dark; one by cattle; and one

by an old woman that has sold whisky here for time out of mind. The road

then passes under an arch cut in the rock by the same spirited

individual who has cleared away many of the difficulties in the route to

Glenarm, and beside a conical hill, where for some time previous have

been visible the ruins of the ‘ancient ould castle’ of Red Bay. At a

distance, it looks very grand upon its height; but on coming close it

has dwindled down to a mere wall, and not a high one. Hence, quickly we

reach Cushendall, where the grocer’s family are on the look-out for him;

the driver begins to blow his little bugle, and the disguised

lady’s-maid begins to smooth her bonnet and hair.

At this place a good dinner of fresh whiting, broiled bacon, and small

beer was served up to me for the sum of eightpence, while the

lady’s-maid in question took her tea. ‘This town is full of Papists,’

said her ladyship, with an extremely genteel air; and, either in

consequence of this, or because she ate up one of the fish, which she

had clearly no right to, a disagreement arose between us, and we did not

exchange another word for the rest of the journey. The road led us for

fourteen miles by wild mountains, and across a fine aqueduct to

Ballycastle; but it was dark as we left Cushendall, and it was difficult

to see more in the grey evening but that the country was savage and

lonely, except where the kilns were lighted up here and there in the

hills, and a shining river might be seen winding in the dark ravines.

Not far from Ballycastle lies a little old ruin, called the Abbey of

Bonamargy: by it the Margy river runs into the sea, upon which you come

suddenly; and on the shore are some tall buildings and factories, that

looked as well in the moonlight as if they had not been in ruins; and

hence a fine avenue of limes leads to Ballycastle. They must have been

planted at the time recorded in the Guide-book, when a mine was

discovered near the town, and the works and warehouses on the quay

erected. At present, the place has little trade, and half a dozen carts

with apples, potatoes, dried fish, and turf, seem to contain the

commerce of the market.

The picturesque sort of vehicle which is here designed, is said to be

going much out of fashion in the country, the solid wheels giving place

to those common to the rest of Europe. A fine and edifying conversation

took place between the designer and the owner of the vehicle. ‘Stand

still for a minute, you and the car, and I will give you twopence!’

‘What do you want to do with it?’ says the latter. ‘To draw it.’ ‘To

_draw_ it?’ says he, with a wild look of surprise, ‘and is it you’ll

draw it?’ ‘I mean, I want to take a picture of it; you know what a

picture is?’ ‘No, I don’t.’ ‘Here’s one,’ says I, showing him a book.

‘Oh, faith, sir,’ says the carman, drawing back rather alarmed, ‘I’m no

scholar!’ And he concluded by saying, ‘_Will you buy the turf, or will

you not?_ by which straightforward question he showed himself to be a

real practical man of sense; and, as he got an unsatisfactory reply to

this query, he forthwith gave a lash to his pony, and declined to wait a

minute longer. As for the twopence, he certainly accepted that handsome

sum, and put it into his pocket, but with an air of extreme wonder at

the transaction, and of contempt for the giver, which very likely was

perfectly justifiable. I have seen men despised in genteel companies

with not half so good a cause.

In respect to the fine arts, I am bound to say that the people in the

south and west showed much more curiosity and interest with regard to a

sketch and its progress than has been shown by the _badauds_ of the

north; the former looking on by dozens, and exclaiming, ‘That’s Frank

Mahony’s house!’ or, ‘Look at Biddy Mullins and the child!’ or ‘He’s

taking off the chimney now!’ as the case may be; whereas, sketching in

the north, I have collected no such spectators, the people not taking

the slightest notice of the transaction.

[Illustration]

The little town of Ballycastle does not contain much to occupy the

traveller: behind the church stands a ruined old mansion with round

turrets, that must have been a stately tower in former days. The town is

more modern, but almost as dismal as the tower. A little street behind

it slides off into a potato-field--the peaceful barrier of the place;

and hence I could see the tall rock of Bengore, with the sea beyond it,

and a pleasing landscape stretching towards it.

