Chapter XVI
MORE RAIN IN GALWAY--A WALK THERE--AND THE SECOND GALWAY NIGHT’S ENTERTAINMENT
‘Seven hills has Rome, seven mouths has Nilus’ stream, Around the Pole seven burning planets gleam. Twice equal these is Galway, Connaught’s Rome: Twice seven illustrious tribes here find their home.[24] Twice seven fair towers the city’s ramparts guard, Each house within is built of marble hard. With lofty turret flanked, twice seven the gates, Through twice seven bridges water permeates. In the High Church are twice seven altars raised, At each a holy saint and patron’s praised. Twice seven the convents, dedicate to Heaven,-- Seven for the female sex--for godly fathers seven.’[25]
Having read in Hardiman’s History the quaint inscription in Irish Latin, of which the above lines are a version, and looked admiringly at the old plans of Galway which are to be found in the same work, I was in hopes to have seen in the town some considerable remains of its former splendour, in spite of a warning to the contrary which the learned historiographer gives.
The old city certainly has some relics of its former stateliness; and, indeed, is the only town in Ireland I have seen, where an antiquary can find much subject for study, or a lover of the picturesque an occasion for using his pencil. It is a wild, fierce, and most original old town. Joyce’s Castle in one of the principal streets, a huge square grey tower, with many carvings and ornaments, is a gallant relic of its old days of prosperity, and gives one an awful idea of the tenements which the other families inhabited, and which are designed in the interesting plate which Mr. Hardiman gives in his work. The Collegiate Church, too, is still extant, without its fourteen altars, and looks to be something between a church and a castle, and as if it should be served by Templars with sword and helmet, in place of mitre and crosier. The old houses in the Main Street are like fortresses; the windows look into a court within; there is but a small low door, and a few grim windows peering suspiciously into the street.
Then there is Lombard Street, otherwise called Deadman’s Lane, with a raw-head and cross-bones and a ‘memento mori’ over the door where the dreadful tragedy of the Lynches was acted in 1493. If Galway is the Rome of Connaught, James Lynch Fitzstephen, the Mayor, may be considered as the Lucius Junius Brutus thereof. Lynch had a son who went to Spain as master of one of his father’s ships, and being of an extravagant wild turn, there contracted debts, and drew bills, and alarmed his father’s correspondent, who sent a clerk and nephew of his own back in young Lynch’s ship to Galway, to settle accounts. On the fifteenth day, young Lynch threw the Spaniard overboard. Coming back to his own country, he reformed his life a little, and was on the point of marrying one of the Blakes, Burkes, Bodkins, or others: when a seaman who had sailed with him, being on the point of death, confessed the murder in which he had been a participator.
Hereon the father, who was chief magistrate of the town, tried his son, and sentenced him to death; and when the clan Lynch rose in a body to rescue the young man, and avert such a disgrace from their family, it is said that Fitzstephen Lynch hanged the culprit with his own hand. A tragedy called ‘The Warden of Galway’ has been written on the subject, and was acted a few nights before my arrival.
The waters of Lough Corrib, which ‘permeate’ under the bridges of the town, go rushing and roaring to the sea with a noise and eagerness only known in Galway; and along the banks you see all sorts of strange figures washing all sorts of wonderful rags, with red petticoats and redder shanks standing in the stream. Pigs are in every street, the whole town shrieks with them: and I saw the pair of lovers in the frontispiece;[26] the girl with the little Galway pet in her lap. There are numbers of idlers on the bridges, thousands in the streets, humming and swarming in and out of dark old ruinous houses; congregated round numberless apple-stalls, nail-stalls, bottle-stalls, pigsfoot-stalls; in queer old shops, that look to be two centuries old; loitering about warehouses, ruined or not; looking at the washerwomen washing in the river, or at the fish-donkeys, or at the potato-stalls, or at a vessel coming into the quay, or at the boats putting out to sea.
That boat at the quay, by the little old gate, is bound for Arranmore; and one next to it has a freight of passengers for the cliffs of Mohir, on the Clare coast; and as the sketch is taken, a hundred of people have stopped in the street to look on, and are buzzing behind in Irish, telling the little boys in that language--who will persist in placing themselves exactly in the front of the designer--to get out of his way; which they do for some time; but at length curiosity is so intense that you are entirely hemmed in, and the view rendered quite invisible. A sailor’s wife comes up--who speaks English--with a very wistful face, and begins to hint, that them black pictures are very bad likenesses, and very dear too for a poor woman, and how much would a painted one cost, does his honour think? And she has her husband that’s going to sea to the West Indies to-morrow, and she’d give anything to have a picture of him. So I made bold to offer to take his likeness for nothing. But he never came, except one day at dinner, and not at all on the next day, though I stayed on purpose to accommodate him. It is true that it was pouring with rain; and as English waterproof cloaks are not waterproof in Ireland, the traveller who has but one coat must of necessity respect it, and had better stay where he is, unless he prefers to go to bed while he has his clothes dried at the next stage.
The houses in the fashionable street where the club-house stands (a strong building, with an agreeable Old Bailey look) have the appearance of so many little Newgates. The Catholic chapels are numerous, unfinished, and ugly. Great warehouses and mills rise up by the stream, or in the midst of unfinished streets here and there; and handsome convents with their gardens, justice-houses, barracks, and hospitals adorn the large, poor, bustling, rough-and-ready-looking town. A man who sells hunting-whips, gunpowder, guns, fishing-tackle, and brass and iron ware, has a few books on his counter; and a lady in a by-street, who carries on the profession of a milliner, eked out her stock in a similar way. But there were no regular book-shops that I saw, and when it came on to rain, I had no resource but the Hedge-School volumes again. They, like Patrick Spelman’s sign (which was faithfully copied in the town), present some very rude flowers of poetry and ‘entertainment’ of an exceedingly humble sort; but such shelter is not to be despised when no better is to be had; nay, possibly its novelty may be piquant to some readers, as an admirer of Shakespeare will occasionally condescend to listen to Mr. Punch, or an epicure to content himself with a homely dish of beans and bacon.
When Mr, Kilroy’s waiter has drawn the window-curtains, brought the hot water for the whisky-negus, and a pipe and a ‘screw’ of tobacco, and two huge old candlesticks that were plated once, the audience may be said to be assembled, and after a little overture performed on the pipe, the second night’s entertainment begins with the historical tragedy of the ‘Battle of Aughrim.’
Though it has found its way to the West of Ireland, the ‘Battle of Aughrim’ is evidently by a Protestant author, a great enemy of Popery and wooden shoes: both of which principles, incarnate in the person of St. Ruth, the French General commanding the troops sent by Louis XIV. to the aid of James II., meet with a woeful downfall at the conclusion of the piece. It must have been written in the reign of Queen Anne, judging from some loyal compliments which are paid to that sovereign in the play, which is also modelled upon Cato.
The ‘Battle of Aughrim’ is written from beginning to end in decasyllabic verse of the richest sort; and introduces us to the chiefs of William and James’s army. On the English side we have Baron de Ginckle, three Generals, and two Colonels; on the Irish, Monsieur St. Ruth, two Generals, two Colonels, and an English gentleman of fortune, a volunteer, and son of no less a person than Sir Edmonbury Godfrey.
There are two ladies--Jemima, the Irish Colonel Talbot’s daughter, in love with Godfrey; and Lucinda, lady of Colonel Herbert, in love with her lord. And the deep nature of the tragedy may be imagined when it is stated that Colonel Talbot is killed, Colonel Herbert is killed, Sir Charles Godfrey is killed, and Jemima commits suicide, as resolved not to survive her adorer. St. Ruth is also killed, and the remaining Irish heroes are taken prisoners or run away. Among the supernumeraries there is likewise a dreadful slaughter.
The author, however, though a Protestant, is an Irishman (there are peculiarities in his pronunciation which belong only to that nation), and as far as courage goes, he allows the two parties to be pretty equal. The scene opens with a martial sound of kettle-drums and trumpets in the Irish camp, near Athlone. That town is besieged by Ginckle, and Monsieur St. Ruth (despising his enemy with a confidence often fatal to Generals) meditates an attack on the besiegers’ lines, if, by any chance, the besieged garrison be not in a condition to drive them off.
After discoursing on the posture of affairs, and letting General Sarsfield and Colonel O’Neil know his hearty contempt of the English and their General, all parties, after protestations of patriotism, indulge in hopes of the downfall of William. St. Ruth says he will drive the wolves’ and lions’ cubs away. O’Neil declares he scorns the Revolution, and, like great Cato, smiles at persecution. Sarsfield longs for the day ‘when our Monks and Jesuits shall return, and holy incense on our altars burn.’ When
‘Enter a Post.
Post. With important news I from Athlone am sent, Be pleased to lead me to the General’s tent.
Sars. Behold the General there. Your message tell.
St. Ruth. Declare your message. Are our friends all well?
Post. Pardon me, sir, the fatal news I bring Like vulture’s poison every heart shall sting. Athlone is lost without your timely aid, At six this morning an assault was made, When, under shelter of the British cannon, Their grenadiers in armour took the Shannon, Led by brave Captain Sandys, who with fame, Plunged to his middle in the rapid stream. He led them through, and with undaunted ire He gained the bank in spite of all our fire; Being bravely followed by his grenadiers Though bullets flew like hail about their ears, And by this time they enter uncontrolled.
St. Ruth. Dare all the force of England be so bold T’ attempt to storm so brave a town, when I With all Hibernia’s sons of war am nigh? Return: and if the Britons dare pursue, Tell them St. Ruth is near, and that will do.
Post. Your aid would do much better than your name.
St. Ruth. Bear back this answer, friend, from whence you came. [Exit Post.’
The picture of brave Sandys, ‘who with fame plunged to his middle in the rapid stream,’ is not a bad image on the part of the Post; and St. Ruth’s reply, ‘Tell them St. Ruth is near, and that will do,’ characteristic of the vanity of his nation. But Sarsfield knows Britons better, and pays a merited compliment to their valour:
‘Sars. Send speedy succours and their fate prevent, You know not yet what Britons dare attempt. I know the English fortitude is such, To boast of nothing, though they hazard much. No force on earth their fury can repel, Nor would they fly from all the devils in hell.’
Another officer arrives--Athlone is really taken, St. Ruth gives orders to retreat to Aughrim, and Sarsfield, in a rage, first challenges him, and then vows he will quit the army. ‘A gleam of horror does my vitals damp,’ says the Frenchman (in a figure of speech more remarkable for vigour than logic); ‘I fear Lord Lucan has forsook the camp!’ But not so: after a momentary indignation, Sarsfield returns to his duty, and ere long is reconciled with his vain and vacillating chief.
And now the love intrigue begins. Godfrey enters--and states Sir Charles Godfrey is his lawful name: he is an Englishman, and was on his way to join Ginckle’s camp, when Jemima’s beauty overcame him: he asks Colonel Talbot to bestow on him the lady’s hand. The Colonel consents, and in Act II., on the plain of Aughrim, at five o’clock in the morning, Jemima enters and proclaims her love. The lovers have an interview, which concludes by a mutual confession of attachment, and Jemima says, ‘Here, take my hand. ‘Tis true the gift is small, but when I can, I’ll give you heart and all.’ The lines show finely the agitation of the young person. She meant to say, Take my heart, but she is longing to be married to him, and the words slip out as it were unawares. Godfrey cries in raptures--
‘Thanks to the gods! who such a present gave: Such radiant graces ne’er could man receive (resave); For who on earth has e’er such transports known? What is the Turkish monarch on his throne, Hemmed round with rusty swords in pompous state? Amidst his court no joys can be so great. Retire with me, my soul, no longer stay! In public view, the General moves this way.’
‘Tis, indeed, the General; who, reconciled with Sarsfield, straightway, according to his custom, begins to boast about what he will do:--
‘Thrice welcome to my heart, thou best of friends! The rock on which our holy faith depends! May this our meeting as a tempest make The vast foundations of Britannia shake, Tear up their orange plant, and overwhelm The strongest bulwarks of the British realm! Then shall the Dutch and Hanoverian fall, And James shall ride in triumph to Whitehall; Then to protect our faith he will maintain An inquisition here like that in Spain.
Sars. Most bravely urged, my Lord! your skill, I own, Would be unparalleled--had you saved Athlone.’
--‘Had you saved Athlone!’ Sarsfield has him there. And the contest of words might have provoked quarrels still more fatal, but alarms are heard: the battle begins, and St. Ruth (still confident) goes to meet the enemy, exclaiming, ‘Athlone was sweet, but Aughrim shall be sour.’ The fury of the Irish is redoubled on hearing of Talbot’s heroic death. The Colonel’s corpse is presently brought in, and to it enters Jemima, who bewails her loss in the following pathetic terms:--
‘Jemima. Oh!--he is dead!--my soul is all on fire, Witness ye gods!--he did with fame expire; For Liberty a sacrifice was made, And fell, like Pompey, by some villain’s blade. There lies a breathless corse, whose soul ne’er knew A thought but what was always just and true; Look down from heaven, God of peace and love, Waft him with triumph to the throne above; And oh! ye winged guardians of the skies! Tune your sweet harps, and sing his obsequies! Good friends, stand off----whilst I embrace the ground Whereon he lies--------and bathe each mortal wound With brinish tears, that like to torrents run From these sad eyes. Oh heavens! I’m undone [Falls down on the body.
Enter SIR CHARLES GODFREY. He raises her.
Sir Char. Why do these precious eyes like fountains flow, To drown the radiant heaven that lies below? Dry up your tears, I trust his soul ere this Has reached the mansions of eternal bliss. Soldiers! bear hence the body out of sight. [They bear him off.
Jem. Oh, stay--ye murderers, cease to kill me quite: See how he glares!----and see again he flies! The clouds fly open, and he mounts the skies. Oh! see his blood, it shines refulgent bright,} I see him yet--I cannot lose him quite,} But still pursue him on--and--lose my sight.’}
The gradual disappearance of the Colonel’s soul is now finely indicated, and so is her grief, when showing the body to Sir Charles, she says, ‘Behold the mangled cause of all my woes.’ The sorrow of youth, however, is but transitory; and when her lover bids her dry her gushish tears, she takes out her pocket-handkerchief with the elasticity of youth, and consoles herself for the father in the husband.
Act III. represents the English camp: Ginckle and his Generals discourse; the armies are engaged. In Act IV. the English are worsted in spite of their valour, which Sarsfield greatly describes. ‘View,’ says he--
‘View how the foe like an impetuous flood Breaks through the smoke, the water, and--the mud!’
It becomes exceedingly hot. Colonel Earles says--
‘In vain Jove’s lightnings issues from the sky, For death more sure from British ensigns fly. Their messengers of death much blood have spilled, And full three hundred of the Irish killed.’
A description of war (Herbert):--
‘Now bloody colours wave in their pride, And each proud hero does his beast bestride.’
General Dorrington’s description of the fight is, if possible, still more noble:--
‘Dor. Haste, noble friends, and save your lives by flight, For ‘tis but madness if you stand to fight. Our cavalry the battle have forsook, And death appears in each dejected look; Nothing but dread confusion can be seen, For severed heads and trunks o’erspread the green; The fields, the vales, the hills, and vanquished plain, For five miles round are covered with the slain. Death in each quarter does the eye alarm, Here lies a leg, and there a shattered arm. There heads appear, which, cloven by mighty bangs, And severed quite, on either shoulder hangs: This is the awful scene, my Lords! Oh, fly The impending danger, for your fate is nigh!’
Which party, however, is to win--the Irish or English? Their heroism is equal, and young Godfrey especially, on the Irish side, is carrying all before him--when he is interrupted in the slaughter by the ghost of his father: of old Sir Edmonbury, whose monument we may see in Westminster Abbey. Sir Charles, at first, doubts about the genuineness of this venerable old apparition; and thus puts a case to the ghost:--
‘Were ghosts in heaven, in heaven they there would stay, Or if in hell, they could not get away.’
A clincher, certainly, as one would imagine; but the ghost jumps over the horns of the fancied dilemma, by saying that he is not at liberty to state where he comes from.
‘Ghost. Where visions rest, or souls imprisoned dwell, By Heaven’s command, we are forbid to tell; But in the obscure grave--where corpse decay, Moulder in dust and putrify away,-- No rest is there; for the immortal soul Takes its full flight and flutters round the pole; Sometimes I hover over the Euxine sea-- From pole to sphere, until the judgment day-- Over the Thracian Bosphorus do I float, And pass the Stygian lake in Charon’s boat, O’er Vulcan’s fiery court and sulph’rous cave, And ride like Neptune on a briny wave; List to the blowing noise of Etna’s flames, And court the shades of Amazonian dames; Then take my flight up to the gloomy moon: Thus do I wander till the day of doom. Proceed I dare not, or I would unfold A horrid tale would make your blood run cold, Chill all your nerves and sinews in a thrice, Like whispering rivulets congealed to ice.
Sir Char. Ere you depart me, ghost, I here demand You’d let me know your last divine command!’
The ghost says that the young man must die in the battle; that it will go ill for him if he die in the wrong cause; and, therefore, that he had best go over to the Protestants--which poor Sir Charles (not without many sighs for Jemima) consents to do. He goes off then, saying--
‘I’ll join my countrymen, and yet proclaim Nassau’s great title to the crimson plain.’
In Act V., that desertion turns the fate of the day. Sarsfield enters with his sword drawn, and acknowledges his fate. ‘Aughrim,’ exclaims Lord Lucan,
‘Aughrim is now no more, St. Ruth is dead, And all his guards are from the battle fled. As he rode down the hill he met his fall, And died a victim to a cannon ball.’
And he bids the Frenchman’s body to
‘----lie like Pompey in his gore, Whose hero’s blood encircles the Egyptian shore.’
‘Four hundred Irish prisoners we have got,’ exclaims an English General, ‘and seven thousand lyeth on the spot.’ In fact, they are entirely discomfited, and retreat off the stage altogether; while, in the moment of victory, poor Sir Charles Godfrey enters, wounded to death, according to the old gentleman’s prophecy. He is racked by bitter remorse; he tells his love of his treachery, and declares ‘no crocodile was ever more unjust.’ His agony increases, the ‘optic nerves grow dim and lose their sight, and all his veins are now exhausted quite;’ and he dies in the arms of his Jemima, who stabs herself in the usual way.
And so every one being disposed of, the drums and trumpets give a great peal, the audience huzzas, and the curtain falls on Ginckle and his friends exclaiming--
‘May all the gods th’ auspicious evening bless, Who crowns Great Britain’s arrums with success!’
And questioning the prosody, what Englishman will not join in the sentiment?
In the interlude the band (the pipe) performs a favourite air. Jack the waiter and candle-snuffer looks to see that all is ready: and after the dire business of the tragedy, comes in to sprinkle the stage with water (and perhaps a little whisky in it). Thus all things being arranged, the audience takes its seat again, and the afterpiece begins.
* * * * *
Two of the little yellow volumes purchased at Ennis are entitled The Irish and the Hibernian Tales. The former are modern, and the latter of an ancient sort; and so great is the superiority of the old stories over the new, in fancy, dramatic interest, and humour, that one can’t help fancying Hibernia must have been a very superior country to Ireland.
These Hibernian novels, too, are evidently intended for the Hedge-School universities. They have the old tricks and some of the old plots that one has read in many popular legends of almost all countries, European and Eastern: successful cunning is the great virtue applauded; and the heroes pass through a thousand wild extravagant dangers, such as could only have been invented when art was young and faith was large. And as the honest old author of the tales says, ‘they are suited to the meanest as well as the highest capacity, tending both to improve the fancy and enrich the mind,’ let us conclude the night’s entertainment by reading one or two of them, and reposing after the doleful tragedy which has been represented. The ‘Black Thief’ is worthy of the Arabian Nights, I think,--as wild and odd as an Eastern tale.
