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DUBLIN.

IRELAND.

THE Bay of Dublin, shallow and unprotected from winds, may have but little value in a sailor's eye, but to the stranger it affords a beautiful prospect, particularly if he contemplates it, as was my case, on a fine cheerful morning, from the deck of a steamer, after having spent the night in a storm at sea. The land, stretching forward in two peninsulas, looks as if it were opening its arms to receive him. In the southern hand it bears the harbour and town of Kingstown, in the northern the harbour and town of Howth, and deep in its bosom it cherishes the metropolis of the country, the ancient Irish Ballagh-Ath-Cliath, a name which it retains to the present day. Ptolemæus called it erroneously Eblana, and to all the non-Irish part of the world it is known under the denomination

of Dublin.

On the left side, near Kingstown, lies the lit

We (that is, my only fellow-passenger in the steamer, and myself) landed at Kingstown, close to two very illustrious footsteps hewn out of the rock on the quay. They are the steps of George IV., who landed here when he visited Ireland in 1821, and to whose honour a monument has

been erected close to the two said steps. I scarcely thought flattery had been so well understood in Great Britain. To hew out the steps of the sovereign on his visit to one of his principal cities, and erect monuments in commemoration of the event! One would suppose Ireland a little out-of-the-way place somewhere beyond the Orkneys, when one finds the visit of

its sovereign treated as so memorable an occurrence; and, in fact, when we consider that Ireland, near as it is to London, was never visited by George III., nor by George II., nor by George I., and that during the century that preceded them, the country never saw its sovereign ex

tle island of Dalkey, and on the right side, near cept in arms, for the suppression of foreign or Howth, the equally little island called Ireland's domestic enemies, it may not be unfair to speak Eye. The name is characteristic and appropri- of Ireland, by the side of the great man-of-war, ate, for just here in the middle of the eastern England, as a little captured bark taken concoast it is that Ireland may be said to have open- temptuously in tow. Our kings of Prussia freed her eye to look out towards England. Per- quently gladden their several provinces with a haps it would be nearer the truth to say that her visit, except Lithuania perhaps, to which one eye has here been forced open; for had Ireland does not often hear of their going; the emperors her own way, could she free herself from her of Russia are almost always on the move, and

vicinity to, and her dependence on, Englandcould she, in short, turn her back on Englandshe would have opened oper her eye in a very different direction. O'Connell, the great Irish patriot, has his summer residence in the far west of the island, on the Atlantic coast, into which he takes much more pleasure in looking, than into the Irish Sea and over to England'; and most of the Irish, had they their own way, would probably like to run over to the Atlantic coast, and erect their capital there. For 600 years, however, England made Ireland turn her obstinate head round, and not keep her back turned upon her neighbour.

The ancient capital of Ireland, if such an expression will here apply, was Tara. Dublin is the capital of English making. Richard I. built a castle here in 1204, and made it the seat of the principal courts of law, and the residence of his vice-governor. Since then, marks of favour, and titles of magistracy, and charters, and corporations, and public buildings, and Wellington monuments, have been poured forth upon the city, till it has grown to be great and more beauful than even London and Edinburgh; and on the other hand, the loyal citizens of Dublin under their provosts and lord mayors, and the English armies under their lords deputies and their lords lieutenant, and episcopal excommunications, and royal letters of menace, have since then kept pouring forth from the city upon the rest of the country, which, through the agency of Dublin, has continued to become more and more dependent and more and more English.*

show themselves now in Moscow, now in St. Petersburg, now in Odessa, now in Warsawin short, in all parts of their dominions except in Siberia; the emperors of Austria, on their accession, go to receive the homage of all but their Walachian subjects; Ireland, the important third of the mighty imperial trinity of Great Britain, has been left to the left, like the Lithuania of Prussia and the Siberia of Russia, and on every new accession of a British sovereign, all that Ireland has had to do has been to waft

her applause across the Channel, as well as she has been able to do so with her bound and fet

tered hands.

