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LIBRARY 1 
 
 UNIVERSITY OF j 
 CALIFORNIA J 
 

 
LIST OF VOLUMES IN THE 
 
 PEEPS AT 
 
 MANY LANDS 
 
 SERIES 
 
 EACH CONTAINING 12 FULL-PAGE 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS IN COLOUR 
 
 BELGIUM 
 
 INDIA 
 
 BURMA 
 
 IRELAND 
 
 CANADA 
 
 ITALY 
 
 CHINA 
 
 JAMAICA 
 
 CORSICA 
 
 JAPAN 
 
 EGYPT 
 
 MOROCCO 
 
 ENGLAND 
 
 NEW ZEALAND 
 
 FINLAND 
 
 NORWAY 
 
 FRANCE 
 
 SCOTLAND 
 
 GERMANY 
 
 SIAM 
 
 GREECE 
 
 SOUTH AFRICA 
 
 HOLLAND 
 
 SOUTH SEAS 
 
 HOLY LAND 
 
 SWITZERLAND 
 
 ICELAND 
 
 WALES 
 
 A LARGER VOLUME IN THE SAME STYLE 
 
 THE 
 
 WORLD 
 
 Containing 37 full-page illustrations in colour 
 
 PUBLISHED BY ADAM AND CHARLES BLACK 
 
 SOHO SQUARE, LONDON, W. 
 
 AGENTS 
 
 AMERICA . . . THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
 
 64 & 66 FIFTH Avenue. NEW YORK 
 
 AU8TRALASIA . OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS 
 
 aos FLINDERS LANE, MELBOURNE 
 
 CANADA . . . THE MACMILLAN COMPANY OF CANADA. LTD. 
 87 RICHMOND STREET WEST, TORONTO 
 
 OIDIA .... MACMILLAN & COMPANY. LTD. 
 
 MACMILLAN BUILDING, BOMBAY 
 
 309 Bow BAZAAR STREET, CALCUTTA 
 
WITH TWELVE FULL- PAGE ILLUSTRATIONS 
 IN COLOUR 
 
 FRANCIS S. WALKER, R.H.A. 
 
LOAN STACK 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 
 CHAPTER 
 
 I. ARRIVAL • 
 
 II. DUBLIN 
 
 III. THE IRISH COUNTRY 
 
 IV. THE IRISH PEOPLE 
 
 V. SOUTH OF DUBLIN 
 
 VI. THE NORTH 
 
 VII. CORK AND THEREABOUTS 
 
 VIII. GALWAY . 
 
 IX. DONEGAL OF THE STRANGER 
 
 X. IRISH TRAITS AND WAYS . 
 
 TACK 
 
 I 
 
 20 
 27 
 38 
 
 44 
 49 
 58 
 
 65 
 76 
 
 111 
 
 307 
 
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 THE eagle's nest, KILLARNEY . 
 
 A VILLAGE IN ACHILL 
 SACKVILLE street, DUBLIN 
 
 dublin bay from victoria hill 
 
 blarney castle 
 
 off to america 
 
 a wicklow glen 
 
 the river lee 
 
 Raleigh's house, myrtle grove 
 
 glencolumbkille head . 
 
 a donegal harvest 
 
 a home in donegal 
 
 digging potatoes 
 
 Frontispiece 
 
 FACING PAGE 
 
 viii 
 
 9 
 i6 
 
 25 
 32 
 41 
 48 
 
 57 
 64 
 
 73 
 80 
 
 on the cover 
 
 Sketch- Map of Ireland on p. vii 
 
SKETCH-MAP OF IRELAND. 
 
 Vll 
 
IRELAND 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 ARRIVAL 
 
 It may safely be said that any boy or girl who takes 
 a peep at Ireland will want another peep. Between 
 London and Ireland, so far as atmosphere and the 
 feeling of things is concerned, there is a world of 
 distance. Of course, it is the difference between 
 two races, for the Irish are mainly Celtic, and the 
 Celtic way of thinking and speaking and feeling is 
 as different as possible from the Saxon or the Teuton, 
 and the Celt has influenced the Anglo-Irish till they 
 are as far away from the English nearly as the Celts 
 themselves. If you are at all alert, you will begin 
 to find the difference as soon as you step off the 
 London and North Western train at Holyhead 
 and go on board the steamer for Kingstown. 
 The Irish steward and stewardess will have a 
 very different way from the formal English way. 
 They will be expansive. They will use ten 
 IR. I I 
 
Ireland 
 
 words to one of the English official. Their speech 
 will be picturesque ; and if you are gifted with 
 a sense of humour — and if you are not, you had 
 better try to beg, borrow or steal it before you go 
 to Ireland — there will be much to delight you. I 
 once heard an Irish steward on a long-sea boat at 
 London Docks remonstrate with the passengers in 
 this manner : 
 
 " Gentlemen, gentlemen, will yez never get to 
 bed ? Yez know as well as I do that every light on 
 the boat is out at twelve o'clock. It's now a quarter 
 to wan, and out goes the lights in ten minutes." 
 
 There is what the Englishman calls an Irish bull in 
 this speech ; but the Irish bull usually means that 
 something is left to the imagination. I will leave 
 you to discover for yourself the hiatus which would 
 have made the steward's remark a sober English 
 statement. 
 
 These things make an Irish heart bound up as 
 exultantly as the lark springs to the sky of a day of 
 April — ^that is to say, of an Irish exile home-return- 
 ing — for the dweller in Ireland grows used to such 
 pearls of speech. 
 
 Said a stewardess to whom I made a request that 
 she would bring to my cabin a pet-dog who, under 
 the charge of the cook, was making the night ring 
 
 2 
 
Arrival 
 
 with his lamentations : " Do you want to have me 
 murdered ?" This only conveyed that it was against 
 the regulations. But while she looked at me her 
 eye softened. " I'll do it for yoz^," she said, with 
 a subtle suggestion that she wouldn't do it for 
 anyone else ; and then added insinuatingly, " if the 
 cook was to mind the basket ?" " To be sure," said 
 I, being Irish. " Ask the cook if he will kindly mind 
 the basket and let me have the dog." And so it 
 was done, and the cook had his perquisite, while I 
 had the dog. 
 
 At first, unless you have a very large sense of 
 humour — and many English people have, though 
 the Irish who do not know anything about them 
 deny it to them en hloc — ^you will be somewhat be- 
 wildered. Apropos of the same little dog, we asked 
 a policeman at the North Wall, one wintry morning 
 of arrival, if the muzzling order was in force in 
 Dublin. 
 
 " Well, it is and it isn't," he said. " Lasteways, 
 there's a muzzlin' order on the south side, but there 
 
 isn't on the north, through Mr. L on the North 
 
 Union Board, that won't let them pass it. If I was 
 you I'd do what I liked with the dog this side of the 
 river, but when I crossed the bridge I'd hide him. 
 You'll be in a cab, won't you ?" 
 
 3 1-2 
 
Ireland 
 
 After you've had a few peeps at Ireland, you won't 
 want the jokes explained to you, perhaps, or the 
 picturesqueness of speech demonstrated. 
 
 Before you glide up to the North Wall Station 
 you will have discovered some few things about Ire- 
 land besides the picturesqueness of the Irish tongue. 
 You will have seen the lovely coast-line, all the town- 
 ships glittering in a fairy-like atmosphere, with the 
 mountains of Dublin and Wicklow standing up be- 
 hind them. You will have passed Howth, that 
 wonderful rock, which seems to take every shade of 
 blue and purple, and silver and gold, and pheasant- 
 brown and rose. You will have felt the Irish air in 
 your face ; and the Irish air is soft as a caress. You 
 will have come up the river, its squalid and pictur- 
 esque quays. You will have noticed that the poor 
 people walking along the quay-side are far more 
 ragged and unkempt generally than the same class in 
 England. The women have a way of wearing shawls 
 over their heads which does not belong naturally to 
 the Western world, and sets one to thinking of the 
 curious belief some people have entertained about 
 the Irish being descended from the lost tribes. A 
 small girl in a Dublin street will hold her little shawl 
 across her mouth, revealing no more of the face than 
 the eyes and nose, with an effect which is distinctly 
 
 4 
 
Arrival 
 
 Eastern. The quay-side streets are squalid enough, 
 and the people ragged beyond your experience, 
 but there will be no effect of depression and de- 
 spondency such as assails you in the East End of 
 London. The people are much noisier. They greet 
 each other with a shrillness that reminds you of the 
 French. The streets are cheerful, no matter how 
 poor they may be. I have always said that there is 
 ten times the noise in an Irish street, apart from 
 mere traffic, than in an English one. An Irish vil- 
 lage is full of noise, chatter of women, crying of chil- 
 dren, barking of dogs, lowing of cattle, bleating of 
 sheep, crowing of cocks, cackling of hens, quacking 
 of ducks, grunting of pigs. The people talk at the 
 top of their voices, so that you might suppose them 
 to be quarrelling. It is merely the dramatic sense. 
 I have heard an Irish peasant make a bald statement 
 — or, at least, it would have been bald in an English 
 mouth — as though she pleaded, argued, remon- 
 strated, scolded, deprecated. 
 
 Accustomed to Irish ways, English villages have 
 always appeared very dead to me. Unless it be on 
 market morning, one might be in the Village of the 
 Palace of the Sleeping Beauty. I once visited Dun- 
 mow of the Flitch of a golden May- day. It was 
 neither Flitch Day nor Market Day, and I aver that 
 
 S 
 
Ireland 
 
 I walked through the town and saw no living crea- 
 ture, except a cat fast asleep, right in the midst of 
 the sun-baked roadway. Such a thing could not 
 have happened in Ireland. 
 
 CHAPTER II 
 
 DUBLIN 
 
 Dublin is a city of magnificences and squalors. It 
 has the widest street in Europe, they say, in Sack- 
 ville Street, which, after the manner of the police- 
 man and the muzzling order, half the population 
 calls O'Connell Street. The public buildings are 
 very magnificent. These are due, for the greater 
 part, to the man who found Dublin brick and left 
 it marble — that great city-builder, John Claudius 
 Beresford, of the latter half of the eighteenth century, 
 whose name is at once famous and infamous to the 
 Irish ear, because when he had made a new Dublin 
 he flogged rebels in Beresford's Riding-School in 
 Marlborough Street with a thoroughness which left 
 nothing to be desired except a little mercy. Beresford, 
 who was one of the Waterford Beresfords, was First 
 Commissioner of Revenue, as well as an Alderman of 
 
 6 
 
Dublin 
 
 the City of Dublin. Before he went city-building, 
 Dublin was a small place enough. For centuries it 
 consisted chiefly of Dublin Castle, the two cathe- 
 drals — Patrick's and Christ's Church; Dublin is alone 
 in Northern Europe in possessing two cathedrals — and 
 the narrow streets that clustered about them. Some- 
 where about the middle of the eighteenth century 
 St. Stephen's Green was built — the finest square in 
 Europe, we say ; I do not know if the claim be well 
 founded. A little later Sackville Street began to 
 take shape, communicating with the other bank of 
 the river by ferry-boats. Essex Bridge was at that 
 time the most easterly of the bridges, and the banks 
 of the river were merely mud-flats, especially so 
 where James Gandon's masterpiece, the Custom- 
 House, was presently to rear its stately fagade. The 
 latter part of the eighteenth century was the great 
 age of Dublin. Ireland still had its Lords and 
 Commons, who had declared their legislative in- 
 dependence of England in 1782. Society was as 
 brilliant as London, and far gayer. It was certainly 
 a time in which to go city-building, for these splen- 
 dours needed housing. Before Beresford began his 
 plans, calling in the genius of James Gandon, with 
 many lesser lights, to assist him, Sackville Street and 
 Dublin generally were as insanitary as any town of 
 
 7 
 
Ireland 
 
 the Middle Ages. Open sewers ran down the 
 middle of the streets. There was no pretence at 
 paving. The streets were ill-lit by smelly oil- 
 lamps. The Dublin watchmen found plenty to do, 
 as did their brethren in London, in protecting 
 peaceful citizens from the pranks of the Dublin 
 brethren of the London Mohocks in the tortuous 
 and ill - lit streets. Dublin, the city of the 
 English pale, remained and remains an English 
 city — with a difference. The Anglo-Irish did the 
 things their London brethren were doing — with a 
 difference. If there were unholy revels at Medmen- 
 ham Abbey on the Thames, they were imitated or 
 excelled by their Irish prototypes, whose club- 
 house you will still see standing up before you a ruin 
 on top of the Dublin mountains. In many ways 
 the society of Dublin models itself on London to 
 this day. 
 
 The Lords and Commons of Ireland were already 
 living about the Rotunda in Sackville Street, Rutland 
 Square, Gardiner's Row, Great Denmark Street, 
 Marlborough Street, and North Great George's 
 Street, when John Claudius Beresford began his 
 work. He bridged the river with Carlisle — now 
 O'Connell — Bridge. He constructed Westmore- 
 land Street right down to the Houses of Parliament. 
 
 8 
 
Dublin 
 
 He built the Custom-House, now a rabbit-warren 
 of Government offices, on a scale proportioned to 
 the needs of the greatest trading city in Europe, 
 oblivious of the fact that Irish trade was going 
 or gone ; or, perhaps — who knows ? — building 
 for the future. All that part of the city lying be- 
 tween the new bridge and the Custom-House was 
 laid out in streets. Meanwhile the nobility and 
 gentry who had town-houses were seized with the 
 passion for beautifying them. The old Dublin 
 houses were of an extraordinary stateliness and 
 beauty. Money was poured out like water on their 
 beautification. The floral decoration in stucco- 
 work on walls and ceilings still makes a dirty glory 
 in some of the old houses. Famous artists, like 
 Cipriani and Angelica Kauffmann, painted the wall- 
 panels and ceilings with pseudo-classical goddesses 
 and nymphs. A certain Italian named Bossi exe- 
 cuted that inlaying in coloured marbles which made 
 so many of the old mantelpieces things of beauty. 
 The old Dublin houses still retain their stately pro- 
 portions, although some of them have been dis- 
 mantled and others come down to be tenement- 
 houses. But there is yet plenty to remind us that 
 Dublin had once its Augustan Age. 
 
 If you have the tastes of the antiquary, the old 
 
 IR. 9 2 
 
Ireland 
 
 Dublin houses and buildings will afford you matter 
 of great interest. 
 
 In the first place, there is Dublin Castle, which 
 was built hy King John. Of the four original 
 towers, only one now remains. The castle has been 
 the town residence of the Lord-Lieutenant of Ire- 
 land since Sidney established himself there in the 
 reign of Queen Elizabeth. For the rest, it is a 
 congerie of Government offices of one sort or 
 another. 
 