Dr. Hamilton’s elegant and learned book has an awful picture of yonder

head of Bengore; and hard by it the Guide-book says is a coal-mine,

where Mr. Barrow found a globular stone hammer, which, he infers, was

used in the coal-mine before weapons of iron were invented. The former

writer insinuates that the mine must have been worked more than a

thousand years ago, ‘before the turbulent chaos of events that succeeded

the eighth century.’ Shall I go and see a coal-mine that may have been

worked a thousand years since? Why go see it? says idleness. To be able

to say that I have seen it. Sheridan’s advice to his son here came into

my mind;[32] and I shall reserve a description of the mine, and an

antiquarian dissertation regarding it, for publication elsewhere.

Ballycastle must not be left without recording the fact that one of the

snuggest inns in the country is kept by the postmaster there; who has

also a stable full of good horses for travellers who take his little inn

on the way to the Giant’s Causeway.

The road to the Causeway is bleak, wild, and hilly. The cabins along the

road are scarcely better than those of Kerry, the inmates as ragged, and

more fierce and dark-looking. I never was so pestered by juvenile

beggars as in the dismal village of Ballintoy. A crowd of them rushed

after the car, calling for money in a fierce manner, as if it was their

right; dogs as fierce as the children came yelling after the vehicle;

and the faces which scowled out of the black cabins were not a whit more

good-humoured. We passed by one or two more clumps of cabins, with their

turf and corn-stacks lying together at the foot of the hills; placed

there for the convenience of the children, doubtless, who can thus

accompany the car either way, and shriek out their ‘Bonny gantleman, gie

us a hap’ny.’ A couple of churches, one with a pair of its pinnacles

blown off, stood in the dismal open country, and a gentleman’s house

here and there: there were no trees about them, but a brown grass round

about--hills rising and falling in front, and the sea beyond. The

occasional view of the coast was noble; wild Bengore towering eastwards

as we went along; Raghery Island before us, in the steep rocks and caves

of which Bruce took shelter when driven from yonder Scottish coast, that

one sees stretching blue in the north-east.

I think this wild gloomy tract through which one passes is a good

prelude for what is to be the great sight of the day, and got my mind to

a proper state of awe by the time we were near the journey’s end; and

turning away shorewards by the fine house of Sir Francis Macnaghten,

went towards a lone handsome inn, that stands close to the Causeway. The

landlord at Ballycastle had lent me Hamilton’s book, to read on the

road; but I had not time then to read more than half a dozen pages of

it. They described how the author, a clergyman distinguished as a man of

science, had been thrust out of a friend’s house by the frightened

servants one wild night, and butchered by some White Boys, who were

waiting outside, and called for his blood. I had been told at Belfast

that there was a corpse in the inn: was it there now? It had driven off,

the car-boy said, ‘in a handsome hearse and four to Dublin the whole

way.’ It was gone, but I thought the house looked as if the ghost was

there. See, yonder are the black rocks stretching to Portrush; how

leaden and grey the sea looks! how grey and leaden the sky! You hear the

waters roaring evermore, as they have done since the beginning of the

world. The car drives up with a dismal grinding noise of the wheels to

the big lone house; there’s no smoke in the chimneys; the doors are

locked; three savage-looking men rush after the car: are they the men

who took out Mr. Hamilton--took him out and butchered him in the

moonlight? Is everybody, I wonder, dead in that big house? Will they let

us in before those men are up? Out comes a pretty smiling girl, with a

curtsey, just as the savages are at the car, and you are ushered into a

very comfortable room; and the men turn out to be guides. Well, thank

Heaven it’s no worse! I had fifteen pounds still left; and, when

desperate, have no doubt should fight like a lion.

CHAPTER XXIX

THE GIANT’S CAUSEWAY--COLERAINE--PORTRUSH

The traveller no sooner issues from the inn by a back door, which he is

informed will lead him straight to the Causeway, than the guides pounce

upon him, with a dozen rough boatmen who are likewise lying in wait; and

a crew of shrill beggar-boys, with boxes of spars, ready to tear him and

each other to pieces seemingly, yell and bawl incessantly round him.