A man, when he lands in Ireland, however, comes to honour without being precisely a king. "Your honours," was the first salutation we met with. It was from a Dublin car-driver. "It's early, your honours, and the railroad won't be warming its engine for you this hour and a half to come. Take my car, your honours, and I'll drive up your hotel, and that's more than the engine will do for you." The reason ing seemed good enough, and the offer was accepted. The vehicle we embarked in seemed strange and grotesque to me. It was a kind of square box, with glasses in the front, and we entered from behind. The machine went upon two wheels, and resembled some of the Chinese | Chester, Carlisle, and others in the west of Eng

* The history of the subjection, colonization, and orga

nization of Ireland, from Dublin as a central point, presents many striking points of resemblance with the conquest of Finland by the Swedes from Abo, and with the organization of Lavonia, Courland, and Esthonia by the Germans from Riga; Livonia, Finland, and Ireland, may be looked on as three German colonial states, formed by foreign intruders, among native populations boked upon as in a state of barbarism.

equipages of which I have read.

Dublin is the second city of the United Kingdom, but is at the same time one of the first and largest of Europe; for in population it falls little short of St. Petersburg, Moscow, and Vienna; rivals Berlin and Lisbon; and surpasses Brussels, Stockholm, Rome, Milan, and Pesth. Few of these capitals have risen to their present importance in so short a time as Dublin. St. Petersburg alone surpasses it in this respect, and Berlin about equals it. The best comparison, however, would be with Pesth, which, like Dublin, is the capital of a dependant kingdom, and, as the residence of a viceroy, has risen from a collection of wooden booths and basket-work huts, to be one of the handsomest cities of Eu

rope.

Dublin, having been built by Englishmen, has quite the exterior of an English city. With the exception of its wretched suburbs, and the quarters abandoned to misery, Dublin has only what may be seen in most of the larger English towns. The private houses of the wealthy, as in England, are small, neat, and plain, and the public buildings equally rich in pillars and ornaments, in rotundas, colonnades, and portals. The quays, lighthouses, docks, and patent slips, remind one of Liverpool, and the noble Custom-house, the Postoffice, with its Ionic, and the Four Courts, with its Corinthian columns, are all splendid buildings, but of the same character as those one meets with in England. Then the streets are spacious and the side pavements broad and convenient, as in English towns; the squares, perhaps, more beautiful, and the buildings even more ornamental. This word "ornamental" is very characteristic of English towns. The French talk of their "villes monumentales," the English tell one of their ornamental towns, by which they mean towns that contain buildings with a profusion of pillars. The Russian and American cities are the only ones that can match those of England in point of pillars. In Germany we talk of our "antique and picturesque" cities, and those we have, whereas the English have them not, with all their columns. Of course, sweeping rules of this kind are not without exceptions.

Nelson pillars and Wellington testimonials, too, are not wanting in Dublin, any more than in English towns generally. Trinity College has its beautiful gardens, shut up from the public, like the colleges at Oxford, and the Castle, the residence of the viceroy, is but a repetition of many similar castles in England. Nor let it

land. I could not, however, reconcile it to myself to find that in the churches of St. Patrick's, St. Kevin's, and of other Irish Catholic saints, whose names can have little signification for Protestant Englishmen, no Catholic service should be held. I had not crossed the Channel in a storm to find myself still in England. Ireland, national Irelend, I had come to see, but that I found had to be sought elsewhere than in its great towns. I therefore made but a short stay in the merry capital, and determined to make a round through the west and south, after which it was my intention to return to Dublin, in order to inform myself on various matters of a characteristic and general interest.

FROM DUBLIN TO EDGEWORTH-
TOWN.

