Romantic Ireland
Volume I.

THE ROCK OF CASHEL.
(See page 271 ).

Copyright, 1904
By L. C. Page & Company
( INCORPORATED )
——
All rights reserved

Published October, 1904

COLONIAL PRESS
Electrotyped and Printed by C. H. Simonds & Co.
Boston, Mass., U. S. A.

Contents
Volume I.

List of Illustrations
Volume I.

{01}

Romantic Ireland

CHAPTER I.

INTRODUCTORY

I N times past books of travel were frequently written for the perusal of “a few intimate friends.” Such was the purpose of a little pamphlet entitled “A Trip to Ireland,” which a few years ago fell into the hands of the writer. Its author and place of publication are unknown, but it bore the date of 1836.

The writer of this book has not the excuse of this unknown author and admirer of Ireland’s sylvan, historical, and romantic beauties for compiling the present work, nor is he possessed of the belief that he is called upon to attempt the task of merely imparting knowledge to the untravelled. But, since his atten {2} tion was thus first directed to Ireland,—with the result that he has made a more or less intimate acquaintance with the allurements and charms of this delectable, if impoverished, land,—he has come to believe that there are a large number of interested people who would be glad to have an attractive presentation of some of the sights, scenes, and incidents which come to those who are fortunate enough to be able to sojourn there for a time.

In other words, this book is a record of, and some impressions of, a few of those ever-present charms of the green isle which have so permeated its history, its romance, and its literature.

As a record of a pilgrimage, this book will doubtless appear less satisfactory than as a presentation of facts relative to both the storied past and present-day affairs of the country, though it deals not so much with political issues and economic aspects as it does with the more pleasing and more tangible features of historic sites and scenes.

It is not expected that this book will escape criticism; probably it will not. It is impossible to attempt to compress a history of Ireland, {3} a monograph on its ancient civilization, a treatise on manners and customs, or even an account of its architectural remains, at all consistent with the deserts of the subject, within the confines of a work such as this.

All that is claimed is that it is a résumé of the facts and the romance which, garnered from various sources, have impressed themselves upon the minds of the collaborators of this book in their journeyings through Erin’s Isle.

It is hoped, however, that these chapters, or, perhaps, more assuredly, the pictures with which they are adorned, will awaken a curiosity on the part of some to know more of Britain’s sister-isle.

Unfortunately, to many travellers—and to most American travellers—Ireland is a mere name, with a handle at either end, Queenstown in the south, and Londonderry or Moville in the north, where ships stop, in the dead of night, to land or embark the mails.

Usually, travellers from the Western world are in too much of a hurry to partake of the delights of London or the “dainty prettiness” of the Thames valley, the sanctity of the cathedral precincts of Canterbury or Salisbury, or {4} even the more alluring attractions which lie “across Channel,” to think for a moment of disembarking at Cork harbour, with the mails, on board a rather uncomfortable “tender,” and, usually, amid much discomfort of weather.

Once the opportunity is missed, they are unlikely to retrace their steps in that direction, since one’s enthusiasm or desire pales before charms and attractions then present.

It ought to be a part of every traveller’s experience for him to pay a visit to Ireland—the “Emerald Isle,” or “Romantic Ireland”—and judge of its attractions, the places and the people, as seen on their native soil.

With a warm heart she will welcome him; with lip-liveliness and sparkling language she will entertain him; with impulsive zeal she will conduct him over her diversified domain, and bring under his eye scenes where—

Though less fastidious than England, and without the canny cautiousness of Scotland, yet, of the Three Graces of the United Kingdom, {5} fair Erin, for natural gifts and spontaneous beauties, stands preëminent.

“To the Bretons, the Basques, and the Irish,” says an observant French writer, “races not dissimilar in their hidden habits of thought and in the vague sadness of their eyes, the Atlantic Ocean is a boundary for the mind.... It is their climate background, resting-place, and grave ... the green hills into which Europe breaks to meet the southwest wind.”

All this, and more, is the Atlantic to the whole of northwest Europe,—Ireland in particular,—and its influences are not only great, but far-reaching.

The Irish, they say, have never been great seafarers. This, it is feared, is true to no small extent. They are not even great fishermen, as they well might be in their sea-girt isle. The Irishman himself will tell you that it is because the thrifty and hardworking west-coast Scotch have usurped their market. This may be so to a certain degree; but, to a still greater degree, their lack of capital to properly equip the industry is the reason why the harvest of the sea is garnered under their very sight.

It is not given to all who would travel and {6} muse en route to be able to express their thoughts with that beauty of language which graces the lines of Stevenson or of Sterne. One may not even have the temerity to attempt to imitate their style.