 The castle was built over the Poddle River, which 
 now creeps in darkness, degraded to a common 
 sewer, under the dark and dismal houses, and empties 
 itself in an unclean cascade through a grating in the 
 Quay walls, whence it flows away with the Liffey to 
 the sea. You can visit the Chapel Royal, if you will, 
 and the viceregal apartments are sometimes open to 
 inspection if the Viceroy is not in residence. I lived 
 many years in Dublin without desiring to inspect 
 what may be seen of Dublin Castle, though I have 
 often stood in the castle yard under the Berming- 
 ham Tower, and, looking up at that great keep, 
 have remembered how Hugh O'Donnell and his 
 companions escaped by way of the Poddle one 
 Christmas Eve in the spacious days of great 
 Elizabeth, and how the young chieftain of Tyr- 
 
 lo 
 
Dublin 
 
 connel narrowly escaped the frozen death which 
 befell his companions as they climbed those 
 Dublin mountains over yonder to find refuge 
 with the O'Tooles and O'Byrnes of the Wicklow 
 Hills. 
 
 Those were the Irish clans that used to make the 
 English burghers of Dublin shake in their shoes. 
 While they sold their silks or woollens, or sat at meals 
 or exchange, or said their prayers in their churches, 
 they never could be sure that the wild Irish cry 
 would not come ringing at their gates. The 
 O'Byrnes and O'Tooles would swoop down at in- 
 tervals, and raid the cattle from the fat pastures of 
 the pale, sweeping back again with their spoil to 
 their impregnable fastnesses. Some years ago a 
 Father O'Toole published a book on the Clan of 
 O'Toole, which contained the genealogical tree of 
 the O'Tooles, tracing their descent without a break 
 from Noah. This is a matter of interest to me, as 
 I myself am an O'Toole. 
 
 The history of nations is, after all, the history of 
 men — of men and of movements — and it is individual 
 and outstanding men who make for us the milestones 
 of history. Ireland has produced, in proportion to 
 her population, a more than usual number of out- 
 standing men ; and, thinking of Dublin houses and 
 
 II 2—2 
 
Ireland 
 
 monuments of one kind or another, we find it is of 
 men we are thinking, after all. 
 
 Thinking of Christ Church, that beautiful Gothic 
 cathedral, I think of St. Patrick, because his staff was 
 preserved there, and was an object of great reverence 
 till it was burnt by a too-zealous reforming Bishop 
 in the days of Elizabeth. St. Patrick was a very de- 
 lightful saint. One loves the legends that gather 
 about him. I like especially how he wrestled with 
 the angel on Croagh-Patrick, and would not come 
 down from the mountain till he had been granted his 
 several prayers. There were three in particular. 
 The first one was that Ireland should never depart 
 from the Christian faith. " Very well, then," said 
 the angel, " God grants you that." " Next," said 
 Patrick, " I ask that on the Judgment Day I may sit 
 on God's right hand and judge the Irish people." 
 " That you can't have," said the angel. " Be quiet 
 now, and go down from the mountain." " What !" 
 said Patrick, " is it for this that I have fasted so 
 many days on the mountain, wrested with evil ones, 
 been exposed to the rain and tempest, prayed hard, 
 fought temptations — only for this ?" " Very well, 
 you shall have this," replied the angel. " And now 
 that you have your wish satisfied, go down from the 
 mountain." " Not till my third prayer be granted." 
 
 12 
 
Dublin 
 
 " What ! a third prayer ?" cried the angel. " You 
 ask too much, O Patrick, and you shall not have it. 
 You are too covetous." " Was it for this ?" began 
 Patrick again, with a recital of all he had done and 
 suffered. " Very well, then," said the angel, tired 
 out ; " have your third prayer, but ask no more, for 
 it will not be given to you." " I ask that all who 
 recite my prayer " (z.<?., the prayer known as St. 
 Patrick's Breastplate) " shall not be lost at the Last 
 Day." " Very well, then," said the angel, " you 
 shall have that ; but now go down." " I am content 
 now," said Patrick ; " I will go down." 
 
 He was a fighting saint, despite his many gentle- 
 nesses. At Downpa trick, where he built his cathe- 
 dral, he took a little fawn which his men would have 
 killed, and carried it in his breast. I like the descrip- 
 tion of him by his friend St. Evan of Monasterevan, 
 which tells us how he was sweet to his friends, but 
 terrible to his enemies. 
 
 I think of St. Patrick at Christ Church rather than 
 of St. Lawrence O'Toole, Archbishop of Dublin, 
 who, with Strongbow, that fierce Norman who 
 seized Ireland for Henry H. of England, built Christ 
 Church. St. Lawrence O'Toole's heart lies here in 
 a reliquary. Here also Lambert Simnel was crowned; 
 but who thinks of that ignoble impostor now ? 
 
 13 
 
Ireland 
 
 Christ Church presents an effect of lightness and 
 brightness very different from St. Patrick's, in which 
 it seems to me it is always afternoon, and winter 
 afternoon. Patrick is in a particularly picturesque 
 slum of the city, in the Earl of Meath's liberty, 
 hard by the Coombe, which was once a pleasant dell, 
 no doubt, but is now the raggedest of slums. To 
 the Earl of Meath's liberty came the French silk- 
 weavers expelled from France after the revocation 
 of the Edict of Nantes, and established the industry 
 of poplin- weaving there. 
 
 The man with whom St. Patrick's Cathedral is 
 associated is Jonathan Swift, and for his sake it is 
 perpetually dark. It is haunted by the tragedy of 
 his life and death. Here Esther Johnson is buried ; 
 and over yonder, in the Deanery House, Swift, a 
 sick man, lay in bed and watched the torches in 
 the great church when they were making ready her 
 grave. The strange bitterness of the terrible in- 
 scription which commemorates that most unhappy 
 great man seems to colour the atmosphere of St. 
 Patrick's. " Where fierce indignation can no more 
 lacerate his heart," he rests by the side of the woman 
 who was faithful to him with a long patience, whose 
 death left him to loneliness and madness. 
 
 The whole place is haunted by him, as is the 
 
Dublin 
 
 deanery close by and the old library of Dr. Marsh, 
 which is said to have a ghost that flings the books 
 about at night. 
 
 What ghosts meet one in the Dublin streets ! There 
 is Wesley. He was visiting the Countess of Moira 
 at Moira House, which now, docked of its upper 
 story, is the Mendicity, or, as the Irish put it, the 
 " Mendacity " Institution. It was a splendid man- 
 sion when Wesley was there. One room with a bay- 
 window was lined with mother-o'-pearl. " Alas," 
 said Wesley prophetically, " that all this must vanish 
 like a dream !" The Moiras were not only religious : 
 they were cultivated, refined, patriotic in the truest 
 sense — altogether noble and generous. They re- 
 ceived poor Pamela, Lady Edward Fitzgerald, with 
 kindly open arms when that romantic hero, Lord 
 Edward, lay dying of his wounds. 
 
 You shall see, if you will, the old House of Lords, 
 preserved in its old state by the Governors of the 
 Bank of Ireland, who have made it their board-room. 
 The House of Commons has become the Bank's 
 counting-house, and there is no trace of its former 
 state. What ghosts you might meet there at night ! 
 — Grattan, Flood, Curran, Hussey Burgh, Plunket, 
 to say nothing of lesser worthies. Over against the 
 Parliament Houses was Daly's Club-House, where 
 
 IS 
 
Ireland 
 
 forgathered the wits, the bucks, the duellists. There 
 was Buck Whaley, who walked to Jerusalem for a 
 wager, and for the same reason once sprang out of 
 the window of his house on Stephen's Green into a 
 carriage full of ladies. That house is now Univer- 
 sity College, and has its associations with Newman ; 
 and you might see there some of the most beautiful 
 specimens of the eighteenth-century decoration still 
 remaining — the Bossi mantelpieces, the stucco- 
 work, the beautiful old doors of wine-red mahogany, 
 and all the rest of it. Buck Whaley had a friend. 
 Buck Jones, who is commemorated in Jones's Road. 
 When I was a little girl — and how long ago that is 
 I shall not tell you — Buck Jones's ghost still walked 
 the road which is named after him. You see, 
 Dublin still ranged itself alongside London ; and we 
 had our Buck Whaley and our Buck Jones if London 
 and Bath had their Beau Brummel and their Beau 
 Nash. 
 
 Cheek by jowl with the Houses of Parliament is 
 the ancient college of Queen Elizabeth — the Col- 
 lege of the Holy and Undivided Trinity. That, too, 
 has memories and ghosts. The University has had 
 illustrious sons. Swift, Goldsmith, Bishop Berkeley, 
 Edmund Burke, were among them. Swift was 
 " stopped of his degree for dulness," and had no love 
 
 i6 
 
Dublin 
 
 for his alma mater. She had other sons, such as Robert 
 Emmet and Theobald Wolfe Tone and Thomas 
 Davis, among her brightest jewels, though she would 
 not have it so. She spreads a quiet place of grey 
 quadrangles and green park and gardens midmost of 
 the city, and she helps to give dignity to Dublin, 
 already by her Viceregal Court marked as no pro- 
 vincial town. 
 
 If I were to talk to you of the ancient history of 
 Dublin, this book would become, not " A Peep at 
 Ireland," but " A Peep at Dublin." You will see 
 for yourself the ancient houses of the nobility, the 
 Lords and Commons of Ireland. Some of them 
 have come to strange uses. Aldborough House is a 
 barracks ; Powerscourt House was in my day a 
 wholesale draper's ; Marino, the splendid residence 
 of the Earls of Charlemont at Clontarf, is in the 
 hands of the Christian Brothers. Many of these old 
 houses are turned into Government offices. 
 
 " Alas, that all this must vanish like a dream !" 
 said John Wesley. And how quickly he was justi- 
 fied ! In the latter part of the eighteenth century 
 Dublin prided itself on being the gayest capital in 
 Europe. Perhaps Dublin had always too many pre- 
 tensions. However, it was sufficiently gay and ex- 
 traordinarily picturesque. The Rutland vice- 
 
 IR. 17 3 
 
Ireland 
 
 royalty marked, perhaps, its highest water-mark of 
 gaiety. It was said that the Rutlands were sent over 
 " to drink the Irish into good-humour " — that is, 
 to distract them from serious matters, such as legis- 
 lative independence and the like. However that 
 may be, they did set the capital to dancing. After 
 all, it was always the Anglo-Irish who counted in the 
 rebellious movements. One has to go as far back as 
 Owen Roe O'Neill to find a Celtic leader. For the 
 time, at all events, Dublin gave itself up to the fas- 
 cinations of the gallant and gay young Duke and his 
 wonderful Duchess. The Irish allowed that the 
 Duchess was one of the handsomest women in Ire- 
 land. Elsewhere she was reputed among the love- 
 liest in Europe. We hear of her dancing at a ball 
 attired in light pink silk, with diamond stomacher 
 and sleeve-knots, and wearing a large brown hat pro- 
 fusely adorned with jewels. Every night there were 
 balls at the castle or the Rotunda. The Duchess 
 was dancing Dublin into good-humour. There 
 were all manner of other social festivities. Every 
 Sunday the Duchess drove on the North Circular 
 Road, with six cream-coloured ponies to her phae- 
 ton, all the rank and fashion of Dublin following in 
 coaches-and-six, coaches-and-four, and less preten- 
 tious equipages. There was card-playing ; there 
 
 i8 
 
Dublin 
 
 was hard drinking ; there were all manner of distrac- 
 tions, disedifying and edifying. For then, as now, 
 the representatives of the King and Queen took 
 the charities under their wing ; and dancing at the 
 Rotunda supported the Rotunda Hospital, to say 
 nothing of the tax on the waiting sedan - chairs, 
 which put a few hundred pounds more into the 
 hospital's coffers. 
 
 " Alas, that all this must vanish like a dream !" 
 To be sure, many of the most illustrious of the 
 Anglo-Irish, more Irish than the Irish, refused to be 
 either danced or drunk into good-humour. The 
 brilliant viceroyalty lasted not quite four years, and 
 the gay and handsome Duke left Ireland in the 
 saddest way, carried high on men's shoulders. 
 
 Afterwards there were other things than dancing. 
 There was the Rebellion of 1798. There was the 
 Legislative Union with Great Britain, which meant 
 for Ireland the absence of her Lords and gentry, and 
 the spending in London of revenues derived from 
 Ireland. 
 
 In the early years of the nineteenth century grass 
 grew in the streets of Dublin. Famine and pesti- 
 lence followed each other in monotonous succession. 
 Emmet's Rebellion broke out in 1804. If you were 
 interested in such things, you would penetrate the 
 
 19 3—2 
 
Ireland 
 
 slummy parts of Dublin as far as Thomas Street to 
 see where, in front of St. Catharine's Church, Emmet 
 died, and the house where Lord Edward Fitzgerald 
 was arrested. 
 
 Dublin is full of memories, of associations, of 
 ghosts : no city in Europe is richer in such. There 
 is hardly a stone of her streets which is not storied. 
 
 CHAPTER III 
 
 THE IRISH COUNTRY 
 
 Dublin possesses great natural advantages. The 
 sea, the mountains, the green country, are at her 
 gates. You take one of her many trams, and at the 
 terminus you step into solitudes, into " dear secret 
 greenness " of country ; on to expanses of sea-sand, 
 with the waves breaking in little crisped curls of foam 
 at your feet. She is ringed about with mountains. 
 She has a most beautiful coast-line. Turn which 
 way you will on leaving her, you are safe to turn to 
 beauty. Round about her are clustered various 
 beauties. Beyond the Dublin mountains, the Wick- 
 low Mountains, into which they gently pass, invite 
 you. The mountains have the most beautiful 
 
The Irish Country 
 
 colouring. It is an effect of the mists and clouds. 
 
 I have seen a mountain red as a rose, and I have 
 
 seen one black as a black pansy and as velvety. 
 
 Sometimes they are veiled in silver, with the soft 
 
 feet of the flying rain upon them ; and sometimes, 
 
 because the sun is shining somewhere, that same 
 
 rain will be a garment of silver or of the rainbow. 
 
 She is the greenest country ever was seen. 
 
 England may think she wears the green ; but as 
 
 compared with Ireland her green is rust-coloured 
 
 and dust-coloured. I have gone over from London 
 
 in May and have found a green in Ireland that 
 
 absolutely made me wink. 
 
 " Sweet rose whose hue, angry and brave, 
 Bids the rash gazer wipe the eye," 
 
 says Herbert ; but the green, which is the eye's 
 comforter of all the colours, is, in an Irish May, of 
 so intense a greenness as to have something of the 
 same effect as Herbert's rose. I think of the fat 
 pasture-lands at the gates of Dublin, as well I know 
 them. In May they are drifts of greenness, with the 
 cattle sunken to their knees, while the meadows 
 white with daisies, gold with buttercups, presently 
 to be brown and green with seeding-grasses, have 
 an exceeding cleanness and brightness of aspect. 
 Grass-green, milk-white, pure gold — these are fields 
 
 21 
 
Ireland 
 
 of delight. There used to be luxuriant hedges, too, 
 ten or twelve feet high. What hedges they were in 
 May ! with the hawthorn in full bloom — no one 
 calls it may in Ireland — and, later, the woodbine — 
 honeysuckle in Ireland is the white and purple 
 clover — and with the woodbine the sheets of wild 
 roses flung lavishly over every hedge. Since my 
 young days an improving county surveyor has cut 
 down the hedges, though not so ruthlessly as here in 
 Hertfordshire, where they are noted hedgers and 
 ditchers, and so strip the poor things to the earth 
 almost, just as they are coming into leaf, leaving the 
 roads pitiless indeed for the summer days. 
 