‘I’m the guide Miss Henry recommends,’ shouts one. ‘I’m Mr. Macdonald’s

guide,’ pushes in another. ‘This way,’ roars a third, and drags his prey

down a precipice; the rest of them clambering and quarrelling after. I

had no friends: I was perfectly helpless. I wanted to walk down to the

shore by myself, but they would not let me, and I had nothing for it but

to yield myself into the hands of the guide who had seized me, who

hurried me down the steep to a little wild bay, flanked on each side by

rugged cliffs and rocks, against which the waters came tumbling,

frothing, and roaring furiously. Upon some of these black rocks two or

three boats were lying: four men seized a boat, pushed it shouting into

the water, and ravished me into it. We had slid between two rocks, where

the channel came gurgling in; we were up one swelling wave that came in

a huge advancing body ten feet above us, and were plunging madly down

another (the descent causes a sensation in the lower regions of the

stomach which it is not at all necessary here to describe), before I had

leisure to ask myself why the deuce I was in that boat, with four rowers

hurrooing and bounding madly from one huge liquid mountain to

another--four rowers whom I was bound to pay. I say, the query came

qualmishly across me why the devil I was there, and why not walking

calmly on the shore.

[Illustration: A ROW TO THE GIANT’S CAUSEWAY]

The guide began pouring his professional jargon into my ears. ‘Every one

of them bays,’ says he, ‘has a name (take my place, and the spray won’t

come over you): that is Port Noffer, and the next, Port na Gange; them

rocks is the Stookawns (for every rock has his name as well as every

bay); and yonder--give way, my boys,--hurray, we’re over it now; has it

wet you much, sir?--that’s the little cave; it goes five hundred feet

under ground, and the boats goes in it easy of a calm day.’

‘Is it a fine day or a rough one now?’ said I; the internal disturbance

going on with more severity than ever.

‘It’s betwixt and between; or, I may say, neither one nor the other. Sit

up, sir; look at the entrance of the cave: don’t be afraid, sir; never

has an accident happened in any one of these boats, and the most

delicate ladies has rode in them on rougher days than this. Now, boys,

pull to the big cave; that, sir, is six hundred and sixty yards in

length, though some says it goes for miles inland, where the people

sleeping in their houses hears the waters roaring under them.’

The water was tossing and tumbling into the mouth of the little cave. I

looked,--for the guide would not let me alone till I did,--and saw what

might be expected: a black hole of some forty feet high, into which it

was no more possible to see than into a millstone. ‘For Heaven’s sake,

sir,’ says I, ‘if you’ve no particular wish to see the mouth of the big

cave, put about and let us see the Causeway and get ashore.’ This was

done, the guide meanwhile telling some story of a ship of the Spanish

Armada having fired her guns at two peaks of rock, then visible, which

the crew mistook for chimney-pots--what benighted fools these Spanish

Armadilloes must have been--it is easier to see a rock than a

chimney-pot; it is easy to know that chimney-pots do not grow on

rocks:--but where, if you please, is the Causeway?

‘That’s the Causeway before you,’ says the guide.

‘Which?’

‘That pier which you see jutting out into the bay right ahead.’

‘Mon Dieu! and have I travelled a hundred and fifty miles to see

_that_?’

I declare, upon my conscience, the barge moored at Hungerford Market is

a more majestic object, and seems to occupy as must space. As for

telling a man that the Causeway is merely a part of the sight; that he

is there for the purpose of examining the surrounding scenery; that if

he looks to the westward he will see Portrush and Donegal Head before

him; that the cliffs immediately in his front are green in some places,

black in others, interspersed with blotches of brown and streaks of

verdure;--what is all this to a lonely individual lying sick in a boat,

between two immense waves that only give him momentary glimpses of the

land in question, to show that it is frightfully near, and yet you are

an hour from it? They won’t let you go away--that cursed guide _will_

tell out his stock of legends and stories. The boatmen insist upon your

looking at boxes of ‘specimens,’ which you must buy of them; they laugh

as you grow paler and paler; they offer you more and more ‘specimens’;

even the dirty lad who pulls number three, and is not allowed by his

comrades to speak, puts in _his_ oar, and hands you over a piece of

Irish diamond (it looks like half-sucked alicompayne), and scorns you.

‘Hurray, lads, now for it, give way!’ how the oars do hurtle in the

rullocks, as the boat goes up an aqueous mountain, and then down into

one of those cursed maritime valleys where there is no rest as on shore!