It begins, as usual, with a king and a queen who lived once on a time in the south of Ireland, and had three sons: but the queen being on her death-bed, and fancying her husband might marry again, and unwilling that her children should be under the jurisdiction of any other woman, besought his majesty to place them in a tower at her death, and keep them there safe until the young princes should come of age.
The queen dies: the king of course marries again, and the new queen, who bears a son too, hates the offspring of the former marriage, and looks about for means to destroy them.
‘At length the queen, having got some business with the hen-wife, went herself to her, and after a long conference passed, was taking leave of her, when the hen-wife prayed that if ever she should come back to her again she might break her neck. The queen, greatly incensed at such a daring insult from one of her meanest subjects, to make such a prayer on her, demanded immediately the reason, or she would have her put to death. “It was worth your while, madam,” says the hen-wife, “to pay me well for it, for the reason I prayed so on you concerns you much.” “What must I pay you?” asked the queen. “You must give me,” says she, “the full of a pack of wool: and I have an ancient crock which you must fill with butter; likewise a barrel which you must fill for me full of wheat.” “How much wool will it take to the pack?” says the queen. “It will take seven herds of sheep,” said she, “and their increase for seven years.” “How much butter will it take to fill your crock?” “Seven dairies,” said she, “and the increase for seven years.” “And how much will it take to fill the barrel you have?” says the queen. “It will take the increase of seven barrels of wheat for seven years.” “That is a great quantity,” says the queen, “but the reason must be extraordinary, and before I want it, I will give you all you demand.”’
The hen-wife acquaints the queen with the existence of the three sons, and giving her majesty an enchanted pack of cards, bids her to get the young men to play with her with these cards, and on their losing, to inflict upon them such a task as must infallibly end in their ruin. All young princes are set upon such tasks, and it is a sort of opening of the pantomime, before the tricks and activity begin. The queen went home, and ‘got speaking’ to the king ‘in regard of his children, and she broke it off to him in a very polite and engaging manner, so that he could see no muster or design in it.’ The king agreed to bring his sons to court, and at night, when the royal party ‘began to sport, and play at all kinds of diversions,’ the queen cunningly challenged the three princes to play cards. They lose, and she sends them in consequence to bring her back the Knight of the Glen’s wild steed of bells.
On their road (as wandering young princes, Indian or Irish, always do) they meet with the Black Thief of Sloan, who tells them what they must do. But they are caught in the attempt, and brought ‘into that dismal part of the palace where the Knight kept a furnace always boiling, in which he threw all offenders that ever came in his way, which in a few minutes would entirely consume them. “Audacious villains!” says the Knight of the Glen, “how dare you attempt so bold an action as to steal my steed? See now the reward of your folly: for your greater punishment, I will not boil you all together, but one after the other, so that he that survives may witness the dire afflictions of his unfortunate companions.” So saying, he ordered his servants to stir up the fire. “We will boil the eldest-looking of these young men first,” says he, “and so on to the last, which will be this old champion with the black cap. He seems to be the captain, and looks as if he had come through many toils.”--I was as near death once as this prince is yet,” says the Black Thief, “and escaped: and so will he too.” “No, you never were,” said the Knight, “for he is within two or three minutes of his latter end.” “But,” says the Black Thief, “I was within one moment of my death, and I am here yet.” “How was that?” says the Knight. “I would be glad to hear it, for it seems to be impossible.” “If you think, Sir Knight,” says the Black Thief, “that the danger I was in surpassed that of this young man, will you pardon him his crime?” “I will,” says the Knight, “so go on with your story.”
‘“I was, sir,” says he, “a very wild boy in my youth, and came through many distresses; once in particular, as I was on my rambling, I was benighted, and could find no lodging. At length I came to an old kiln, and being much fatigued, I went up and lay on the ribs. I had not been long there, when I saw three witches coming in with three bags of gold. Each put their bags of gold under their heads, as if to sleep. I heard the one say to the other, that if the Black Thief came on them while they slept, he would not leave them a penny. I found by their discourse that everybody had got my name into their mouth, though I kept silent as death during their discourse. At length they fell fast asleep, and then I stole softly down, and seeing some turf convenient, I placed one under each of their heads, and off I went with their gold, as fast as I could.
‘“I had not gone far,” continued the Thief of Sloan, “until I saw a greyhound, a hare, and a hawk in pursuit of me, and began to think it must be the witches that had taken that metamorphose, in order that I might not escape them unseen either by land or water. Seeing they did not appear in any formidable shape, I was more than once resolved to attack them, thinking that with my broadsword I could easily destroy them. But considering again that it was perhaps still in their power to become so, I gave over the attempt, and climbed with difficulty up a tree, bringing my sword in my hand, and all the gold along with me. However, when they came to the tree they found what I had done, and, making further use of their hellish art, one of them was changed into a smith’s anvil, and another into a piece of iron, of which the third one soon made a hatchet. Having the hatchet made, she fell to cutting down the tree, and in course of an hour it began to shake with me.”’
This is very good and original. The ‘boiling’ is in the first fee-faw-fum style, and the old allusion to ‘the old champion in the black cap’ has the real Ogresque humour. Nor is that simple contrivance of the honest witches without its charm; for if, instead of wasting their time, the one in turning herself into an anvil, the other into a piece of iron, and so hammering out a hatchet at considerable labour and expense--if either of them had turned herself into a hatchet at once, they might have chopped down the Black Thief before cock-crow, when they were obliged to fly off, and leave him in possession of the bags of gold.
The eldest prince is ransomed by the Knight of the Glen, in consequence of this story; and the second prince escapes on account of the merit of a second story; but the great story of all is of course reserved for the youngest prince.
‘I was one day on my travels,’ says the Black Thief, ‘and I came into a large forest, where I wandered a long time, and could not get out of it. At length I came to a large castle, and fatigue obliged me to call in the same, where I found a young woman, and a child sitting on her knee, and she crying. I asked her what made her cry, and where the lord of the castle was, for I wondered greatly that I saw no stir of servants, or any person about the place. “It is well for you,” says the young woman, “that the lord of this castle is not at home at present; for he is a monstrous giant, with but one eye on his forehead, who lives on human flesh. He brought me this child,” says she--I do not know where he got it--and ordered me to make it into a pie, and I cannot help crying at the command.” I told her that if she knew of any place convenient, that I could leave the child safely, I would do it, rather than that it should be buried in the bowels of such a monster. She told of a house a distance off, where I would get a woman who would take care of it. “But what will I do in regard of the pie?” “Cut a finger off it,” said I, “and I will bring you in a young wild pig out of the forest, which you may dress as if it was the child, and put the finger in a certain place, that if the giant doubts anything about it, you may know where to turn it over at first, and when he sees it he will be fully satisfied that it is made of the child.” She agreed to the plan I proposed; and, cutting off the child’s finger, by her direction, I soon had it at the house she told me of, and brought her the little pig in the place of it. She then made ready the pie; and, after eating and drinking heartily myself, I was just taking my leave of the young woman when we observed the giant coming through the castle gates. “Lord bless me!” said she, “what will you do now? Run away and lie down among the dead bodies that he has in the room” (showing me the place); “and strip off your clothes that he may not know you from the rest if he has occasion to go that way.” I took her advice, and laid myself down among the rest, as if dead, to see how he would behave. The first thing I heard was him calling for his pie. When she set it down before him, he swore it smelt like swine’s flesh; but, knowing where to find the finger, she immediately turned it up, which fairly convinced him of the contrary. The pie only served to sharpen his appetite, and I heard him sharpen his knife, and saying he must have a collop or two, for he was not near satisfied. But what was my terror when I heard the giant groping among the bodies, and, fancying myself, cut the half of my hip off, and took it with him to be roasted. You may be certain I was in great pain; but the fear of being killed prevented me from making any complaint. However, when he had eat all, he began to drink hot liquors in great abundance, so that in a short time he could not hold up his head, but threw himself on a large creel he had made for the purpose, and fell fast asleep. Whenever I heard him snoring, bad as I was, I went up and caused the woman to bind my wound with an handkerchief; and taking the giant’s spit, I reddened it in the fire, and ran it through the eye, but was not able to kill him. However, I left the spit sticking in his head, and took to my heels; but I soon found he was in pursuit of me, although blind; and, having an enchanted ring, he threw it at me, and it fell on my big toe and remained fastened to it. The giant then called to the ring, where it was, and to my great surprise it made him answer on my foot; and he, guided by the same, made a leap at me, which I had the good luck to observe, and fortunately escaped the danger. However, I found running was of no use in saving me as long as I had the ring on my foot; so I took my sword and cut off the toe it was fastened on, and threw both into a large fish-pond that was convenient. The giant called again to the ring, which, by the power of enchantment, always made answer; but he, not knowing what I had done, imagined it was still on some part of me, and made a violent leap to seize me, when he went into the pond, over head and ears, and was drowned. “Now, Sir Knight,” says the Thief of Sloan, “you see what dangers I came through and always escaped; but, indeed, I am lame for want of my toe ever since.”’
And now remains but one question to be answered, viz. How is the Black Thief himself to come off? This difficulty is solved in a very dramatic way, and with a sudden turn in the narrative that is very wild and curious.
‘My lord and master,’ says an old woman that was listening all the time, ‘that story is but too true, as I well know, for I am the very woman that was in the giant’s castle, and you, my lord, the child that I was to make into a pie, and this is the very man that saved your life, which you may know by the want of your finger that was taken off, as you have heard, to deceive the giant.’
That fantastical way of bearing testimony to the previous tale, by producing an old woman who says the tale is not only true, but she was the very old woman who lived in the giant’s castle, is almost a stroke of genius. It is fine to think that the simple chronicler found it necessary to have a proof for his story, and he was no doubt perfectly contented with the proof found.
‘The Knight of the Glen, greatly surprised at what he had heard the old woman tell, and knowing he wanted his finger from his childhood, began to understand that the story was true enough. “And is this my dear deliverer?” says he. “O brave fellow, I not only pardon you all, but I will keep you with myself while you live; where you shall feast like princes, and have every attendance that I have myself.” They all returned thanks on their knees, and the Black Thief told him the reason they attempted to steal the steed of Bells, and the necessity they were under in going home. “Well,” says the Knight of the Glen, “if that’s the case, I bestow you my steed rather than this brave fellow should die; so you may go when you please; only remember to call and see me betimes, that we may know each other well.” They promised they would, and with great joy they set off for the King their father’s palace, and the Black Thief along with them. The wicked Queen was standing all this time on the tower, and, hearing the bells ringing at a great distance off, knew very well it was the Princes coming home, and the steed with them, and through spite and vexation precipitated herself from the tower, and was shattered to pieces. The three Princes lived happy and well during their father’s reign, always keeping the Black Thief along with them; but how they did after the old King’s death is not known.’
Then we come upon a story that exists in many a European language, of the man cheating Death; then to the history of the Apprentice Thief, who of course cheated his masters; which, too, is an old tale, and may have been told very likely among those Phœnicians who were the fathers of the Hibernians for whom these tales were devised. A very curious tale is there, concerning Manus O’Malaghan and the fairies:--‘In the parish of Ahoghill lived Manus O’Malaghan. As he was searching for a calf that had strayed, he heard many people talking. Drawing near, he distinctly heard them repeating, one after the other, “Get me a horse, get me a horse”; and “Get me a horse too,” says Manus. Manus was instantly mounted on a steed surrounded with a vast crowd, who galloped off, taking poor Manus with them. In a short time they suddenly stopped in a large wide street, asking Manus if he knew where he was? “Faith,” says he, “I do not.” “You are in Spain,” said they.’
Here we have again the wild mixture of the positive and the fanciful. The chronicler is careful to tell us why Manus went out searching for a calf, and this positiveness prodigiously increases the reader’s wonder at the subsequent events. And the question and answer of the mysterious horsemen is fine: ‘Don’t you know where you are? In Spain.’ A vague solution, such as one has of occurrences in dreams sometimes.
The history of Robin the Blacksmith is full of these strange flights of poetry. He is followed about ‘by a little boy in a green jacket,’ who performs the most wondrous feats of the blacksmith’s art, as follows:--
‘Robin was asked to do something, who wisely shifted it, saying he would be very sorry not to give the honour of the first trick to his lordship’s smith; at which he was called forth to the bellows. When the fire was well kindled, to the great surprise of all present he blew a great shower of wheat out of the fire, which fell through all the shop. They then demanded of Robin to try what he could do. “Pho!” said Robin, as if he thought nothing of what was done. “Come,” said he to the boy, “I think I showed you something like that.” The boy goes then to the bellows and blew out a great flock of pigeons, who soon devoured all the grain, and then disappeared.
‘The Dublin smith, sorely vexed that such a boy as him should outdo him, goes a second time to the bellows, and blew a fine trout out of the hearth, who jumped into a little river that was running by the shop door, and was seen no more at that time.
‘Robin then said to the boy, “Come, you must bring us yon trout back again, to let the gentlemen see we can do something.” Away the boy goes, and blew a large otter out of the hearth, who immediately leaped into the river, and in a short time returned with it in his mouth, and then disappeared. All present allowed that it was a folly to attempt a competition any further.’
The boy in the green jacket was one ‘of a kind of small beings called Fairies’; and not a little does it add to the charm of these wild tales to feel, as one reads them, that the writer must have believed in his heart a great deal of what he told. You see the tremor, as it were, and a wild look of the eyes, as the story-teller sits in his nook, and recites, and peers wistfully round, lest the beings he talks of be really at hand.
Let us give a couple of the little tales entire. They are not so fanciful as those before mentioned, but of the comic sort, and suited to the first kind of capacity mentioned by the author in his preface.
Donald and his Neighbors
‘Hudden and Dudden, and Donald O’Neary, were near neighbours in the barony of Ballinconlig, and ploughed with three bullocks; but the two former, envying the present prosperity of the latter, determined to kill his bullock, to prevent his farm being properly cultivated and laboured, that, going back in the world, he might be induced to sell his lands, which they meant to get possession of. Poor Donald, finding his bullock killed, immediately skinned it, and throwing his skin over his shoulder, with the fleshy side out, set off to the next town with it, to dispose of it to the best advantage. Going along the road a magpie flew on the top of the hide, and began picking it, chattering all the time. This bird had been taught to speak and imitate the human voice, and Donald, thinking he understood some words it was saying, put round his hand and caught hold of it. Having got possession of it, he put it under his greatcoat, and so went on to the town. Having sold the hide, he went into an inn to take a dram; and, following the landlady into the cellar, he gave the bird a squeeze, which caused it to chatter some broken accents that surprised her very much. “What is that I hear?” said she to Donald: “I think it is talk, and yet I do not understand.” “Indeed,” said Donald, “it is a bird I have that tells me everything, and I always carry it with me to know when there is any danger. Faith,” says he, “it says you have far better liquor than you are giving me.” “That is strange,” said she, going to another cask of better quality, and asking him if he would sell the bird. “I will,” said Donald, “if I get enough for it.” “I will fill your hat with silver if you leave it with me.” Donald was glad to hear the news, and, taking the silver, set off, rejoicing at his good luck. He had not been long home when he met with Hudden and Dudden. “Ha!” said he, “you thought you did me a bad turn, but you could not have done me a better; for, look here, what I have got for the hide,” showing them the hatful of silver. “You never saw such a demand for hides in your life as there is at present.” Hudden and Dudden that very night killed their bullocks, and set out the next morning to sell their hides. On coming to the place they went through all the merchants, but could only get a trifle for them. At last they had to take what they could get, and came home in a great rage, and vowing revenge on poor Donald. He had a pretty good guess how matters would turn out; and his bed being under the kitchen window, he was afraid they would rob him, or perhaps kill him when asleep; and on that account, when he was going to bed, he left his old mother in his bed, and lay down in her place, which was in the other side of the house; and, taking the old woman for Donald, choked her in the bed; but he making some noise, they had to retreat, and leave the money behind them, which grieved them very much. However, by daybreak, Donald got his mother on his back, and carried her to town. Stopping at a well, he fixed his mother, with her staff, as if she was stooping for a drink, and then went into a public-house convenient, and called for a dram. “I wish,” said he to a woman that stood near him, “you would tell my mother to come in; she is at yon well trying to get a drink, and she is hard in hearing; if she does not observe you, give her a little shake, and tell her that I want her.” The woman called her several times, but she seemed to take no notice: at length she went to her and shook her by the arm; but when she let her go again, she tumbled on her head into the well, and, as the woman thought, was drowned. She, in great fear and surprise at the accident, told Donald what had happened. “O, mercy,” said he, “what is this?” He ran and pulled her out of the well, weeping and lamenting all the time, and acting in such a manner that you would imagine that he had lost his senses. The woman, on the other hand, was far worse than Donald; for his grief was only feigned, but she imagined herself to be the cause of the old woman’s death. The inhabitants of the town, hearing what had happened, agreed to make Donald up a good sum of money for his loss, as the accident happened in their place; and Donald brought a greater sum home with him than he got for the magpie. They buried Donald’s mother; and as soon as he saw Hudden and Dudden, he showed them the last purse of money he had got. “You thought to kill me last night,” said he, “but it was good for me it happened on my mother, for I got all that purse for her, to make gunpowder.”
‘That very night Hudden and Dudden killed their mothers, and the next morning set off with them to town. On coming to the town with their burthen on their backs, they went up and down crying, “Who will buy old wives for gunpowder?” so that every one laughed at them, and the boys at last clodded them out of the place. They then saw the cheat, and, vowing revenge on Donald, buried the old women, and set off in pursuit of him. Coming to his house, they found him sitting at his breakfast, and seizing him, put him in a sack, and went to drown him in a river at some distance. As they were going along the highway, they raised a hare, which they saw had but three feet, and, throwing off the sack, ran after her, thinking by appearance she would be easily taken. In their absence there came a drover that way, and hearing Donald singing in the sack, wondered greatly what could be the matter. “What is the reason,” said he, “that you are singing, and you confined?” “Oh, I am going to heaven,” said Donald; “and in a short time I expect to be free from trouble.” “Oh dear,” said the drover, “what will I give you if you let me to your place?” “Indeed I do not know,” said he; “it would take a good sum.” “I have not much money,” said the drover, “but I have twenty head of fine cattle, which I will give you to exchange places with me.” “Well, well,” says Donald, “I don’t care if I should; loose the sack and I will come out.” In a moment the drover liberated him, and went into the sack himself; and Donald drove home the fine heifers and left them in his pasture.
‘Hudden and Dudden having caught the hare, returned, and getting the sack on one of their backs, carried Donald, as they thought, to the river, and threw him in, where he immediately sunk. They then marched home, intending to take immediate possession of Donald’s property; but how great was their surprise, when they found him safe at home before them, with such a fine herd of cattle, whereas they knew he had none before. “Donald,” said they, “what is all this? We thought you were drowned, and yet you are here before us?” “Ah!” said he, “if I had but help along with me when you threw me in, it would have been the best job ever I met with, for of all the sight of cattle and gold that ever was seen, is there, and no one to own them; but I was not able to manage more than what you see, and I could show you the spot where you might get hundreds.” They both swore they would be his friend, and Donald accordingly led them to a very deep part of the river, and lifting up a stone, “Now,” said he, “watch this,” throwing it into the stream. “There is the very place, and go in one of you first, and if you want help, you have nothing to do but call.” Hudden jumping in, and sinking to the bottom, rose up again, and making a bubbling noise as those do that are drowning, attempting to speak, but could not. “What is that he is saying now?” says Dudden. “Faith,” says Donald, “he is calling for help--don’t you hear him? Stand about,” said he, running back, “till I leap in; I know how to do better than any of you.” Dudden, to have the advantage of him, jumped in off the bank, and was drowned along with Hudden. And this was the end of Hudden and Dudden.’
The Spaeman
‘A poor man in the North of Ireland was under the necessity of selling his cow, to help to support his family. Having sold his cow, he went into an inn, and called for some liquor. Having drank pretty heartily, he fell asleep, and when he awoke he found he had been robbed of his money. Poor Roger was at a loss to know how to act; and, as is often the case, when the landlord found that his money was gone, he turned him out of doors. The night was extremely dark, and the poor man was compelled to take up his lodgings in an old uninhabited house at the end of the town.
