in Prussia and Saxony, to pave the way for the introduction of permanent leases, for the reduction of exorbitant rents, and then first to allow, and afterward to make it imperative, that the tenant shall have it in his power to convert the permanent lease into a freehold. No one here seems to have dreamed of inquiring how this has been done in France, in Germany, and even in the Baltic provinces of Russia; no one has yet been bold enough here to raise the question, whether the real cultivator of the soil has not, in point of fact, a better claim to a property in it, than the noble owner whose privileges have almost always had their origin in violence and injustice. People here have such a holy dread of touching, even in the most remote way, what they call the "rights of property," that they seem incapable of raising themselves to the level of the idea, that circumstances may arise to make it the highest political wisdom to venture on the infringement of those rights.

The titles by which the landed nobility of Europe hold their estates and tenants are of infinite variety. In most cases they have originated in possession from time immemorial, individuals having, in a dark age, of which all record has been lost, established their ascendancy, either by cunning or violence. In some states, however, the dependence and poverty of the tillers of the soil has been the consequence of the conquest of the country, and its partition among the conquerors. In general the date of this conquest went back to so remote a period, that the injustice which attached to the original title had been forgotten, or the estates had passed in the course of time into the possession of new families, who could not, in the most remote degree, be held responsible for the original injustice. Could the law always have come upon the

brought with it extensive confiscations, and the expulsion of the ancient owners of the land, so much so that at present nine tenths of the whole Irish soil are held by families of English descent, and nearly every large landholder can still tell when his ancestors first became possessed of the estate. I have said that the best title an Irish landholder can in general show is violencemeaning conquest; but in many cases estates were obtained by the ancestors of the present possessors by treachery and fraud. For a long time the law was that a son might dispossess his father, or a younger his elder brother, by embracing Protestantism, and there are many, very many Irish landowners, whose possessions can be shown to have originated in the application of this atrocious law. In presence of such titles, what wise government ought to hesitate to interfere-not indeed with revolutionary measures calculated to throw everything into confusion, but to enact such salutary reforms as would enable the poor tenants at will and leaseholders gradually to convert their tenure into a freehold, so that the millions might not continue for ever to waste away for the profit of a few oligarchs?

In my excursions to the farmers of Sunna, I met with an old woman who spoke Irish and very little English. In her youth, she said, meaning fifty years ago, few people here, in the centre of Ireland, spoke or understood anything but Irish; but many of them had since forgotten it, and to the children nothing but English was taught. There are few, she added, that can even bless themselves in Irish now! She told me the ancient Irish name for Edgeworthtown, but I have forgotten it.

It is strange that throughout Ireland, even in those parts that have longest been Anglicized or Saxonized, the original names have been retain

original wrong-doer or his immediate descend-ed for the political divisions of the country.

Thus in the vicinity of Edgeworthtown I met with the townships of Camliskbey, Agadonagh, Ballinloughtagh, names that must have had an odd sound to Saxon ears. Several of these townships are sometimes united to form a parish, and by a union of several parishes a barony is constituted. Some of these baronies have English names, but in the west they are Irish without an exception. Six or eight baronies make a county. Of the counties many have English names, as Waterford, Longford, Down, Queen's County, and King's County; others again have retained genuine Irish denominations, as Monaghan, Fermanagh, Donegal, &c. Several counties together form a province, of which there are four.