At last, after they had pulled me enough about, and sold me all the

boxes of specimens, I was permitted to land at the spot whence we set

out, and whence, though we had been rowing for an hour, we had never

been above five hundred yards distant. Let all cockneys take warning

from this; let the solitary one caught issuing from the back door of the

hotel, shout at once to the boatmen to be gone--that he will have none

of them. Let him, at any rate, go first down to the water to determine

whether it be smooth enough to allow him to take any decent pleasure by

riding on its surface. For after all, it must be remembered that it is

pleasure we come for--that we are not _obliged_ to take those

boats.--Well, well! I paid ten shillings for mine, and ten minutes

before would cheerfully have paid five pounds to be allowed to quit it;

it was no hard bargain after all. As for the boxes of spar and

specimens, I at once, being on terra firma, broke my promise, and said I

would see them all ---- first. It is wrong to swear, I know; but

sometimes it relieves one _so_ much!

The first act on shore was to make a sacrifice to Sanctissima Tellus;

offering up to her a neat and becoming Taglioni coat, bought for a

guinea in Covent Garden only three months back. I sprawled on my back on

the smoothest of rocks that is, and tore the elbows to pieces: the guide

picked me up; the boatmen did not stir, for they had had their will of

me; the guide alone picked me up, I say, and bade me follow him. We went

across a boggy ground in one of the little bays, round which rise the

green walls of the cliff, terminated on either side by a black crag, and

the line of the shore washed by the poluphlosboiotic, nay, the

poluphlosboiotatotic sea. Two beggars stepped over the bog after us,

howling for money, and each holding up a cursed box of specimens. No

oaths, threats, entreaties, would drive this vermin away; for some time

the whole scene had been spoilt by the incessant and abominable jargon

of them, the boatmen, and the guides. I was obliged to give them money

to be left in quiet, and if, as no doubt will be the case, the Giant’s

Causeway shall be a still greater resort of travellers than ever, the

county must put policemen on the rocks to keep the beggars away, or

fling them in the water when they appear.

And now, by force of money, having got rid of the sea and land beggars,

you are at liberty to examine at your leisure the wonders of the place.

There is not the least need for a guide to attend the stranger, unless

the latter have a mind to listen to a parcel of legends, which may be

well from the mouth of a wild simple peasant who believes in his tales,

but are odious from a dullard who narrates them at the rate of sixpence

a lie. Fee him and the other beggars, and at last you are left tranquil

to look at the strange scene with your own eyes, and enjoy your own

thoughts at leisure.

That is, if the thoughts awakened by such a scene may be called

enjoyment; but for me, I confess, they are too near akin to fear to be

pleasant; and I don’t know that I would desire to change that sensation

of awe and terror which the hour’s walk occasioned, for a greater

familiarity with this wild, sad, lonely place. The solitude is awful. I

can’t understand how those chattering guides dare to lift up their

voices here, and cry for money.

It looks like the beginning of the world, somehow: the sea looks older

than in other places, the hills and rocks strange, and formed

differently from other rocks and hills--as those vast dubious monsters

were formed who possessed the earth before man. The hilltops are

shattered into a thousand cragged fantastical shapes; the water comes

swelling into scores of little strange creeks, or goes off with a leap,

roaring into those mysterious caves yonder, which penetrate who knows

how far into our common world. The savage rock-sides are painted of a

hundred colours. Does the sun ever shine here? When the world was

moulded and fashioned out of formless chaos, this must have been the

_bit over_--a remnant of chaos! Think of that!--it is a tailor’s simile.

Well, I am a cockney: I wish I were in Pall Mall! Yonder is a

kelp-burner: a lurid smoke from his burning kelp rises up to the leaden

sky, and he looks as naked and fierce as Cain. Bubbling up out of the

rocks at the very brim of the sea rises a little crystal spring: how

comes it there? and there is an old grey hag beside it, who has been

there for hundreds and hundreds of years, and there sits and sells

whisky at the extremity of creation! How do you dare to sell whisky

there, old woman? Did you serve old Saturn with a glass when he lay

along the Causeway here? In reply, she says, she has no change for a

shilling: she never has; but her whisky is good.