He may, however,—and with propriety, thinks the writer,—consider, if he will, that theirs was the view-point of the acute observer and lover of the beautiful, and, as near as may be, imbibe somewhat of the emotions and sentiments with which these masters beheld the spots covered by their wanderings. Their words have come down to us as a variety of topographical description which can only be recognized as a new and precious thing, compared to the descriptions before and since.

With such an end in view were the various wanderings which are set forth in these pages undertaken. Not consecutively, nor even methodically, was the route laid out, but in the end it covered practically the entire island at varying seasons and under equally varying conditions of comfort or discomfort, though no hardships or disagreeable experiences were encountered, and it is confidently asserted that nothing of the kind would be met with by {7} any who might make the journeys under similar conditions.

“June the nineteenth, arrived at Holyhead after an instructive journey through a part of England. Found the packet, the Claremont , Captain Taylor, would sail very soon.

“After a tedious passage of two and twenty hours, landed on the twentieth, in the morning, at Dunleary (now Kingstown), four miles from Dublin, a city which much exceeded my expectation.”

Thus wrote Arthur Young in his simple and quaint phraseology in 1776.

Arthur Young was a great traveller, one might say an inveterate traveller. He observed and wrote mostly of matters agricultural, but his side-lights thrown upon the screen—if not exactly illuminating it to a marked degree—were of far more interest and value to the general reader or travel-lover than the dicta of pedants or the conjectures of antiquarians.

Arthur Young was an agriculturist, an economist, or whatever you like to think him; but he evidently could not repress the temptation to put the results of his observations into print, {8} as the many scores of entries to his credit in the history of book-making and authorship will show.

He sought to chronicle his “Tour in Ireland” for posterity, and conceived the thought of publishing the work “by subscription.” This he did in the year 1780—and a most unlovely specimen of book-making it was. It was foredoomed to failure, and it apparently met it forthwith; for the author states in his preface that he was only able to complete the work at great expense to himself.

No further criticism shall be made. It remains now but to praise. The book is a veritable mine of fact—with precious little fancy—of the farming, fishing, weaving, and allied interests of the Ireland of that day, with not a little detail concerning the history, romance, and plain matter-of-fact social and economic conditions of life.

To-day, conditions for all but the well-to-do classes have changed but little, and here is a splendid framework to suggest a line of thought as far different from that conveyed by the “impressions” of one travelling for mere pleasure, as it is from the cut-and-dried {9} bits of scrappy information which fill the guide-books to-day.

Until the indefatigable German comes to the rescue, it may be ventured that we shall have no comprehensive, concise, and correct guide-book to Ireland, and will have to take our pickings where we find them.

This book attempts merely the task of compiling fact and fancy, drawn from many sources, in connection with current comment—based upon actual observations.

There is much contributory and allied matter to be found in the wealth of illustration “done by the artist on the spot,” which, like the letter-press, professes truthfulness and attractiveness in its presentation.

Such economic questions as are dealt with herein are those only which would be observed by all, no matter how rapid their passage; and references to political questions have only been made when they bear some relation to historical events of a past long gone by.

The controversial side of the religious question is omitted, though, considering the many noble monuments, ancient shrines, ruined abbeys, and existing church edifices through {10} out the land, references to it, and many of its acts and functions, were here and there necessary.

So, too, mention has been made of many of the romantic and eery legends of the country, many of which are, in the light of recent history, considered somewhat apocryphal as to their genuineness. But, reader, what would you? You surely would not go to Ravenna and not see Juliet’s tomb, even though you know that Juliet had no real identity. Neither would you go to that gay little city of mid-France, Nevers, without visiting the tomb of “all the Montmorencies,” nor to Warwickshire without going to Stratford. Hence you must, if you would know aught of Ireland, see Muckross Abbey, Blarney Castle, and the Giant’s Causeway. The harps, the shamrocks, the blackthorns, and the peat-bogs, all of which are genuine enough, will then fit themselves accommodatingly into the ensemble, and you will have a picture so impressed upon the memory that the recollection of it will rival most things of this earth with which one has had but a passing intimacy.

This work, then, may in some small measure {11}

MUCKROSS ABBEY.

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{13}

give a more favourable impression of the country than has commonly been produced even by Ireland’s pseudo-humourous novelists—that it is simply a land where mud huts, misery, discord, and violence predominate—by recognizing it as a land blessed by Heaven, in the first instance, at any rate, with nearly every natural gift.

If there be no end to the making of books, there should at least be a suitable and preconceived ending to all so made; and herein lies the difficulty for most writers.

The popular fictionist seems under the impression that the public want close upon a couple of hundred thousand words, filling a plump, ungraceful volume, for their few modest pennies; the compiler of books of pedantic information pads his product into a stately quarto, and the guide-book maker descends to small type and badly designed pages and crowds as much as he can into a small pocketable volume.