 I think of the lavish Irish hedges and of the strip 
 of grass white with daisies which ran either side of 
 the footpath. There was always a clear stream 
 singing along the ditch. It had come down from 
 the mountains, and was amber-brown in colour, and 
 clear as glass ; it ran over pebbles that were pure gold 
 and silver and precious stones, now and again getting 
 dammed around a boulder, making a leap to escape, 
 and coming around the boulder with a swirl and a 
 few specks of foam floating upon it. Ireland of the 
 Streams is one of the old names for Ireland, and it is 
 justified ; for not only are there lordly rivers like the 
 Shannon and the Blackwater, to mention but two of 
 
 22 
 
The Irish Country 
 
 them, but there are innumerable little streams every- 
 where, undefiled — at least, as I know them — hy 
 factories. You can always kneel down of a summer's 
 day by one, fill your two hands full and drink your 
 fill ; and that mountain water is better than any 
 wine. You may track it, if you will, up to the 
 mountains, where you will find it welling out, per- 
 haps, through the fronds of a hartstongue fern, the 
 first tiny gush of it ; and you will find it widening 
 out and almost hidden by a million flowers and plants 
 that like to stand with their feet in water. Or you 
 will see it, cool and deep, with golden shadows 
 sleeping in it, slipping round little boulders and 
 clattering over stones, in a tremendous hurry to 
 escape from these sweet places to the noisome city, 
 where it will lose itself in the sewer water before it 
 finds its way to the sea. 
 
 There is no such order in an Irish as in an English 
 landscape : none of the rich, ordered garden air 
 which in England so delights Americans and colo- 
 nials. The Irish landscape is always somewhat for- 
 lorn, wild and soft, with an impalpable melancholy 
 upon it — this even in the fat pasture-lands of 
 Dublin County. How much more so when the bogs 
 spread their beautiful brown desolation over miles of 
 country, or in the wild places where man asks for 
 
 23 
 
Ireland 
 
 bread and Nature gives him a stone ! At its most 
 prosperous the country is always a Httle wild, a little 
 mournful, a barefooted colleen with cloudy hair and 
 shy eyes sometimes tearful, and no conventional 
 beauty — only something that takes the heart by 
 storm and holds it fast. 
 
 Irish skies weep a deal. That accounts, of course, 
 for the great vegetation, the intense greenness. If 
 I did not know the Irish green I should be unable to 
 realize the mantle of grass-green silk which so often 
 the old ballad-makers gave their knights and ladies. 
 Knowing the Irish grass, I see an intenser green than 
 if I did not know it. Where there are not rocks and 
 stones and mountains, where there is cultivation in 
 Ireland, there is leafage and grass of great luxurious- 
 ness. Of a wet summer in Ireland you could scarcely 
 walk through the grass ; it might meet above a 
 child's head. Contrariwise, the flora of Ireland, as I 
 know it, is much less various and luxuriant than that 
 of England. In a childhood and youth spent in the 
 Irish country — it was round about Dublin — I recall 
 only the simpler and commoner wild-flowers. On a 
 chalk cliff at Dover, when May spread a carpet of 
 flowers, I have seen a greater variety of wild-flowers 
 than I knew in a lifetime in Ireland — most of them 
 unknown to me by name. 
 
 24 
 
The Irish Country 
 
 Nor do I think the birds are so many as in Eng- 
 land, perhaps because so much of Ireland is stripped 
 of its woods ; perhaps because Ireland has been 
 slower to protect the birds than England ; perhaps, 
 also, because of the scantier population, which leaves 
 the birds to suffer hunger in the winter. There are 
 no nightingales in Ireland, but I do not think we 
 have missed them, having the thrush and the black- 
 bird, which seem to me to sing with a richer sweet- 
 ness in Ireland than in England ; but that may be 
 because the Irish-born person is prone to exaggerate 
 the sweetness he has lost. But the most character- 
 istic note of the Irish summer is the corn-crake's. 
 Somehow the Irish corn-crake has a bigger note and 
 is much more in evidence than his English brother. 
 All the nights of the early summer in Ireland he 
 saws away with his rasping note, till the hay is cut, 
 when he disappears. I suppose one hears him as 
 much in the day-time, but one does not notice him. 
 He is the harsh Irish nightingale. Poor fellow ! he 
 is often immolated before the mowing-machine ; 
 and you shall see him flying with his long-legged wife 
 and children — or rather scurrying — to the nearest 
 hedgerow, where there is always a plentiful supply of 
 grass to cover him till he can make up his mind to 
 go elsewhere. It is a saying in Ireland that you 
 
 IR. 25 4 
 
Ireland 
 
 never see a corn-crake after the meadows are cut. A 
 learned doctor has assured me that they migrate to 
 Egypt for the good of their voices. 
 
 For the rest, in the Irish country there are vil- 
 lages of an incredible poverty. The Irish village 
 mars a landscape, whereas so often an English one 
 enhances its beauty. There are farmhouses and 
 isolated cottages. The farmhouses are seldom even 
 pretty. Irish house architecture is terribly ugly, as 
 a rule, except for the few eighteenth - century 
 houses which derive from the English. The Irish 
 farmhouse is generally a two-story building, slated 
 and whitewashed. It is too narrow for its height, 
 although the height may be no great thing. A mean 
 hall-door in the middle, with a mean window to 
 either side, three mean windows above — ^that is the 
 Irish farmer's idea of house-building. I remember 
 an Irishman of genius objecting to Morland that his 
 cottages were impossible ; there was never the like 
 out of Arcadia. As a matter of fact, the cottages 
 were such as are the commonplaces of English vil- 
 lages. But no good Irishman will concede to Eng- 
 land a beauty, natural or otherwise, which Ireland 
 does not possess. The country shows many ruins — 
 ruined houses, the houses of the Irish gentry ; ruined 
 mills ; ruined churches and castles ; and behind grey 
 
 26 
 
The Irish Country 
 
 stone walls, unthought of, uncared for, old disused 
 graveyards filled with prairie grass to the height of 
 the crumbling walls. 
 
 When the Irish go away they are always lonely for 
 the mountains. No other mountains are so soft- 
 bosomed and so mild. They have wisps of cloud 
 lying along the side of them and the blue peak show- 
 ing above. I have seen a rainbow, one end of the 
 arch planted in the sea, the other somewhere behind 
 the mountains, " over the hills and far away." Seeing 
 that incomparable sight, I understood why the Irish 
 peasant imagines fairy treasures hidden at the foot 
 of the rainbow. I, too, have been in Arcadia. 
 
 CHAPTER IV 
 
 THE IRISH PEOPLE 
 
 I MUST warn you, before proceeding to write about 
 the Irish people, that I have tried to explain them, 
 according to my capacity, a thousand times to my 
 English friends and neighbours, and have been pulled 
 up short as many times by the reflection that all I 
 have been saying was contradicted by some other 
 aspect of my country-people. For we are an eter- 
 
 27 4—2 
 
Ireland 
 
 nally contradictory people, and none of us can prog- 
 nosticate exactly what we shall feel, what do, under 
 given circumstances ; whereas the Englishman is 
 simple. He has no mysteries. Once you know him, 
 you can pretty- well tell what he will say, what feel, 
 and do under given circumstances. You have a 
 formula for him : you have no formula for the Irish. 
 The Englishman is simple, the Irish complex. The 
 Anglo-Irish, who stand to most English people for 
 the Irish, have had grafted on to them the com- 
 plexity of the Irish without their pliability. It 
 makes, perhaps, the most puzzling of all mixtures, 
 and it may be the chief difficulty in a proper esti- 
 mate of the Irish character. 
 
 They will tell you in Ireland that you have to go 
 some forty or fifty miles from Dublin before you get 
 into Irish Ireland. There are a good many Irish in 
 Anglo-Ireland, usually in the humbler walks of life, 
 whence you shall find in Dublin servants, car- 
 drivers, policemen, newspaper-boys, and so on, the 
 raciness, the vivacity, the charm, which in Irish Ire- 
 land is a perpetual delight. Dublin drawing-rooms 
 are not vivacious, nor are the manners gracious, al- 
 though the Four Courts still produce a galaxy of 
 wit, and Dublin citizens buttonhole each other 
 with good stories all along the streets, roaring with 
 
 28 
 
The Irish People 
 
 laughter in a way that would be regarded as Bedlam 
 in Fleet Street. 
 
 Get into Irish Ireland and the manners have a 
 graciousness which is like a blessing. I asked the way 
 in Ballyshannon town once. The woman who 
 directed me came out into the street and a little way 
 with me, and when she left me called to me sweetly, 
 " Come back soon to Donegal !" which left a sense of 
 blessing with me all that day. There was a certain 
 curly-haired " Wullie," who drove the long car from 
 Donegal to Killybegs. I can see "Wullie" yet helping 
 the women on and off the car with their myriad 
 packages, can see the delightful grief with which he 
 parted from us, his shining face of welcome when 
 he met us again a fortnight later. To set against 
 " Wullie " were the car-drivers, who certainly are un- 
 pleasant if the " whip-money " does not come up to 
 their expectations. We say of such that they are 
 " spoilt by the tourists," yet I remember some who 
 were not spoilt by the tourists, although they were 
 perpetually in touch with them — boatmen and pony- 
 boys at Killarney; and a certain delightful guide, 
 whose winning gaiety was not at all merely professional. 
 
 Thinking over my country-people, I say, " They 
 are so-and-so," and then I have a misgiving, and I 
 say, " But, after all, they are not so-and-so." 
 
 29 / 
 
Ireland 
 
 They are the most generous people in the world. 
 They enjoy to the fullest the delight of giving ; and 
 what a good delight that is ! I pity the ungiving 
 people. You will receive more gifts in Ireland in a 
 twelvemonth than in a lifetime out of it. The first 
 instinct of Irish liking or loving is to give you some- 
 thing. The giving instinct runs through all classes. 
 If you sit down in a cabin and see an old piece of 
 lustre-ware or something else of the sort, do not 
 admire it unless you mean to accept it ; for it will be 
 offered to you, not in the Spanish way which does 
 not expect acceptance, but in the Irish way which 
 does. I have many little bits of china given so, 
 usually the one thing of any consideration or value 
 the donor possessed. I once sought to buy an old 
 china dish, much flawed and cracked by hot ovens, 
 in a Dublin hotel, as much to save it from following 
 its fellows to destruction as for any other reason. The 
 owner would not sell the dish, but he offered it for 
 my acceptance in such a way that I could not refuse. 
 When I go back to my old home, the cottagers bring 
 a few new-laid eggs or a griddle-cake for my accept- 
 ance. I have a friend in an Irish village whose in- 
 come from an official source is j^io a year. She 
 has a cottage, a few hens, and enough grass for a 
 cow when she can get one. Her gifts come at 
 
 30 
 
The Irish People 
 
 Christmas, at Easter, on St. Patrick's Day, and on 
 some special, private feasts of my own — eggs, sweets, 
 flowers, a bit of lace, or a fine embroidered handker- 
 chief, and, in times of illness, a pair of chickens. 
 That is royal giving out of so little ; and I assure you 
 that it blesses the giver as well as the recipient. 
 
 On the other hand, the farmers grow thriftier and 
 thriftier. Sir Horace Plunkett and men like him, 
 truly patriotic Irishmen, are showing them the way. 
 Successive Land Acts lift them more and more into 
 a position of security from one of precariousness. 
 They have more money now to put in the savings- 
 banks. Their prosperity does not mean a higher 
 standard of living, although that is badly needed. 
 It means more money in the banks — that is all. 
 
 The Irish are very like the French. If the day 
 should come when they should learn, like the French, 
 to be thrifty and usurious, I hope I shall not be there 
 to see it. Better — a thousand times better — that 
 they should remain royal wastrels to the end. 
 
 As yet we need not fear it. Still, if you ask a drink 
 of water at a mountain cabin in the poorest parts of 
 Ireland, you are given milk ; and do not ofer to pay for 
 it, lest you sink to the lowest place in the estimation 
 of these splendid givers. 
 
 The hospitality is truly splendid. There is a 
 
 31 
 
Ireland 
 
 saying in Ireland that they always put an extra bit in 
 the pot for " the man coming over the hill." It is 
 an unheard-of thing that you should call at an Irish 
 house and not be asked if " you've a mouth on you." 
 If your visit be within anything like measurable dis- 
 tance of meal-time you will be obliged to stay for 
 the meal. 
 
 In England, when people are poor, or compara- 
 tively so, or feel the need of retrenchment, they '^ do 
 not entertain." It is almost the first form of re- 
 trenchment which suggests itself to the Englishman ; 
 whereas to curtail his hospitalities would be the last 
 form of retrenchment to an Irishman, and you will 
 be entertained generously and lavishly by people you 
 know to be poor. The Englishman's different way 
 of looking at the matter is no doubt partly due to 
 the fact that he is a much more domestic person than 
 the Irishman, and depends mainly on his family life 
 for his happiness and pleasure. Now, the French do 
 not give hospitality at all outside the large family 
 circle, so that in that regard at least the Irish will 
 have a long way to travel before they touch with 
 the French. 
 
 I have said that the Irish are not domestic. They 
 are gregarious, but not domestic. The Irishman 
 depends a deal on the neighbours ; he has no such 
 
 32 
 
The Irish People 
 
 way of enclosing himself within a little fortified place 
 of home against all the ills of the world as has the 
 Englishman. Irish mothers, like Irish nurses, are 
 often tenderly, exquisitely soft and warm ; but the 
 young ones will fly out of the nest for all that. 
 Perhaps the art of making the home pleasant is not 
 an Irish art. Perhaps it is the gregariousness, general 
 and not particular — at least, general in the sense of 
 embracing the parish and not the family. To the 
 young Irish and a good many of their elders the 
 home is dull. They go off to America, leaving the 
 old people to loneliness, because there is no amuse- 
 ment. They do not make their own interests, as the 
 slower, less vivacious nations do. The rainy Irish 
 climate seems made for a people who would find 
 their pleasures indoors. But the Irish will be out 
 and about, telling good stories and hearing them. 
 They are an artistic people, with great traditions ; 
 yet books or music or conversation will not keep 
 them at home. If they cannot have the neighbours 
 in, they will go out to the neighbours. 
 
 They are very religious, and accept the invisible 
 world with a thoroughness and simplicity of belief 
 which they would say themselves is their most pre- 
 cious inheritance. The Celt is no materialist. He 
 does not love success or riches ; most of those whom 
 
 iR- 33 5 
 
Ireland 
 
 he holds in esteem have been neither successful nor 
 rich. Money is not the passport to his affections. 
 He ought never to go away, and, alas ! he goes away 
 in thousands ! Contact with the selfish, money- 
 getting materialism has power to destroy the spiritual 
 qualities of the Celt, once he is outside Ireland. 
 When he comes back — a prosperous Irish-American 
 — he is no longer the Celt we loved. And he does 
 come back : that is one of his contradictions. The 
 home he has left behind because of its dulness, the 
 arid patch of mountain-land, the graves of his people, 
 call him back again at the moment when one would 
 have said every bond with them was loosened. 
 