This is not a description of the Giant’s Causeway (as some clever critic

will remark), but of a Londoner there, who is by no means so interesting

an object as the natural curiosity in question. That single hint is

sufficient; I have not a word more to say. ‘If,’ says he, ‘you cannot

describe the scene lying before us--if you cannot state from your

personal observation that the number of basaltic pillars composing the

Causeway has been computed at about forty thousand, which vary in

diameter, their surface presenting the appearance of a tesselated

pavement of polygonal stones--that each pillar is formed of several

distinct joints, the concave end of the one being accurately fitted into

the concave of the next, and the length of the joints varying from five

feet to four inches--that although the pillars are polygonal, there is

but one of three sides in the whole forty thousand (think of that!), but

three of nine sides, and that it may be safely computed that ninety-nine

out of one hundred pillars have either five, six, or seven sides;--if

you cannot state something useful, you had much better, sir, retire and

get your dinner.’

Never was summons more gladly obeyed. The dinner must be ready by this

time; so, remain you, and look on at the awful scene, and copy it down

in words if you can. If at the end of the trial you are dissatisfied

with your skill as a painter, and find that the biggest of your words

cannot render the hues and vastness of that tremendous swelling sea--of

those lean solitary crags standing rigid along the shore, where they

have been watching the ocean ever since it was made--of those grey

towers of Dunluce standing upon a leaden rock, and looking as if some

old, old princess, of old, old fairy times, were dragon-guarded

within--of yon flat stretches of sand where the Scotch and Irish

mermaids hold conference--come away too, and prate no more about the

scene! There is that in nature, dear Jenkins, which passes even our

powers. We can feel the beauty of a magnificent landscape, perhaps; but

we can describe a leg of mutton and turnips better. Come, then, this

scene is for our betters to depict. If Mr. Tennyson were to come hither

for a month, and brood over the place, he might, in some of those lofty

heroic lines which the author of the ‘Morte d’Arthur’ knows how to pile

up, convey to the reader a sense of this gigantic desolate scene. What!

you too are a poet? Well then, Jenkins, stay! but believe me, you had

best take my advice, and come off.

* * * * *

The worthy landlady made her appearance with the politest of bows and an

apology,--for what does the reader think a lady should apologise in the

most lonely rude spot in the world?--because a plain servant-woman was

about to bring in the dinner, the waiter being absent on leave at

Coleraine! O heaven and earth! where will the genteel end? I replied

philosophically that I did not care twopence for the plainness or beauty

of the waiter, but that it was the dinner I looked to, the frying

whereof made a great noise in the huge lonely house; and it must be

said, that though the lady _was_ plain, the repast was exceedingly good.

‘I have expended my little all,’ says the landlady, stepping in with a

speech after dinner, ‘in the building of this establishment; and though

to a man its profits may appear small, to such a _being_ as I am it will

bring, I trust, a sufficient return’; and on my asking her why she took

the place, she replied that she had always, from her earliest youth, a

fancy to dwell in that spot, and had accordingly realised her wish by

building this hotel--this mausoleum. In spite of the bright fire, and

the good dinner, and the good wine, it was impossible to feel

comfortable in the place; and when the car-wheels were heard, I jumped

up with joy to take my departure and forget the awful lonely shore, that

wild, dismal, genteel inn. A ride over a wide gusty country, in a grey,

misty, half-moonlight, the loss of a wheel at Bushmills, and the escape

from a tumble, were the delightful varieties after the late awful

occurrences. ‘Such a being’ as I am, would die of loneliness in that

hotel; and so let all brother cockneys be warned.

Some time before we came to it, we saw the long line of mist that lay

above the Bann, and coming through a dirty suburb of low cottages,

passed down a broad street with gas and lamps in it (thank Heaven, there

are people once more!), and at length drove up in state, across a

gas-pipe, in a market-place, before an hotel in the town of Coleraine,

famous for linen and for Beautiful Kitty, who must be old and ugly now,

for it’s a good five-and-thirty years since she broke her pitcher,

according to Mr. Moore’s account of her. The scene as we entered the

Diamond was rather a lively one--a score of little stalls were brilliant

with lights; the people were thronging in the place making their

Saturday bargains; the town clock began to toll nine; and hark! faithful

to a minute, the horn of the Derry mail was heard tootooing, and four

commercial gentlemen, with Scotch accents, rushed into the hotel at the

same time with myself.