From these species of printed things ramify many varieties, and the author of this work has many times been placed in a quandary as to what mammoth proportions it might not {14} assume were he to allow his predilections to run riot through its pages.

It is easy to say with Sterne, “Let us write a duodecimo,” but with what measure may an enthusiastic or just admiration be limited as to the overflowing volume of appreciation?

Mere cubic capacity as to size of the volume, or the superficial area of its pages, will not serve. The arts of the publisher and his printer can nullify any preconceived plans of this nature.

A judicious selection of the material to be used would be much more likely to bring about the desired result, though again we are confronted by the moving question as to how elaborate or extensive a work is necessary in order to cover the ground as minutely or as broadly as might be desired.

The result will not be found to approach the completeness of an historical record, nor yet the flimsiness of a mere sentimental journey along well-worn roads. It fills, rather, the gap which lies between, in view of the greater interest which is daily being shown in all things relating to Ireland—its literature, its history, its architecture, and its arts. Hence {15} to a considerable public, which, it may be presumed, will ultimately show an interest therein, it is offered as an appreciation of the Ireland of the past and the present, based upon something more than a personally conducted tour to Killarney, or a jaunting-car ride about Queenstown, while awaiting the departure of the Atlantic mail-boat. {16}

CHAPTER II.

A TRAVEL CHAPTER

T HE true peripatetic philosopher is the only genuine traveller, and the vagabond and the pilgrim are but varieties of the species. The “personally conducted,” alone or in droves, have no realization of the unquestionable authority by which nature “sets up her boundaries and fences; and so circumscribes the discontent of man,” to borrow the words of Sterne.

The individual who merely wants to “get there” in the shortest possible time, and by the most direct road, knows not the joys of travel, nor ever will.

The moods of the traveller are likewise a varied thing; circumstances never alter cases more than when met with unexpectedly by him who travels for business or pleasure.

With Ireland the above singularly applies. {17}

THE CHIMNEY-TOPS, GIANT’S CAUSEWAY

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Similar conditions must exist in order for one to see it in just the same phase.

The Liffey, which flows through Dublin’s streets, may be dirty, picturesque, or beautiful according to whether you view it on one part or another.

Blarney Castle does not look as if it were made to kiss, and so some are disappointed therein.

Cork harbour is one of the most charming landlocked waters one may see; but, if he views it from Queenstown heights and is pestered meanwhile by a shabby, loafing beggar for an “American nickel or dime,” the onlooker will doubtless form a mental reservation which will linger as long as the lovely memory itself.

Killarney may, or may not, come up to his preconceived ideas, and Slievemore, that majestic peak which towers sugar-loaf fashion quite two thousand feet from the water’s edge, may seem grim and bare where he would have found it forest-grown. The Giant’s Causeway, but for the recollection of its various legends, might suggest something quite different. And so the whole scheme, viewed in {20} a pessimistic manner, leaves no such impression as otherwise would have been the case.

For him, then, who would like his way smoothed,—his travel-routes laid down and simplified,—the present chapter, it is hoped, will be found acceptable.

The approach to Ireland from England is, at best, not so very comfortable or attractive. The Holyhead mail-boats are so timed as to accomplish remarkable regularity of passage in all weathers, but, at times, with no little discomfort to passengers.

The crossing from Holyhead to Kingstown is the Pas de Calais over again; with an exaggeration of length and, if possible, of boisterousness. It lasts two and three-quarters hours, and, in any but the most temperate mood of wind and wave, would be a good test of one’s fitness for a seafaring life. The passage from Stranraer to Larne is better, being less than two hours and not all of that in the open sea; while from Milford Haven to Waterford, in the south, is some six or eight hours’ journey; and that of Holyhead to Greenore, or Liverpool to Belfast, is worse in every particular. On the whole, Holyhead—Kings {21} town is the route which may best be followed, under normal conditions and circumstances, in reaching Ireland from England.

Anglesea Island, on which is Holyhead, is the “Lands End” of North Wales and the natural gateway for reaching Ireland, hence it is a foregone conclusion that the route should be popular. Holyhead, itself, offers little suggestion of the dense forests of druidical times. It is popularly supposed to have been devastated by the Romans, who slaughtered those pitiless hierarchs, the druids, and put an end to human sacrifice—cutting down with sharp axes the sacred shady groves which once dotted the island.

As the South Stack is left behind,—that beacon-light by which passes all of that vast sea-borne traffic to and from Liverpool via St. George’s Channel,—the mail-packet begins to find herself; and, in the course of time, wind, and tide, the greensward of Dalkey and the heights of Howth—guarding Dublin Bay on the north and south—come into view.

It has seldom, if ever, been claimed that the shores of Ireland actually denote hospitality; {22} in fact, it is doubtful if this be true of any land north of tropic climes.

