referable to the double origin of the people, in vain; however differing in rank, party, or ancestry, they bear the indelible mark of a common nativity. Restless, yet indolent; shrewd, and indiscreet; impetuous, impatient, and improvident; instinctively brave, thoughtlessly generous; quick to resent and forgive offences, to form and renounce friendships, they will forgive injury rather than insult; their country's good they seldom, their own they carelessly, pursue; but the honour of both they eagerly vindicate; oppression they have long borne, insolence never.

"With genius they are profusely gifted, with judgment sparingly; to acquire knowledge, they find more easy than to arrange and employ it; inferior in vanity only to the French, and in wịt superior even to the Italian, they are more able to give, and more ready to receive, amusement than instruction; in raillery and adulation they freely indulge, and without malignity or baseness. It is the singular temper of this people, that they are prone equally to satirize and to praise, and patient alike of sarcasm and flattery.

"Inclining to exaggerate, but not intending to deceive, you will applaud them rather for sincerity than truth. Accuracy is not the merit, nor duplicity the failing, of a lively but neglected and uncultivated people. Their passions lie on the surface, unsheltered from irritation or notice; and cautious England is glad to recognize the Irish character only by these inconsistencies and errors,

which her own novercal government has produced or perpetuated.

"In their domestic life, the gentry and traders differ from the English of equal rank, not in essentials, but in modes. Here are less neatness and economy, more enjoyment and society: emulative profusion is an Irish folly. The gentry would rival the nobility; the merchant affects to surpass, and the shopkeeper to approach, the splendor of the gentry. Hence patrimonies are dilapidated; hence capital is diverted from business. to pleasure; the profit of one enterprize is not, as in England, embarked in another, but sunk in a villa, or an equipage. The English trader bequeaths, the Irish enjoys; but his enjoyment is not often elegant, nor always secure.

"The nobility and affluent gentry spend much or all of their fortunes and time in England; leaving their places to be filled, in the country, by hired agents-in the city, by a plebeian aristocracy: the former solely engaged in increasing and collecting rents, can have little conciliatory power with the people; but the influence of the latter tends rather to increase than diminish the political danger.

"A great evil. Not because the country is drained by remittance, but because she is widowed of her natural protectors. The loss is not of money, but manners; not of wealth, but of civilization and peace.

"The condition of the peasant was of late utterly, and is still almost, barbarous. What the Romans found the Britons and Germans, the Britons found the Irish-and left them: neglect or degeneracy of the colonists, and obstinacy of the natives, have preserved even to our day living proofs of the veracity of Cæsar and Tacitus: of this, many will affect to be incredulous of the Irish, lest it diminish the character of their coun-try-of the English, because it arraigns the wisdom and policy of their system. But the experienced know it to be true, and the impartial will own it.

"The cultivator of the land seldom holds from the inheritor; between them stand a series of sublandlords and tenants, each receiving a profit from his lessee, but having no further interest or connexion with the soil. The last in the series must provide for the profits of all-he therefore parcels out, at rack-rents, the land to his miserable tenant. Here is no yeomanry, no agricultural capitalist; no degree between the landlord and the labourer ; the words 'peasantry' and 'poor' synonimously employed.

"Their dwellings are of primitive and easy construction-the walls and floors of clay, the roofs of sod or thatch: within, are two unequal divisions; in the smaller, filthy and unfurnished, you would hardly suppose the whole family to sleep; in the larger, on a hearth, without grate

or chimney, a scanty fire warms rather by its smoke than its blaze, and discolours whatever it warms. Glazed windows there are none, the open doors amply sufficing for light and air, to those that are careless of either. Furniture they neither have, nor want; their food and its preparation are simple-potatoes or oaten cakes, sour milk, and sometimes salted fish. In drink they are not so temperate of all spirituous liquors they are im-. moderately fond, but most of whiskey, the distilled

In many districts, by

extract of fermented corn. an ingenious and simple process, they prepare this liquor themselves, but clandestinely, and to the great injury of national morals and revenue. Were they allowed, by private distillation, to indulge their taste for inebriety, their own vice would more effectually subdue them than 'centuries of war.

"Their dress is mean and squalid, particularly of the females, whom you would not always distinguish from men by their attire. Of personal cleanliness they have no care. Both sexes wear, in winter and summer, long woollen coats, or cloaks, derived from, and similar to, the sagum of their ancestors. The children are generally half, and sometimes altogether naked; living, without distinction of sexes,' in dirt and mire, almost with the cattle. Yet from this nakedness and filth, they grow up to that strength and stature for which they are admirable.

"The peasantry of Ireland are generally of the Roman catholic religion, but utterly and disgracefully ignorant; few among them can read, fewer write. The Irish language, a barbarous jargon, is generally, and in some districts exclusively, spo-. ken; and with it are retained customs and superstitious as barbarous. Popish legends and pagan: tradition are confounded and revered: for certain holy wells, and sacred places, they have extraordinary respect; thither crowd the sick for cure, and the sinful for expiation; and their priests, deluded or deluding, enjoin those pilgrimages as penance, or applaud them, when voluntary, as piety. The religion of such a people is not to be confounded with one of the same name professed by the enlightened nations of Europe. The university of Paris has some tenets in common, perhaps, with the Irish papist; but does it believe that water restores the cripple, enlightens the blind or purifies the guilty?

"In agricultural pursuits they are neither active nor expert: hereditary indolence would induce them to employ their lands in pasturage; and it is often more easy to induce them to take arms, for their country, or against it, than to cultivate the earth, and wait upon the seasons. Even at this day, the sons of the old inheritors are suspected of being more ready to regain their possessions by their blood, than by their labour. Their very amusements are polemical: fighting is a pas