‘Roger had not remained long here until he was surprised by the noise of three men, whom he observed making a hole, and, depositing something therein, closed it carefully up again, and then went away. The next morning, as Roger was walking towards the town, he heard that a cloth shop had been robbed to a great amount, and that a reward of thirty pounds was offered to any person who could discover the thieves. This was joyful news to Roger, who recollected what he had been witness to the night before. He accordingly went to the shop, and told the gentleman that for the reward he would recover the goods, and secure the robbers, provided he got six stout men to attend him. All which was thankfully granted him.
‘At night Roger and his men concealed themselves in the old house, and in a short time after the robbers came to the spot for the purpose of removing their booty; but they were instantly seized and carried into the town, prisoners, with the goods. Roger received the reward and returned home, well satisfied with his good luck. Not many days after, it was noised over the country that this robbery was discovered by the help of one of the best Spaemen to be found, insomuch that it reached the ears of a worthy gentleman of the county of Derry, who made strict inquiry to find him out. Having at length discovered his abode, he sent for Roger, and told him he was every day losing some valuable article, and, as he was famed for discovering lost things, if he could find out the same he should be handsomely rewarded. Poor Roger was put to a stand, not knowing what answer to make, as he had not the smallest knowledge of the like. But recovering himself a little, he resolved to humour the joke; and, thinking he would make a good dinner and some drink of it, told the gentleman he would try what he could do, but that he must have a room to himself for three hours, during which time he must have three bottles of strong ale and his dinner. All which the gentleman told him he should have. No sooner was it made known that the Spaeman was in the house than the servants were all in confusion, wishing to know what would be said.
‘As soon as Roger had taken his dinner, he was shown into an elegant room, where the gentleman sent him a quart of ale by the butler. No sooner had he set down the ale than Roger said, “There comes one of them”; intimating the bargain he had made with the gentleman for the three quarts, which the butler took in a wrong light, and imagined it was himself. He went away in great confusion, and told his wife. “Poor fool,” said she, “the fear makes you think it is you he means; but I will attend in your place, and hear what he will say to me.” Accordingly she carried the second quart; but no sooner had she opened the door than Roger cried, “There comes two of them.” The woman, no less surprised than her husband, told him the Spaeman knew her too. “And what will we do?” said he; “we will be hanged.” “I will tell you what we must do,” said she: “we must send the groom the next time, and if he is known, we must offer him a good sum not to discover on us.” The butler went to William and told him the whole story, and that he must go next to see what he would say to him, telling him at the same time what to do, in case he was known also. When the hour was expired, William was sent with the third quart of ale, which, when Roger observed, he cried out, “There is the third and last of them”; at which he changed colour, and told him “that if he would not discover on them, they would show him where they were all concealed, and give him five pounds besides.” Roger, not a little surprised at the discovery he had made, told him “if he recovered the goods, he would follow them no further.”
‘By this time the gentleman called Roger to know how he had succeeded. He told him “he could find the goods, but that the thief was gone.” “I will be well satisfied,” said he, “with the goods, for some of them are very valuable.” “Let the butler come along with me, and the whole shall be recovered.” He accordingly conducted Roger to the back of the stables, where the articles were concealed--such as silver cups, spoons, bowls, knives, forks, and a variety of other articles of great value.
‘When the supposed Spaeman brought back the stolen goods, the gentleman was so highly pleased with Roger, that he insisted on his remaining with him always, as he supposed he would be perfectly safe as long as he was about his house. Roger gladly embraced the offer, and in a few days took possession of a piece of land, which the gentleman had given to him in consideration of his great abilities.
‘Some time after this, the gentleman was relating to a large company the discovery Roger had made, and that he could tell anything. One of the gentlemen said he would dress a dish of meat, and bet for fifty pounds that he could not tell what was in it, and he would allow him to taste it. The bet being taken and the dish dressed, the gentleman sent for Roger, and told the bet that was depending on him. Poor Roger did not know what to do; at last he consented to the trial. The dish being produced, he tasted it, but could not tell what it was. At last, seeing he was fairly beat, he said, “Gentlemen, it is folly to talk: the fox may run awhile, but he is caught at last”--allowing with himself that he was found out. The gentleman that had made the bet then confessed that it was a fox he had dressed in the dish; at which they all shouted out in favour of the Spaeman--particularly his master, who had more confidence in him than ever.
‘Roger then went home, and so famous did he become, that no one dared take anything but what belonged to them, fearing that the Spaeman would discover on them.’
* * * * *
And so we shut up the Hedge-School Library, and close the Galway Nights’ Entertainments. They are not quite so genteel as Almack’s, to be sure; but many a lady who has her opera-box in London has listened to a piper in Ireland.
Apropos of pipers: here is a young one that I caught and copied to-day. He was paddling in the mud, shining in the sun careless of his rays, and playing his little tin-music as happy as Mr. Cooke with his oboe.
Perhaps the above verses and tales are not unlike my little Galway musician. They are grotesque and rugged; but they are pretty and innocent-hearted too; and as such, polite persons may deign to look at them for once in a way. While we have Signor Costa in a white neckcloth, ordering opera-bands to play for us the music of Donizetti, which is not only sublime but genteel; of course such poor little operatives as he who plays the wind-instrument yonder, cannot expect to be heard often; but is not this Galway? and how far is Galway from the Haymarket?
XVII. FROM GALWAY TO BALLYNAHINCH
The Clifden car, which carries the Dublin letters into the heart of Connemara, conducts the passenger over one of the most wild and beautiful districts that it is ever the fortune of a traveller to examine; and I could not help thinking, as we passed through it, at how much pains and expense honest English Cockneys are, to go and look after natural beauties far inferior, in countries which, though more distant, are not a whit more strange than this one. No doubt, ere long, when people know how easy the task is, the rush of London tourism will come this way; and I shall be very happy if these pages shall be able to awaken in one bosom, beating in Tooley Street or the Temple, the desire to travel towards Ireland next year.
After leaving the quaint old town behind us, and ascending one or two small eminences to the north-westward, the traveller, from the car, gets a view of the wide sheet of Lough Corrib shining in the sun, as we saw it, with its low dark banks stretching round it. If the view is gloomy, at least it is characteristic; nor are we delayed by it very long; for though the lake stretches northwards into the very midst of the Joyce country (and is there in the close neighbourhood of another huge lake, Lough Mask, which again is near to another sheet of water), yet from this road henceforth, after keeping company with it for some five miles, we only get occasional views of it, passing over hills and through trees, by many rivers and smaller lakes, which are dependent upon that of Corrib. Gentlemen’s seats, on the road from Galway to Moycullen, are scattered in great profusion--perhaps there is grass growing on the gravel walk, and the iron gates of the tumble-down old lodges are rather rickety; but for all that, the places look comfortable, hospitable, and spacious; and as for the shabbiness and want of finish here and there, the English eye grows quite accustomed to it in a month; and I find the bad condition of the Galway houses by no means so painful as that of the places near Dublin. At some of the lodges, as we pass, the mail-carman, with a warning shout, flings a bag of letters. I saw a little party looking at one which lay there in the road, crying, Come, take me! but nobody cares to steal a bag of letters in this country, I suppose, and the carman drove on without any alarm. Two days afterwards, a gentleman with whom I was in company left on a rock his book of fishing-flies; and I can assure you there was a very different feeling expressed about the safety of that.
In the first part of the journey, the neighbourhood of the road seemed to be as populous as in other parts of the country,--troops of red-petticoated peasantry peering from their stone-cabins,--yelling children following the car, and crying, ‘Lash, lash!’ It was Sunday, and you would see many a white chapel among the green bare plains to the right of the road, the courtyard blackened with a swarm of cloaks. The service seems to continue (on the part of the people) all day. Troops of people, issuing from the chapel, met us at Moycullen, and ten miles farther on, at Oughterard, their devotions did not yet seem to be concluded.
A more beautiful village can scarcely be seen than this. It stands upon Lough Corrib, the banks of which are here, for once at least, picturesque and romantic; and a pretty river, the Feogh, comes rushing over rocks and by woods, until it passes the town and meets the lake. Some pretty buildings in the village stand on each bank of this stream, a Roman Catholic chapel with a curate’s neat lodge, a little church, on one side of it; a fine court-house of grey stone on the other. And here it is that we get into the famous district of Connemara, so celebrated in Irish stories, so mysterious to the London tourist. ‘It presents itself,’ says the Guide-book, ‘under every possible combination of heathy moor, bog, lake, and mountain. Extensive mossy plains, and wild pastoral valleys, lie embosomed among the mountains, and support numerous herds of cattle and horses, for which the district has been long celebrated. These wild solitudes, which occupy by far the greater part of the centre of the country, are held by a hardy and ancient race of grazing farmers, who live in a very primitive state, and, generally speaking, till little beyond what supplies their immediate wants. For the first ten miles the country is comparatively open; and the mountains on the left, which are not of great elevation, can be distinctly traced as they rise along the edge of the heathy plain.
‘Our road continues along the Feogh River, which expands itself into several considerable lakes, and at five miles from Oughterard we reach Lough Bofin, which the road also skirts. Passing in succession Lough-a-preaghan, the lakes of Anderran and Shindella, at ten miles from Oughterard we reach Slyme and Lynn’s Inn, or Halfway House, which is near the shore of Loughonard. Now, as we advance towards the group of Binabola, or the Twelve Pins, the most gigantic scenery is displayed.’
But the best guide-book that ever was written cannot set the view before the mind’s eye of the reader, and I won’t attempt to pile up big words in place of these wild mountains, over which the clouds as they passed, or the sunshine as it went and came, cast every variety of tint, light, and shadow; nor can it be expected that long, level sentences, however smooth and shining, can be made to pass as representations of those calm lakes by which we took our way. All one can do is to lay down the pen and ruminate, and cry ‘Beautiful!’ once more; and to the reader say, ‘Come and see!’
Wild and wide as the prospect around us is, it has somehow a kindly, friendly look, differing in this from the fierce loneliness of some similar scenes in Wales that I have viewed. Ragged women and children come out of rude stone-huts to see the car as it passes. But it is impossible for the pencil to give due raggedness to the rags, or to convey a certain picturesque mellowness of colour that the garments assume. The sexes, with regard to raiment, do not seem to be particular. There were many boys on the road in the national red petticoat, having no other covering for their lean, brown legs. As for shoes, the women eschew them almost entirely; and I saw a peasant trudging from mass, in a handsome scarlet cloak, a fine blue cloth gown, turned up to show a new lining of the same colour, and a petticoat quite white and neat, in a dress of which the cost must have been at least £10; and her husband walked in front carrying her shoes and stockings.
The road had conducted us for miles through the vast property of the gentleman to whose house I was bound, Mr. Martin, the Member for the county; and the last and prettiest part of the journey was round the Lake of Ballynahinch, with tall mountains rising immediately above us on the right, pleasant woody hills on the opposite side of the lake, with the roofs of the houses rising above the trees; and in an island in the midst of the water a ruined old castle, that cast a long, white reflection into the blue waters where it lay. A land-pirate used to live in that castle, one of the peasants told me, in the time of ‘Oliver Cromwell.’ And a fine fastness it was for a robber, truly; for there was no road through these wild countries in his time--nay, only thirty years since, this lake was at three days’ distance of Galway. Then comes the question, What, in a country where there were no roads and no travellers, and where the inhabitants have been wretchedly poor from time immemorial,--what was there for the land-pirate to rob? But let us not be too curious about times so early as those of Oliver Cromwell. I have heard the name many times from the Irish peasant, who still has an awe of the grim, resolute Protector.
The builder of Ballynahinch House has placed it to command a view of a pretty, melancholy river that runs by it, through many green flats and picturesque rocky grounds; but from the lake it is scarcely visible. And so, in like manner, I fear it must remain invisible to the reader too, with all its kind inmates, and frank, cordial hospitality, unless he may take a fancy to visit Galway himself, when, as I can vouch, a very small pretext will make him enjoy both.
It will, however, be only a small breach of confidence to say, that the major-domo of the establishment (who has adopted accurately the voice and manner of his master, with a severe dignity of his own, which is quite original) ordered me on going to bed ‘not to move in the morning till he called me,’ at the same time expressing a hearty hope that I should ‘want nothing more that evening.’ Who would dare, after such peremptory orders, not to fall asleep immediately, and in this way disturb the repose of Mr. J--n M--ll--y!
There may be many comparisons drawn between English and Irish gentlemen’s houses; but perhaps the most striking point of difference between the two is the immense following of the Irish house, such as would make an English housekeeper crazy almost. Three comfortable, well-clothed, good-humoured fellows walked down with me from the car, persisting in carrying--one a bag, another a sketching-stool, and so on; walking about the premises in the morning, sundry others were visible in the courtyard, and near the kitchen door. In the grounds a gentleman, by name Mr. Marcus C--rr, began discoursing to me regarding the place, the planting, the fish, the grouse, and the Master, being himself, doubtless, one of the irregulars of the house. As for maids, there were half a score of them skurrying about the house; and I am not ashamed to confess that some of them were exceedingly good-looking. And if I might venture to say a word more, it would be respecting Connemara breakfasts; but this would be an entire and flagrant breach of confidence, and, to be sure, the dinners were just as good.
One of the days of my three days’ visit was to be devoted to the lakes; and as a party had been arranged for the second day after my arrival, I was glad to take advantage of the society of a gentleman staying in the house, and ride with him to the neighbouring town of Clifden.
The ride thither from Ballynahinch is surprisingly beautiful; and as you ascend the high ground from the two or three rude stone-huts which face the entrance-gates of the house, there are views of the lake and the surrounding country which the best parts of Killarney do not surpass, I think, although the Connemara lakes do not possess the advantage of wood which belongs to the famous Kerry landscape.
But the cultivation of the country is only in its infancy as yet, and it is easy to see how vast its resources are, and what capital and cultivation may do for it. In the green patches among the rocks, and the mountain-sides, wherever crops were grown, they flourished; plenty of natural wood is springing up in various places; and there is no end to what the planter may do, and to what time and care may effect. The carriage-road to Clifden is but ten years old; as it has brought the means of communication into the country, the commerce will doubtless follow it; and in fact, in going through the whole kingdom, one can’t but be struck with the idea that not one-hundredth part of its capabilities are yet brought into action, or even known perhaps, and that by the easy and certain progress of time, Ireland will be poor Ireland no longer. For instance, we rode by a vast green plain, skirting a lake and river, which is now useless almost for pasture, and which a little draining will convert into thousands of acres of rich productive land. Streams and falls of water dash by one everywhere--they have only to utilise this water-power for mills and factories; and hard by are some of the finest bays in the world, where ships can deliver and receive foreign and home produce. At Roundstone especially, where a little town has been erected, the bay is said to be unexampled for size, depth, and shelter; and the Government is now, through the rocks and hills on their wild shore, cutting a coast-road to Bunown, the most westerly part of Connemara, whence there is another good road to Clifden. Among the charges which the Repealers bring against the Union, they should include at least this: they would never have had these roads but for the Union, roads which are as much at the charge of the London tax-payer as of the most ill-used Milesian in Connaught.
A string of small lakes follow the road to Clifden, with mountains on the right of the traveller for the chief part of the way. A few figures at work in the bog-lands--a red petticoat passing here and there--a goat or two browsing among the stones--or a troop of ragged whitey-brown children, who came out to gaze at the car, form the chief society on the road. The first house at the entrance to Clifden is a gigantic poorhouse--tall, large, ugly, comfortable, it commands the town, and looks almost as big as every one of the houses therein. The town itself is but of a few years’ date, and seems to thrive in its small way. Clifden Castle is a fine château in the neighbourhood, and belongs to another owner of immense lands in Galway--Mr. D’Arcy.
Here a drive was proposed along the coast to Bunown, and I was glad to see some more of the country, and its character. Nothing can be wilder. We passed little lake after lake, lying a few furlongs inwards from the shore. There were rocks everywhere, some patches of cultivated land here and there, nor was there any want of inhabitants along this savage coast. There were numerous cottages, if cottages they may be called, and women and, above all, children in plenty. Here is one of the former--her attitude as she stood gazing at the car. To depict the multiplicity of her rags would require a month’s study.
At length we came in sight of a half-built edifice, which is approached by a rocky, dismal grey road, guarded by two or three broken gates, against which rocks and stones were piled, which were to be removed to give an entrance to our car. The gates were closed so laboriously, I presume to prevent the egress of a single black consumptive pig, far gone in the family way--a teeming skeleton--that was cropping the thin dry grass that grew upon a round hill which rises behind this most dismal castle of Bunown.
If the traveller only seeks for strange sights, this place will repay his curiosity. Such a dismal house is not to be seen in all England, or, perhaps, such a dismal situation. The sea lies before and behind; and on each side, likewise, are rocks and copper-coloured meadows, by which a few trees have made on attempt to grow. The owner of the house had, however, begun to add to it, and there, unfinished, is a whole apparatus of turrets, and staring raw stone and mortar, and fresh ruinous carpenters’ work. And then the courtyard!--tumble-down outhouses, staring empty pointed windows, and new-smeared plaster cracking from the walls--a black heap of turf, a mouldy pump, a wretched old coal-scuttle emptily sunning itself in the midst of this cheerful scene! There was an old Gorgon, who kept the place, and who was in perfect unison with it--Venus herself would become bearded, blear-eyed, and haggard if left to be the housekeeper of this dreary place.
In the house was a comfortable parlour, inhabited by the priest who has the painful charge of the district. Here were his books and his breviaries, his reading-desk with the cross engraved upon it, and his portrait of Daniel O’Connell the Liberator, to grace the walls of his lonely cell. There was a dead crane hanging at the door on a gaff; his red fish-like eyes were staring open, and his eager grinning bill--a rifle-ball had passed through his body. And this was doubtless the only game about the place; for we saw the sportsman who had killed the bird, hunting vainly up the round hill for other food for powder. This gentleman had had good sport, he said, shooting seals upon a neighbouring island, four of which animals he had slain.
Mounting up the round hill, we had a view of the Sline Lights--the most westerly point in Ireland.
Here too was a ruined sort of summer-house, dedicated DEO HIBERNIÆ LIBERATORI. When these lights were put up, I am told the proprietor of Bunown was recommended to apply for compensation to Parliament, inasmuch as there would be no more wrecks on the coast: from which branch of commerce the inhabitants of the district used formerly to derive a considerable profit. Between these Sline Lights and America nothing lies but the Atlantic. It was beautifully blue and bright on this day, and the sky almost cloudless; but I think the brightness only made the scene more dismal, it being of that order of beauties which cannot bear the full light, but require a cloud or a curtain to set them off to advantage. A pretty story was told me by the gentleman who had killed the seals. The place where he had been staying for sport was almost as lonely as this Bunown, and inhabited by a priest too--a young, lively, well-educated man. ‘When I came here first,’ the priest said, ‘I cried for two days’; but afterwards he grew to like the place exceedingly, his whole heart being directed towards it, his chapel, and his cure. Who would not honour such missionaries--the virtues they silently practise, and the doctrines they preach? After hearing that story, I think Bunown looked not quite so dismal, as it is inhabited, they say, by such another character. What a pity it is that John Tuam, in the next county of Mayo, could not find such another hermitage to learn modesty in, and forget his Graceship, his Lordship, and the sham titles by which he sets such store.
A moon as round and bright as any moon that ever shone, and riding in a sky perfectly cloudless, gave us a good promise of a fine day for the morrow, which was to be devoted to the lakes in the neighbourhood of Ballynahinch; one of which, Lough Ina, is said to be of exceeding beauty. But no man can speculate upon Irish weather. I have seen a day beginning with torrents of rain, that looked as if a deluge was at hand, clear up in a few minutes, without any reason, and against the prognostications of the glass and all other weather-prophets; so in like manner, after the astonishingly fine night, there came a villainous dark day; which, however, did not set in fairly for rain until we were an hour on our journey, with a couple of stout boatmen rowing us over Ballynahinch Lake. Being, however, thus fairly started, the water began to come down, not in torrents certainly, but in that steady, creeping, insinuating mist, of which we scarce know the luxury in England; and which, I am bound to say, will wet a man’s jacket as satisfactorily as a cataract would do.