 He is full of sentiment, yet he makes mercenary 
 marriages. The Irish match-making customs are 
 well known. In the South and West of Ireland the 
 prospective bride is bargained over with no more 
 sentiment than if she were a heifer. She may be 
 '' turned down " for an iron pot or a feather-bed 
 which her mother will not give up to supplement the 
 dowry. Satin cheeks and speedwell eyes and a head 
 of silk like the raven's plume will not count against 
 a bullock extra with a yellow spinster of greater for- 
 tune, or is not supposed to count ; for sometimes 
 Cupid steps in, although the match-making customs 
 are usually accepted as unquestioningly as a similar 
 
 34 
 
The Irish People 
 
 institution is by the French. And even in such un- 
 promising soil flowers of love and tenderness will 
 spring up. Under my hand I have a letter from 
 an Irish peasant which I think affords a beautiful 
 refutation of the idea that sentiment and match- 
 making cannot go together. Here is a passage from it : 
 " For the last few weeks I was anxiously engaged 
 at match-making, as matters were going from bad to 
 worse ; having no housekeeper, household jobs and 
 cares prevented me from attending to outside work. 
 Well, at last my match is made. The marriage is to 
 take place next Thursday. The ' young girl ' is 
 twenty-two years, and I thank God that I am per- 
 fectly satisfied with my life-companion-to-be. There 
 were many other matches introduced to me — far 
 more satisfactory from the financial point of view, 
 some having £zo^ some ^^30, and one ^40 more 
 fortune than my intended wife has, with whom I am 
 getting but ^^90, while I must ' by will ' give ^120 
 to my brother, leaving a deficit of ^^30 ; but, some- 
 how, I could not satisfy my mind with the other 
 ' good girls ' if they had over ;^200 — nay, at all. 
 And the poet's words were true when he said some- 
 thing like ' pity is akin to love'; pity I felt first for 
 my intended wife, with her simple, yet wise, unaf- 
 fected ways, not used to world's ways and wiles, 
 
 35 5-^ 
 
Ireland 
 
 ' an unspoiled child of Nature/ never flirted, never 
 went to dances, with the bloom of her maidenhood 
 fresh and pure, and fair and bright. When but a 
 last ^5 was between myself and her people re for- 
 tune, her very words to me were : ' Wisha, God help 
 me ! if I'm worth anything, I ought to be worth that 
 ^5.' That expression of hers stung me to the quick, 
 so openly, frankly, and innocently uttered, and ' I'm 
 getting other accounts, but would not marry anyone 
 but you.' Well, the end was in that one night, 
 sitting beside her in her father's house, the feeling of 
 pity changed to a warmer feeling, thank God ; for if 
 it didn't, I would rather live and die single than 
 marry against my will. ' 'Tisn't riches makes happi- 
 ness.' I've read somewhere that when want comes 
 in at the door, love flies out of the window ; but I 
 don't believe it — I don't believe it. And my brother 
 is kind ; he will be giving me time to pay the balance, 
 j^3o, by degrees." 
 
 The Irish are notoriously brave, yet they have a 
 fear of public opinion unknown to an Englishman. 
 Underneath their charmingly gay and open manner 
 there is a self-consciousness, a self-mistrust. For 
 all their keen sense of humour, they cannot bear 
 laughter directed at themselves. They dread to be 
 made absurd more than anything else in this world. 
 
 ?6 
 
The Irish People 
 
 They are responsive and sympathetic, yet too witty 
 not to be somewhat malicious ; and they are warm 
 and generous, yet not always so reliably kind as a 
 duller, slower people. They are irritable, so they 
 are less tolerant of children and animals, although 
 they make excellent nurses, as I have said. They 
 have no tolerance at all for slowness and stupidity, 
 very little for ugliness or want of charm. They 
 adore beauty, though it doesn't count for much in 
 their most intimate relations ; and it is not, therefore, 
 the paradise of plain women. 
 
 I have not touched on a hundredth part of their 
 contradictoriness, which makes the Irish so eternally 
 unexpected and interesting. They can be, as they say 
 themselves, " contrairy " when they choose — and 
 they often choose. Yet, when all is said and done, 
 they are the pleasantest people in the world. Nor 
 is their pleasantness insincere. They are pleasant 
 because they feel pleasant ; and an Irish man or 
 woman will pay you an amazing, fresh, audacious 
 compliment which an Englishman might feel, 
 but would rather die than say. 
 
 Did I say that the Celt was gay and melancholy ? 
 He is exquisitely gay and most profoundly melan- 
 choly. He is in touch with the other world, and 
 yet desperately afraid of it, or of the passage to it, 
 
 37 
 
Ireland 
 
 being a creature of fine nerves and apprehension ; 
 whence he will joke about death to cover up his real 
 repugnance, and yet hold the key to heaven as 
 securely as though it were the other side of the wall, 
 with a lonesome passage to be traversed. It is the 
 lonesomeness of death which makes it terrible to the 
 gregarious Irishman, although he knows that the 
 other side of the wall the kinsmen and friends and 
 neighbours await him, friendly and loving as of old. 
 
 CHAPTER V 
 
 SOUTH OF DUBLIN 
 
 If you go down from Dublin by the wonderful coast- 
 line or through the beautiful country inland which 
 runs by the base of the mountains, you will come 
 upon beautiful scenery, and find a population not at 
 all characteristically Irish. The beauty of Wicklow, 
 its wonderful woods, its deep glens, its placid waters, 
 its glorious mountains, is only less than the beauty of 
 Killarney, which is an earthly paradise. But in 
 Wicklow, in Wexford, in Waterford, the people's 
 blood is mixed. Sometimes it is Celt upon Celt, the 
 Welsh Celt upon the Irish. There are charming 
 people in Wicklow and Wexford and Waterford, but 
 
 38 
 
South of Dublin 
 
 to those counties belongs also what I call the cynical 
 Irishman — the Irishman without charm of manner, 
 the " independent " Irishman, who will not take oif 
 his hat to rank or age or sex ; yet he is Irish enough 
 in the core of him. And Wicklow and Wexford, with 
 Kildare and part of Meath, were the scenes of the 
 Rebellion in 1798. Perhaps the memory of those 
 days helps to make the Irishman of the south-east 
 corner of Ireland what he is, and that is often some- 
 thing very unlike the gracious Irishman of the South 
 and West. He has his resentments. I have heard 
 an Irishman say : " A Wexford man will never look 
 at a Tipperary man, because Tipperary didn't rise 
 in the Rebellion." The Rebellion, which was 
 hatched in the North by Ulster Presbyterians, broke 
 out, after all, in Wexford, and on a religious, and a 
 Catholic, cause of quarrel. There could have been 
 nothing farther from the thoughts of the leaders of 
 the united Irishmen than to make a religious war, 
 but that was what the Rebellion of 1798 turned out 
 to be — a religious war ; a war between Catholic and 
 Protestant, precipitated not by English intriguers, 
 say those who know well, but by outrageous insults 
 to the Catholic altars, led in many cases by priests on 
 the rebel side, foredoomed to failure in spite of the 
 desperate courage of the peasantry who for a time 
 
 39 
 
Ireland 
 
 swept all before them. One always thinks of Wex- 
 ford and the Rebellion simultaneously. It was a 
 time of cynical contrasts. Think of the poor 
 peasants, maddened by outrages to their altars, led 
 by their priests, carrying on the Rebellion planned 
 by Protestants of the North — by leaders deeply im- 
 bued with the French revolutionary spirit, which 
 was certainly not Christian ! Think of the Western 
 peasants, when Humbert and his men landed at 
 Killala, hailing those good comrades of the Revolu- 
 tion as fellow-Catholics, coming to meet them 
 decked out in religious emblems ! One of the 
 strangest and most cynical of these contrasts was the 
 fact that while the peasant army fought desperately 
 at New Ross, where they all but carried the day, on 
 the other side of the Barrow River men were plough- 
 ing peacefully in their fields, because it was Wexford 
 that was up and not their county. I suppose it is 
 the clan system which differentiates Irishmen by their 
 counties and their towns. Dublin is heterogeneous, 
 perhaps. It has, at all events, few distinguishing char- 
 acteristics, whereas Cork and Waterford men are as 
 widely apart almost as though they were of different 
 nationalities ; and both are agreed in despising 
 Dublin, although Dublin has made history in the last 
 hundred years — national history — more than either. 
 
 40 
 
:;*jr-- y 
 
 
 ■:^^.^ 
 
 ^y^ 
 
 ^^*^.#^-^ 
 
 ^^^^ 
 
 A WICKLOW QLEN. 
 
South of Dublin 
 
 The men who were the first begetters of the Re- 
 bellion, and the men who saved Ireland for the Eng- 
 lish Crown, were alike men of Anglo-Irish blood. The 
 Rebellion was put down by the Irish yeomanry, as 
 English statesmen had to acknowledge, however little 
 they liked the methods of their allies. The yeo- 
 manry did not make war with rose-water, any more 
 than they precipitated the Rebellion by gentle 
 methods. It is a bloody and brutal chapter of Irish 
 history, and the memories of it accounted for the 
 religious animosities which I remember in my youth, 
 which are fading out as the memories of the Re- 
 bellion are fading. The year 1798 has ceased to be a 
 landmark in Irish life. When I was a child, there yet 
 lived people who could tell at first hand or second 
 hand of the terrible happenings of those days. People 
 used to say, fixing an age : " He was born the year of 
 the Rebellion." Now all that has passed away. Even 
 in those times it was becoming more customary to 
 date events by the year of the Big Wind, 1839. 
 Now, with the establishment of parish registers — 
 which did not come in in Ireland till the sixties — 
 and the spread of newspapers and cheap knowledge 
 generally, such landmarks are no longer required ; 
 and the Big Wind of 1903 has wiped out the memory 
 of its predecessor. 
 
 IR. 41 6 
 
Ireland 
 
 In the mountains of Wicklow the insurgents of 
 those days found their refuges and their fastnesses 
 and their graves. I remember having seen some- 
 where near Roundwood, in the Wicklow Mountains, 
 in the midst of a ploughed field a long strip of 
 greenest grass covering the grave of many rebels. 
 The plough had gone round it ever since then, but 
 not a sod of it had been turned up ; it had remained 
 inviolate. 
 
 A great deal of Irish history gathers round the 
 Rebellion — the Rebellion, the Irish yet call it, as 
 though there had never been any other. The men 
 who made it were literary men, in a more vital sense 
 than the men of '48, who were also literary. Two 
 books of that day stand out pre-eminently — Lord 
 Edward Fitzgerald's " Life and Letters," edited by 
 Thomas Moore, and the Journal of Theobald Wolfe 
 Tone. Lord Edward had an exquisite style. His 
 letters are the frank revelation of a beautiful and 
 gallant and innocent mind and heart. Without de- 
 liberation, without knowledge, his family letters 
 achieved the highest art. They are immortal, im- 
 perishable things. 
 
 Then Tone's Journal is as remarkable a human 
 document. Tone swaggers through these pages 
 better than any hero of romance. Life, after all, is 
 
 42 
 
South of Dublin 
 
 the greatest artist, and one does not say, " Here is a 
 true Dumas hero ! Here is a true Stevenson hero !" 
 For Life is better than her children. 
 
 Nearly all the United Irish leaders left memoirs 
 or journals behind them. There was, perhaps, 
 something of the self-consciousness of the French 
 Revolution in this keeping a journal in the face of 
 battle. Anyhow, we are grateful to Holt, to 
 Teeling, to Cloney, for keeping alive for us those 
 days and those men. 
 
 In Lady Sarah Napier's letters you also get most 
 vivid glimpses of the Rebellion — as, indeed, you do 
 in the letters of the whole Leinster family. Mary 
 Ledbetter, that gentle Quakeress, of Ballitore, has 
 told her experiences of the Rebellion in Kildare ; 
 there is Bishop Stock's Narrative of the French 
 landing at Killala and those days in which he enter- 
 tained willy-nilly the French leaders and found 
 them the most considerate of guests. In fact, there 
 is a whole library of Rebellion literature. 
 
 I ask pardon for treating Wicklow and Wexford as 
 though they were the theatre of '98, and nothing 
 more ; but, indeed, in the story of Wexford the Re- 
 bellion stands up like White Mountain and Mount 
 Leinster, and one finds little else to say. 
 
 43 
 
 6- 
 
Ireland 
 
 CHAPTER VI 
 
 THE NORTH 
 
 Between Dublin and Newry there is not much to 
 see or to remember except that Cromwell sacked 
 Drogheda with a thoroughness, and that at Dundalk 
 Edward Bruce, the brother of Robert, was crowned 
 King of Ireland. The Mourne Mountains and 
 Carlingford Lough bring us back to characteristic 
 Ireland. Beyond them one enters the manufac- 
 turing districts — that north-east corner of Ireland 
 which no Celt looks upon as Ireland at all. In 
 speech, in character, in looks, the people become 
 Scotch and not Irish. One has crossed the border 
 and Celtic Ireland is left behind. 
 
 In the north-east corner of Ulster they are all busy 
 money-making and money-getting. The North of 
 Ireland has admirable qualities — thrift, energy, 
 industry, ambition, capacity. In other parts of 
 Ireland you find these qualities here and there ; they 
 are mainly, but not altogether, the qualities of the 
 Anglo-Irish — that is, in so far as they are a business 
 asset. The Celt has no real capacity for money- 
 
 44 
 
The North 
 
 making, though at the wrong end of the virtue of 
 thrift — that dreariest of the virtues — he may acxu- 
 mulate it. He will put an enormous deal of energy 
 into something that does not pay him in hard cash. 
 Honorary positions are greedily sought after by the 
 Irish everywhere. They will run any number of 
 societies for nothing, will do the business of Leagues, 
 of the Poor Law, of the County Councils. The 
 energy shown by the Celt in doing the public busi- 
 ness would enrich him if applied to his own. He 
 has a large capacity for public business, and an 
 extraordinary readiness to do it, which is, I suppose, 
 the reason why he does the public business of 
 America, while non-Irish Americans sit by and 
 grumble at his way of doing it. 
 
 In Ireland and in America he does hard manual 
 labour, but somehow the genius of finance is not his. 
 His hard work is on the land in one form or another. 
 Now and again he may build up quite a considerable 
 fortune in petty shop-keeping — the big traders are 
 nearly all Anglo-Irish — but when he does, his sons be- 
 come professional men and the business ceases to be. 
 One can hardly imagine in Celtic Ireland what occurs 
 every day in English business life, where the son of 
 a successful business man may be a public-school 
 man, a University man, and have had all the advan- 
 
 45 
 
Ireland 
 
 tages of wealth, and yet succeed his father in the 
 business. And his son succeeds him, and so on. 
 This, in Celtic Ireland, would, I fear, be taken as 
 indicative of a pettifogging spirit. The Anglo- 
 Irishman, on the contrary, succeeds to the business 
 his father has made, even though he be a University 
 man ; and the Grafton Street shops are often run 
 by men who are graduates and honourmen of the 
 University, and yet do not disdain to be seen in their 
 shops. 
 