Among the beauties of Coleraine may be mentioned the price of beef,

which a gentleman told me may be had for fourpence a pound; and I saw

him purchase an excellent codfish for a shilling. I am bound, too, to

state, for the benefit of aspiring Radicals, what two Conservative

citizens of the place stated to me, viz.:--that though there were two

Conservative candidates then canvassing the town, on account of a

vacancy in the representation, the voters were so truly liberal that

they would elect any person of any other political creed, who would

simply bring money enough to purchase their votes. There are 220 voters,

it appears; of whom it is not, however, necessary to ‘argue’ with more

than fifty, who alone are open to conviction; but as parties are pretty

equally balanced, the votes of the quinquagint, of course, carry an

immense weight with them. Well, this is all discussed calmly standing on

an inn steps, with a jolly landlord and a professional man of the town

to give the information. So, Heaven bless us, the ways of London are

beginning to be known even here. Gentility has already taken up her seat

in the Giant’s Causeway, where she apologises for the plainness of her

look; and, lo! here is bribery as bold as in the most civilised

places--hundreds and hundreds of miles away from St. Stephen’s and Pall

Mall. I wonder, in that little island of Raghery, so wild and lonely,

whether civilisation is beginning to dawn upon them?--whether they bribe

and are genteel? But for the rough sea of yesterday, I think I would

have fled thither to make the trial.

The town of Coleraine, with a number of cabin suburbs belonging to it,

lies picturesquely grouped on the Bann river; and the whole of the

little city was echoing with psalms as I walked through it on the Sunday

morning. The piety of the people seems remarkable; some of the inns even

will not receive travellers on Sunday; and this is written in an hotel,

of which every room is provided with a Testament, containing an

injunction on the part of the landlord to consider this world itself as

only a passing abode. Is it well that Boniface should furnish his guest

with Bibles as well as bills, and sometimes shut his door on a

traveller, who has no other choice but to read it on a Sunday? I heard

of a gentleman arriving from shipboard at Kilrush on a Sunday, when the

pious hotel-keeper refused him admittance; and some more tales, which to

go into would require the introduction of private names and

circumstances, but would tend to show that the Protestant of the north

is as much priest-ridden as the Catholic of the south;--priest and

old-woman-ridden, for there are certain expounders of doctrine in our

Church, who are not, I believe, to be found in the Church of Rome; and

woe betide the stranger who comes to settle in these parts, if his

‘seriousness’ be not satisfactory to the heads (with false fronts to

most of them) of the congregations.

Look at that little snug harbour of Portrush; a hideous new castle

standing on a rock protects it on one side, a snug row of gentlemen’s

cottages curve round the shore facing northwards, a bath-house, an

hotel, more smart houses, face the beach westward, defended by another

mound of rocks. In the centre of the little town stands a new-built

church; and the whole place has an air of comfort and neatness which is

seldom seen in Ireland. One would fancy that all the tenants of these

pretty snug habitations, sheltered in this nook far away from the world,

have nothing to do but to be happy, and spend their little comfortable

means in snug little hospitalities among one another, and kind little

charities among the poor. What does a man in active life ask for more

than to retire to such a competence, to such a snug nook of the world;

and there repose with a stock of healthy children round the fireside, a

friend within call, and the means of decent hospitality wherewith to

treat him?

Let any one meditating this pleasant sort of retreat, and charmed with

the look of this or that place as peculiarly suited to his purpose, take

a special care to understand his neighbourhood first, before he commit

himself by lease-signing or house-buying. It is not sufficient that you

should be honest, kind-hearted, hospitable, of good family--what are

your opinions upon religious subjects? Are they such as agree with the

notions of old Lady This, or Mrs. That, who are the patronesses of the

village? If not, woe betide you! you will be shunned by the rest of the

society, thwarted in your attempts to do good, whispered against over

evangelical bohea and serious muffins. Lady This will inform every new

arrival that you are a reprobate, and lost; and Mrs. That will consign

you and your daughters, and your wife (a worthy woman, but, alas! united

to that sad worldly man!) to damnation. The clergyman who partakes of

the muffins and bohea before mentioned, will very possibly preach

sermons against you from the pulpit: this was not done at Portstewart to

my knowledge, but I have had the pleasure of sitting under a minister in

Ireland who insulted the very patron who gave him his living,

discoursing upon the sinfulness of partridge-shooting, and threatening

hell-fire as the last ‘meet’ for fox-hunters; until the squire, one of

the best and most charitable resident landlords in Ireland, was

absolutely driven out of the church where his fathers had worshipped

for hundreds of years, by the insults of this howling evangelical

inquisitor.