It was just such another day as that of the famous stag-hunt at Killarney, in a word; and as, in the first instance, we went to see the deer killed, and saw nothing thereof, so, in the second case, we went to see the landscape with precisely the same good fortune. The mountains covered their modest beauties in impenetrable veils of clouds; and the only consolation to the boat’s crew was, that it was a remarkably good day for trout-fishing--which amusement some people are said to prefer to the examination of landscapes, however beautiful.
O you, who laboriously throw flies in English rivers, and catch, at the expiration of a hard day’s walking, casting, and wading, two or three feeble little brown trouts of two or three ounces in weight, how would you rejoice to have but an hour’s sport in Derryclear or Ballynahinch; where you have but to cast, and lo! a big trout springs at your fly, and, after making a vain struggling, splashing, and plunging for a while, is infallibly landed in the net and thence into the boat! The single rod in the boat, caught enough fish in an hour to feast the crew, consisting of five persons, and the family of a Herd of Mr. Martin’s, who has a pretty cottage on Derryclear Lake, inhabited by a cow and its calf, a score of fowls, and I don’t know how many sons and daughters.
Having caught enough trout to satisfy any moderate appetite, like true sportsmen the gentlemen on board our boat became eager to hook a salmon. Had they hooked a few salmons, no doubt they would have trolled for whales, or for a mermaid; one of which finny beauties the waterman swore he had seen on the shore of Derryclear, he with Jim Mullen being above on a rock, the mermaid on the shore directly beneath them, visible to the middle, and as usual ‘racking her hair.’ It was fair hair, the boatman said; and he appeared as convinced of the existence of the mermaid, as he was of the trout just landed in the boat.
In regard of mermaids, there is a gentleman living near Killala Bay, whose name was mentioned to me, and who declares solemnly, that one day, shooting on the sands there, he saw a mermaid, and determined to try her with a shot. So he drew the small-shot charge from his gun and loaded with ball, that he always had by him for seal-shooting, fired, and hit the mermaid through the breast. The screams and moans of the creature, whose person he describes most accurately, were the most horrible heart-rending noises that he ever, he said, heard: and not only were they heard by him, but by the fishermen along the coast, who were furiously angry against Mr. A----n, because, they said, the injury done to the mermaid would cause her to drive all the fish away from the bay for years to come.
But we did not, to my disappointment, catch a glimpse of one of these interesting beings, nor of the great sea-horse which is said to inhabit these waters, nor of any fairies (of whom the stroke-oar, Mr. Marcus, told us not to speak, for they didn’t like bein’ spoken of); nor even of a salmon, though the fishermen produced the most tempting flies. The only animal of any size that was visible, we saw while lying by a swift black river, that comes jumping with innumerable little waves into Derryclear, and where the salmon are especially suffered to “stand”; this animal was an eagle--a real wild eagle, with grey wings and a white head and belly; it swept round us, within gunshot reach, once or twice, through the leaden sky, and then settled on a grey rock, and began to scream its shrill, ghastly, aquiline note.
The attempts on the salmon having failed, the rain continuing to fall steadily, the Herd’s cottage before named was resorted to: when Marcus, the boatman, commenced forthwith to gut the fish, and, taking down some charred turf-ashes from the blazing fire, on which about a hundredweight of potatoes were boiling, he--Marcus--proceeded to grill on the floor some of the trout, which we afterwards ate with immeasurable satisfaction. They were such trouts as, when once tasted, remain for ever in the recollection of a commonly grateful mind--rich, flaky, creamy, full of flavour. A Parisian gourmand would have paid ten francs for the smallest cooleen among them; and, when transported to his capital, how different in flavour would they have been!--how inferior to what they were as we devoured them, fresh from the fresh waters of the lake, and jerked as it were from the water to the gridiron! The world had not had time to spoil those innocent beings before they were gobbled up with pepper and salt, and missed, no doubt, by their friends. I should like to know more of their ‘set.’ But enough of this: my feelings overpower me: suffice it to say, they were red or salmon trouts--none of your white-fleshed brown-skinned river fellows.
When the gentlemen had finished their repast, the boatmen and the family set to work upon the ton of potatoes, a number of the remaining fish, and a store of other good things; then we all sat round the turf-fire in the dark cottage, the rain coming down steadily outside, and veiling everything except the shrubs and verdure immediately about the cottage. The Herd, the Herd’s wife, and a nondescript female friend, two healthy young herdsmen in corduroy rags, the herdsman’s daughter paddling about with bare feet, a stout black-eyed wench with her gown over her head, and a red petticoat not quite so good as new, the two boatmen, a badger just killed and turned inside out, the gentlemen, some hens cackling and flapping about among the rafters, a calf in a corner cropping green meat and occasionally visited by the cow her mama, formed the society of the place. It was rather a strange picture; but as for about two hours we sat there, and maintained an almost unbroken silence, and as there was no other amusement but to look at the rain, I began, after the enthusiasm of the first half-hour, to think that after all London was a bearable place, and that for want of a turf-fire and a bench in Connemara, one might put up with a sofa and a newspaper in Pall Mall.
This, however, is according to tastes; and I must say that Mr. Marcus betrayed a most bitter contempt for all cockney tastes, awkwardness, and ignorance: and very right too. The night, on our return home, all of a sudden cleared; but though the fishermen, much to my disgust--at the expression of which, however, the rascals only laughed--persisted in making more casts for trout, and trying back in the dark upon the spots which we had visited in the morning, it appeared the fish had been frightened off by the rain; and the sportsmen met with such indifferent success that at about ten o’clock we found ourselves at Ballynahinch. Dinner was served at eleven: and, I believe, there was some whisky-punch afterwards, recommended medicinally and to prevent the ill effects of the wetting; but that is neither here nor there.
The next day the Petty Sessions were to be held at Roundstone, a little town which has lately sprung up near the noble bay of that name. I was glad to see some specimens of Connemara litigation, as also to behold at least one thousand beautiful views that lie on the five miles of road between the town and Ballynahinch. Rivers and rocks, mountains and sea, green plains and bright skies, how (for the hundred-and-fiftieth time) can pen-and-ink set you down? But if Berghem could have seen those blue mountains, and Karel du Jardin could have copied some of these green airy plains, with their brilliant little coloured groups of peasants, beggars, horsemen, many an Englishman would know Connemara upon canvas, as he does Italy or Flanders now.
XVIII. ROUNDSTONE PETTY SESSIONS
‘The temple of august Themis,’ as a Frenchman would call the Sessions-room at Roundstone, is an apartment of some twelve feet square, with a deal table and a couple of chairs for the accommodation of the magistrates, and a Testament with a paper cross pasted on it to be kissed by the witnesses and complainants who frequent the court. The law-papers, warrants, etc., are kept on the Session-clerk’s bed in an adjoining apartment, which commands a fine view of the courtyard--where there is a stack of turf, a pig, and a shed beneath which the magistrates’ horses were sheltered during the sitting. The Sessions-clerk is a gentleman ‘having,’ as the phrase is here, both the English and Irish languages, and interpreting for the benefit of the worshipful bench.
And if the cockney reader suppose that in this remote country spot, so wild, so beautiful, so distant from the hum and vice of cities, quarrelling is not, and Litigation never shows her snaky head, he is very much mistaken. From what I saw, I would recommend any ingenious young attorney whose merits are not appreciated in the Metropolis, to make an attempt upon the village of Roundstone; where as yet, I believe, there is no solicitor, and where an immense and increasing practice might speedily be secured. Mr. O’Connell, who is always crying out ‘Justice for Ireland,’ finds strong supporters among the Roundstonians, whose love of justice for themselves is inordinate. I took down the plots of the five first little litigious dramas which were played before Mr. Martin and the stipendiary magistrate.
Case 1.--A boy summoned a young man for beating him so severely that he kept his bed for a week, thereby breaking an engagement with his master, and losing a quarter’s wages.
The defendant stated, in reply, that the plaintiff was engaged--in a field through which defendant passed with another person--setting two little boys to fight; on which defendant took plaintiff by the collar and turned him out of the field. A witness who was present swore that defendant never struck plaintiff at all, nor kicked him, nor ill-used him, further than by pushing him out of the field.
As to the loss of his quarter’s wages, the plaintiff ingeniously proved that he had afterwards returned to his master, that he had worked out his time, and that he had in fact received already the greater part of his hire. Upon which the case was dismissed, the defendant quitting court without a stain upon his honour.
Case 2 was a most piteous and lamentable case of killing a cow; the plaintiff stepped forward with many tears and much gesticulation to state the fact, and also to declare that she was in danger of her life from the defendant’s family.
It appeared on the evidence that a portion of the defendant’s respectable family are at present undergoing the rewards which the law assigns to those who make mistakes in fields with regard to the ownership of sheep which sometimes graze there. The defendant’s father, O’Damon, for having appropriated one of the fleecy bleaters of O’Melibœus, was at present past beyond sea to a country where wool, and consequently mutton, is so plentiful, that he will have the less temptation. Defendant’s brothers tread the Ixionic wheel for the same offence. Plaintiff’s son had been the informer in the case, hence the feud between the families, the threats on the part of the defendants, the murder of the innocent cow.
But upon investigation of the business, it was discovered, and on the plaintiff’s own testimony, that the cow had not been killed, nor even been injured, but that the defendant had flung two stones at it, which might have inflicted great injury had they hit the animal with greater force in the eye or in any delicate place.
Defendants admitted flinging the stones, but alleged as a reason that the cow was trespassing on their grounds, which plaintiff did not seem inclined to deny. Case dismissed.--Defendant retires with unblemished honour; on which his mother steps forward, and lifting up her hands with tears and shrieks, calls upon God to witness that the defendant’s own brother-in-law had sold to her husband the very sheep on account of which he had been transported.
Not wishing probably to doubt the justice of the verdict of an Irish jury, the magistrate abruptly put an end to the lamentation and oaths of the injured woman by causing her to be sent out of court, and called the third cause on.
This was a case of thrilling interest and a complicated nature, involving two actions, which ought each perhaps to have been gone into separately, but were taken together. In the first place Timothy Horgan brought an action against Patrick Dolan for breach of contract in not remaining with him for the whole of six months during which Dolan had agreed to serve Horgan. Then Dolan brought an action against Horgan for not paying him his wages for six months’ labour done--the wages being two guineas.
Horgan at once, and with much candour, withdrew his charge against Dolan, that the latter had not remained with him for six months; nor can I understand to this day, why in the first place he swore to the charge, and why afterwards he withdrew it. But immediately advancing another charge against his late servant, he pleaded that he had given him a suit of clothes, which should be considered as a set-off against part of the money claimed.
Now such a suit of clothes as poor Dolan had was never seen, I will not say merely on an English scarecrow, but on an Irish beggar. Strips of rags fell over the honest fellow’s great brawny chest, and the covering on his big brown legs hung on by a wonder. He held out his arms with a grim smile, and told his Worship to look at the clothes--the argument was irresistible, Horgan was ordered to pay forthwith: he ought to have been made to pay another guinea for clothing a fellow-creature in rags so abominable. And now came a case of trespass, in which there was nothing interesting but the attitude of the poor woman who trespassed, and who meekly acknowledged the fact. She stated, however, that she only got over the wall as a short cut home: but the wall was eight feet high, with a ditch too; and I fear there were cabbages or potatoes in the enclosure. They fined her a sixpence, and she could not pay it, and went to gaol for three days, where she and her baby, at any rate, will get a meal.
Last on the list which I took down, came a man who will make the fortune of the London attorney, that I hope is on his way hither. A rather old, curly-headed man, with a sly smile perpetually lying on his face (the reader may give whatever interpretation he please to the ‘lying’)--he comes before the Court almost every fortnight, they say, with a complaint of one kind or other. His present charge was against a man for breaking into his courtyard, and wishing to take possession of the same. It appeared, however, that he, the defendant, and another lived in a row of houses--the plaintiff’s house was, however, first built, and as his agreement specified that the plot of ground behind his house should be his likewise, he chose to imagine that the plot of ground behind all the three houses was his, and built his turf-stack against his neighbour’s window. The magistrate of course pronounced against this ingenious discoverer of wrongs, and he left the court still smiling and twisting round his little wicked eyes, and declaring solemnly that he would put in an appale. If one could have purchased a kicking at a moderate price off that fellow’s back, it would have been a pleasant little piece of self-indulgence, and I confess I longed to ask him the price of the article.
And so, after a few more such great cases, the court rose; and I had leisure to make moral reflections, if so minded--and sighing to think that cruelty and falsehood, selfishness and rapacity, dwell not in crowds alone, but flourish all the world over: sweet flowers of human nature, they bloom in all climates and seasons, and are just as much at home in a hothouse in Thavies’ Inn, as on a lone mountain or a rocky sea-coast in Ireland, where never a tree will grow!
We walked along this coast, after the judicial proceedings were over, to see the country, and the new road that the Board of Works is forming--such a wilderness of rocks I never saw! The district for miles is covered with huge stones, shining white in patches of green, with the Binabola on one side of the spectator, and the Atlantic running in and out of a thousand little bays on the other. The country is very hilly, or wavy rather, being a sort of ocean petrified; and the engineers have hard work with these numerous abrupt little ascents and descents, which they equalise as best they may, by blasting, cutting, filling cavities, and levelling eminences. Some hundreds of men were employed at this work, busy with their hand-barrows, their picking and boring. Their pay is eightpence a day.
There is little to see in the town of Roundstone, except a Presbyterian Chapel in process of erection, that seems big enough to accommodate the Presbyterians of the county; and a sort of lay convent, being a community of brothers of the third order of St. Francis. They are all artisans and workmen, taking no vows, but living together in common, and undergoing a certain religious regimen. Their work is said to be very good, and all are employed upon some labour or other. On the front of this unpretending little dwelling is an inscription with a great deal of pretence, stating that the establishment was founded with the approbation of ‘His Grace, the most Reverend the Lord Archbishop of Tuam.’
The most Reverend Doctor MacHale is a clergyman of great learning, talents, and honesty; but His Grace the Lord Archbishop of Tuam strikes me as being no better than a mountebank; and some day I hope even his own party will laugh this humbug down. It is bad enough to be awed by big titles at all; but to respect sham ones! O stars and garters! We shall have his Grace the Lord Chief-Rabbi next, or his Lordship the Arch-Imaum!
XIX. CLIFDEN TO WESTPORT
On leaving Ballynahinch (with sincere regret, as any lonely tourist may imagine, who is called upon to quit the hospitable friendliness of such a place and society), my way lay back to Clifden again, and thence through the Joyce country, by the Killery mountains, to Westport in Mayo. The road, amounting in all to four-and-forty Irish miles, is performed in cars, in different periods of time, according to your horse and your luck. Sometimes, both being bad, the traveller is two days on the road; sometimes a dozen hours will suffice for the journey--which was the case with me, though I confess to having found the twelve hours long enough. After leaving Clifden, the friendly look of the country seemed to vanish; and, though picturesque enough, was a thought too wild and dismal for eyes accustomed to admire a hop-garden in Kent, or a view of rich folly meadows in Surrey, with a clump of trees and a comfortable village spire. ‘Inglis,’ the Guide-book says, ‘compares the scenes to the Norwegian Fiords.’ Well, the Norwegian Fiords must, in this case, be very dismal sights; and I own that the wildness of Hampstead Heath (with the imposing walls of Jack Straw’s Castle rising stern in the midst of the green wilderness) are more to my taste than the general views of yesterday.
We skirted by lake after lake, lying lonely in the midst of lonely boglands, or bathing the sides of mountains robed in sombre rifle green. Two or three men, and as many huts, you see in the course of each mile perhaps, as toiling up the bleak hills, or jingling more rapidly down them, you pass through this sad region. In the midst of the wilderness, a chapel stands here and there, solitary, on the hillside; or a ruinous, useless school-house, its pale walls contrasting with the general surrounding hue of sombre purple and green. But though the country looks more dismal than Connemara, it is clearly more fertile: we passed miles of ground that evidently wanted but little cultivation to make them profitable; and along the mountain-sides, in many places, and over a great extent of Mr. Blake’s country especially, the hills were covered with a thick, natural plantation, that may yield a little brushwood now, but might in fifty years’ time bring thousands of pounds of revenue to the descendants of the Blakes. This spectacle of a country going to waste is enough to make the cheerfullest landscape look dismal; it gives this wild district a woeful look indeed. The names of the lakes by which we came I noted down in a pocket-book as we passed along; but the names were Irish, the car was rattling, and the only names readable in the catalogue is Letterfrack.
The little hamlet of Leenane is at twenty miles’ distance from Clifden; and to arrive at it, you skirt the mountain along one side of a vast pass, through which the ocean runs from Killery Bay, separating the mountains of Mayo from the mountains of Galway. Nothing can be more grand and gloomy than this pass; and as for the character of the scenery, it must, as the Guide-book says, ‘be seen to be understood.’ Meanwhile, let the reader imagine huge, dark mountains in their accustomed livery of purple and green, a dull grey sky above them, an estuary silver-bright below: in the water lies a fisherman’s boat or two; a pair of sea-gulls, undulating with the little waves of the water; a pair of curlews wheeling overhead and piping on the wing; and on the hillside a jingling car, with a cockney in it, oppressed by and yet admiring all these things. Many a sketcher and tourist, as I found, has visited this picturesque spot; for the hostess of the inn had stories of English and American painters, and of illustrious book-writers, too, travelling in the services of our Lords of Paternoster Row.
The landlord’s son of Clifden, a very intelligent young fellow, was here exchanged for a new carman in the person of a raw Irisher of twenty years of age, ‘having’ little English, and dressed in that very pair of pantaloons which Humphrey Clinker was compelled to cast off some years since, on account of the offence which they gave to Mrs. Tabitha Bramble. This fellow, emerging from among the boats, went off to a field to seek for the black horse, which the landlady assured me was quite fresh and had not been out all day, and would carry me to Westport in three hours. Meanwhile I was lodged in a neat little parlour, surveying the Mayo side of the water, with some cultivated fields and a show of a village at the spot where the estuary ends, and above them lodges and fine dark plantations, climbing over the dark hills that lead to Lord Sligo’s seat of Delphi. Presently, with a curtsey, came a young woman who sold worsted socks at a shilling a pair, and whose portrait is here given.
It required no small pains to entice this rustic beauty to stand, while a sketch should be made of her. Nor did any compliments or cajolements, on my part or the landlady’s, bring about the matter; it was not until money was offered that the lovely creature consented. I offered (such is the ardour of the real artist) either to give her a sixpence, or to purchase two pairs of her socks, if she would stand still for five minutes. On which she said she would prefer selling the socks. Then she stood still for a moment in the corner of the room; then she turned her face towards the corner and the other part of her person towards the artist, and exclaimed in that attitude, ‘I must have a shilling more.’ Then I told her to go to the deuce. Then she made a proposition, involving the stockings and sixpence, which was similarly rejected; and finally, the above splendid design was completed at the price first stated.
However, as we went off, this timid little love barred the door for a moment, and said that ‘I ought to give her another shilling; that a gentleman would give her another shilling,’ and so on--she might have trod the London streets for ten years, and not have been more impudent and more greedy.
By this time the famous fresh horse was produced, and the driver, by means of a wraprascal, had covered a great part of the rags of his lower garment. He carried a whip and a stick, the former lying across his knee ornamentally, the latter being for service, and as his feet were directly under the horse’s tail, he had full command of the brute’s back, and belaboured it for six hours without ceasing.