A man must travel a long way by railroad in England, or had best make up his mind to cross over to Ireland at once, if he wish to see the antique stage coach offices which formerly abounded in the country, and which are so humorously described by the greater part of the writers on England. The first day on which I saw one of these establishments was in Dublin, and on the 26th of September, on which day I prepared myself for my departure for the interior of the green island. The first glance at such an office is not calculated to produce a very favourable impression. The many long-printed bills on the wall, warning travellers that the office holds itself in no way responsible for damage done to a traveller's effects, nor even for their loss, nor for the retention of his place, and hinting various other equally agreeable contingencies, are apt to fill a stranger's mind with uneasiness. Then he is somewhat embarrassed as to where he shall sit. Inside there's as little spare room as in a herring-cask, and on the outside, a little iron bulwark, orly four inches high, is all that guards him against an abyss of fifteen feet. The sight of it is enough to make a man giddy. To say truth, the places in and on an English stage coach are the most comfortless things of their kind on earth, and I was at first at a loss to reconcile them with the characteristic love of the English for convenience. I solve the riddle thus: In every undertaking the English keep the main end steadily in view. This, in their houses, is domestic comfort, and accordingly nothing can be more full of comfort than an English house. In travelling, the main end is to get on as fast as possible, and whatever can contribute to this is admirably arranged. The car

be supposed, that, Ineland being a Catholic coun-riages, though as solid as iron and steel can leave his head behind him, if he neglected the warning of the guard, who in a loud voice calls on every man to stoop his head.

try, its capital must therefore present the decoration of old churches and convents, venerable cathedrals, and quaint chapels at the corners of the streets. Nothing of the kind. The stranger sees as little Catholicism in Dublin as he does Protestantism in Prague. No processions, no monks, no priests about the streets. The Catholic chapels, as they are called, are generally small places, and retire from view into the lanes and alleys of the city. It is only since 1745 that the Catholics have been allowed to open their chapels at all. The Protestant Episcopal churches, of which there are more than twenty, look very much like the Protestant churches of England, and the celebrated cathedral of St. Patrick's, the most distinguished of all the ancient ecclesiastical edifices of Ireland, is in the whole of its architecture the very ditto of the cathedrals of

make them, are of surprising lightness, the horses swift as birds, and the coachmen all artists in their line; but convenient seats you must not hope for, nor will you find it advisable to carry much luggage with you; all you have a right to expect is, that wet or dry, clean or dirty, with whole bones or broken, you will be brought to the end of your journey within a few minutes of the appointed time. Every other consideration is of secondary importance to a man of business, and of every hundred who travel in England, ninety do so on business.

I always choose an outside place. You can thence see the country conveniently right and left, provided you do not lose your head in starting. The gateways of most English coach-offices-and this again again is an enigma-are so low, that every outside passenger would infallibly

"All right!" cried the guard just as the clock struck six, or rather just as the hand of the clock pointed to that hour; for in an English town there are more clocks that show the hour, and fewer that announce it in an audible tone, than in one of our own cities. "All right! stoop your heads, gentlemen!" Thirteen heads were bent in obedience to the word of command, and by the time we had raised them again, and made ourselves as comfortable as we could, we were rolling away from the city of Dublin, into the county of the same name.

Our road lay through the heart of Ireland, through its most peopled and most fertile provpeopled inces, over the rich plains of Dublin, Kildare, Meath, Westmeath, and Longford, and the end of my journey was to be Edgeworthtown, a place whither I had been invited by one whose name is known and honoured in Germany, and the invitation had been given with so much kindness, that I had resolved to stay some little time there, in order to sharpen and prepare my powers of perception, for the observance of Irish matters. For, in many respects, a man coming into a new country is like one suddenly brought into a dusky cellar, where he overlooks many things and sees others in a false light, because his eyes are not yet accustomed to the place. Not that I would have a traveller say nothing of a country till he have familiarized himself with it, and become almost a native; on the contrary, the progress of his familiarization, nay, his very errors and misconceptions, may have in them much that is characteristic of the scenes he visits.