 There is nothing Irish about North-East Ulster 
 except the country itself, which does not materially 
 alter its character, because it is studded with fac- 
 tories. From the streets of Belfast you see the Cave 
 Hill, as from easy-going Dublin you see the Dublin 
 Mountains. Perhaps there is something of exuber- 
 ance caught from the Celt in the paraphernalia and 
 ceremonial of the Orange Society. Who can say 
 how much of poetry it may not mean, that crowded 
 hour of glorious life which comes about mid-July, 
 when men who have worked side by side in amity all 
 the rest of the year suddenly become bitter enemies, 
 when the wearing of an Orange sash and the sight of 
 an Orange lily stir a fever in the blood ? 
 
 Apart from such occasions, they are given in Bel- 
 fast to minding their own business, and minding it 
 
 46 
 
The North ' 
 
 very well. The Belfast man is very shrewd, but he 
 has a great simplicity withal. He has none of the 
 uppish notions of the Celt, and though he makes 
 money he does not make it to display it. He is 
 blunt and brusque in his speech and manner, and so 
 not unlike his Lancashire brother. He lives simply. 
 In public matters he has the priceless advantage, in 
 Ireland, of knowing what he wants ; and he usually 
 gets it, unless his demands be too outrageous. He is 
 a hard man of business, but in his human relation- 
 ships he is kind and sincere. I have known exiles of 
 Dublin who went to Belfast in tears, and for the first 
 months or years of their residence were always 
 sighing after Dublin. When, however, they came 
 to know the man of the North — he takes a good deal 
 of knowing — nothing would induce them to return 
 to Dublin. 
 
 Like his Scottish progenitors, he stands by the 
 Bible. There is as much Bible-reading in the fine 
 red-brick mansions of Belfast as there is in Scotland. 
 He does not produce literature. The more artistic 
 parts of Ireland look down on him as one to whom 
 " boetry and bainting " are as unacceptable as they 
 were to the Second George. But he encourages 
 solid learning, and he endows seats of learning as 
 generously as does the American millionaire, who in 
 
 47 
 
Ireland 
 
 this respect offers an example to his English brother. 
 The Belfast man has the Scottish love of education. 
 He has many of the homespun Scottish virtues, and 
 much less than the Scottish love of money. 
 
 At the very gates of Belfast you find the Irish 
 country. The Glens of Antrim are as Irish as 
 Limerick or Clare. They are very beautiful, and not 
 much exploited. There is also the Giant's Cause- 
 way to see. The legend of its construction is that 
 Finn, the Irish giant, invited a Scotch giant over to 
 fight him, and generously provided the Causeway for 
 him to cross by ; but he played a nasty trick on him, 
 for he pretended to the Scottish giant when he came 
 that he was his own little boy. " If you are the 
 little son, what must your father be ?" the Scottish 
 giant is reported to have said before taking to his 
 heels. 
 
 I do not believe the story. I believe that the 
 Scottish giant came and stayed. You see his chil- 
 dren all over North-East Ulster. 
 
 There are women-poets whom one associates with 
 the North— Moira O'Neill of the Glens, and Alice 
 Milligan, a daughter of Belfast. They are both 
 
 " Kindly Irish of the Irish 
 Neither Saxon nor Italian," 
 
 nor Scottish. 
 
 48 
 
Cork and Thereabouts 
 
 CHAPTER VII 
 
 CORK AND THEREABOUTS 
 
 There is something of rich and racy association 
 about the very name of Cork — something that sug- 
 gests joviality, wit, a warm southern temperament. 
 Corkmen only out of all Ireland hold together. 
 The rest of Ireland may be fissiparous, disunited. 
 Corkmen cleave closer than Scotsmen to one another, 
 and to be a Corkman is to another Corkman a cloak 
 that covers a multitude of sins. A Corkman in 
 Dublin will have friends in all sorts of unlikely 
 places. What matter though a man be in a humble 
 rank of life — a cabman, a policeman, a postman, even 
 a scavenger ! So he be a Corkman, he has an appeal 
 to the heart of his brother Corkman. It is a Free- 
 masonry. There is nothing else like it in Ireland, nor 
 anywhere else, so far as I know ; for the Scotsman 
 coming into England may draw other Scotsmen to 
 follow him, but in the Scotch sticking together there 
 is less real affection than there is in the case of the 
 Corkman. To be able to exchange memories of 
 the Mardyke, of the River Lee, of Shandon and 
 ir. 49 7 
 
Ireland 
 
 Sunday's Well, is to make Corkmen brothers all 
 the world over. Cork looks on itself as the real 
 capital of Ireland, and has always its eye on a day 
 when Dublin will be dispossessed. 
 
 It has a most excellent situation on the River Lee, 
 and is surrounded by all manner of natural beauties. 
 There is plenty of business stirring, and there is a 
 good deal of opulence in Cork, where, Corkmen 
 being men of taste, they display it in their houses, 
 their way of living and on the persons of their beau- 
 tiful women, with the irresistible Cork brogue to 
 crown all their other charms. Cork is nothing if not 
 artistic. She has produced artists of all descriptions 
 — poets, painters, great newspaper men (was not 
 Delane of the l^imes a Corkman ?), musicians, sculp- 
 tors, orators, preachers. The words roll off the Cork 
 tongue sweet as honey. There is something extra- 
 ordinarily rich, gay and alluring about Cork and 
 Cork people. They were always audacious. They 
 set up Perkin Warbeck as a Pretender to the English 
 Crown, clad him in silks and velvets, and demanded 
 his acknowledgment at the hands of the Lord 
 Deputy. I do not know that as a city Cork took 
 a great part in any of the many Irish rebellions. 
 It would make a city of diplomatists because of 
 its honeyed tongue. Queen Elizabeth, they say, 
 
 SO 
 
Cork and Thereabouts 
 
 was the first one to talk of Blarney, which is a Cork 
 commodity. There was a certain McCarthy, Lord 
 of Blarney, who would not come in and submit to 
 the Queen's forces, though week by week he promised 
 to come and kept the Queen's anger off by cozening 
 words. " It is all Blarney," the Queen came to say 
 of fair words that meant nothing ; but that is 
 a derivation I somewhat suspect. I do not know 
 what Cork was doing in the Desmond Rebellion, of 
 the results of which Spenser has left us so harrowing a 
 description. She was perhaps enjoying herself after 
 the fashion of that day. Spenser married a Cork- 
 woman, and has enshrined her in the " Epithala- 
 mion," the most beautiful love-poem in the English 
 language. Cork has its links with the Golden Age of 
 England, for Raleigh was at Youghal, and Spenser at 
 Kilcolman close by ; and in Raleigh's house at 
 Youghal they show you the oriel in which Spenser sat 
 and read the " Faerie Queene " to his host, the 
 Shepherd of the Ocean. Youghal and all that part 
 of the country round about Cork is steeped in tradi- 
 tions and memories. St. Mary's Collegiate Church 
 at Youghal might be in an English town, and there 
 are malls and promenades in those parts, with high, 
 crumbling houses, which suggest the English civiliza- 
 tion of the Middle Ages and not the Irish civiliza- 
 
 51 7—2 
 
Ireland 
 
 tion before the Norman Conquest. The Normans 
 were great church-builders, but of their churches, 
 as in the case of the old Abbey of St. Francis at 
 Youghal, there remain now only ruins — a naked 
 gable standing up amid a wilderness of graves, 
 buried in coarse grasses, which, when I was there, 
 had a greater decency towards the dead than had 
 the living. For it is strange that the Irish, who love 
 the dead, have little piety towards their graves. 
 
 From Youghal Sir Walter Raleigh sailed away to 
 Virginia on his last disastrous voyage. Spenser had 
 gone back to London earlier than that, heart-broken 
 by the loss of his little son, who was burnt to death 
 in a fire at Kilcolman Castle. Raleigh and Spenser 
 had received grants of the lands of the attainted 
 Desmonds. Very little profit either had of them, 
 and Raleigh's lands passed to the Earl of Cork, com- 
 monly called " the Great," whose flaring chapel de- 
 stroys the quiet of St. Mary's dim aisles and chancel. 
 Never was there so worldly a monument as this of 
 Robert Boyle, his mother, his two wives, and his nine 
 children, all in hideously painted and decorated 
 Italian marble. The fierce eyes of the great Earl 
 are something to remember with dismay. 
 
 I recall the evidence the great Earl adduced to prove 
 that Sir Walter did really hand him over his Irish 
 
 52 
 
Cork and Thereabouts 
 
 estates on the eve of that journey to Virginia — for a 
 small consideration of money and plenishing for the 
 expedition. " If you do not take the lands, some 
 Scot will have them," said, or is reported to have 
 said, Sir Walter, which reminds us that Jamie had 
 succeeded Elizabeth, and was already transplanting 
 his Scots — Jamie, who was to keep so brilliant a bird 
 as Sir Walter in so squalid a cage as a prison till 
 he made up his mind to send him to the block. 
 Youghal is haunted by Sir Walter and Spenser. My 
 memories of the place in a windy autumn are bright- 
 ened by sudden gleams, as of splendid attire and 
 golden olive faces with the Elizabethan ruff and the 
 Elizabethan pointed beard. 
 
 The Blackwater, which runs through Youghal, 
 dropping into the sea at that point, had at Rhincrew 
 Point its House of Knights Templars. From Youghal 
 they also sailed away in search of El Dorado, but a 
 heavenly one. May they have found it ! 
 
 And also there is Templemichael, of the Earls of 
 Desmond, the southern branch of the Fitzgeralds, 
 which Cromwell battered down for " dire insolence." 
 There is a story of a Desmond lord who was buried 
 across the water at Ardmore, the holy place of St. 
 Declan, where there is a pilgrimage and a patronage 
 to this day. But holy as Ardmore was and is, Earl 
 
 S3 
 
Ireland 
 
 Gerald could not sleep there. He wanted to be back 
 at Templemicliael, where his young wife lay in her 
 lonely grave. So that night after night there came 
 a terrible cry, " Garault Arointha ! Garault Aroin- 
 tha !"— that is to say : " Give Gerald a ferry !" So 
 at last some of his faithful followers rowed over by 
 night, took up the body of Earl Gerald, and carried 
 it back to Templemichael and to the dead Countess's 
 side. And after that Earl Gerald slept in peace. 
 
 My memory of Youghal in that far-away windy 
 autumn is compounded of three or four things. 
 There was purple wistaria hanging in great masses 
 over the walls of the college which was the founda- 
 tion of one of the Desmonds. There was provision 
 there for so many singing men — twenty, was it ? — 
 who were to sing in St. Mary's choir. The great 
 Earl of Cork had a great maw, one that never suf- 
 fered from indigestion. The revenues of St. Mary's 
 College went the same way as Sir Walter's slice of the 
 Desmond lands. Then, again, in a little shop- 
 window of the town, there was a glorious show of 
 fruit — great scarlet-skinned tomatoes, gorgeous 
 plums and pears and apples, which reminded one 
 that Raleigh had planted orchards at Aifane, on the 
 Blackwater. As a rule, fruit is sadly to seek in a 
 small Irish town, although Cork produces some of 
 
 54 
 
Cork and Thereabouts 
 
 the finest fruit I have ever seen. Then, again, there 
 was a room in Raleigh's house, Myrtle Grove, unlit 
 save for the flicker of firelight, the darkness all about 
 us, and an old voice bidding us to notice the earthy 
 smell, which was supposed to enter the room from 
 a subterranean passage that led to St. Mary's. 
 
 Again, I have another widely different memory. 
 It is of a fine, tall, beautifuUy-complexioned girl 
 standing behind the counter of a draper's shop, her 
 shining red-golden head showing against a back- 
 ground of little plaid shawls and kerchiefs, while she 
 lamented in her wailing southern brogue the fact 
 that no one could hope to get married in Youghal, 
 unless one had ;£300 to buy an old " widda-man "; 
 and they were all the men that were going. 
 
 I like to get back from Youghal and its ghosts, and 
 Rosanna, who never thought of rebelling against the 
 marriage customs of her forbears, to cheerful Cork 
 of the living and not the dead, with her tramcars, 
 her jingles — the curious covered car which takes 
 the place of the outside car in other Irish towns 
 — her citizens laughing and button-holing each 
 other with a greater gaiety than the Dubliners ; her 
 excellent shops, her beautiful girls promenading 
 Patrick Street, her club-houses, her churches, her 
 Queen's College, and all the rest of it, down to her 
 
 SS 
 
Ireland 
 
 river with its busy steamers. Cork's citizens live 
 outside her gates, at Monkstown, at Blackrock, at 
 Glenbrook ; and the busy steamers carry them to 
 and fro by the loveliest of waterways. " Are the 
 steamers punctual ?" I asked a Cork friend. " Is it 
 punctual ?" repeated he. " They're the most punc- 
 tual things in Ireland, for they always get in before 
 their time." 
 
 Father Mathew is one of Cork's memories ; Father 
 Prout is another; Dr. Maginn is another. But the 
 list of Cork's worthies is a long one, and I shall not 
 enter upon it here. 
 
 Cork has the most enervating climate for one who 
 comes to it from more northern latitudes. It is always 
 soft and warm, and often wet. " Good heavens !" 
 said John Mitchel, when he came back from twenty 
 years or so of Australia, gliding in by Spike Island 
 in that same silver mist of rain in which he had gone 
 out, " isn't that shower over yet ?" The flowers are 
 wonderful in Cork, as well as the fruit. I have seen 
 the suburban gardens of Corkmen a luxuriance of 
 vivid, closely packed, overflowing blossom. Myrtles 
 and fuchsias grow in the open air. There are hedges 
 of fuchsias at Killarney. There are hydrangeas also ; 
 but the same is true of Dublin and its precincts. No 
 one coming in from outside has energy to do any- 
 
 56 
 
Cork and Thereabouts 
 
 thing in Cork. But the Corkman lacks nothing of 
 energy, nothing of the joy of life. He is a keen 
 business man, and there is plenty of industrial 
 enterprise. He is interested in the affairs of 
 the world at large and of Cork in particular. He 
 has his enthusiasms. He is a tremendous politician, 
 and does not mind being on the losing side so 
 long as it is the right one. He is a sportsman and 
 a bit of a gambler ; he makes love and is a good 
 friend. The place is full of wit and gaiety and 
 humour. His standard of living when he has money, 
 or ought to have it, is an unusually high one for Ire- 
 land. Some of those successful merchants live, I am 
 told, like merchant princes. He is lavish and gene- 
 rous, and fond of display — altogether a rich, abun- 
 dant, highly-coloured character. He lives in an 
 atmosphere of incessant wit and humour. Hardly 
 a man in Cork but has his nickname. " There goes 
 Billy Boulevard," you hear, and you are told that 
 the gentleman so designated desired to embellish 
 Patrick Street with trees. But it was in Dublin that 
 they called one who had made his money in pneu- 
 matic tyres, and was exalted above his humbler 
 neighbours, " Lord Tyre and Side-on." 
 