What little English the fellow knew, he uttered with a howl, roaring into my ear answers, which, for the most part, were wrong, to various questions put to him. The lad’s voice was so hideous, that I asked him if he could sing; on which forthwith he began yelling the most horrible Irish ditty, of which he told me the title, that I have forgotten. He sang three stanzas, certainly keeping a kind of tune, and the latter lines of each verse were in rhyme; but when I asked him the meaning of the song, he only roared out its Irish title.
On questioning the driver further, it turned out that the horse, warranted fresh, had already performed a journey of eighteen miles that morning, and the consequence was, that I had full leisure to survey the country through which we passed. There were more lakes, more mountains, more bog, and an excellent road through this lonely district, though few only of the human race enlivened it. At ten miles from Leenane, we stopped at a roadside hut, where the driver pulled out a bag of oats, and borrowing an iron pot from the good people, half filled it with corn, which the poor, tired, galled, bewhipped black horse began eagerly to devour. The young charioteer himself hinted very broadly his desire for a glass of whisky, which was the only kind of refreshment that this remote house of entertainment supplied.
In the various cabins I have entered, I have found talking a vain matter; the people are suspicious of the stranger within their wretched gates, and are shy, sly, and silent. I have, commonly, only been able to get half-answers in reply to my questions, given in a manner that seemed plainly to intimate that the visit was unwelcome. In this rude hostel, however, the landlord was a little less reserved, offered a seat at the turf-fire, where a painter might have had a good subject for his skill. There was no chimney, but a hole in the roof, up which a small portion of the smoke ascended (the rest preferring an egress by the door, or else to remain in the apartment altogether); and this light from above lighted up as rude a set of figures as ever were seen. There were two brown women, with black eyes and locks, the one knitting stockings on the floor, the other ‘racking’ (with that natural comb which five horny fingers supply) the elf-locks of a dirty urchin between her knees. An idle fellow was smoking his pipe by the fire; and by his side sate a stranger, who had been made welcome to the shelter of the place--a sickly well-looking man, whom I mistook for a deserter at first, for he had evidently been a soldier.
But there was nothing so romantic as desertion in his history. He had been in the dragoons, but his mother had purchased his discharge: he was married, and had lived comfortably in Cork for some time, in the glass-blowing business. Trade failing at Cork, he had gone to Belfast to seek for work. There was no work at Belfast; and he was so far on his road home again: sick, without a penny in the world, a hundred and fifty miles to travel, and a starving wife and children to receive him at his journey’s end. He had been thrown off a caravan that day, and had almost broken his back in the fall. Here was a cheering story! I wonder where he is now: how far has the poor starving lonely man advanced over that weary desolate road, that in good health, and with a horse to carry me, I thought it a penalty to cross? What would one do under such circumstances, with solitude and hunger for present company, despair and starvation at the end of the vista? There are a score of lonely lakes along the road which he has to pass: would it be well to stop at one of them, and fling into it the wretched load of cares which that poor broken back has to carry? Would the world he would light on then be worse for him than that he is pining in now: Heaven help us: and on this very day, throughout the three kingdoms, there are a million such stories to be told! Who dare doubt of heaven after that? of a place where there is at last a welcome to the heart-stricken prodigal and a happy home to the wretched.
The crumbs of oats which fell from the mouth of the feasting Dives of a horse were battled for outside the door by a dozen Lazaruses in the shape of fowls, and a lanky young pig, who had been grunting in an old chest in the cabin, or in a miserable recess of huddled rags and straw which formed the couch of the family, presently came out and drove the poultry away, picking up, with great accuracy, the solitary grains lying about, and more than once trying to shove his snout into the corn-pot, and share with the wretched old galled horse. Whether it was that he was refreshed by his meal, or that the car-boy was invigorated by his glass of whisky, or inflamed by the sight of eighteenpence--which munificent sum was tendered to the soldier, I don’t know, but the remaining eight miles of the journey were got over in much quicker time, although the road was exceedingly bad and hilly for the greatest part of the way to Westport. However, by running up the hills at the pony’s side, the animal, fired with emulation, trotted up them too, descending them with the proverbial surefootedness of his race, the car and he bouncing over the rocks and stones at the rate of at least four Irish miles an hour.
At about five miles from Westport the cultivation became much more frequent. There were plantations upon the hills, yellow corn and potatoes in plenty in the fields, and houses thickly scattered. We had the satisfaction, too, of knowing that future tourists will have an excellent road to travel over in this district; for by the side of the old road, which runs up and down a hundred little rocky steeps, according to the ancient plan, you see a new one running for several miles,--the latter way being conducted, not over the hills, but around them, and, considering the circumstances of the country, extremely broad and even. The car-boy presently yelled out ‘REEK, REEK!’ with a shriek perfectly appalling. This howl was to signify that we were in sight of that famous conical mountain so named, and from which St. Patrick, after inveigling thither all the venomous reptiles in Ireland, precipitated the whole noisome race into Clew Bay. The road also for several miles was covered with people, who were flocking in hundreds from Westport market, in cars and carts, on horseback single and double, and on foot.
And presently, from an eminence, I caught sight not only of a fine view, but of the most beautiful view I ever saw in the world, I think; and to enjoy the splendour of which I would travel a hundred miles in that car with that very horse and driver. The sun was just about to set, and the country round about and to the east was almost in twilight. The mountains were tumbled about in a thousand fantastic ways, and swarming with people. Trees, cornfields, cottages, made the scene indescribably cheerful; noble woods stretched towards the sea, and, abutting on them, between two highlands, lay the smoking town. Hard by was a large Gothic building--it is but a poor-house; but it looked like a grand castle in the grey evening--but the bay, and the Reek which sweeps down to the sea, and a hundred islands in it, were dressed up in gold and purple and crimson, with the whole cloudy west in a flame. Wonderful, wonderful!... The valleys in the road to Leenane have lost all glimpses of the sun ere this; and I suppose there is not a soul to be seen in the black landscape, or by the shores of the ghastly lakes, where the poor glass-blower from the whisky-shop is faintly travelling now.
XX. WESTPORT
Nature has done much for this pretty town of Westport; and after Nature, the traveller ought to be thankful to Lord Sligo, who has done a great deal too. In the first place, he has established one of the prettiest, comfortablest inns in Ireland, in the best part of his little town, stocking the cellars with good wines, filling the house with neat furniture, and lending, it is said, the whole to a landlord gratis, on condition that he should keep the house warm, and furnish the larder, and entertain the traveller. Secondly, Lord Sligo has given up, for the use of the townspeople, a beautiful little pleasure-ground about his house. ‘You may depand upon it,’ said a Scotchman at the inn, ‘that they’ve right of pathway through the groonds, and that the Marquess couldn’t shut them oot.’ Which is a pretty fair specimen of charity in this world: this kind world, that is always ready to encourage and applaud good actions, and find good motives for the same. I wonder how much would induce that Scotchman to allow poor people to walk in his park, if he had one!
In the midst of this pleasure-ground, and surrounded by a thousand fine trees, dressed up in all sorts of verdure, stands a pretty little church; paths through the wood lead pleasantly down to the bay; and, as we walked down to it on the day after our arrival, one of the green fields was suddenly black with rooks, making a huge cawing and clanging as they settled down to feed. The house, a handsome massive structure, must command noble views of the bay, over which all the colours of Titian were spread, as the sun set behind its purple islands.
Printer’s ink will not give these wonderful hues; and the reader will make his picture at his leisure. That conical mountain to the left is Croagh-Patrick; it is clothed in the most magnificent violet colour, and a couple of round clouds were exploding, as it were, from the summit, that part of them towards the sea lighted up with the most delicate gold and rose colour. In the centre is the Clare Island, of which the edges were bright cobalt, whilst the middle was lighted up with a brilliant scarlet tinge, such as I would have laughed at in a picture, never having seen in nature before, but looked at now with wonder and pleasure until the hue disappeared as the sun went away. The islands in the bay (which was of a gold colour) looked like so many dolphins and whales basking there. The rich park-woods stretched down to the shore; and the immediate foreground consisted of a yellow cornfield, whereon stood innumerable shocks of corn, casting immense long purple shadows over the stubble. The farmer, with some little ones about him, was superintending his reapers; and I heard him say to a little girl, ‘Nory, I love you the best of all my children!’ Presently, one of the reapers coming up, says, ‘It’s always the custom in these parts to ask strange gentlemen to give something to drink the first day of reaping; and we’d like to drink your honour’s health in a bowl of coffee.’ O fortunatos nimium! The cockney takes out sixpence, and thinks that he never passed such a pleasant half-hour in all his life as in that cornfield, looking at that wonderful bay.
A car which I had ordered presently joined me from the town, and going down a green lane very like England, and across a causeway near a building, where the carman proposed to show me ‘me Lard’s caffin that he brought from Rome, and a mighty big caffin entirely,’ we came close upon the water and the Port. There was a long, handsome pier (which, no doubt, remains at this present minute), and one solitary cutter lying alongside it; which may or may not be there now. There were about three boats lying near the cutter, and six sailors, with long shadows, lolling upon the pier. As for the warehouses, they are enormous; and might accommodate, I should think, not only the trade of Westport, but of Manchester too. There are huge streets of these houses, ten stories high, with cranes, owners’ names, etc., marked Wine Stores, Flour Stores, Bonded Tobacco Warehouses, and so forth. The six sailors that were singing on the pier, no doubt are each admirals of as many fleets of a hundred sail, that bring wines and tobacco from all quarters of the world to fill these enormous warehouses. These dismal mausoleums, as vast as pyramids, are the places where the dead trade of Westport lies buried--a trade that, in its lifetime, probably was about as big as a mouse. Nor is this the first nor the hundredth place to be seen in this country, which sanguine builders have erected to accommodate an imaginary commerce. Mill-owners over-mill themselves, merchants over-warehouse themselves, squires over-castle themselves, little tradesmen about Dublin and the cities over-villa and over-gig themselves, and we hear sad tales about hereditary bondage and the accursed tyranny of England.
Passing out of this dreary pseudo-commercial port, the road lay along the beautiful shores of Clew Bay, adorned with many a rickety villa and pleasure-house, from the cracked windows of which may be seen one of the noblest views in the world. One of the villas the guide pointed out with peculiar exultation; it is called by a grand name--Waterloo Park, and has a lodge, and a gate, and a field of a couple of acres, and belongs to a young gentleman who, being able to write Waterloo Park on his card, succeeded in carrying off a young London heiress with a hundred thousand pounds. The young couple had just arrived, and one of them must have been rather astonished, no doubt, at the ‘Park.’ But what will not love do? With love and a hundred thousand pounds, a cottage may be made to look like a castle, and a park of two acres may be brought to extend for a mile. The night began now to fall, wrapping up in a sober grey livery the bay and mountains, which had just been so gorgeous in sunset; and we turned our backs presently upon the bay, and the villas with the cracked windows, and scaling a road of perpetual ups and downs, went back to Westport. On the way was a pretty cemetery, lying on each side of the road, with a ruined chapel for the ornament of one division, a holy well for the other. In the holy well lives a sacred trout, whom sick people come to consult, and who operates great cures in the neighbourhood. If the patient sees the trout floating on his back, he dies; if on his belly, he lives; or vice versâ. The little spot is old, ivy-grown, and picturesque, and I can’t fancy a better place for a pilgrim to kneel and say his beads at.
But considering the whole country goes to mass, and that the priests can govern it as they will, teaching what shall be believed and what shall be not credited, would it not be well for their reverences, in the year eighteen hundred and forty-two, to discourage these absurd lies and superstitions, and teach some simple truths to their flock? Leave such figments to magazine-writers and ballad-makers; but, corbleu! it makes one indignant to think that people in the United Kingdom, where a press is at work, and good sense is abroad, and clergymen are eager to educate the people, should countenance such savage superstitions and silly, grovelling heathenisms.
The chapel is before the inn where I resided, and on Sunday, from a very early hour, the side of the street was thronged with worshippers, who came to attend the various services. Nor are the Catholics the only devout people of this remote district. There is a large Presbyterian church very well attended, as was the Established Church service in the pretty church in the park. There was no organ, but the clerk and a choir of children sang hymns sweetly and truly; and a charity sermon being preached for the benefit of the diocesan schools, I saw many pound-notes in the plate, showing that the Protestants here were as ardent as their Roman Catholic brethren. The sermon was extempore, as usual, according to the prevailing taste here. The preacher by putting aside his sermon-book, may gain in warmth, which we don’t want, but lose in reason, which we do. If I were Defender of the Faith, I would issue an order to all priests and deacons to take to the book again; weighing well, before they uttered it, every word they proposed to say upon so great a subject as that of religion; and mistrusting that dangerous facility given by active jaws and a hot imagination. Reverend divines have adopted this habit, and keep us for an hour listening to what might well be told in ten minutes. They are wondrously fluent, considering all things; and though I have heard many a sentence begun whereof the speaker did not evidently know the conclusion, yet, somehow or other, he has always managed to get through the paragraph without any hiatus, except perhaps in the sense. And as far as I can remark, it is not calm, plain, downright preachers who preserve the extemporaneous system for the most part, but pompous orators, indulging in all the cheap graces of rhetoric--exaggerating words and feelings to make effect, and dealing in pious caricature. Church-goers become excited by this loud talk and captivating manner, and can’t go back afterwards to a sober discourse read out of a grave old sermon-book, appealing to the reason and the gentle feelings, instead of to the passions and the imagination. Beware of too much talk, O parsons! If a man is to give an account of every idle word he utters, for what a number of such loud nothings, windy emphatic tropes and metaphors, spoken, not for God’s glory but the preacher’s, will many a cushion-thumper have to answer! And this rebuke may properly find a place here, because the clergyman by whose discourse it was elicited is not of the eloquent dramatic sort, but a gentleman, it is said, remarkable for old-fashioned learning and quiet habits, that do not seem to be to the taste of the many boisterous young clergy of the present day.
The Catholic chapel was built before their graces the most reverend lord archbishops came into fashion. It is large and gloomy, with one or two attempts at ornament by way of pictures at the altars, and a good inscription warning the incomer, in a few bold words, of the sacredness of the place he stands in. Bare feet bore away thousands of people who came to pray there; there were numbers of smart equipages for the richer Protestant congregation. Strolling about the town in the balmy summer evening, I heard the sweet notes of a hymn from the people in the Presbyterian praying-house. Indeed, the country is full of piety, and a warm, sincere, undoubting devotion.
On week-days the street before the chapel is scarcely less crowded than on the Sabbath: but it is with women and children merely; for a stream bordered with lime-trees runs pleasantly down the street, and hither come innumerable girls to wash, while the children make dirt-pies and look on. Wilkie was here some years since, and the place affords a great deal of amusement to the painter of character. Sketching, tant bien que mal, the bridge and the trees, and some of the nymphs engaged in the stream, the writer became an object of no small attention; and at least a score of dirty brats left their dirt-pies to look on, the bare-legged washing-girls grinning from the water.
One, a regular rustic beauty, whose face and figure would have made the fortune of a frontispiece, seemed particularly amused and agaçante; and I walked round to get a drawing of her fresh jolly face: but directly I came near she pulled her gown over her head, and resolutely turned round her back; and, as that part of her person did not seem to differ in character from the backs of the rest of Europe, there is no need of taking its likeness.
XXI. THE PATTERN AT CROAGH-PATRICK
On the pattern-day, however, the washerwomen and children had all disappeared--nay, the stream, too, seemed to be gone out of town. There was a report current, also, that on the occasion of the pattern, six hundred teetotallers had sworn to revolt; and I fear that it was the hope of witnessing this awful rebellion which induced me to stay a couple of days at Westport. The pattern was commenced on the Sunday, but the priests, going up to the mountain, took care that there should be no sports nor dancing on that day; but that the people should only content themselves with the performance of what are called religious duties. Religious duties! Heaven help us! If these reverend gentlemen were worshippers of Moloch or Baal, or any deity whose honour demanded bloodshed, and savage rites, and degradation, and torture, one might fancy them encouraging the people to the disgusting penances the poor things here perform. But it’s too hard to think that in our days any priests of any religion should be found superintending such a hideous series of self-sacrifices as are, it appears, performed on this hill.
A friend who ascended the hill brought down the following account of it. The ascent is a very steep and hard one, he says; but it was performed in company of thousands of people who were making their way barefoot to the several ‘stations’ upon the hill.
‘The first station consists of one heap of stones, round which they must walk seven times, casting a stone on the heap each time, and before and after every stone’s throw saying a prayer.
‘The second station is on the top of the mountain. Here there is a great altar--a shapeless heap of stones. The poor wretches crawl on their knees into this place, say fifteen prayers, and after going round the entire top of the mountain fifteen times, say fifteen prayers again.
‘The third station is near the bottom of the mountain at the further side from Westport. It consists of three heaps. The penitents must go seven times round these collectively, and seven times afterwards round each individually, saying a prayer before and after each progress.’
My informant describes the people as coming away from this ‘frightful exhibition, suffering severe pain, wounded and bleeding in the knees and feet, and some of the women shrieking with the pain of their wounds.’ Fancy thousands of these bent upon their work, and priests standing by to encourage them!--for shame, for shame! If all the popes, cardinals, bishops, hermits, priests, and deacons that ever lived, were to come forward and preach this as a truth--that to please God you must macerate your body, that the sight of your agonies is welcome to Him, and that your blood, groans, and degradation find favour in His eyes, I would not believe them. Better have over a company of Fakeers at once, and set the Suttee going.
Of these tortures, however, I had not the fortune to witness a sight; for going towards the mountain for the first four miles, the only conveyance I could find was half the pony of an honest sailor, who said, when applied to, ‘I tell you what I do wid you: I give you a spell about’; but as it turned out we were going different ways, this help was but a small one. A car with a spare seat, however (there were hundreds of others quite full, and scores of rattling country carts covered with people, and thousands of bare legs trudging along the road)--a car with a spare seat passed by at two miles from the Pattern, and that just time to get comfortably wet through on arriving there. The whole mountain was enveloped in mist; and we could nowhere see thirty yards before us. The women walked forward, with their gowns over their heads; the men sauntered on in the rain, with the utmost indifference to it. The car presently came to a cottage, the court in front of which was black with two hundred horses, and where as many drivers were jangling and bawling; and here we were told to descend. You had to go over a wall and across a brook, and behold the Pattern.
The pleasures of the poor people--for after the business on the mountain came the dancing and love-making at its foot--was woefully spoiled by the rain, which rendered dancing on the grass impossible; nor were the tents big enough for that exercise. Indeed, the whole sight was as dismal and half-savage a one as I have seen. There may have been fifty of these tents squatted round a plain of the most brilliant green grass, behind which the mist curtains seemed to rise immediately; for you could not even see the mountain side beyond them. Here was a great crowd of men and women, all ugly, as the fortune of the day would have it (for the sagacious reader has, no doubt, remarked that there are ugly and pretty days in life). Stalls were spread about, whereof the owners were shrieking out the praises of their wares--great, coarse, damp-looking bannocks of bread for the most part, or, mayhap, a dirty collection of pigs’-feet, and such refreshments. Several of the booths professed to belong to ‘confectioners’ from Westport or Castlebar, the confectionery consisting of huge biscuits and doubtful-looking ginger-beer--ginger-ale or gingeretta it is called in this country, by a fanciful people who love the finest titles. Add to these, caldrons containing water for tay at the doors of the booths, other pots full of masses of pale legs of mutton (the owner ‘prodding,’ every now and then for a bit, and holding it up and asking the passenger to buy). In the booths it was impossible to stand upright, or to see much, on account of smoke. Men and women were crowded in these rude tents, huddled together, and disappearing in the darkness. Owners came bustling out to replenish the emptied water-jugs, and landladies stood outside in the rain calling strenuously upon all passers-by to enter. Here is a design taken from one of the booths, presenting ingeniously an outside and an inside view of the same place--an artifice seldom practised in pictures.