So much as this I did not hear at Portstewart; but I was told that at

yonder neat-looking bath-house _a dying woman_ was denied a bath on a

Sunday. By a clause of the lease by which the bath-owner rents his

establishment, he is forbidden to give baths to any one on the Sunday.

The landlord of the inn, forsooth, shuts his gates on the same day, and

his conscience on week-days will not allow him to supply his guests with

whisky or ardent spirits. I was told by my friend, that because he

refused to subscribe for some fancy charity, he received a letter to

state that ‘he spent more in one dinner than in charity in the course of

the year.’ My worthy friend did not care to contradict the statement, as

why should a man deign to meddle with such a lie? But think how all the

fishes, and all the pieces of meat, and all the people who went in and

out of his snug cottage by the seaside must have been watched by the

serious round about! The sea is not more constant roaring there, than

scandal is whispering. How happy I felt, while hearing these histories

(demure heads in crimped caps peering over the blinds at us as we walked

on the beach), to think I am a cockney, and don’t know the name of the

man who lives next door to me!

I have heard various stories, of course from persons of various ways of

thinking, charging their opponents with hypocrisy, and proving the

charge by statements clearly showing that the priests, the preachers, or

the professing religionists in question, belied their professions

wofully by their practice. But in matters of religion, hypocrisy is so

awful a charge to make against a man, that I think it is almost unfair

to mention even in the cases in which it is proven, and which,--as, pray

God, they are but exceptional,--a person should be very careful of

mentioning, lest they be considered to apply generally. _Tartuffe_ has

been always a disgusting play to me to see, in spite of its sense and

its wit; and so, instead of printing, here or elsewhere, a few stories

of the Tartuffe kind which I have heard in Ireland, the best way will be

to try and forget them. It is an awful thing to say of any man walking

under God’s sun by the side of us, ‘You are a hypocrite, lying as you

use the Most Sacred Name, knowing that you lie while you use it.’ Let it

be the privilege of any sect that is so minded, to imagine that there is

perdition in store for all the rest of God’s creatures who do not think

with them; but the easy countercharge of hypocrisy, which the world has

been in the habit of making in its turn, is surely just as fatal and

bigoted an accusation as any that the sects make against the world.

What has this disquisition to do _à propos_ of a walk on the beach at

Portstewart? Why, it may be made here as well as in other parts of

Ireland, or elsewhere as well, perhaps, as here. It is the most

priest-ridden of countries; Catholic clergymen lord it over their ragged

flocks, as Protestant preachers, lay and clerical, over their more

genteel co-religionists. Bound to inculcate peace and goodwill, their

whole life is one of enmity and distrust.

Walking away from the little bay and the disquisition which has somehow

been raging there, we went across some wild dreary highlands to the

neighbouring little town of Portrush, where is a neat town and houses,

and a harbour, and a new church too, so like the last-named place that I

thought for a moment we had only made a round, and were back again at

Portstewart. Some gentlemen of the place, and my guide, who had a

neighbourly liking for it, showed me the new church, and seemed to be

well pleased with the edifice; which is, indeed, a neat and convenient

one, of a rather irregular Gothic. The best thing about the church, I

think, was the history of it. The old church had lain some miles off, in

the most inconvenient part of the parish, whereupon the clergyman and

some of the gentry had raised a subscription in order to build the

present church. The expenses had exceeded the estimates, or the

subscriptions had fallen short of the sums necessary; and the church, in

consequence, was opened with a debt on it, which the rector and two more

of the gentry had taken on their shoulders. The living is a small one;

