river Barrow, which serpentines very beauti fully. The church is small and very ill-attended. There is a canal near this place, the écluses of which are extremely well constructed. At Carlow much blood was spilt in '98. As an instance of the execrable conduct of the orange men, a number of these sanguinary monsters applied a torch to a hospital which was crowded with unresisting and wounded patriots, and consumed them in one general conflagration! The destruction of these helpless wretches, by a death which gives an idea of the torments of the damned, seemed to afford heartfelt gratification to the hellish fiends who revelled in the excrutiating pangs of their fellow creatures. During the Rebellion, more than 500 people were massacred in the streets, or burnt in houses set on fire, at Carlow! Blue, I observe, is the fashionable colour at this place: the walls of the houses are blue, the doors with their "frappant and tintina-bunt appendages," (as Johnson would have called them,) are blue; the windows, shutters, ladies' hoods and mantles are blue; and even (horresco referens!) the drop and pulleys of the gallows, "kissed by the breath of heav'n, seem colour'd by its skies." Port Patrick is the Gretna Green of the Land of Erin. Here young adventurers carry the heiresses they can persuade to run off with them; which, by the way, is the easiest method for a lawyer or doctor to get into practice! "If a young fellow, (says Addison,) finds he can make nothing of Coke and Littleton, he provides himself with a ladder of ropes, and by that means very often enters upon the premis es." Seriously all the old duennas, antiquated virgins and cross uncles and guardians, should reflect that" Love laughs at Locksmiths," and that unless they resort to man-traps and spring guns, they will never be able to keep off fortune hunters from their Hesperian fruit. As I travelled about the country in my shabby Highland dress, I was enabled to visit the hovels of the peasants, the greatest part of which, (to use Charles Phillips' expression,) are wretched bazaars of mud and misery; and I could ask questions for information, without being looked upon with the eye of distrust which the poor man casts towards the trappings of opulence. I will describe one of these huts, and let it suffice as an example of the rest. As I entered the door, I was stopped by a pig, which almost broke my shins, in attempting to rush out into the open air. I should have been tempted to indulge my risible muscles at this accident, had not the scene I witnessed cast a gloom over my spirits. Like the pathetic Sterne, I would not have let fallen an unseasonable pleasantry in the venerable presence of misery, to be entitled to all the wit that Rabelais ever scattered! The floor of the hovel was the ground; the wall was covered with cobwebs, hanging from the broken plaster, "where tawdry yellow strove with dirty red" and was so abominably filthy as to turn my stomach in entering the room. The little window was adorned with tapestry, in such a condition, that it fell to pieces whenever it was touched. On a miserable cot, lay the father of the family, almost dead from excess of labour, to which he had been forced, to obtain subsistence for his family-his wife and three children were crying round the bed. Near a fire of turf, I observed a beautiful boy, naked as when it first came from " its living tomb." The lovely little cherub was asleep on a bare plank, and presented an object such as a painter would have taken as a model of angelic loveliness: Sideway his face reposed On one white arm, and tenderly unclos'd, Whether the fire crimsoned the face of the babe, or that nature mantled its unconscious cheek with a blush, that the lot of man should be so degraded, I do not pretend to decide; but there was something so striking in the latter thought, that I could not help cherishing it. In another part of the room, stretched on an old blanket, lay the peasant's daughter, who appeared to suffer from some deep-seated disease. Her mother told me that some months before, she had caught a cold, in exposing herself to the moist night air, and had not time, from her laborious occupations, to check the disease at its birth. Instead of the roses, which seemed formerly to bloom in her cheek, a vivid red showed itself through a small part of the deadly paleness which overspread her emaciated face; and the fire of that slow fever which devoured her vitals, sparkled in her dark blue eyes. To this description of an Irish hovel, permit me to add the ludicrous picture which Miss Edgeworth presents of one, in the most amusing of her Fashionable Tales, (" Ennui.") · To be sure, it does not prepossess the reader in favour of the cottages of Erin, so much as her other characteristic representations: "It was a wretched looking, low mud-walled cabin. At one end it was propped by a buttress of loose stones, upon which stood a goat reared on its hind legs, to browse on the grass that grew on the house top! A dunghill was before the only window, at the other end of the house, and close to the door was a puddle of the dirtiest of dirty water, in which ducks were dabbling. At my approach, there came out of the cabbin a pig, a calf, a lamb, a kid and two geese, all with their legs tied: followed by cocks, hens, chickens, a dog, a cat, a kitten, a beggar-man, a beggar-woman with a pipe in her mouth; children innumerable, and a stout girl, with a pitchfork in her hand. I asked if Ellinor was at home; but the dog barked, the geese cackled, the turkeys gobbled, and the beggars begged with one accord, so loudly, that there was no chance of my being heard." So poor are many of the labourers, that they have neither table, nor chair nor stool in their wretched hovels. A pile of stones near the fire, covered with straw as a cushion, serves for a seat in the best cottages! Domestic animals, pigs, &c. form part of the family. The hog appears quite at his ease-at meals he draws near the board with the familiarity of an old acquaintance-he squats like a dog near his master and grunts his request. I have even been assured that a recumbent pig often serves as a pillow for the children! Tacitus (de Mor. German. cap. 20.) has the following observation, which is very applicable to the Irish poor: "In every family, children, reared up in filth, run about naked, and in time grow up to that strength and size of limbs, which we behold with wonder." The children I have seen in the Irish cottages, bloom with the purest health, and are generally very beautiful. I have often seen on a handful of straw, or in a sort of cradle of coarse wicker work, a child fed on potatoes and butter-milk, who looked better than a prince; indeed many a nabob would exchange his whole brood of puny whipsters, for one of those blooming cherubs. Poverty does not prevent the lower orders from marrying; but the blind God of Love is neither Catholic nor Protestant, Whig nor Tory, and he lets off his arrows indiscriminately at the rich and poor, high-born and plebeian. A few potatoes and a shed of turf, are a sufficient inducement for a poor couple to begin |