ants, no one would have accused the state of injustice if it had said to him, "You hold your land by an unjust title, so we shall take it from you and restore it to the poor peasants whose ancestors were robbed by yours." Prussia and the other states of Germany did more than this. It was impossible for them to distinguish those titles that were of a vicious origin, so they proceeded against all alike, and forced them all to abandon privileges injurious to the community at large, and to accept a moderate indemnity in exchange. What we in Germany have done to a nobility, whose privileges rested on incomparably better titles, people in Ireland do not venture to think of, with respect to a nobility holding its privileges by the worst possible titles. There is scarcely such a thing to be heard of The gentry and nobility in this part of Ireland in Ireland as a proprietor of land whose family, understand nothing of Irish; indeed there are growing out of the people, have held their land but few districts in the country where the landfrom time immemorial. The ancient national owners are able to converse with their peasants Irish nobles and landowners have, with very in the native dialect. In the neighbourhood of few exceptions, been completely destroyed. The Galway, a thoroughly Irish city, even the gentry best title that an Irish landowner can, in gener- are said to understand Irish, and there the priests al, trace his possession to is violence, but this are obliged to preach in that language. There, violence is almost always of no very ancient too, the best Irish scholars are met with, among date, for though in the twelfth century the Eng- whom Dr. M'Hale, the Archbishop of Tuam, lish laid claim to all Ireland, in virtue of a gift and his Vicar-General, Dr. Loftus, are particufrom the pope, it was but a small portion of the larly distinguished. The former is engaged in country of which they took possession, and till the publication of an Irish version of the Iliad, the reign of Henry VIII. and Queen Elizabeth, and lately published a translation of Thomas what was called "the Pale" never occupied Moore's poems. more than a third or fourth of the island. It was Large parties of Irish labourers passed through by Cromwell that the conquest of Ireland was Edgeworthtown during my stay there, and excifirst completed, and by William III. it may be ted my compassion by their melancholy appearsaid to have been repeated. Each conquestance. I had seen several swarms of them on

the road from Dublin, and all of them complain- There are parts of Germany, France, and the ed of having made so little money in England Netherlands, which also seem to have a decided

this time. Every year numbers of these labourers wander away from the western parts of Ireland, particularly from Connaught, to assist the English farmers in getting in the harvest. It happened, however, that this year so many men were out of employment in England, that labourers could be had in abundance at low wages, and the poor Irish, in consequence, had had a bad time of it; ragged and hungry they had gone over to England, and even so they returned, having scarcely earned enough to defray the cost of the journey. These periodical migrations of Irish labourers occur as regularly as the movements of so many birds of passage. Wages in England, on an average, are twice as high as in Ireland, and the Irish harvesters, accustomed to the cheapest food, are generally able to bring back the greater part of what they earn. The men have usually a bit of ground in Donegal, Clare, Mayo, Connemara, or some where among the bogs and mountains of the west, and as soon as they have put their own fields in order they start for one of the eastern ports - Dublin, Belfast, Dundalk, &c. - and cross over to England, leaving their families at home. Their little harvest is often attended to by their wives, or, as among the mountains of Connaught the harvest is generally later than in England, the men are often at home again quite in time to attend to the getting in of their own produce. During harvest time in England and Scotland the services of these Irish labourers are of great importance, and sometimes it would be difficult, without their aid, to get the harvest in at all. They generally return every year to the same part of the country, and work for the same farmers who employed them at the preceding harvest; thus it often happens that a district in England will have its corn cut and gathered in every year by labourers from some particular

district in Ireland.

To see poor Paddy with a rueful countenance is the more moving, as it so seldom happens to him to carry a look of care about with him; but this year, gloom was fixed on almost every face that returned from England. Some even complained, that of the little they had earned they had been robbed by the rioters in the English manufacturing districts. The poor fellows thought of their families at home, who were counting on the harvest penny that was to pay the rent, and supply a few pressing wants. Fortunately the potato-harvest was a productive one, but how they were to fight it out during the winter with the landlord and the driver, Heaven only knew. I have seen migrations of harvesters somewhat similar, in many parts of Europe, but nowhere did they produce so melancholy an impression upon me as in Ireland; neither the North Germans, wandering away to the rich marshes of Holland; nor the poor Croats, Bohemians, and mountaineers, from Hungary, Bohemia, and Styria, on their way to the fertile lowlands of the Danube; nor the Swiss descending from their Alps into the teeming plains of Lombardy; nor the mowers that swarm yearly from the central part of Russia, into the thinly-peopied steppes of the southern provinces.