Meanwhile, high up on the invisible mountain, the people were dragging their bleeding knees from altar to altar, flinging stones, and muttering some endless litanies, with the priests standing by. I think I was not sorry that the rain, and the care of my precious health, prevented me from mounting a severe hill to witness a sight that could only have caused one to be shocked and ashamed that servants of God should encourage it. The road home was very pleasant; everybody was wet through, but everybody was happy, and by some miracle we were seven on the car. There was the honest Englishman in the military cap, who sung ‘The sea, the hopen sea’s my ‘ome,’ although not any one of the company called upon him for that air. Then the music was taken up by a good-natured lass from Castlebar; then the Englishman again, ‘With burnished brand and musketoon’; and there was no end of pushing pinching, squeezing, and laughing. The Englishman, especially, had a favourite yell, with which he saluted and astonished all cottages, passengers, cars, that we met or overtook. Presently came prancing by two dandies, who were especially frightened by the noise. ‘Thim’s two tailors from Westport,’ said the carman, grinning with all his might. ‘Come, gat out of the way there, gat along!’ piped a small English voice from above somewhere. I looked up, and saw a little creature perched on the top of a tandem, which he was driving with the most knowing air--a dreadful young hero, with a white hat, and a white face, and a blue bird’s-eye neckcloth. He was five feet high, if an inch, an ensign, and sixteen; and it was a great comfort to think, in case of danger or riot, that one of his years and personal strength was at hand to give help.
‘Thim’s the afficers,’ said the carman, as the tandem wheeled by, a small groom quivering on behind--and the carman spoke with the greatest respect this time. Two days before, on arriving at Westport, I had seen the same equipage at the door of the inn--where for a moment there happened to be no waiter to receive me. So, shouldering a carpet-bag, I walked into the inn-hall, and asked a gentleman standing there, where was the coffee-room? It was the military tandem-driving youth, who with much grace looked up in my face, and said calmly, ‘I dawnt knaw.’ I believe the little creature had just been dining in the very room--and so present my best compliments to him.
The Guide-book will inform the traveller of many a beautiful spot which lies in the neighbourhood of Westport, and which I had not the time to visit; but I must not take leave of the excellent little inn without speaking once more of its extreme comfort; nor of the place itself, without another parting word regarding its beauty. It forms an event in one’s life to have seen that place, so beautiful is it, and so unlike all other beauties that I know of. Were such a bay lying upon English shores it would be a world’s wonder: perhaps, if it were on the Mediterranean, or the Baltic, English travellers would flock to it by hundreds; why not come and see it in Ireland? Remote as the spot is, Westport is only two days’ journey from London now, and lies in a country far more strange to most travellers than France or Germany can be.
XXII. FROM WESTPORT TO BALLINASLOE
The mail-coach took us next day by Castlebar and Tuam to Ballinasloe, a journey of near eighty miles. The country is interspersed with innumerable seats belonging to the Blakes, the Browns, and the Frenches; and we passed many large domains belonging to bankrupt lords and fugitive squires, with fine lodges, adorned with moss and battered windows, and parks where, if the grass was growing on the roads, on the other hand the trees had been weeded out of the grass. About these seats and their owners the guard, an honest shrewd fellow, had all the gossip to tell. This jolly guard himself was a ruin, it turned out; he told me his grandfather was a man of large property; his father, he said, kept a pack of hounds, and had spent everything by the time he, the guard, was sixteen: so the lad made interest to get a mail-car to drive, whence he had been promoted to the guard’s seat, and now for forty years had occupied it, travelling eighty miles, and earning seven-and-twopence every day of his life. He had been once ill, he said, for three days; and if a man may be judged by ten hours’ talk with him, there are few more shrewd, resolute, simple-minded men to be found on the outside of any coaches or the inside of any houses in Ireland.
During the first five-and-twenty miles of the journey,--for the day was very sunny and bright,--Croaghpatrick kept us company; and, seated with your back to the horses, you could see, ‘on the left, that vast aggregation of mountains which stretches southwards to the Bay of Galway; on the right, that gigantic assemblage which sweeps in circular outline northward to Killule.’ Somewhere amongst those hills the great John Tuam was born, whose mansion and cathedral are to be seen in Tuam town, but whose fame is spread everywhere. To arrive at Castlebar, we go over the undulating valley which lies between the mountains of Joyce country and Erris; and the first object which you see on entering the town is a stately Gothic castle that stands at a short distance from it.
On the gate of the stately Gothic castle was written an inscription not very hospitable: WITHOUT BEWARE, WITHIN AMEND;--just beneath which is an iron crane of neat construction. The castle is the county gaol, and the iron crane is the gallows of the district. The town seems neat and lively; there is a fine church, a grand barracks (celebrated as the residence of the young fellow with the bird’s-eye neckcloth), a club, and a Whig and Tory newspaper. The road hence to Tuam is very pretty and lively, from the number of country seats along the way, giving comfortable shelter to more Blakes, Brownes, and Lynches.
In the cottages, the inhabitants looked healthy and rosy in their rags, and the cots themselves in the sunshine almost comfortable. After a couple of months in the country, the stranger’s eye grows somewhat accustomed to the rags: they do not frighten him as at first: the people who wear them look for the most part healthy enough; especially the small children--those who can scarcely totter, and are sitting shading their eyes at the door, and leaving the unfinished dirt-pie to shout as the coach passes by--are as healthy a looking race as one will often see. Nor can any one pass through the land without being touched by the extreme love of children among the people: they swarm everywhere, and the whole county rings with cries of affection towards the children, with the songs of young ragged nurses dandling babies on their knees, and warnings of mothers to Patsey to come out of the mud, or Norey to get off the pig’s back.
At Tuam the coach stopped exactly for fourteen minutes and a half, during which time those who wished might dine: but instead, I had the pleasure of inspecting a very mouldy dirty town, and made my way to the Catholic Cathedral--a very handsome edifice indeed; handsome without and within, and of the Gothic sort. Over the door is a huge coat of arms surmounted by a Cardinal’s hat--the arms of the See, no doubt, quartered with John Tuam’s own patrimonial coat; and that was a frieze coat, from all accounts, passably ragged at the elbows. Well, he must be a poor wag who could sneer at an old coat because it was old and poor. But if a man changes it for a tawdry gimcrack suit, bedizened with twopenny tinsel, and struts about calling himself his Grace and my Lord, when may we laugh if not then? There is something simple in the way in which these good people belord their clergymen, and respect titles real or sham. Take any Dublin paper,--a couple of columns of it are sure to be filled with movements of the small great men of the world. Accounts from Darrynane state that the Right Honourable the Lord Mayor is in good health--his Lordship went out with his beagles yesterday; or His Grace the Most Reverend the Lord Archbishop of Ballywhack, assisted by the Right Reverend the Lord Bishops of Trincomalee and Hippopotamus, assisted, etc.; or Colonel Tims, of Castle Tims, and lady, have quitted the Shelburne Hotel, with a party for Kilballybathershins, where the august[27] party propose to enjoy a few days’ shrimp-fishing,--and so on. Our people are not witty and keen of perceiving the ridiculous, like the Irish; but the bluntness and honesty of the English have well-nigh kicked the fashionable humbug down; and except perhaps among footmen and about Baker Street, this curiosity about the aristocracy is wearing fast away. Have the Irish so much reason to respect their lords that they should so chronicle all their movements; and not only admire real lords, but make sham ones of their own to admire them?
There is no object of special mark upon the road from Tuam to Ballinasloe, the country being flat for the most part, and the noble Galway and Mayo mountains having disappeared at length, until you come to a glimpse of Old England in the pretty village of Ahascragh. An old oak-tree grows in the neat street, the houses are as trim and white as eye can desire, and about the church and the town are handsome plantations, forming on the whole such a picture of comfort and plenty as is rarely to be seen in the part of Ireland I have traversed. All these wonders have been wrought by the activity of an excellent resident agent. There was a countryman on the coach deploring that, through family circumstances, this gentleman should have been dispossessed of his agency, and declaring that the village had already begun to deteriorate in consequence. The marks of such decay were not, however, visible, at least to a newcomer; and, being reminded of it, I indulged in many patriotic longings for England: as every Englishman does when he is travelling out of the country which he is always so willing to quit.
That a place should instantly begin to deteriorate because a certain individual was removed from it--that cottagers should become thriftless, and houses dirty, and house-windows cracked,--all these are points which public economists may ruminate over, and can’t fail to give the carelessest traveller much matter for painful reflection. How is it that the presence of one man more or less should affect a set of people come to years of manhood, and knowing that they have their duty to do? Why should a man at Ahascragh let his home go to ruin, and stuff his windows with ragged breeches instead of glass, because Mr. Smith is agent in place of Mr. Jones? Is he a child, that won’t work unless the schoolmaster be at hand? or are we to suppose, with the Repealers, that the cause of all this degradation and misery is the intolerable tyranny of the sister country, and the pain which poor Ireland has been made to endure? This is very well at the Corn Exchange, and among patriots after dinner; but, after all, granting the grievance of the franchise (though it may not be unfair to presume that a man who has not strength of mind enough to mend his own breeches or his own windows will always be the tool of one party or another), there is no Inquisition set up in the country; the law tries to defend the people as much as they will allow; the odious tithe has even been whisked off from their shoulders to the landlord’s; they may live pretty much as they like. Is it not too monstrous to howl about English tyranny and suffering Ireland, and call for a Stephen’s Green Parliament to make the country quiet and the people industrious? The people are not politically worse treated than their neighbours in England. The priests and the landlords, if they chose to co-operate, might do more for the country now than any kings or laws could. What you want here is not a Catholic or Protestant party, but an Irish party.
In the midst of these reflections, and by what the reader will doubtless think a blessed interruption, we came in sight of the town of Ballinasloe and its ‘gash-lamps,’ which a fellow-passenger did not fail to point out with admiration. The road-menders, however, did not appear to think that light was by any means necessary: for, having been occupied, in the morning, in digging a fine hole upon the highway, previous to some alterations to be effected there, they had left their work at sundown, without any lamp to warn coming travellers of the hole--which we only escaped by a wonder. The papers have much such another story. In the Galway and Ballinasloe coach a horse on the road suddenly fell down and died; the coachman drove his coach unicorn-fashion into town; and, as for the dead horse, of course he left it on the road at the place where it fell, and where another coach coming up was upset over it, bones broken, passengers maimed, coach smashed. By Heavens! the tyranny of England is unendurable; and I have no doubt it had a hand in upsetting that coach.
XXIII. BALLINASLOE TO DUBLIN
During the cattle-fair the celebrated town of Ballinasloe is thronged with farmers from all parts of the kingdom--the cattle being picturesquely exhibited in the park of the noble proprietor of the town, Lord Clancarty. As it was not fair-time the town did not seem particularly busy, nor was there much to remark in it, except a church, and a magnificent lunatic asylum, that lies outside the town on the Dublin road, and is as handsome and stately as a palace. I think the beggars were more plenteous and more loathsome here than almost anywhere; to one hideous wretch I was obliged to give money to go away, which he did for a moment, only to obtrude his horrible face directly afterwards, half eaten away with disease. ‘A penny for the sake of poor little Mery,’ said another woman, who had a baby sleeping on her withered breast; and how can any one who has a little Mery at home resist such an appeal? ‘Pity the poor blind man!’ roared a respectably dressed grenadier of a fellow. I told him to go to the gentleman with a red neckcloth and fur cap (a young buck from Trinity College)--to whom the blind man with much simplicity immediately stepped over, and as for the rest of the beggars, what pen or pencil could describe their hideous leering flattery, their cringing swindling humour!
The inn, like the town, being made to accommodate the periodical crowds of visitors who attended the fair, presented in their absence rather a faded and desolate look; and, in spite of the live-stock for which the place is famous, the only portion of their produce which I could get to my share, after twelve hours’ fasting and an hour’s bell-ringing and scolding, was one very lean mutton-chop and one very small damp kidney, brought in by an old tottering waiter to a table spread in a huge black coffee-room, dimly lighted by one little jet of gas.
As this only served very faintly to light up the above banquet, the waiter, upon remonstrance, proceeded to light the other bec; but the lamp was sulky, and upon this attempt to force it, as it were, refused to act altogether, and went out. The big room was then accommodated with a couple of yellow mutton-candles. There was a neat, handsome, correct young English officer warming his slippers at the fire, and opposite him sate a worthy gentleman, with a glass of mingled ‘materials,’ discoursing to him in a very friendly and confidential way.
As I don’t know the gentleman’s name, and as it is not at all improbable, from the situation in which he was, that he has quite forgotten the night’s conversation, I hope there will be no breach of confidence in recalling some part of it. The speaker was dressed in deep black, worn, however, with that dégagé air peculiar to the votaries of Bacchus, or that nameless god, offspring of Bacchus and Ceres, who may have invented the noble liquor called whisky. It was fine to see the easy folds in which his neckcloth confined a shirt-collar moist with the generous drops that trickled from the chin above,--its little percentage upon the punch. There was a fine dashing black satin waistcoat that called for its share, and generously disdained to be buttoned. I think this is the only specimen I have seen yet of the personage still so frequently described in the Irish novels--the careless drinking ‘squire--the Irish Will Whimble.
‘Sir,’ says he, ‘as I was telling you before this gentleman came in (from Westport, I preshume, sir, by the mail; and ‘my service to you!’), the butchers in Chume (Tuam)--where I live, and shall be happy to see you and give you a shakedown, a cut of mutton, and the use of as good a brace of pointers as ever you shot over--the butchers say to me, whenever I look in at their shops and ask for a joint of meat--they say: “Take down that quarther o’ mutton, boy; IT’S NO USE WEIGHING IT for Mr. Bodkin. He can tell with an eye what’s the weight of it to an ounce!” And so, sir, I can; and I’d make a bet to go into any market in Dublin, Tchume, Ballinasloe, where you please, and just by looking at the meat decide its weight.’
At the pause, during which the gentleman here designated Bodkin drank off his materials, the young officer said gravely, that this was a very rare and valuable accomplishment, and thanked him for the invitation to Tchume.
The honest gentleman proceeded with his personal memoirs; and (with a charming modesty that authenticated his tale, while it interested his hearers for the teller) he called for a fresh tumbler, and began discoursing about horses. ‘Them, I don’t know,’ says he, confessing the fact at once; ‘or, if I do, I’ve been always so unlucky with them that it’s as good as if I didn’t.
‘To give you an idea of my ill fortune: Me brother-‘n-law Burke once sent me three colts of his to sell at this very fair of Ballinasloe, and, for all I could do I could only get a bid for one of ‘em, and sold her for sixteen pound. And d’ye know what that mare was, sir?’ says Mr. Bodkin, giving a thump that made the spoon jump out of the punch-glass for fright. ‘D’ye know who she was? she was Water-Wagtail, sir,--WATER-WAGTAIL! She won fourteen cups and plates in Ireland before she went to Liverpool; and you know what she did there?’ (We said, ‘Oh! of course.’) ‘Well, sir, the man who bought her from me sold her for four hunder’ guineas; and in England she fetched eight hunder’ pounds.
‘Another of them very horses, gentlemen (Tim, some hot wather--screeching hot, you divil--and a sthroke of the limin)--another of them horses that I was refused fifteen pound for, me brother-in-law sould to Sir Rufford Bufford for a hunder’-and-fifty guineas. Wasn’t that luck?
‘Well, sir, Sir Rufford gives Burke his bill at six months, and don’t pay it when it come jue. A pretty pickle Tom Burke was in, as I leave ye to fancy, for he’d paid away the bill, which he thought as good as goold; and sure it ought to be, for Sir Rufford had come of age since the bill was drawn, and before it was due, and, as I needn’t tell you, had slipped into a very handsome property.
‘On the protest of the bill, Burke goes in a fury to Gresham’s in Sackville Street, where the baronet was living, and (would ye believe it?) the latter says he doesn’t intend to meet the bill, on the score that he was a minor when he gave it. On which Burke was in such a rage that he took a horsewhip and vowed he’d beat the baronet to a jelly, and post him in every club in Dublin, and publish every circumstance of the transaction,’
‘It does seem rather a queer one,’ says one of Mr. Bodkin’s hearers.
‘Queer indeed: but that’s not it, you see; for Sir Rufford is as honourable a man as ever lived; and after the quarrel he paid Burke his money, and they’ve been warm friends ever since. But what I want to show ye is our infernal luck. Three months before, Sir Rufford had sold that very horse for three hunder guineas.’
The worthy gentleman had just ordered in a fresh tumbler of his favourite liquor, when we wished him good-night, and slept by no means the worse, because the bedroom candle was carried by one of the prettiest young chambermaids possible.
Next morning, surrounded by a crowd of beggars more filthy, hideous, and importunate than any I think in the most favoured towns of the south, we set off, a coach-load, for Dublin. A clergyman, a guard, a Scotch farmer, a butcher, a bookseller’s hack, a lad bound for Maynooth and another for Trinity, made a varied pleasant party enough, where each, according to his lights, had something to say.
I have seldom seen a more dismal and uninteresting road than that which we now took, and which brought us through the ‘old, inconvenient, ill-built, and ugly town of Athlone.’ The painter would find here, however, some good subjects for his sketch-book, in spite of the commination of the Guide-book. Here, too, great improvements are taking place for the Shannon navigation, which will render the town not so inconvenient as at present it is stated to be; and hard by lies a little village that is known and loved by all the world where English is spoken. It is called Lishoy, but its real name is Auburn, and it gave birth to one Noll Goldsmith, whom Mr. Boswell was in the habit of despising very heartily. At the Quaker town of Moate, the butcher and the farmer dropped off, the clergyman went inside, and their places were filled by four Maynoothians, whose vacation was just at an end. One of them, a freshman, was inside the coach with the clergyman, and told him, with rather a long face, of the dismal discipline of his college. They are not allowed to quit the gates (except on general walks); they are expelled if they read a newspaper; and they begin term with ‘a retreat’ of a week, which time they are made to devote to silence, and, as it is supposed, to devotion and meditation.
I must say the young fellows drank plenty of whisky on the road to prepare them for their year’s abstinence; and, when at length arrived in the miserable village of Maynooth, determined not to go into college that night, but to devote the evening to ‘a lark.’ They were simple, kind-hearted young men, sons of farmers or tradesmen seemingly; and, as is always the case here, except among some of the gentry, very gentlemanlike, and pleasing in manners. Their talk was of this companion and that; how one was in rhetoric, and another in logic, and a third had got his curacy. Wait for a while; and with the happy system pursued within the walls of their college, those smiling good-humoured faces will come out with a scowl, and downcast eyes that seem afraid to look the world in the face. When the time comes for them to take leave of yonder dismal-looking barracks, they will be men no longer, but bound over to the Church, body and soul; their free thoughts chained down and kept in darkness, their honest affections mutilated: well, I hope they will be happy to-night at any rate, and talk and laugh to their hearts’ content. The poor freshman, whose big chest is carried off by the porter yonder to the inn, has but twelve hours more of hearty, natural human life. To-morrow, they will begin their work upon him; cramping his mind, and bitting his tongue, and firing and cutting at his heart,--breaking him to pull the Church chariot. Ah! why didn’t he stop at home, and dig potatoes and get children?
Part of the drive from Maynooth to Dublin is exceedingly pretty: you are carried through Leixlip, Lucan, Chapelizod, and by scores of parks and villas, until the gas-lamps come in sight. Was there ever a cockney that was not glad to see them; and did not prefer the sight of them, in his heart, to the best lake or mountain ever invented? Pat the waiter comes jumping down to the car and says, ‘Welcome back, sir!’ and bustles the trunk into the queer little bedroom, with all the cordial hospitality imaginable.