The counties I have just mentioned, and which lie immediately west from Dublin, are the most fertile of Ireland, are celebrated for their good cultivation, and are looked upon as a sort of Land of Promise by the poor people of Clare, Kerry, and others of the western districts. Nowhere else, except in Wexford, is there so small - a portion of the land lying waste in bog or moor; nowhere else are the cattle so fine, the corn so good and abundant, and nowhere else have English improvements made more progress. These counties were always advantageously situated for the reception of English settlers, and for the introduction of the English language; the language, superstition, and customs of Ireland have therefore been nearly extirpated, and an English character has been substituted. These are historical and undeniable facts, and yet the traveller who visits these happy regions for the first time, is apt to receive quite a contrary impression, and to imagine himself in the most wretched part of the country. Till he has seen the west of Ireland, he has no idea that human beings can live in a state of greater misery than in the fertile environs of Dublin, or that a peopled and cultivated land can look wilder than the cornabounding plains of Meath, Kildare, and Westmeath. In the west of Ireland there are districts where a man may imagine himself in a wilderness abandoned by mankind; where nothing is to be seen but rocks, bogs, and brushwood, and where wild beasts alone may be supposed capable of housing. All at once, however, on closer inspection, little green patches, like potatofields, are seen scattered here and there amid the rocks, and a stranger is tempted to go nearer and examine them. Let him look where he is going,

may give way under his feet, and he may fali into-What! into an abyss, a cavern, a bog?No, into a hut, into a human dwelling-place, whose existence he had overlooked, because the roof on one side was level with the ground, and nearly of the same consistency. Perhaps my traveller may draw back his foot just in time, and then let him look around, and he will find the place filled with a multitude of similar huts, all swarming with life and potatoes.

It is not so bad certainly in the happy regions of the east, but even these can scarcely be said to have the appearance of a cultivated countrya well-cultivated country is out of the question. In a well-cultivated country, I expect to see fields neatly marked off with hedges and ditches, and bordered here and there with trees and other signs of demarkation or defence. Among these fields I expect to see neat farmhouses and villages, with roofs in sound condition, and yards orderly and tidily kept, instead of being filled with a chaotic mass of stagnant rainwater and drainings from the dunghill. The farmer's house I expect to see high and dry with its little garden, pretty to look on, though kept for use rather than show, but in which, nevertheless, the cultivator may show his taste in the rearing and grafting of his apple, pear, and peach trees. There must be the dairy scrupulously clean, and the tidy kitchen with its brightly scoured pots and dishes, and the orderly sitting-room for the farmer's family, and perchance now and then a company room for particular occasions; but why do I dwell on things, the very trace of which is lost almost as soon as one leaves Dublin? I discovered nothing that deserved to be called hedges or fences, and as to gardens, fruit-trees, or flower-beds, I could see nothing of the kind. I was at first at a loss how to distinguish the cultivated from the uncultivated land. Instead of cheerful farmhouses I beheld ruinous huts, and whenever the coach stopped, I got down that I might see the interiors of the houses, which excited my astonishment. This was in the most prosperous part of Ireland, and along the highway. How must things have looked in more secluded places? Often I could see quite enough without getting down, for at times I could study the interior economy of the establishment through the holes in the roof-the fractured plates in the kitchen, the potato-kettle on the hearth, the heap of damp straw for a bed in one corner, and the pigsty in another!

The landlords of Ireland, according to Spencer, who wrote a book on the country 300 years ago, draw their rents from their poor tenants, but do not assist them in the erection of their houses, in the fencing of their fields, or in the repair of their roads. If they did, they would deive as much advantage as their tenants from such a course; but they leave everything to chance, and let their tenants get on as well as they can. Spencer then goes on to describe the cottage of an Irish farmer in terms quite as suitable to the present day. The Irish landlords, it would seem, are even worse than the great Polish and Russian proprietors, who at least build houses for their peasants, and furnish them with food in times of famine. This the Irish landlord does not do, because his tenant is a free man, though with only the inconveniences of freedom -such as hunger, want, and care-without any of its advantages. He cannot be flogged, it must be thankfully admitted.

however, or he may make a false step; the earth The land here is everywhere level, without

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