tendency to the formation of bog, but nowhere else is this so much the case as in Ireland. Our Harz Mountains have some bog it is true, but in Ireland the very summits of such mountains are covered with bog, and wherever cultivation recedes, the bog resumes possession of the abandoned ground. The humidity of the climate, I suppose, is the chief though not the only cause of this phenomenon. The decayed vegetable matter, which in other countries dries and resolves itself into dust, leaves here a considerable residuum, which is augmented in the following year by the new residua of decayed plants, and a rapid accumulation thus takes place, a quantity of moisture being held in absorption, till gradually immense compact masses are formed. A young bog, one that is yet but in its infancy, is called a "quaking bog;" but in time, when the mass becomes more compact, and assumes a black colour, it is known as a turf-bog, or peat-bog. The vegetables, whose residua go to the formation of these bogs, are of course of infinite variety. The mosses, as they decay, form a loose, spongy mass, often so tough that the turf-spade will not pierce it, and it then goes by the name of "old wife's tow." Sometimes the bog is formed almost wholly of mosses, sometimes of mosses mixed with the remains of other plants. Hence arise two principal descriptions of morasses in Ireland, the red or dry bogs, and the green or wet bogs. The former yields a light, spongy turf that quickly burns away, the latter a heavy, black turf. Some of the green bogs, however, are so wet, that no turf can be obtained from them at all.

The Irish bogs are at once a source of wealth, and a cause of poverty to Ireland. They yield fuel to the poor, but at the same time cover much fertile land, which they withhold from cultivation, and they spoil the water of the rivers, fill the atmosphere everywhere with a turfy smell, and infect the air with unwholesome exhalations; they are often a great hinderance to internal communication, and have long served as places of refuge to the thieves and outlaws of Ireland, who, according to Boate, could not exist without the bogs. The object of the Irish ought to be to subject to a wise system of economy those bogs that yield good fuel, and to have all the others drained and brought under cultivation. Hitherto the Irish have done neither of these two things; they have not economized their turf, and they have not drained the unproductive bogs, because these were for a long time looked upon as the most effectual natural protection against the English. The English, indeed, "the introducers of all that is good into Ireland," as Boate calls them, (he might with equal justice have called them the authors of much evil there), have for centuries laboured at the draining of these bogs, and lately again a company has been formed for the reclaiming of Irish bogs, but, compared to the quantity of bogs that exists, little or nothing has hitherto been done, and even at the present day the traveller in Ireland seldom finds himself on any point whence he may not see bog within his horizon.

It would seem that there was a time when, if not the entire island, at least portions of it, must have been better cultivated, and less covered with morasses than at present, for there are large tracts of bog, under which the soil shows the

Mountains and valleys, rocks, ravines, and plains, nay, sometimes even the caverns, are all covered with bog in Ireland. Where cultivation ceases, the bog begins, and the whole island may be said to be a bog with occasional interruptions. I most distinct traces of former cultivation by the

plough. Nay, some Irish historians point to ⚫certain districts, which, atter having been laid waste by this or that English general or chief, rapidly became converted into a morass.

others believe the hillocks to be of a much more ancient date, and to have formed the strongholds of the ancient native kings. In the north of Ireland is a mound of enormous size, said to have been the seat of the Kings of Ulster. Probably this earthy architecture, which appears to have been so widely diffused over Ireland, was the work of different ages, of various races, and had more objects than one in view. Nearly all the nations of Europe, in the infancy of their civilization, seem to have delighted in the erection of these artificial hills. The whole of Southern Russia is full of them, and we meet with them in Hungary, Turkey, Scandinavia, and Denmark, as well as in England and Ireland, but nowhere in such numbers as in Ireland, whence we may conclude that the ancient Irish must have built many of their raths long before the Danes arrived among them.