XXIV. TWO DAYS IN WICKLOW
The little tour we have just been taking has been performed, not only by myriads of the ‘car-drivingest, tay-drinking, say-bathingest people in the world,’ the inhabitants of the city of Dublin, but also by all the tourists who have come to discover this country for the benefit of the English nation. ‘Look here!’ says the ragged bearded genius of a guide at the Seven Churches. ‘This is the spot which Mr. Henry Inglis particularly admired, and said it was exactly like Norway. Many’s the song I’ve heard Mr. Sam Lover sing here--a pleasant gentleman entirely. Have you seen my picture that’s taken off in Mrs. Hall’s book? All the strangers know me by it, though it makes me much cleverer than I am.’ Similar tales has he of Mr. Barrow, and the trans-atlantic Willis, and of Crofton Croker, who has been everywhere.
The guide’s remarks concerning the works of these gentlemen inspired me, I must confess, with considerable disgust and jealousy. A plague take them! What remains for me to discover after the gallant adventurers in the service of Paternoster Row have examined every rock, lake, and ruin of the district, exhausted it of all its legends, and ‘invented new’ most likely, as their daring genius prompted? Hence it follows that the description of the two days’ jaunt must of necessity be short; lest persons who have read former accounts should be led to refer to the same, and make comparisons which might possibly be unfavourable to the present humble pages.
Is there anything new to be said regarding the journey? In the first place, there’s the railroad: it’s no longer than the railroad to Greenwich, to be sure, and almost as well known: but has it been done? that’s the question; or has anybody discovered the dandies on the railroad?
After wondering at the beggars and carmen of Dublin, the stranger can’t help admiring another vast and numerous class of inhabitants of the city--namely, the dandies. Such a number of smartly-dressed young fellows, I don’t think any town possesses: no, not Paris, where the young shopmen, with spurs and stays, may be remarked strutting abroad on fête-days; nor London, where on Sundays, in the Park, you see thousands of this cheap kind of aristocracy parading--nor Liverpool, famous for the breed of commercial dandies, desk and counter Dorsays and cotton and sugar-barrel Brummels, and whom one remarks pushing on to business with a brisk determined air--all the above races are only to be encountered on holidays, except by those persons whose affairs take them to shops, docks, or counting-houses, where these fascinating young fellows labour during the week.
But the Dublin breed of dandies is quite distinct from those of the various cities above-named, and altogether superior; for they appear every day, and all day long, not once a week merely, and have an original and splendid character and appearance of their own, very hard to describe, though no doubt every traveller, as well as myself, has admired and observed it. They assume a sort of military and ferocious look, not observable in other cheap dandies, except in Paris perhaps now and then; and are to be remarked not so much for the splendour of their ornaments as for the profusion of them. Thus, for instance, a hat which is worn straight over the two eyes costs very likely more than one which hangs upon one ear; a great oily bush of hair to balance the hat (otherwise the head no doubt would fall hopelessly on one side) is even more economical than a crop which requires the barber’s scissors ofttimes; also a tuft on the chin may be had at a small expense of bear’s-grease by persons of a proper age; and although big pins are the fashion, I am bound to say I have never seen so many or so big as here. Large agate marbles or ‘taws,’ globes terrestrial and celestial, pawnbrokers’ balls,--I cannot find comparisons large enough for these wonderful ornaments of the person. Canes also should be mentioned, which are sold very splendid, with gold or silver heads, for a shilling on the quays; and the dandy not uncommonly finishes off with a horn quizzing-glass, which being stuck in one eye, contracts the brows and gives a fierce determined look to the whole countenance.
In idleness at least these young men can compete with the greatest lords; and the wonder is, how the city can support so many of them, or they themselves; how they manage to spend their time; who gives them money to ride hacks in the ‘Phaynix’ on fields and race days; to have boats at Kingstown during the summer; and to be crowding the railway-coaches all the day long. Cars go whirling about all day, bearing squads of them. You see them sauntering at all the railway-stations in vast numbers, and jumping out of the carriages as the trains come up, and greeting other dandies with that rich large brogue which some actor ought to make known to the English public: it being the biggest, richest, and coarsest of all the brogues of Ireland.
I think these dandies are the chief objects which arrest the stranger’s attention as he travels on the Kingstown railroad, and I have always been so much occupied in watching and wondering at them as scarcely to have leisure to look at anything else during the pretty little ride of twenty minutes, so beloved by every Dublin cockney. The waters of the bay wash in many places the piers on which the railway is built, and you see the calm stretch of water beyond, and the big purple hill of Howth, and the lighthouses, and the jetties, and the shipping. Yesterday was a boat-race (I don’t know how many scores of such take place during the season), and you may be sure there were tens of thousands of the dandies to look on. There had been boat-races the two days previous: before that, had been a field day--before that, three days of garrison races--to-day, to-morrow, and the day after, there are races at Howth. There seems some sameness in the sports, but everybody goes; everybody is never tired; and then I suppose comes the punch-party, and the song in the evening--the same old pleasures, and the same old songs the next day, and so on to the end. As for the boat-race, I saw two little boats in the distance tugging away for the dear life--the beach and piers swarming with spectators, the bay full of small yachts, and innumerable row-boats, and in the midst of the assemblage a convict-ship lying ready for sail, with a black mass of poor wretches on her deck, who too were eager for pleasure.
Who is not, in this country? Walking away from the pier and King George’s column, you arrive upon rows after rows of pleasure-houses, whither all Dublin flocks during the summer time; for every one must have his sea-bathing, and they say that the country houses to the west of the town are to be empty, or had for very small prices; while for those on the coast, especially towards Kingstown, there is the readiest sale at large prices. I have paid frequent visits to one, of which the rent is as great as that of a tolerable London house; and there seems to be others suited to all purses--for instance, there are long lines of two-roomed houses, stretching far back and away from the sea, accommodating, doubtless, small commercial men, or small families, or some of those travelling dandies we have just been talking about, and whose costume is so cheap and so splendid.
A two-horse car, which will accommodate twelve, or will condescend to receive twenty passengers, starts from the railway-station for Bray, running along the coast for the chief part of the journey, though you have but few views of the sea, on account of intervening woods and hills. The whole of this country is covered with handsome villas and their gardens and pleasure-grounds. There are round many of the houses parks of some extent, and always of considerable beauty, among the trees of which the road winds. New churches are likewise to be seen in various places; built like the poorhouses, that are likewise everywhere springing up, pretty much upon one plan--a sort of bastard or Vauxhall Gothic--resembling no architecture of any age previous to that when Horace Walpole invented the Castle of Otranto and the other monstrosity upon Strawberry Hill, though it must be confessed that those on the Bray line are by no means so imaginative. Well, what matters, say you, that the churches be ugly, if the truth is preached within? Is it not fair, however, to say that Beauty is the truth too, of its kind? and why should it not be cultivated as well as other truth? Why build these hideous barbaric temples, when at the expense of a little study and taste, beautiful structures might be raised?
After leaving Bray, with its pleasant bay, and pleasant river, and pleasant inn, the little Wicklow tour may be said to commence properly; and, as that romantic and beautiful country has been described many times in familiar terms, our only chance is to speak thereof in romantic and beautiful language, such as no other writer can possibly have employed.
We rang at the gate of the steward’s lodge, and said, ‘Grant us a pass, we pray, to see the parks of Powerscourt, and to behold the brown deer upon the grass, and the cool shadows under the whispering trees.’
But the steward’s son answered, ‘You may not see the parks of Powerscourt, for the lord of the castle comes home, and we expect him daily.’ So, wondering at this reply, but not understanding the same, we took leave of the son of the steward, and said, ‘No doubt Powerscourt is not fit to see. Have we not seen parks in England, my brother, and shall we break our hearts that this Irish one hath its gates closed to us?’
Then the car-boy said, ‘My lords, the park is shut, but the waterfall runs for every man; will it please you see the waterfall?’ ‘Boy,’ we replied, ‘we have seen many waterfalls; nevertheless, lead on!’ and the boy took his pipe out of his mouth, and belaboured the ribs of his beast.
And the horse made believe, as it were, to trot, and jolted the ardent travellers; and we passed the green trees of Tinnehinch, which the grateful Irish nation bought and consecrated to the race of GRATTAN; and we said, ‘What nation will spend fifty thousand pounds for our benefit?’ and we wished we might get it; and we passed on. The birds were, meanwhile, chanting concerts in the woods; and the sun was double-gilding the golden corn.
And we came to a hill, which was steep and long of descent; and the car-boy said, ‘My lords, I may never descend this hill with safety to your honours’ bones: for my horse is not sure of foot, and loves to kneel in the highway; descend therefore, and I will await your return here on the top of the hill.’
So we descended, and one grumbled greatly; but the other said, ‘Sir, be of good heart! the way is pleasant, and the footman will not weary as he travels it’; and we went through the swinging gates of a park, where the harvestmen sate at their potatoes--a mealy meal.
The way was not short, as the companion said, but still it was a pleasant way to walk. Green stretches of grass were there, and a forest nigh at hand. It was but September; yet the autumn had already begun to turn the green ones into red; and the ferns that were waving underneath the trees were reddened and fading too. And as Dr. Jones’s boys of a Saturday disport in the meadows after school-hours, so did the little clouds run races over the waving grass. And as grave ushers who look on smiling at the sports of these little ones, so stood the old trees around the green, whispering and nodding to one another.
Purple mountains rose before us in front, and we began presently to hear a noise and roaring afar off--not a fierce roaring, but one deep and calm, like to the respiration of the great sea, as he lies basking on the sands in the sunshine.
And we came soon to a little hillock of green, which was standing before a huge mountain of purple black, and there were white clouds over the mountains, and some trees waving on the hillock, and between the trunks of them we saw the waters of the waterfall descending; and there was a snob on a rock, who stood and examined the same.
Then we approached the water, passing the clump of oak-trees. The waters were white, and the cliffs which they varnished were purple. But those round about were grey, tall, and gay with blue shadows, and ferns, heath, and rusty-coloured funguses sprouting here and there in the same. But in the ravine where the waters fell, roaring, as it were, with the fall, the rocks were dark, and the foam of the cataract was of a yellow colour. And we stood, and were silent, and wondered. And still the trees continued to wave, and the waters to roar and tumble, and the sun to shine, and the fresh wind to blow.
And we stood and looked: and said in our hearts it was beautiful, and bethought us how shall all this be set down in types and ink? (for our trade is to write books and sell the same--a chapter for a guinea, a line for a penny); and the waterfall roared in answer: ‘For shame, O vain man, think not of thy books and of thy pence now; but look on, and wonder, and be silent! Can types or ink describe my beauty, though aided by thy small wit? I am made for thee to praise and wonder at: be content, and cherish thy wonder. It is enough that thou hast seen a great thing: is it needful that thou shouldst prate of all thou hast seen?’
So we came away silently, and walked through the park without looking back. And there was a man at the gate, who opened it and seemed to say, ‘Give me a little sixpence.’ But we gave nothing, and walked up the hill, which was sore to climb; and on the summit found the car-boy, who was lolling on his cushions and smoking, as happy as a lord.
Quitting the waterfall of Powerscourt (the grand style in which it has been described was adopted in order that the reader, who has probably read other descriptions of the spot, might have at least something new in this account of it), we speedily left behind us the rich and wooded tract of country about Powerscourt, and came to a bleak tract, which, perhaps by way of contrast to so much natural wealth, is not unpleasing, and began ascending what is very properly called the Long Hill. Here you see, in the midst of the loneliness, a grim-looking barrack, that was erected when, after the Rebellion, it was necessary for some time to occupy this most rebellious country; and a church, looking equally dismal, a lean-looking, sham-Gothic building, in the midst of this green desert. The road to Luggala, whither we were bound, turns off the Long Hill, up another hill, which seems still longer and steeper, inasmuch as it was ascended perforce on foot, and over lonely, boggy moorlands, enlivened by a huge grey boulder plumped here and there, and come, one wonders how, to the spot. Close to this hill of Slieve-Buck is marked in the maps a district called ‘the uninhabited country,’ and these stones probably fell at a period of time when not only this district, but all the world, was uninhabited,--and in some convulsion of the neighbouring mountains, this and other enormous rocks were cast abroad.
From behind one of them, or out of the ground somehow, as we went up the hill, sprang little ragged guides, who are always lurking about in search of stray pence from tourists; and we had three or four of such at our back by the time we were at the top of the hill. Almost the first sight we saw was a smart coach-and-four, with a loving wedding party within, and a genteel valet and lady’s-maid without. I wondered, had they been burying their modest loves in the uninhabited district? But presently, from the top of the hill, I saw the place on which their honeymoon had been passed; nor could any pair of lovers, nor a pious hermit, bent on retirement from the world, have selected a more sequestered spot.
Standing by a big shining granite stone on the hilltop, we looked immediately down upon Lough Tay--a little round lake of half a mile in length, which lay beneath us as black as a pool of ink--a high, crumbling, white-sided mountain, falling abruptly into it on the side opposite to us, with a huge ruin of shattered rocks at its base. Northwards, we could see between mountains a portion of the neighbouring lake of Lough Dan, which, too, was dark, though the Annamoe river, which connects the two lakes, lay coursing through the greenest possible flats, and shining as bright as silver. Brilliant green shores, too, come gently down to the southern side of Lough Tay; through these runs another river, with a small rapid or fall, which makes a music for the lake; and here, amidst beautiful woods, lies a villa, where the four horses, the groom and valet, the postillions, and the young couple had, no doubt, been hiding themselves.
Hereabouts, the owner of the villa, Mr. Latouche, has a great grazing establishment; and some herd-boys, no doubt seeing strangers on the hill, thought proper that the cattle should stray that way, that they might drive them back again, and parenthetically ask the travellers for money,--everybody asks travellers for money, as it seems. Next day, admiring in a labourer’s arms a little child--his master’s son, who could not speak--the labourer, his he-nurse, spoke for him, and demanded a little sixpence to buy the child apples. One grows not a little callous to this sort of beggary; and the only one of our numerous young guides who got a reward was the raggedest of them. He and his companions had just come from school, he said,--not a Government school, but a private one, where they paid. I asked how much,--‘Was it a penny a week?’ ‘No; not a penny a week, but so much at the end of the year.’ ‘Was it a barrel of meal, or a few stone of potatoes, or something of that sort?’ ‘Yes; something of that sort.’
The something must, however, have been a very small something on the poor lad’s part. He was one of four young ones, who lived with their mother, a widow. He had no work; he could get no work; nobody had work. His mother had a cabin with no land--not a perch of land, no potatoes--nothing but the cabin. How did they live?--the mother knitted stockings. I asked, had she any stockings at home?--the boy said, ‘No.’ How did he live?--he lived how he could; and we gave him threepence, with which, in delight, he went bounding off to the poor mother. Gracious heavens! what a history to hear, told by a child looking quite cheerful as he told it, and as if the story was quite a common one. And a common one, too, it is; and God forgive us!
Here is another, and of a similar low kind, but rather pleasanter. We asked the car-boy how much he earned. He said, ‘Seven shillings a week, and his chances’--which in the summer season, from the number of tourists who are jolted in his car, must be tolerably good--eight or nine shillings a week more, probably. But he said, in winter his master did not hire him for the car; and he was obliged to look for work elsewhere: as for saving, he never had saved a shilling in his life.
We asked him, was he married? and he said, No, but he was as good as married; for he had an old mother and four little brothers to keep, and six mouths to feed, and to dress himself decent to drive the gentlemen. Was not the ‘as good as married’ a pretty expression? and might not some of what are called their betters learn a little good from these simple poor creatures? There’s many a young fellow who sets up in the world would think it rather hard to have four brothers to support; and I have heard more than one genteel Christian pining over five hundred a year. A few such may read this, perhaps: let them think of the Irish widow with the four children and nothing, and at least be more contented with their port and sherry and their leg of mutton.
This brings us at once to the subject of dinner and the little village, Roundwood, which was reached by this time, lying a few miles off from the lakes, and reached by a road not particularly remarkable for any picturesqueness in beauty, though you pass through a simple pleasing landscape, always agreeable as a repose, I think, after viewing a sight so beautiful as those mountain lakes we have just quitted. All the hills up which we had panted had imparted a fierce sensation of hunger; and it was nobly decreed that we should stop in the middle of the street of Roundwood, impartially between the two hotels, and solemnly decide upon a resting-place after having inspected the larders and bedrooms of each.
And here, as an impartial writer, I must say, that the hotel of Mr. Wheatley possesses attractions which few men can resist, in the shape of two very handsome young ladies, his daughters; whose faces, were they but painted on his signboard, instead of the mysterious piece which ornaments it, would infallibly draw tourists into the house, thereby giving the opposition inn of Murphy not the least chance of custom.
A landlord’s daughters in England, inhabiting a little country inn, would be apt to lay the cloth for the traveller, and their respected father would bring in the first dish of the dinner; but this arrangement is never known in Ireland; we scarcely ever see the cheering countenance of my landlord. And as for the young ladies of Roundwood, I am bound to say that no young persons in Baker Street could be more genteel; and that our bill, when it was brought the next morning, was written in as pretty and fashionable a lady’s hand as ever was formed in the most elegant finishing school at Pimlico.
Of the dozen houses of the little village, the half seem to be houses of entertainment. A green common stretches before these, with its rural accompaniments of geese, pigs, and idlers; a park and plantation at the end of the village, and plenty of trees round about it, give it a happy, comfortable, English look; which is, to my notion, the best compliment that can be paid to a hamlet; for where, after all, are villages so pretty?
Here, rather to one’s wonder, for the district was not thickly enough populated to encourage dramatic exhibitions, a sort of theatre was erected on the common; a ragged cloth covering the spectators and the actors, the former (if there were any) obtaining admittance through two doors on the stage, in front, marked PIT & GALERY. Why should the word not be spelt with one L as with two?
The entrance to the pit was stated to be threepence, and to the galery twopence. We heard the drums and pipes of the orchestra as we sate at dinner; it seemed to be a good opportunity to examine Irish humour of a peculiar sort, and we promised ourselves a pleasant evening in the pit.
But, although the drums began to beat at half-past six, and a crowd of young people formed round the ladder at that hour, to whom the manager of the troop addressed the most vehement invitations to enter, nobody seemed to be inclined to mount the steps; for the fact, most likely was that not one of the poor fellows possessed the requisite twopence which would induce the fat old lady who sate by it to fling open the gallery-door. At one time I thought of offering a half-crown for a purchase of tickets for twenty and so at once benefiting the management and the crowd of ragged urchins who stood wistfully without his pavilion; but it seemed ostentatious, and we had not the courage to face the tall man in the greatcoat gesticulating and shouting in front of the stage and make the proposition.
Why not? It would have given the company potatoes at least for supper, and made a score of children happy. They would have seen ‘the learned pig who spells your name, the feats of manly activity, the wonderful Italian vaulting’; and they would have heard the comic songs by ‘your humble servant.’
‘Your humble servant’ was the head of the troop: a long man, with a broad accent, a yellow topcoat, and a piteous lean face. What a speculation was this poor fellow’s! he must have a company of at least a dozen to keep. There were three girls in trousers, who danced in front of the stage, in Polish caps, tossing their arms about to the tunes of three musicianers; there was a page, two young tragedy actors, and a clown; there was the fat old woman at the gallery-door waiting for the twopences; there was the Jack-pudding; and it was evident that there must have been some one within, or else who would take care of the learned pig?
The poor manager stood in front, and shouted to the little Irishry beneath; but no one seemed to move. Then he brought forward Jack Pudding, and had a dialogue with him; the jocularity of which, by heavens! made the heart ache to hear. We had determined, at least, to go to the play before that, but the dialogue was too much: we were obliged to walk away, unable to face that dreadful Jack Pudding, and heard the poor manager shouting still for many hours through the night, and the drums thumping vain invitations to the people. Oh unhappy children of the Hibernian Thespis! it is my belief that they must have eaten the learned pig that night for supper.
It was Sunday morning when we left the little inn at Roundwood; the people were flocking in numbers to church, on cars and pillions, neat, comfortable, and well-dressed. We saw in this country more health, more beauty, and more shoes than I have remarked in any quarter. That famous resort of sightseers, the Devil’s Glen, lies at a few miles’ distance from the little village; and, having gone on the car as near to the spot as the road permitted, we made across the fields--boggy, stony, ill-tilled fields they were--for about a mile, at the end of which walk, we found ourselves on the brow of the ravine that has received so ugly a name.