 IR. 57 
 
Ireland 
 
 CHAPTER VIII 
 
 GALWAY 
 
 Galway is so synonymous with racy Irish life that 
 a peep at Ireland must be incomplete unless it in- 
 cludes a peep at Galway. It is full of the strangest 
 monuments of the past. It was once a town of the 
 Irishry, in the O' Flaherty country. But with the 
 Norman Conquest there came in that group of 
 Anglo-Norman families known as the Tribes, who in 
 course of time went the way of all their compeers, 
 becoming more Irish than the Irish. " Lord !" said 
 Edmund Spenser, " how quickly doth that country 
 alter men's natures !" The Tribes were, and are — for 
 happily there are still the Tribes of Galway — thirteen? 
 viz. : Athy, Blake, Bodkin, Browne, D'Arcy, Font, 
 French, Joyce, Kirwan, Lynch, Martin, Morris, and 
 Skerrett. These Tribes became responsible in time 
 for so much of the wild and picturesque life of the 
 Irish gentry of the eighteenth century — the duelling, 
 the drinking, the racing, the gambling, the general 
 devil-may-care life — that Galway looms more largely, 
 perhaps, than any town in the social history of Ireland. 
 
 S8 
 
Galway 
 
 Galway drew up a code for duellists known as the 
 Galway Code ; and in the irresponsible life of the 
 eighteenth century, such as you find in Miss Edge- 
 worth's " Castle Rackrent " and in Lever's novels, 
 the life which the Encumbered Estates Act put a 
 period to, the names of the Tribes figure oftener 
 than more Celtic names. For the picturesque wild- 
 ness of Irish life was the wildness of the settlers 
 rather than the wildness of the native Irish. 
 
 However, in the great days of Galway's trade with 
 Spain and other continental ports, traces of which are 
 scattered all over the old ruined city, which is as 
 much Spanish as it is Irish, the Tribes were just 
 merchant princes, not anticipating the time when, 
 more Hibernico, they should fling trade to the winds 
 and become the maddest crew of dare-devils known 
 in the social life of any country. And here I find, 
 in the record of the duelling and drinking days, 
 traces and indications of the English descent of the 
 roysterers. For certainly there was a lack of humour 
 in the actors, though none for the spectator ; there 
 was a solemnity — not always a drunken solemnity — 
 in the way their pranks were performed that was not 
 Celtic ; for the Celt has a terrible sense of the ridicu- 
 lous. Doubtless it was from his Anglo-Irish betters 
 that the Celt derived the habit of " trailing his coat " 
 
 59 8—2 
 
Ireland 
 
 through a fair when he was spoiling for a fight, 
 though, to do him justice, he practised it only when 
 he was drunk. The Anglo-Irish duellists inaugu- 
 rated the custom. When on no pretext could they 
 find a friend or neighbour to kill or be killed by, they 
 went out and " trailed the coat," like the gentleman 
 who rode on a tailless horse, with his face to the 
 crupper, and, seeing an unwary stranger smile, im- 
 mediately challenged him, and rode home in huge 
 delight to look to his pistols. They were extremely 
 solemn over their pranks. One wonders how often 
 the Celtic servants had a smile behind their hand 
 at such strange goings-on of their masters, which 
 would not have been possible to the self-conscious 
 Celt. 
 
 Over one of the gates of Galway was the pious 
 legend, " From the ferocious O' Flaherties, good 
 Lord deliver us !" I have heard of other inscrip- 
 tions referring to other Irish septs over the remaining 
 gates of the town, but those I think are apocryphal. 
 The fact remains that the Tribes, having seized the 
 town of the Irish after their rapacious Norman 
 manner, were obliged to wall it against the O' Flaher- 
 ties, and doubtless often slept ill at night because of 
 the wild Irish battering at their gates, as did their 
 brothers of the English pale up in Dublin. 
 
 60 
 
Galway 
 
 Galway would at that time have been well worth 
 sacking. A traveller of the early seventeenth cen- 
 tury reports : " The merchants of Galway are rich 
 and great adventurers at sea : their commonalitie is 
 composed of the descendants of the ancient English 
 families of the towne : and rairlie admit of any 
 new English among them, and never of any of 
 the Irish ; they keep good hospitalitie and are 
 kind to strangers, and in their manner of enter- 
 tainment and in fashioninge and apparellynge 
 themselves and their wives do most preserve the 
 ancient manners and state of annie towne that ever 
 I saw." 
 
 They had their enactments against the Irish, in- 
 cluding the MacWilliam Burkes, who had gone over 
 to the Irish, bag and baggage : 
 
 " That none of the towne buy cattle out of the 
 country but only of true men. 
 
 " That no man of the towne shall sell galley, bote 
 or barque to an Irishman. 
 
 " That no person shall give or sell to the Irish any 
 munition as hand-povins, calivres, poulter, leade, nor 
 salt-peter, nor yet large bowes, cross-bowes, cross- 
 bowe strings, nor yearne to make the same, nor any 
 kind of weapon on payn to forfayt the same and an 
 hundred shyllinges. 
 
 6i 
 
Ireland 
 
 " If anie man being an Irishman to brag and boste 
 upon the towne, to forfayt 12 pence. 
 
 " That no man of this towne shall ostle or receive 
 into their house at Christmasse or Easter nor no feast 
 elles, anny of the Burkes MacWilliams, the Kellies, 
 nor no septs elles, without the licence of the Maior 
 and Council on payn to forfayt ^5. That neither 
 O' ne Mac shall strutt or swagger through the streets 
 of Gal way." 
 
 You still find traces of the commerce of the 
 Tribes with Spain, not only in the old Spanish build- 
 ings of the town, but in the black Spanish eyes and 
 hair of the people. I remember to have been struck 
 in Donegal by a dignity, a loftiness of bearing, as 
 well as by a height and stateliness of the peasant 
 people that made one murmur " Spanish " to one's 
 own ear. 
 
 One of the sights of Galway is the ruins of the 
 house from the window of which James Lynch Fitz- 
 Stephen, a Chief Magistrate of Galway in 1493, 
 hanged his only son for murder with his own hand, 
 lest the townspeople should rescue him. The house 
 is called The Cross Bones nowadays, and is situated 
 most appropriately in Dead-Man's Lane. There 
 remains but an old wall, with a couple of doorways 
 having the pointed Spanish arches and some ornate 
 
 62 
 
Galway 
 
 window-spaces above. There is a tablet on the wall, 
 
 bearing a skull and cross-bones, with the inscription : 
 
 " Remember Deathe, 
 Vaniti of vaniti% all is but vaniti." 
 
 Some people believe that this Lynch is the " onlie 
 begetter " of Lynch Law. This, however, I do not 
 believe, and I think it more likely to have been de- 
 rived from a Lynch of the mining-camps in Southern 
 California, who was the first to promulgate and put 
 in practice the wild justice of execution without 
 judge or jury. Anyhow, I cannot see that the ex- 
 ample of James Lynch FitzStephen was an admirable 
 one, and I do not believe the legend that he died 
 heart-broken as a result of his own stern sense of 
 justice. 
 
 The palmy days of the Tribes were over with the 
 Reformation, for they did not cease to be Catholics, 
 and so were in no great favour with the predominant 
 partner. Galway also stood for the King against 
 the Parliament, was besieged and taken by the Par- 
 liamentary soldiers under Ludlow, who stabled his 
 horses, according to report, in St. Nicholas's Cathe- 
 dral. After that Galway's great prosperity as a 
 trading centre passed away, and the Tribes scattered 
 among the ferocious O' Flaherties and others of 
 their sort and became country gentlemen, with a 
 
 63 
 
Ireland 
 
 noble contempt for trade. The situation of Gal- 
 way, on its magnificent Bay, still cries out for com- 
 merce. The spectacle of Galway as a port of call for 
 American steamers has dangled before the eyes of the 
 Galwegians for a long time without being realized, 
 although they made preparations for it long ago, by 
 building a hotel that would house a Mauretania- 
 load of travellers. 
 
 Only the other day I listened to a Galway Tribesman 
 conversing with someone who had lived in Galway, 
 and who asked after the old places and persons. 
 " What's become of So-and-so ?" " He's just the 
 same as ever ; not a bit of change in him. He comes 
 home every night strapped to the outside car to keep 
 him from falling off." " And what's become of So- 
 and-so ?" " Oh, he's done very well for himself. 
 His father says, * Mac's all right ; he's got the run of 
 a kitchen in Yorkshire,' meaning that he married an 
 English heiress." 
 
 This conversation made me feel that to some 
 extent Galway stands where it did. 
 
 The Claddagh fishing village by Galway is some- 
 thing not to be missed. It keeps itself to itself, with 
 a reserve Celtic or Spanish or anything else you like, 
 but not English. It used to be ruled by its own 
 King, who was just a fisherman like his subjects, 
 
 64 
 
Galway 
 
 and was not exalted in his manner of living by his 
 royal state. He was chosen for his governing powers 
 and his mental and moral qualities, and his subjects 
 were ruled by him with a despotism that was never 
 anything but fatherly. They intermarried, too, 
 among themselves — I do not know if this usage sur- 
 vives — and their ring of betrothal, handed on from 
 one generation to another, has a design of two hands 
 holding up a heart. At the Claddagh they still have 
 the Blessing of the Sea, but they will not make a 
 show of it, and even the Galway people are kept in 
 ignorance of the time when the ceremony takes 
 place. 
 
 CHAPTER IX 
 
 DONEGAL OF THE STRANGERS 
 
 It once fell to my lot to make a hasty scamper 
 through Donegal from end to end ; that is to say, as 
 far as possible, I made the circuit of the county, be- 
 ginning with Ballyshannon, following the coast-line, 
 with divergences, from Donegal to Gweedore, going 
 round by Bloody Foreland, by Falcarragh and Dun- 
 fanaghy, and ending up by way of Letterkenny at 
 iR. 65 9 
 
Ireland 
 
 iBallyshannon again. I took ten or twelve days to 
 do it — perhaps a fortnight — staying each night at an 
 inn. To Gweedore I devoted the best portion of a 
 week. Now, in that scamper I had a very character- 
 istic peep at Ireland. I missed, indeed, the wild 
 gaiety of the South. Donegal people are somewhat 
 sorrowful. But I found plenty of types and racy 
 life nevertheless. 
 
 It is a good many years ago now ; and travelling in 
 Donegal has been simplified since then by the light 
 railways with which the names of Mr. Arthur Balfour 
 and Mr. Gerald Balfour are gratefully associated. 
 When I was there I drove through the country, only 
 taking the train from Letterkenny to Ballyshannon 
 on my return journey; and it was an excellent, though 
 somewhat expensive, way of seeing the country. 
 However, the hospitality was so wonderful that one 
 only slept and breakfasted in one's hotel. For the 
 rest, the kind priests were only too eager to give 
 hospitality to myself and my companion. 
 
 At Ballyshannon we stayed a night in one of those 
 enormous old hotels with a maze of winding pas- 
 sages, which suggest to one in the dead waste and 
 middle of the night that in case of a fire one never 
 could get out. The next day we came upon the 
 first of the priests, who carried us off to see every- 
 
 66 
 
Donegal of the Strangers 
 
 thing that could be seen of Ballyshannon, including 
 a visit to Abbey Assaroe, which we knew already in 
 William Allingham's poetry. To the grief of these 
 kind friends of ours, we insisted on going off the 
 same afternoon to Donegal town, to which we were 
 driven by " WuUie "—the first " WuUie "—a red- 
 haired, taciturn youth, who suspected us of laughing 
 at him and was closer than an oyster. Your English 
 man or woman is the truly expansive person. When 
 you want to get at anything from an Irishman you've 
 got to sit down and wait for the charmed moment 
 when his suspicion of you is put to sleep. Dr. 
 Douglas Hyde got his Religious Songs and Love 
 Songs of Connacht by sitting over the turf fire in 
 a cabin, taking a " shaugh " of the pipe and offering 
 a fill of it, passing round a flask of poteen, perhaps. 
 It might be hours, and it might be days, and it might 
 be weeks before you broke down the barrier of re- 
 serve, well worth the breaking-down if you have 
 " worlds enough and time." You can't travel 
 twenty miles in an English third-class carriage before 
 you have the intimate confidence of your fellow- 
 passengers. You are told which relative died of 
 cancer, with harrowing details, which is in a mad- 
 house, and which in gaol ; for the plain English 
 people are the most unreserved in the world, while 
 
 67 9—3 
 
Ireland 
 
 the Irish are the most reticent. And if you win a 
 flow of talk from the Irish peasants, be sure they are 
 talking round what they have to tell by way of lead- 
 ing you away from it ; for an Irishman uses language 
 to conceal his thoughts. 
 
 We hadn't " worlds enough and time " for 
 " WuUie." His lips were tight-locked from Bally- 
 shannon to Donegal. 
 
 The next day we saw what was to be seen of the 
 Castle, under the guidance of the parish priest, whom 
 we met walking in the Diamond. We introduced 
 ourselves to him. He was a delightful, humorous, 
 stately, kindly old man, and he looked at us when he 
 met us with an eye that asked : " Who are you and 
 what is your business in Donegal ?" It is a way the 
 priests have in the remote parts of Ireland, where 
 they are everything to their flocks. Being reassured, 
 he gave his day to our entertainment, taking us to 
 see some of his parishioners when he had shown us 
 all the town contained of interest. 
 
 Killybegs I remember as a beautiful bay, big 
 enough to take in the whole English fleet. The next 
 day we went on to Kilcar, where we found our third 
 priest, who lived in a delightfully clean little cabin 
 with a clay floor. His housekeeper was barefooted, 
 but he had dainty table appointments. I remember 
 
 68 
 
Donegal of the Strangers 
 
 that he had very good china, and he explained that 
 his mother had given it to him. He was the son of 
 rather wealthy people. We had a meal of fish, with 
 a little fruit to follow ; and while we ate it a messen- 
 ger was out prospecting for the loan of an outside 
 car for the priest. Sure enough, by the time we had 
 finished the meal the car was at the door, and our 
 host carried us off to see the Caves of Muckross, some 
 six miles away. Incidentally, we saw Bunglass, that 
 magnificent cliff-face where Slieve League drops 
 into the sea. I remember a visit we paid to a cottage 
 where a father sat at the loom weaving, the mother 
 was carding wool, and a black-haired daughter was 
 sprigging muslin by the little narrow square window. 
 A scarlet geranium in the window seemed to be in 
 her night-black hair, and her tears flowed when our 
 little priest spoke to her. He told us that her lover 
 had married a richer girl and gone to America. I 
 can remember quite well walking up a mountain 
 road where the friendly little lambs came and trotted 
 a bit of the way with us, and the voice of the young 
 priest as he told us of the innocence of the people — 
 " not a sin in it from year's end to year's end," for 
 they were too poor to drink — and how his ambition 
 was to get away to the East End of London, where 
 there was something to do for a born fighter. 
 