While I was at Edgeworthtown, I heard the people talk a great deal of the Centre of Ireland, and a farmer one day accompanied me to an artificial mound, which the people looked upon as the said central point. This mound is called the Moate of Lisserdowling. We were, no doubt, very near the centre, but the hill in question, it is equally certain, was not that centre, the precise locality of which it would be difficult to determine. The Moate of Lisserdowling is a round conical hill, about forty feet high, and about five hundred feet in circumference. It stands on a plain, and is surrounded by cornfields, and being planted with trees and white-thorn bushes, presents a stately object on the naked level. On the summit the moate was flat, with an indentation in the middle, leaving a few stones bare, that seemed to form a part of some masonry concealed under the turf, by which the whole of the artificial hill was covered. The popular tradition, I was told, assigned the moate a dwelling-place to an ancient Irish chief of the name of Naghten O'Don Donnell, and a small by-road in the neighbourhood is still called after him, "Naghten's Lane." The hill stands in high repute throughout the country, and is a fa*vourite resort on fine afternoons, when hundreds may be seen sitting and lying on its sides; but not one of these visiters remains after dark, when the Moate of Lisserdowling, and the lane leading to it, are abandoned to the fairies, or "good people," as they are called in Ireland. it is difficult to guess what use they were intend

as a

Nor will any one touch a stone or stick on the hill, "unless they have had a dream," as my farmer expressed himself, "and have had a commission from the good people." I observed on the side of the mount the stump of an old thornbush. My guide informed me that the bush itself had been blown down one windy night, many years ago, and had been left to rot on the -ground where it fell, no one daring to touch it, though in general the poor people are ready enough to appropriate to themselves anything burnable that they may find by the wayside. Young trees they will steal with very little remorse, but wood growing on one of these fairy mounts is almost always secure from their depredations.

On the following day I visited a similar hill, the Moate-o'-Ward, which was likewise covered with white thorns, and in the sequel I met with great numbers of these artificial hillocks, of which Ireland contains many more than either England or Scotland. The people call them moats, a word used in English to designate the ditch of a fortress. In Irish they are called "raths," a word bearing precisely the same signification. They are also sometimes called "Danes' Mounts," for in Ireland, as every art of destruction is charitably set down to Cromwell's account, so every erection of a remote date is at tributed to the Danes. The popular belief is unanimous, therefore, in giving the Danes the credit of having erected these tumuli, as fortresses whence they might hold the country in subjection, and when the Danes had been expelled, an Irish chief here and there chose the deserted fastness for his dwelling place. The learned are not quite so unanimous in their views as to the origin of these erections. Some go with the stream, and set them down to Danish account;

It is also probable that they were erected with different objects in view. Some, we know, were intended as boundary marks, and some we know were raised over the remains of distinguished heroes and chiefs. From some it was customary for the lawgivers and judges to announce their decisions to the assembled multitude, and on others kings were anointed and crowned. The Druids required sacred hills to offer their sacrifices on, and where a natural hill was not to be had, an artificial one, no doubt, was often formed. Others again may have been intended as fortresses on which the people might seek refuge from an enemy. Many, no doubt, remain that are quite enigmatical. Several, when opened, are found to contain passages and cells, of which

ed for. They are too small for storehouses, and can scarcely have served as tombs, or bones and other remains would have been found there.

Lisserdowling, a high pyramid surrounded by a low rampart and ditch, is more likely, in my opinion, to have been erected as a religious monument than as a fortress. Had it been intended for a fortress, why should so much labour have been expended in giving it a conical form, and why not have bestowed more pains on the circumvallation? As a fortress it would have been the strangest and most ineligible that could have been built. The space on the summit would scarcely afford room for two huts, and when the rampart had once been stormed by the enemy, the defenders would have been at the greatest disadvantage on the sides of the cone. Probably the circumvallation has led to the belief that this, and many other tumuli, were intended for fortresses, but Stonehenge, which nobody ever took to be a fortress, is also surrounded by rampart and ditch. The circumvallation may have been intended simply to mark the boundary of the holy place, and to cut off all connexion with the profane part of the world.

Enough, however, of the Danes' mounts, and now let me proceed to notice a few memoranda which I find set down in my journal during my stay in Edgeworthtown.

In the little Protestant church at Edgeworthtown I found a wooden gallery, which, as I learned from an inscription, had been erected sixty years previously, by a vicar of the parish, for the exclusive use of the public at large. The small space on the floor of the church was occupied wholly by the pews of the wealthier part of the congregation, so that the poor, who could not afford to pay pew-rent, were all but excluded from the place of worship, as is generally the