the other two gentlemen going bail for the edifice not so rich as to

think light of the payment of a couple of hundred pounds beyond their

previous subscriptions--the lists are therefore still open; and the

clergyman expressed himself perfectly satisfied either that he would be

reimbursed one day or other, or that he would be able to make out the

payment of the money for which he stood engaged. Most of the Roman

Catholic churches that I have seen through the country have been built

in this way,--begun when money enough was levied for constructing the

foundation, elevated by degrees as fresh subscriptions came in, and

finished--by the way, I don’t think I _have_ seen one finished--but

there is something noble in the spirit (however certain economists may

cavil at it) that leads people to commence these pious undertakings with

the firm trust that ‘Heaven will provide.’

Eastwards from Portrush, we came upon a beautiful level sand which leads

to the White Rocks, a famous place of resort for the frequenters of the

neighbouring watering-places. Here are caves, and for a considerable

distance a view of the wild and gloomy Antrim coast as far as Bengore.

Midway, jutting into the sea (and I was glad it was so far off), was the

Causeway; and nearer, the grey towers of Dunluce.

Looking north, were the blue Scotch hills and the neighbouring Raghery

Island. Nearer Portrush are two rocky islands, called the Skerries, of

which a sportsman of our party vaunted the capabilities, regretting that

my stay was not longer, so that I might land and shoot a few ducks

there. This unlucky lateness of the season struck me also as a most

afflicting circumstance. He said also that fish were caught off the

island--not fish good to eat, but very strong at pulling, eager of

biting, and affording a great deal of sport. And so we turned our backs

once more upon the Giant’s Causeway, and the grim coast on which it

lies; and as my taste in life leads me to prefer looking at the smiling

fresh face of a young cheerful beauty, rather than at the fierce

countenance and high features of a fierce dishevelled Meg Merrilies, I

must say again that I was glad to turn my back on that severe part of

the Antrim coast, and my steps towards Derry.

[Illustration]

CHAPTER XXX

PEG OF LIMAVADDY

Between Coleraine and Derry there is a daily car (besides one or two

occasional queer-looking coaches), and I had this vehicle, with an

intelligent driver, and a horse with a hideous raw on his shoulder,

entirely to myself for the five-and-twenty miles of our journey. The

cabins of Coleraine are not parted with in a hurry, and we crossed the

bridge, and went up and down the hills of one of the suburban streets,

the Ban flowing picturesquely to our left; a large Catholic chapel, the

before-mentioned cabins, and farther on, some neat-looking houses and

plantations, to our right. Then we began ascending wide lonely hills,

pools of bog shining here and there amongst them, with birds, both black

and white, both geese and crows, on the hunt. Some of the stubble was

already ploughed up, but by the side of most cottages you saw a black

potato-field that it was time to dig now, for the weather was changing

and the winds beginning to roar. Woods, whenever we passed them, were

flinging round eddies of mustard-coloured leaves; the white trunks of

lime and ash trees beginning to look very bare. Then we stopped to give

the raw-backed horse water; then we trotted down a hill with a noble

bleak prospect of Lough Foyle and the surrounding mountains before us,

until we reached the town of Newtown Limavaddy, where the raw-backed

horse was exchanged for another not much more agreeable in his

appearance, though, like his comrade, not slow on the road.

Newtown Limavaddy is the third town in the county of Londonderry. It

comprises three well-built streets, the others are inferior; it is,

however, respectably inhabited; all this may be true, as the

well-informed Guide-book avers, but I am bound to say that I was

thinking of something else as we drove through the town, having fallen

eternally in love during the ten minutes of our stay. Yes, Peggy of

Limavaddy, if Barrow and Inglis have gone to Connemara to fall in love

with the Misses Flynn, let us be allowed to come to Ulster and offer a

tribute of praise at your feet--at your stockingless feet, O Margaret!

Do you remember the October day (‘twas the first day of the hard

weather), when the way-worn traveller entered your inn? But the

circumstances of this passion had better be chronicled in deathless

verse.

PEG OF LIMAVADDY

Riding from Coleraine

(Famed for lovely Kitty),

Came a cockney bound

Unto Derry city;

Weary was his soul,

Shivering and sad he

Bump’d along the road

Leads to Limavaddy.