 69 
 
Ireland 
 
 A night at the excellent hotel at Carrick and the 
 next day we were at Glencolumkille, that wild and 
 lonely glen between the mountains and the sea, with 
 the majestic Glen Head standing out into the At- 
 lantic. In the Glen are twelve crosses of stone, 
 where pilgrims make the stations in honour of St. 
 Columba or Columkille, the Dove of the Churches. 
 Above Lough Gartan, on Eithne's Bed, he was born, 
 and any who lie there shall not have the pangs of 
 home-sickness ; wherefore many emigrants stretch 
 themselves upon that rocky couch before they cross 
 " the Green Fields to America." The Glen is full 
 of the noise and thunder of the waves, and Slieve 
 League lies superbly up in the sky, reminding one 
 of Browning — 
 
 "The hills, like giants at a hunting, lay." 
 
 At Glencolumkille we met the fourth of our 
 priests — a tall, thin, Spanish-looking youth, who 
 came to meet us with a collie at his heels. Glen- 
 columkille is very lonesome. There is only an Irish- 
 speaking peasant population of the very poorest, and 
 the nearest one with whom our priest could exchange 
 a word on his own level was some seven Irish miles 
 away. He gave us an impression of immense loneli- 
 ness, although his joy at having someone to entertain 
 irradiated his melancholy, handsome face with cheer- 
 
 70 
 
Donegal of the Strangers 
 
 fulness. He was rejoiced that by the greatest of good 
 luck he had a bit of meat for dinner, for fish is the 
 staple food of the Glen. He was very much interested 
 in news from the great world, and produced with 
 some pride a copy of the Daily Telegraph, several 
 days old, to prove that he kept in touch with the 
 world. He told us that he was the youngest of a 
 large family, and his home was as far away as Dublin. 
 Over nearly a score of years I have the most vivid 
 impression of the lonely figure, the dog at his heels, 
 as we left Glencolumkille behind us. He had made 
 us free of his house and hospitality, and parted from 
 us with the utmost unwillingness. 
 
 Ardara, Glenties, Dungloe — I think of them, 
 little villages lying amongst gorgeous mountains, and 
 remember that in those gloomy and frowning fast- 
 nesses the Irish were safe against Cromwell's 
 planters, since what man who could choose, not being 
 Irish, would desire to live in such a place ? A 
 Donegal farm is something to remember. The one 
 crop the ground grows freely is stones — stones in 
 millions, boulders as great sometimes as a small 
 house. There are glens that are nothing but stones 
 from end to end, about as promising ground as the 
 Giant's Causeway for a farmer. In such places you 
 may see a little field, the size of a tablecloth, snatched 
 
 71 
 
Ireland 
 
 from the aridity of Nature by the incredible industry 
 of man. Everywhere in Donegal man asks Nature 
 for bread and she gives him a stone, unless it be the 
 harvest of the sea, which he snatches from her at the 
 price of his life, it may be. 
 
 I saw Donegal in April, softened as much as might 
 be by the wild April showers and the bursts of 
 April sunshine. The clouds and the mountains, the 
 cliffs and the sea — Slieve League, Errigal, Muckish, 
 Bunglass, Horn Head, the Glen Head, Tory Island- 
 were all beautiful beyond telling, with a wild and 
 stormy magnificence of beauty. I try to imagine 
 their desolation in winter and fail to realize it. 
 
 Ardara I remember by the beauty of Glengesh on 
 an April day, with a hundred streams running down 
 its sides ; and at Ardara we halted on Sunday, and 
 knelt in the gallery of the church, looking down at 
 the peasants kneeling in rows on the stone floor 
 before the altar. The doors were wide open, and 
 birds wheeled in from the sunlight and out again 
 with flashing wings ; and the air was exquisite, fresh 
 and wild and sweet. 
 
 At Gweedore, as I have said, we tarried nearly a 
 week, held there by the hospitality of the parish 
 priest, who would have us see everything thoroughly. 
 We stayed at an idyllic little inn, and were fed on the 
 
 72 
 
Donegal of the Strangers 
 
 best and simplest fare : stirabout, made as only the 
 Irish can make it ; home-made bread ; delicious 
 butter, new-laid eggs ; little delicate chickens, with 
 green parsley sauce and boiled bacon, potatoes, 
 and cabbage, cooked as only the Irish can cook 
 them ; for in certain simple dishes of their own the 
 Irish cannot be beaten. 
 
 There was a most picturesque waiting-maid, a shy 
 little girl, as pretty as a picture, who wore a pink 
 cotton frock, and had pink bare feet showing under 
 it, who had the softest, most appealing of voices. 
 
 At the inn our priest found us, sallying in with his 
 great blackthorn in his hand to see who were the 
 strange visitors to the Glen. He was a redoubtable 
 priest — the Law of Gweedore, they called him — and 
 he sheltered his people as the hen sheltereth her 
 chickens. The Glen was exquisitely clean from end 
 to end, though starveling poor. But the priest saw 
 to it that they did not starve. 
 
 For four or five days, perhaps, we abode in this 
 little inn, where the Glen opens out to the sea. We 
 visited the people in their cottages, under the guid- 
 ance of our redoubtable fadre, and saw all there was 
 to be seen. His hospitality was unbounded, al- 
 though at the time there was a wide and bitter divi- 
 sion in politics between us. 
 
 iR. 73 10 
 
Ireland 
 
 I shall not soon forget the manner of our going. 
 We had come now almost to the end of our 
 journey, and it was desirable that we should return 
 to Dublin as quickly as possible. He wanted us 
 to make the journey round by Bloody Foreland, 
 and we wanted to do it as shortly as possible, 
 striking inland to meet the mail-car for Letter- 
 kenny at, I think, Gortahork. But we knew better 
 than to say " No " to the Law of Gweedore ; so we 
 thought to slip away early in the morning, and made 
 our arrangements the last thing at night, after 
 leaving his hospitable roof. 
 
 But the Law of Gweedore knew all that happened 
 in Gweedore. A full hour before we had appointed 
 for being called we were called. His Reverence had 
 arranged our conveyance, and faid for it — paid also, 
 I think, for a luncheon-basket. Willy-nilly, we went 
 round by Bloody Foreland and visited the evicted 
 tenants, crouching under scraws and twigs, in shelters 
 which suggested the caves of the earth-dwellers 
 rather than anything fit for man. 
 
 Gortahork I remember as a place where we had a 
 good meal of tea and hot cakes and eggs, and other 
 things thrown in, for a shilling. And I remember 
 also the long, long drive to Letterkenny — some forty 
 miles it was, I seem to remember, but shall not 
 
 74 
 
Donegal of the Strangers 
 
 pledge myself to it lest I be confuted — and how we 
 dashed along the sides of precipices, we on one side 
 of the car, with our feet almost touching earth, the 
 other side high in air, being weighted only with empty 
 parcel-post hampers, of which Donegal needs no 
 great supply ; below us — far, far below — a valley 
 filled in with mighty stones and rocks. The pace 
 was so fast that we could hardly keep our seats, 
 though well accustomed to that car which the un- 
 lettered English tripper is apt to call " a jolting 
 car "; and the driver was quite unaware of our dis- 
 comfort, assuring us with as much jocularity as a 
 Donegal man permits himself that the horses never 
 were known to stumble, and that, although an occa- 
 sional English tourist did fall off, he or she always 
 " fell soft." 
 
 After all, when I look back to that scamper through 
 Donegal sixteen years ago, I remember the moun- 
 tains and the priests. Monuments of a beautiful 
 hospitality, the priests for me mark the wild ways 
 up and down Donegal. 
 
 75 
 
 10- 
 
Ireland 
 
 CHAPTER X 
 
 IRISH TRAITS AND WAYS 
 
 An English person in Ireland may find himself astray 
 because he will have no clue to the minds of the people. 
 I once heard two English ladies returning from an 
 Irish trip say to each other across a railway-carriage, 
 otherwise full of Irish people, that the Irish all told 
 lies. This was a rash judgment and a harsh one ; I 
 do not know what the occasion of it was. Some- 
 times the Irish, through their naturally gracious 
 manners, will say the thing that will please you best 
 to hear rather than the absolute truth by rule of 
 thumb. There is the well-known, well-founded 
 complaint about Irish distances ; a peasant will tell 
 you that you are three miles from a place when 
 you are really seven. Now, of course you may be 
 misled by the difference between the Irish and Eng- 
 lish mile ; and thereby hangs a tale. The Irish or 
 Plantation measure was adopted by Cromwell's 
 planted English, so that they might get a bigger slice 
 of land than was intended for them. But if you 
 are told you have three Irish miles to go and find 
 
 76 
 
Irish Traits and Ways 
 
 that you have seven, almost certainly the thought 
 uppermost in your misinformant's mind was : " The 
 crathur ! Sure, he'll think nothin' of it if he believes 
 it's only three miles ; and the spring 'ud be taken out 
 of him altogether if he thought he'd seven weary 
 miles before him yet. And, sure, by the time he's 
 travelled the three miles he won't be far off the 
 seven." 
 
 The Irish mind, besides being very nimble, is 
 subtle and complicated. It may have gone off on an 
 excursion before answering you which you in your 
 Anglo-Saxon plainness would never dream of ; and 
 your truth may not be the Irish truth at all, and yet 
 both of them be the genuine article. 
 
 A very small Irish boy of my acquaintance, being 
 rudely accused of having told a lie, responded 
 meekly : " I don't think it were really a lie ; I think 
 it were only an imagination." 
 
 " Are there any priests in the town ?" you 
 ask an Irishman ; and he replies, there being 
 some half-dozen : " The streets are black with 
 them." 
 
 " You can't always depend on eggs, not if they 
 comes in fresh from the nest," said an Irish servant 
 to me, when some of the grocer's " new-laid " eggs 
 had " popped " in the saucepan. The remark was 
 
 11 
 
Ireland 
 
 purely consolatory and was not at all intended to 
 convey that the hens laid stale eggs. 
 
 The Irish " bull," so-called, very often is the result 
 of the nimble-wittedness of the speaker. He has 
 thought more than he has expressed, and the bull 
 implies a hiatus. " I'd better be a coward for 
 ten minutes than be dead all my life " is a famous 
 example of an Irish bull ; but it only means " all 
 the days of my natural life "; so much was not 
 expressed. 
 
 My harsh critics of the London and North- Western 
 express would doubtless have found the soft, flatter- 
 ing ways of the Irish false and hypocritical. One 
 remembers the famous compliment, " No matter 
 what age you are, ma'am, you don't look it," and the 
 historical compliment of the Irish coal-porter to one 
 of the beautiful Gunnings : " Sure, I could light my 
 pipe by the fire of her eye." 
 
 Sometimes a compliment or a wheedling good 
 wish will take a sudden turn. " May the blessin' of 
 God go afther you !" says an Irish beggar — " may 
 the blessin' of God go afther you !" The desired 
 alms not being forthcoming, the blessing flows 
 naturally into — " and never overtake you." 
 
 The beggars are great wits, of a sardonic kind 
 usually. A rather short friend of mine walking with 
 
 78 
 
Irish Traits and Ways 
 
 his tall sister, the two were importuned fruitlessly by 
 a beggar-woman. Before they passed out of hearing 
 she called gently to the lady : " Well, there you go ! 
 And goodness help the poor little crathur that 
 hadn't the spirit to say no to you." This double 
 insult to the supposed husband and wife was very 
 neat. 
 
 A matter-of-fact young sister of mine, having been 
 begged from by a ragged woman with a string of 
 ragged children at one end of the village, was impor- 
 tuned at the other end by a man, similarly accom- 
 panied, whom she took rightly to be the woman's 
 mate. " We're poor orphans," whined the second 
 string of children ; " our poor mother's dead and 
 buried." " I don't believe it," she said ; " I met 
 your mother at the other end of the village." " Take 
 no notice of her, childer," said the man sorrow- 
 fully. " It wouldn't be right to touch a penny 
 of her money. She's an unbeliever — that's what 
 she is." 
 
 An old beggar- man, to whom I explained apolo- 
 getically that I was without my purse, looked at me 
 benevolently. " Never mind 1" he said ; " you'd 
 give it if you had it, wouldn't you ? But there's one 
 thing I want to tell you : your dog's gone home with- 
 out you." I don't quite know how it was meant, 
 
 79 
 
Ireland 
 
 but it conveyed to me a sense of well-meaning failure 
 and inefficiency generally. 
 
 The salutations in Ireland used to be delightful. 
 I hope it may be long before they are out of date. 
 " God save you kindly," was the salutation on the 
 roadside. " God save all here !" you said, entering 
 a house. And if any work was in progress, you said : 
 " God bless the work !" If they were churning in 
 the kitchen as you entered it, with the old up-and- 
 down dasher or " dash," as I knew it, you took a few 
 turns with the dash lest you should carry off the 
 butter. Butter and milk are things often charmed 
 away. When I was a young girl, there was at Lucan, 
 in the county Dublin, a fairy doctor, who was called 
 in if the cows weren't milking well, or the butter 
 didn't come to the churn, or if the beasts were ailing. 
 A more Christian thing was to bring the live-stock 
 to the priest to be blessed, or to bring the priests to 
 the field to bless them, which is done every year. 
 Even the Orangeman of the North, if he has a cow 
 ailing, thinks it not amiss to ask for the priest's 
 blessing. All the same, the Irish Celts, in their 
 superstitions, have a way of rounding on their good 
 friends, the priests. Priests' marriages — that is^ 
 marriages arranged by the priests — are proverbially 
 unlucky. And to buy the priest's cow in a fair is 
 
 80 
 
Irish Traits and Ways 
 
 notoriously unlucky for the general dealing of the 
 day, as well as that particular one. 
 
 The freedom of the people with their superiors is 
 often a stumbling-block to the stranger ; while to 
 the Irish man or woman the division between classes 
 in England will seem strange and unnatural — in- 
 human almost. " That's an elegant new trousers 
 you have on, Master John," I heard an apple-woman 
 by the kerb say to a young gentleman. The inti- 
 macy is not at all presumptuous ; very far from it. 
 Indeed, Irish people coming to live in England often 
 blunder into treating their inferiors with the easy 
 intimacy of the life at home, only to find that it is 
 neither desired nor expected. 
 