Is there a legend about the place? No doubt for this, as for almost every other natural curiosity in Ireland, there is some tale of monk, saint, fairy, or devil; but our guide in the present day was a barrister from Dublin, who did not deal in fictions by any means so romantic, and the history, whatever it was, remained untold. Perhaps the little breechesless cicerone who offered himself, would have given us the story, but we dismissed the urchin with scorn, and had to find our own way through bush and bramble down to the entrance of the gully.
Here we came on a cataract, which looks very big in Messrs. Curry’s pretty little Guide-book (that every traveller to Wicklow will be sure to have in his pocket); but the waterfall, on this shining Sabbath morning, was disposed to labour as little as possible, and, indeed, is a spirit of a very humble ordinary sort.
But there is a ravine of a mile and a half, through which a river runs roaring (a lady who keeps the gate will not object to receive a gratuity)--there is a ravine, or Devil’s Glen, which forms a delightful wild walk, and where a Methusaleh of a landscape-painter might find studies for all his life long. All sorts of foliage and colour, all sorts of delightful caprices of light and shadow--the river tumbling and frothing amidst the boulders--raucum per lævia murmur saxa ciens, and a chorus of 150,000 birds (there might be more), hopping, twittering, singing under the clear cloudless Sabbath scene, make this walk one of the most delightful that can be taken; and, indeed, I hope there is no harm in saying that you may get as much out of an hour’s walk there, as out of the best hour’s extempore preaching. But this was as a salvo to our conscience for not being at church.
Here, however, was a long aisle, arched gothically overhead, in a much better taste than is seen in some of those dismal new churches; and, by way of painted glass, the sun lighting up multitudes of various-coloured leaves, and the birds for choristers, and the river by way of organ, and in it stones enough to make a whole library of sermons. No man can walk in such a place without feeling grateful, and grave, and humble; and without thanking Heaven for it as he comes away. And, walking and musing in this free happy place, one could not help thinking of a million and a half of brother Cockneys, shut up in their huge prison (the treadmill for the day being idle), and told by some legislators that relaxation is sinful, that works of art are abominations, except on week-days, and that their proper place of resort is a dingy tabernacle, where a loud-voiced man is howling about hell-fire in bad grammar. Is not this beautiful world, too, a part of our religion? Yes, truly, in whatever way my Lord John Russell may vote; and it is to be learned without having recourse to any professor at any Bethesda, Ebenezer, or Jerusalem; there can be no mistake about it; no terror, no bigoted dealing of damnation to one’s neighbour--it is taught without false emphasis or vain spouting on the preacher’s part--how should there be such with such a preacher?
This wild onslaught upon sermons and preachers needs perhaps an explanation; for which purpose we must whisk back out of the Devil’s Glen (improperly so named) to Dublin, and to this day week, when, at this very time, I heard one of the first preachers of the city deliver a sermon that lasted for an hour and twenty minutes--time enough to walk up the Glen and back, and remark a thousand delightful things by the way.
Mr. G----‘s church (though there would be no harm in mentioning the gentleman’s name, for a more conscientious and excellent man, as it is said, cannot be) is close by the Custom House in Dublin, and crowded morning and evening with his admirers. The service was beautifully read by him, and the audience joined in the responses, and in the psalms and hymns,[28] with a fervour which is very unusual in England. Then came the sermon; and what more can be said of it than that it was extempore, and lasted for an hour and twenty minutes? The orator never failed once for a word, so amazing is his practice; though, as a stranger to this kind of exercise, I could not help trembling for the performer, as one has for Madame Saqui on the slack-rope, in the midst of a blaze of rockets and squibs, expecting every minute she must go over. But the artist was too skilled for that; and after some tremendous bound of a metaphor in the midst of which you expect he must tumble neck and heels, and be engulfed in the dark abyss of nonsense, down he was sure to come, in a most graceful attitude too, in the midst of a fluttering ‘ah!’ from a thousand wondering people.
But I declare solemnly that when I came to try and recollect of what the exhibition consisted, and give an account of the sermon at dinner that evening, it was quite impossible to remember a word of it; although, to do the orator justice, he repeated many of his opinions a great number of times over. Thus, if he had to discourse of death to us, it was--At the approach of the Dark Angel of the Grave--at the coming of the grim King of Terrors--at the warning of that awful Power to whom all of us must bow down--at the summons of that Pallid Spectre whose equal foot knocks at the monarch’s tower or the poor man’s cabin--and so forth. There is an examiner of plays, and indeed there ought to be an examiner of sermons, by which audiences are to be fully as much injured or misguided as by the other named exhibitions. What call have reverend gentlemen to repeat their dicta half a dozen times over, like Sir Robert Peel when he says anything that he fancies to be witty? Why are men to be kept for an hour and twenty minutes listening to that which may be more effectually said in twenty?
And it need not be said here that a church is not a sermon-house--that it is devoted to a purpose much more lofty and sacred, for which has been set apart the noblest service, every single word of which latter has been previously weighed with the most scrupulous and thoughtful reverence. And after this sublime work of genius, learning, and piety is concluded, is it not a shame that a man should mount a desk, who has not taken the trouble to arrange his words beforehand, and speak thence his crude opinions in his doubtful grammar? It will be answered that the extempore preacher does not deliver crude opinions, but that he arranges his discourse beforehand; to all which it may be answered that Mr.---- contradicted himself more than once in the course of the above oration, and repeated himself a half-dozen of times. A man in that place has no right to say a word too much or too little.
And it comes to this,--it is the preacher the people follow, not the prayers; or why is this church more frequented than any other? It is that warm emphasis, and word-mouthing, and vulgar imagery, and glib rotundity of phrase, which brings them together and keeps them happy and breathless. Some of this class call the Cathedral Service Paddy’s Opera; they say it is Popish--downright scarlet--they won’t go to it. They will have none but their own hymns--and pretty they are--no ornaments but those of their own minister, his rank incense and tawdry rhetoric. Coming out of the church, on the Custom House steps hard by, there was a fellow with a bald large forehead, a new black coat, a little Bible, spouting--spouting in omne volubilis œvum--the very counterpart of the reverend gentleman hard by. It was just the same thing, just as well done, the eloquence quite as easy and round, the amplifications as ready, the big words rolling round the tongue, just as within doors. But we are out of the Devil’s Glen by this time; and perhaps, instead of delivering a sermon there, we had better have been at church hearing one.
The country people, however, are far more pious; and the road along which we went to Glendalough was thronged with happy figures of people plodding to or from mass. A chapel-yard was covered with grey cloaks; and at a little inn hard by, stood numerous carts, cars, shandry-dans, and pillioned horses, awaiting the end of the prayers. The aspect of the country is wild, and beautiful of course; but why try to describe it? I think the Irish scenery just like the Irish melodies--sweet, wild, and sad even in the sunshine. You can neither represent one nor other by words; but I am sure if one could translate ‘The Meeting of the Waters’ into form and colours, it would fall into the exact shape of a tender Irish landscape. So, take and play that tune upon your fiddle, and shut your eyes, and muse a little, and you have the whole scene before you.
I don’t know if there is any tune about Glendalough; but if there be, it must be the most delicate, fantastic, fairy melody that ever was played. Only fancy can describe the charms of that delightful place. Directly you see it, it smiles at you as innocent and friendly as a little child; and once seen, it becomes your friend for ever, and you are always happy when you think of it. Here is a little lake, and little fords across it, surrounded by little mountains, and which lead you now to little islands where there are all sorts of fantastic little old chapels and graveyards; or, again, into little brakes and shrubberies where small rivers are crossing over little rocks, plashing and jumping, and singing as loud as ever they can. Thomas Moore has written rather an awful description of it; and it may indeed appear big to him, and to the fairies who must have inhabited the place in old days--that’s clear. For who could be accommodated in it except the little people?
There are seven churches, whereof the clergy must have been the smallest persons, and have had the smallest benefices and the littlest congregations ever known. As for the cathedral, what a bishoplet it must have been that presided there!--the place would hardly hold the Bishop of London, or Mr. Sidney Smith--two full-sized clergymen of these days--who would be sure to quarrel there for want of room, or for any other reason. There must have been a dean no bigger than Mr. Moore before mentioned, and a chapter no bigger than that chapter in Tristram Shandy which does not contain a single word, and mere popguns of canons, and a beadle about as tall as Crofton Croker, to whip the little boys who were playing at taw (with peas) in the yard.
They say there was a university, too, in the place, with I don’t know how many thousand scholars; but for accounts of this, there is an excellent guide on the spot, who, for a shilling or two, will tell all he knows, and a great deal more too.
There are numerous legends, too, concerning St. Kevin, and Fin Mac Coul and the devil, and the deuce knows what. But these stories are, I am bound to say, abominably stupid and stale; and some guide[29] ought to be seized upon and choked, and flung into the lake, by way of warning to the others to stop their interminable prate. This is the curse attending curiosity, for visitors to almost all the show-places in the country: you have not only the guide--who himself talks too much, but a string of ragged amateurs, starting from bush and briar, ready to carry his honour’s umbrella or my lady’s cloak, or to help either up a bank or across a stream. And all the while they look wistfully in your face, saying, ‘Give me sixpence!’ as clear as looks can speak. The unconscionable rogues! how dare they, for the sake of a little starvation or so, interrupt gentlefolks in their pleasure?
A long tract of wild country, with a park or two here and there, a police barrack perched on a hill, a half-starved-looking church stretching its long scraggy steeple over a wide plain, mountains whose base is richly cultivated while their tops are purple and lonely, warm cottages and farms nestling at the foot of the hills, and humble cabins here and there on the wayside, accompany the car, that jingles back over fifteen miles of ground through Inniskerry to Bray. You pass by wild gaps and greater and lesser Sugar Loaves; and about eight o’clock, when the sky is quite red with sunset, and the long shadows are of such a purple as (they may say what they like) Claude could no more paint than I can, you catch a glimpse of the sea, beyond Bray, and crying out, ‘θἁλαττα, θἁλαττα! affect to be wondrously delighted by the sight of that element.
The fact is, however, that at Bray is one of the best inns in Ireland; and there you may be perfectly sure is a good dinner ready, five minutes after the honest car-boy, with innumerable hurroos and smacks of his whip, has brought up his passengers to the door with a gallop.
* * * * *
As for the Vale of Avoca, I have not described that; because (as has been before occasionally remarked) it is vain to attempt to describe natural beauties; and because, secondly (though this is a minor consideration), we did not go thither. But we went on another day to the Dargle, and to Shanganah, and the city of Cabinteely, and to the Scalp--that wild pass; and I have no more to say about them, than about the Vale of Avoca. The Dublin cockney, who has these places at his door, knows them quite well; and, as for the Londoner, who is meditating a trip to the Rhine for the summer, or to Britanny or Normandy, let us beseech him to see his own country first (if Lord Lyndhurst will allow us to call this a part of it); and if, after twenty-four hours of an easy journey from London, the cockney be not placed in the midst of a country as beautiful, as strange to him, as romantic as the most imaginative man on ‘Change can desire,--may this work be praised by the critics all around and never reach a second edition!
XXV. COUNTRY MEETINGS IN KILDARE--MEATH--DROGHEDA
An agricultural show was to be held at the town of Naas, and I was glad, after having seen the grand exhibition at Cork, to be present at a more homely, unpretending country festival, where the eyes of Europe, as the orators say, did not happen to be looking on. Perhaps men are apt, under the idea of this sort of inspection, to assume an air somewhat more pompous and magnificent than that which they wear every day. The Naas meeting was conducted without the slightest attempt at splendour or display--a hearty, modest, matter-of-fact country meeting.
Market-day was fixed upon of course, and the town, as we drove into it, was thronged with frieze-coats, the market-place bright with a great number of apple-stalls, and the street filled with carts and vans of numerous small tradesmen, vending cheeses, or cheap crockeries, or ready-made clothes and such goods. A clothier, with a great crowd round him, had arrayed himself in a staring new waistcoat of his stock, and was turning slowly round to exhibit the garment, spouting all the while to his audience, and informing them that he could fit out any person, in one minute, ‘in a complete new shuit from head to fut.’ There seemed to be a crowd of gossips at every shop-door, and, of course, a number of gentlemen waiting at the inn-steps, criticising the cars and carriages as they drove up. Only those who live in small towns know what an object of interest the street becomes, and the carriages and horses which pass therein. Most of the gentlemen had sent stock to compete for the prizes. The shepherds were tending the stock. The judges were making their award, and until their sentence was given, no competitors could enter the show-yard. The entrance to that, meanwhile, was thronged by a great posse of people, and as the gate abutted upon an old grey tower, a number of people had scaled that, and were looking at the beasts in the court below. Likewise, there was a tall haystack, which possessed similar advantages of situation, and was equally thronged with men and boys. The rain had fallen heavily all night, the heavens were still black with it, and the coats of the men, and the red feet of many ragged female spectators, were liberally spattered with mud.
The first object of interest we were called upon to see was a famous stallion; and passing through the little by-streets (dirty and small, but not so small and dirty as other by-streets to be seen in Irish towns) we came to a porte-cochère, leading into a yard filled with wet fresh hay, sinking juicily under the feet; and here in a shed was the famous stallion. His sire must have been a French diligence-horse; he was of a roan colour, with a broad chest, and short clean legs. His forehead was ornamented with a blue ribbon, on which his name and prizes were painted, and on his chest hung a couple of medals by a chain--a silver one awarded to him at Cork, a gold one carried off by superior merit from other stallions assembled to contend at Dublin. When the points of the animal were sufficiently discussed, a mare, his sister, was produced, and admired still more than himself. Any man who has witnessed the performance of the French horses in the Havre diligence, must admire the vast strength and the extraordinary swiftness of the breed; and it was agreed on all hands, that such horses would prove valuable in this country, where it is hard now to get a stout horse for the road, so much has the fashion for blood, and nothing but blood, prevailed of late.
By the time the stallion was seen, the judges had done their arbitration; and we went to the yard, where broad-backed sheep were resting peaceably in their pens; bulls were led about by the nose; enormous turnips, both Swedes and Aberdeens, reposed in the mud; little cribs of geese, hens, and peafowl were come to try for the prize; and pigs might be seen--some encumbered with enormous families, others with fat merely. They poked up one brute to walk for us: he made, after many futile attempts, a desperate rush forward, his legs almost lost in fat, his immense sides quivering and shaking with the exercise; he was then allowed to return to his straw, into which he sunk panting. Let us hope that he went home with a pink ribbon round his tail that night, and got a prize for his obesity.
I think the pink ribbon was, at least to a Cockney, the pleasantest sight of all; for on the evening after the show we saw many carts going away so adorned, having carried off prizes on the occasion. First came a great bull stepping along, he and his driver having each a bit of pink in their hats; then a cart full of sheep; then a car of good-natured-looking people, having a churn in the midst of them that sported a pink favour. When all the prizes were distributed, a select company sate down to dinner at Macavoy’s Hotel; and no doubt a reporter who was present has given in the county paper an account of all the good things eaten and said. At our end of the table we had saddle of mutton, and I remarked a boiled leg of the same delicacy, with turnips, at the opposite extremity. Before the vice I observed a large piece of roast beef, which I could not observe at the end of dinner, because it was all swallowed. After the mutton we had cheese, and were just beginning to think that we had dined very sufficiently, when a squadron of apple-pies came smoking in, and convinced us that, in such a glorious cause, Britons are never at fault. We ate up the apple-pies, and then the punch was called for by those who preferred that beverage to wine, and the speeches began.
The chairman gave ‘The Queen,’ nine times nine and one cheer more; ‘Prince Albert and the rest of the Royal Family,’ great cheering; ‘The Lord-Lieutenant’--his Excellency’s health was received rather coolly, I thought. And then began the real business of the night: Health of the Naas Society, health of the Agricultural Society, and healths all round; not forgetting the Sallymount Beagles and the Kildare Foxhounds--which toasts were received with loud cheers and halloos by most of the gentlemen present, and elicited brief speeches from the masters of the respective hounds, promising good sport next season. After the Kildare Foxhounds, an old farmer in a grey coat got gravely up, and without being requested to do so in the least, sung a song, stating that--
‘At seven in the morning by most of the clocks We rode to Kilruddery in search of a fox’;
and at the conclusion of his song challenged a friend to give another song. Another old farmer, on this, rose and sung one of Morris’s songs with a great deal of queer humour; and, no doubt many more songs were sung during the evening, for plenty of hot-water jugs were blocking the door as we went out.
The jolly frieze-coated songster who celebrated the Kilruddery fox, sung, it must be confessed, most woefully out of tune; but still it was pleasant to hear him, and I think the meeting was the most agreeable one I have seen in Ireland: there was more good-humour, more cordial union of classes, more frankness and manliness, than one is accustomed to find in Irish meetings. All the speeches were kind-hearted, straightforward speeches, without a word of politics or an attempt at oratory: it was impossible to say whether the gentlemen present were Protestant or Catholic,--each one had a hearty word of encouragement for his tenant, and a kind welcome for his neighbour. There were forty stout, well-to-do farmers in the room, renters of fifty, seventy, a hundred acres of land. There were no clergymen present, though it would have been pleasant to have seen one of each persuasion, to say grace for the meeting and the meat.
At a similar meeting at Ballytore the next day, I had an opportunity of seeing a still finer collection of stock than had been brought to Naas, and at the same time one of the most beautiful, flourishing villages in Ireland. The road to it from H---- town, if not remarkable for its rural beauty, is pleasant to travel, for evidences of neat and prosperous husbandry are around you everywhere--rich crops in the fields, and neat cottages by the roadside, accompanying us as far as Ballytore--a white, straggling village, surrounding green fields, of some five furlongs square, with a river running in the midst of them, and numerous fine cattle in the green. Here is a large windmill, fitted up like a castle, with battlements and towers; the castellan thereof is a good-natured old Quaker gentleman, and numbers more of his following inhabit the town.
The consequence was, that the shops of the village were the neatest possible, though by no means grand or portentous. Why should Quaker shops be neater than other shops? They suffer to the full as much oppression as the rest of the hereditary bondsmen; and yet, in spite of their tyrants, they prosper.
I must not attempt to pass an opinion upon the stock exhibited at Ballytore; but, in the opinion of some large agricultural proprietors present, it might have figured with advantage in any show in England, and certainly was finer than the exhibition at Naas; which, however, is a very young society. The best part of the show, however, to everybody’s thinking (and it is pleasant to observe the manly fair-play spirit which characterises the society), was, that the prizes of the Irish Agricultural Society were awarded to two men--one a labourer, the other a very small holder, both having reared the best stock exhibited on the occasion. At the dinner, which took place in a barn of the inn, smartly decorated with laurels for the purpose, there was as good and stout a body of yeomen as at Naas the day previous, but only two landlords; and here, too, as at Naas, neither priest nor parson. Cattle-feeding, of course, formed the principal theme of the after-dinner discourse--not, however, altogether to the exclusion of tillage; and there was a good and useful prize for those who could not afford to rear fat oxen--for the best-kept cottage and garden namely, which was won by a poor man with a large family and scanty precarious earnings, but who yet found means to make the most of his small means, and to keep his little cottage neat and cleanly. The tariff and the plentiful harvest together had helped to bring down prices severely; and we heard from the farmers much desponding talk. I saw hay sold for £2 the ton, and oats for 8s. 3d. the barrel.
In the little village I remarked scarcely a single beggar, and very few bare feet indeed among the crowds who came to see the show. Here the Quaker village had the advantage of the town of Naas, in spite of its poorhouse, which was only half full when we went to see it; but the people prefer beggary and starvation abroad, to comfort and neatness in the union-house.
A neater establishment cannot be seen than this; and liberty must be very sweet indeed, when people prefer it and starvation to the certainty of comfort in the union-house. We went to see it after the show at Naas.
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.