 Irish servants of the old class were retainers and 
 very much devoted to the families they lived with. 
 The conditions were strange and difficult to those 
 not accustomed to them. You would find a family 
 of the gentry of the lowest Low Church on terms of 
 tender affection with its Papistical servants and with 
 the neighbouring peasants. They would have told 
 you as abstract facts that Home Rule would mean the 
 massacre of the Protestants, and that already their 
 lands and properties were partitioned in the secret 
 councils of whatever League happened to be upper- 
 most at the moment. It would be an article of their 
 
 IR. 8l II 
 
Ireland 
 
 creed that the priests were accountable for all the 
 troubles of Ireland. They would have consented 
 generally to the axiom that no Irish Papist told the 
 truth. Yet they would always exempt their own 
 servants, and perhaps their own tenants, and would 
 fly at you as being anti-Irish if you suggested a flaw 
 in the Irish character, or even an excellency in the 
 English, which is almost as bad, if not quite. There 
 are families of Irish gentlefolk come down in the world 
 whose servants, having feasted with them, starve with 
 them. One such servant I knew who managed the 
 whole finances of the family, and laid out the few 
 coins to the greatest advantage, allotting the supplies 
 with a carefulness which must have been bitter to 
 her Irish heart. If the family lived too well at 
 the beginning of the week, it must go hungry at 
 the end. 
 
 In an Irish house the young ladies and gentlemen 
 are very often found in the kitchen, not in pursuit of 
 the housewifely virtues, but for social reasons. The 
 kitchen-fire is the best " to have a heat by." The 
 cook will rake out the ashes and make the fire bright 
 for Master Rody or Miss Sheila to warm their feet 
 by ; and in the kitchen Irish children of the gentle 
 class get filled to the lips with the peculiarly awful 
 ghost-stories of the Celt, with old songs and charms 
 
 22 
 
Irish Traits and Ways 
 
 and folklore of one sort or another ; sometimes, too, 
 with old legends and stories which make young rebels 
 of the children of the garrison and perhaps old 
 rebels as well. There is no nurse so warm and com- 
 fortable as a good Irish nurse, as the little children 
 of the Irish nobility and gentry — invading or 
 planted families, very often — found, drawing life 
 from an Irish breast, and wrapped up in a 
 comfortable Irish embrace from all ghosts and 
 hobgoblins. 
 
 I remember the young daughter of very Evan- 
 gelical gentlepeople in Ireland who used to spend her 
 Sunday afternoons, with the full knowledge of her 
 parents, seated on the kitchen-table reading Papis- 
 tical newspapers to the servants, whom she adored, 
 and who adored her with at least an equal warmth. 
 Her gold watch was the gift of one old servant ; and 
 on the eve of her marriage to a London curate she 
 found pinned to her pincushion an envelope con- 
 taining a five-pound note — " For my darling Miss 
 Biddy, from Mary Anne." 
 
 It has always seemed to me that the tie is closer 
 and tenderer between the Irish Catholic servant 
 and the Protestant gentry than when the employers 
 are also of the old religion. It is certain that 
 in the burning of ScuUabogue Barn, and at 
 
 83 II— 2 
 
Ireland 
 
 the Bridge of Wexford, during the Rebellion, 
 Catholic servants perished with their Protestant 
 employers. 
 
 The tender concern that may be shown for you by 
 an Irish person of whom you ask the way will stir you 
 to wonderment. " Is it permissible to walk on the 
 sea-wall ?" a friend of mine asked of an Irish police- 
 man. " Sure it is ; but I wouldn't do it if I was 
 you. It 'ud be terrible cowld," was the reply. " I 
 wouldn't walk it if I was you," you may be answered 
 when you ask how far a place is ; " you wouldn't be 
 killin' yourself — now, would you ?'' 
 • When ladies first rode the bicycle in Ireland they 
 excited different emotions, according to the char- 
 acter of the looker-on. " What would the blessed 
 saints in heaven think of you ?" the old women used 
 to call out ; but one old man had only compassion 
 for the female cyclist. " God help yez," he said ; 
 " 'tis killin' yourselves yez'll be with them little 
 wheely things, bad luck to them !" 
 
 You will find the soft, insinuating ways in a shop 
 when you make a purchase or mean to make one. 
 *' It looks lovely on you," a shop-assistant will say, 
 with an air of being dispassionate. " Can you send 
 this home to-night ?" you ask, having concluded 
 your purchase. " Sure, why not ?" If you are 
 
Irish Traits and Ways 
 
 English-born and bred, you will be at a loss to say- 
 why not. 
 
 A policeman in Dublin will direct you : " You 
 take that turn over there, an' you go along till you 
 meet a turn on your left, but you'll take no notice of 
 that ; you'll keep straight on, and there'll be another 
 turn, but you'll take no notice of that. An' after 
 that, you'll come to a third turn, an' you'll take 
 notice of that, for that's the street you're 
 after." 
 
 I recognized a countryman of my own in London 
 when I asked a policeman the way and demurred 
 from his instructions, remarking that I had been told 
 to approach by a different way. " " Sure you can, if 
 you like," he said, looking at me with his head on one 
 side, " but I wouldn't if I was you ; it 'ud be a 
 terrible long way round." 
 
 An Irishman will always agree with you if he can 
 — or even if he can't. It is the Irish politeness. If 
 you were to say to him, " Three years ago to-day I 
 had as bad a cold as ever I had in my life," he will 
 say, " To be sure you had ; I remember it well. 
 'Twas a terrible dose of a cowld, all out." This 
 makes the Irish a very agreeable people to live with 
 if you have not offended them. 
 
 There are one or two virtues, not of the shining 
 
 8s 
 
Ireland 
 
 sort, which are hardly virtues at all, but rather vices 
 to the Irish. Thrift is one of these. Another is its 
 cousin, punctuality. No Irishman holds punctuality 
 in honour. Irish time is twenty-five minutes later 
 than English time and takes a deal longer than that 
 to come up with English time. Any time at all will 
 do for an Irishman. " Punctuality is the thief of 
 time " is one of his axioms. Above all things, he 
 despises punctuality about meal-times, and this, I 
 know, will wring an Englishman's withers. An Irish 
 meal is served whenever it is ready ; and if it is never 
 ready at all, the Irishman will take a snack when he 
 feels he really wants it. No Irishman is ill-tempered 
 because his meals are late. He prides himself on his 
 indifference to food as one of the things that set him 
 apart from the unspiritual Saxon. You could hardly 
 offend an Irishman more than by accusing him of 
 having a hearty appetite. His meals are all movable 
 feasts. Oddly enough, the Anglo-Irishman is quite 
 as unpunctual as the Celt, if not more so. He as- 
 similates the ways of the Celt, while the Celt re- 
 mains untouched by his. The Anglo-Irishman is 
 often as good a trencherman as his English brother, 
 but he would never think of disturbing the 
 machinery of Irish life so far as to expect his dinner 
 at a given time. I have been asked to dine in 
 
 86 
 
Irish Traits and Ways 
 
 Dublin and have arrived punctually, only to find 
 the tradesmen's carts delivering the dinner ; and, 
 having grown accustomed to English ways, I have 
 made a frantic effort to arrive at the appointed hour 
 for a luncheon-party, only to find the hostess lying 
 down with toothache, and the drawing-room fire 
 still unlit. 
 
 To be sure, you may arrive at a house at any hour 
 of the day in Ireland and fall in for a meal. If you 
 arrive at a time within at all measurable distance of 
 meal-time, you shall not go forth unfed, although 
 you be press-ganged to stay. I shall never forget the 
 horror of my Irish friends when they heard that one 
 was allowed to leave an English house with the 
 dinner-bell in one's ears. " It must be an awful 
 country," they said ; then, detecting something of 
 guilt, perhaps, in my air, they ventured : " But that 
 wouldn't happen in an Irish house — not in yours.^^ 
 When I confessed that it had happened in mine 
 they changed the subject. If they had allowed 
 themselves to speak, they would have said too 
 much. 
 
 I know an Irishman settled in England — a 
 North of Ireland, that is to say a Scotch-Irish- 
 man, and a man of business — who always has 
 the motor round for a spin as soon as the 
 
 87 
 
Ireland 
 
 dinner-bell rings. He cannot keep his English 
 servants, and is grieved at their perversity, which 
 v^ould keep him chained to a hot dining-room on 
 an ideal evening for a motor-run. His guests stay 
 their hunger with sherry and biscuits while they 
 await his return. 
 
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 8 full-page Illustrations in Colour by 
 J. Jellicoe 
 
 By Stanley Waterloo 
 
 A TALE OF THE TIME OF 
 THE CAVE MEN 
 
 8 full-page Illustrations in Colour by 
 Simon Harmon Vedder 
 
 
 
 By the Rev. R. C. Gillie 
 
 THE KINSFOLK AND 
 FRIENDS OF JESUS 
 
 16 full-page Illustrations in Colour 
 and Sepia 
 
 PUBLISHED BY A. AND C. BLACK, SOHO SQUARE, LONDON, W. 
 
PRICE 6/« EACH 
 
 ALL WITH FULL-PAGE ILLUSTRATIONS IN COLOUR 
 Large square crown Sw., cloth 
 
 By G. E. MiTTON 
 
 THE BOOK OF THE 
 RAILWAY 
 
 12 full-page Illustrations in Colour by 
 Allan Stewart 
 
 GULLIVER'S TRAVELS 
 
 i6 full-page Illustrations in Colour by 
 Stephen Baghot de la Bere 
 
 By Mrs. Alfred Sidgwick and Mrs. Paynter 
 
 THE CHILDREN'S BOOK OF 
 GARDENINQ 
 
 12 full-page Illustrations in Colour by 
 Mrs. Cayley-Robinson 
 
 By AscoTT R. Hope 
 
 THE 
 ADVENTURES OF PUNCH 
 
 12 full-page Illustrations in Colour by 
 Stephen Baghot de la Bere 
 
 By Miss Conway and Sir Martin Conway 
 
 THE CHILDREN'S BOOK 
 OF ART 
 
 i6 full-page Illustrations in Colour from 
 Public and Private Galleries 
 
 By Dudley Kidd 
 
 THE BULL OF THE KRAAL 
 
 A Tale of Black Children 
 
 12 full-page Illustrations in Colour by 
 A. M. Goodall 
 
 By Elizabeth Grierson 
 
 CHILDREN'S TALES OF 
 ENGLISH MINSTERS 
 
 12 full-page Illustrations in Colour by 
 various Artists 
 
 By P. G. Wodehouse 
 
 WILLIAM TELL TOLD 
 AGAIN 
 
 i6 full-page Illustrations in Colour by 
 Philip Dadd 
 
 By Ascott R. Hope 
 
 ADVENTURERS IN 
 AMERICA 
 
 8 full-page Illustrations in Colour by 
 Henry Sandham, R.C.A. 
 
 By John Bunyan 
 
 THE PILGRIM'S PROGRESS 
 
 8 full-page Illustrations in Colour by 
 Gertrude Demain Hammond, R.I. 
 
 By S. R. Crockett 
 
 RED CAP ADVENTURES 
 
 Being the Second Series of Red Cap Tales 
 Stolen from the Treasure-Chest of the Wizard 
 
 of the North 
 
 i6 full-page Illustrations by Allan Stewart 
 
 and others 
 
 By G. E. MiTTON 
 
 THE CHILDREN'S BOOK 
 OF STARS 
 
 Preface by Sir David Gill, K.C.B. 
 
 i6 full-page Illustrations (i I in Colour) and 
 
 8 smaller figures in the text 
 
 By S. R. Crockett 
 
 RED CAP TALES 
 
 stolen from the Treasure-Chest of the 
 Wizard of the North 
 
 i6 full-page Illustrations in Colour 
 by Simon Harmon Vedder 
 
 By G. E. MiTTON 
 
 THE CHILDREN'S BOOK 
 OF LONDON 
 
 12 full-page Illustrations in Colour by 
 John Williamson 
 
 Translated and Abridged by Dominick Daly 
 
 THE ADVENTURES OF 
 DON QUIXOTE 
 
 12 full-page Illustrations in Colour by 
 1 Stephen Baghot de la Bere 
 
 By Elizabeth W. Grierson 
 
 THE CHILDREN'S BOOK 
 OF CELTIC STORIES 
 
 12 full-page Illustrations in Colour by 
 Allan Stewart 
 
 PUBLISHED BY A. AND C. BLACK. SOHO SQUARE, LONDON, W. 
 
PRICE 5/= EA^" 
 
 ALL WITH FULL-PAGE ILLUSTRATIONS IN COLOUR 
 Large square crown Svo., cloth 
 
 By Elizabeth W. Grierson 
 
 THE CHILDREN'S BOOK 
 OF EDINBURGH 
 
 12 full-page Illustrations in Colour by 
 Allan Stewart 
 
 Edited by G. E. Mitton 
 
 SWISS FAMILY ROBINSON 
 
 12 full-page Illustrations in Colour by 
 Harry Rountree 
 
 By Elizabeth W. Grierson 
 
 CHILDREN'S TALES FROM 
 SCOTTISH BALLADS 
 
 12 full-page Illustrations in Colour by 
 Allan Stewart 
 
 By Harriet Beecher Stowe 
 
 UNCLE TOM'S CABIN 
 
 8 full-page Illustrations in Colour and many 
 others in the text 
 
 ANIMAL AUTOBIOGRAPHIES 
 
 Edited by G. E. Mitton 
 
 Each volume deals entirely with the life 
 story of some one animal, and is not merely 
 a collection of animal stories. It is neces- 
 sary to emphasize this, as the idea of the 
 series has sometimes been misunderstood. 
 Children who have outgrown fairy-tales 
 undoubtedly prefer this form of story to any 
 other, and a more wholesome way of stimu- 
 lating their interest in the living things 
 around them could hardly be found. 
 
 Though the books are designed for chil- 
 dren of all ages, many adults have been 
 attracted by tneir freshness, and have found 
 in them much that they did not know before. 
 
 The autobiographical form was chosen 
 after careful consideration in preference to 
 the newer method of regarding an animal 
 through the eyes of a human being, because 
 it is the first aim of the series to depict the 
 world as animals see it, and it is not 
 possible to do this reaUstically unless the 
 animal himself tells the story. 
 
 THE LIFE STORY OF 
 
 A DOG 
 
 By G. E. Mitton 
 
 12 full-page Illustrations in Colour by 
 
 John Williamson 
 
 THE LIFE STORY OF 
 
 A FOX 
 
 By J. C. Tregarthen 
 
 12 full-page Illustrations in Colour by 
 
 Countess Helena Gleichen 
 
 THE LIFE STORY OF 
 
 A FOWL 
 
 By J. W. Hurst 
 
 12 full-page Illustrations in Colour by 
 
 Allan Stewart and Maude Scrivener 
 
 THE LIFE STORY OF 
 
 A BLACK BEAR 
 
 By H. Perry Robinson 
 
 12 full-page Illustrations in Colour by 
 
 J. Van Oort 
 
 THE LIFE STORY OF 
 
 A RAT 
 
 By G. M. a. Hewett 
 
 12 full-page Illustrations in Colour by 
 Stephen Baghot de la Bere 
 
 THE LIFE STORY OF 
 
 A CAT 
 
 By Violet Hunt 
 
 12 full-page Illustrations in Colour by 
 Adolph Birkenruth 
 
 THE LIFE STORY OF 
 
 A SQUIRREL 
 
 By T. C. Bridges 
 
 la full-page Illustrations in Colour by 
 
 Allan Stewart 
 
 PUBLISHED BY A. AND C. BLACK, SOHO SQUARE, LONDON, W. 
 
1^. BERKELEY LIBRARIES 
 
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