Dublin has not an ideal situation for a touring centre, in fact, it is not central at all; but it is the best that offers, and is the gateway through which by far the majority of travellers make their entrance.

Four great topographical divisions lie north, south, and west of this gateway, and arrange themselves naturally enough along the boundary-lines of the ancient political divisions of Leinster, Munster, Ulster, and Connaught, which have descended in historical lore and association from the Irish kings.

Each of these topographical divisions forms a centre of itself, and each is equally accessible from Dublin.

In popular sentiment, the south, perhaps, stands at the head, with Connemara and the western highlands next, and lastly the colder north. The entire island is but three hundred miles in length by one hundred and eighty miles in width. Naturally such a circumscribed area offers but little difficulty for modern means of transport, and, did one but have the time and inclination, it would be hard {23}

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to find a more entrancing journey on foot than to walk around the island along its wonderfully picturesque coast roads.

This procedure will doubtless not be practicable to every one; but he who is able to do so is strongly recommended to so accomplish a portion of the round, if only that small portion which lies between Bantry and Killarney or Clifden, in Connemara and Sligo.

If he would not tramp, he can find “car” accommodation in summer; or he may make the journey with much pleasure by means of his bicycle, or, more progressively, by motor-car. In any event, he will then see and realize to the full some of the things that the average person sees only in pictures, and reads of only in books.

It is a question as to how far the casual traveller likes to be left to his own resources to discover new or latent beauties of landscape or environment; but, while the spirit of adventure need not necessarily be great in one’s soul, it is unquestionably with somewhat of the feeling that the old explorers must have had that one comes suddenly upon a vista miles and miles in extent, with perhaps not a sign {24} of human habitation or of human life in any form to be noted in any direction.

There may be other populous countries of Europe where this is equally possible, as well as Ireland, but assuredly not more so.

There is in the two localities before mentioned, and in the Donegal Highlands, an isolation as primitive and unworldly as the mind of man, used to the civilization of cities, can possibly conceive; and, yet, all is within a couple of hours’ ride by rail of centres of population which, if not entitled to be classed as great cities, are resplendent with electric-lights and under the spell of motor-cars and electric lines.

The railway routes, generally speaking, also readily lend themselves to this arrangement of the topographical divisions into the south, the north, and the west. Thus one may go to Cork either via Mallow, the junction for Killarney, or via the easterly coast through the “Garden of Wicklow,” Wexford, Waterford, and Youghal.

Until Cork is reached, the tourist journeys rapidly or slowly, as the places en route may or may not have an appealing interest for him; {25}

THE CLIFFS OF MOHER.

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but, once Cork, or Mallow, is reached, he is put to it to decide his future movements with something of the precision of a time-table, depending on whether he has much or little of the well-recognized commodity of time at his disposal.

To know and appreciate the full charm of that jagged corner of southwest Ireland which lies between Cork harbour—whence so many sunny-spirited Hibernians have migrated to America during the last fifty years—and Tralee, in County Kerry, one should journey around the coast by steamer.

One week, not less, should without question be devoted to Killarney and about there, if one would enjoy it to the full, though the week can perhaps be made to include the tour between Dublin and Limerick, as well as the coach trip from Bantry Bay to Killarney via Glengarriff. Another week—it can hardly be accomplished in less time—should be passed between Limerick and Sligo, including Galway, Connemara, Achill,—that lone peak rising from the sea,—and such of the western highlands, in general, as it may be possible to cover in this time. A final week, all too {28} short, may be given to the Donegal Highlands, the Giant’s Causeway, and around the coast to Belfast, whence one completes the round by returning to Dublin, or crossing to England by way of Greenore to Holyhead, Belfast to Liverpool, or Larne to Stranraer.

Such, in brief, is the general outline of the methods which will enable the traveller to make the round with the most economical expenditure of time and money. In the height of the season, July and August,—one should not, however, go anywhere in “the height of the season,”—there are charming variations of travel by lake or river, or coasting trips by steamer around the greater part of the island, which lend not only variety, but offer to some a more pleasant method than even travel by land.

The longest, and by far the best appointed, of these communications by inland waterways is a stretch of something over a hundred miles of the noble river Shannon,—“Our own romantic stream, green Erin’s lovely river,”—which, in conjunction with a series of beautiful lakes, extends from Killaloe, in the south {29}

McCARTHY MORE’S CASTLE.

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(near Limerick), to Dromod, in the north (near Sligo). During the summer the journey is made in comfortable and well-appointed steamers, and throughout is intensely interesting and full of variety. About Killaloe the views are very fine. The mountains of Clare and of Tipperary shadow the town on either side, and away to the north for three and twenty miles stretches Lough Derg, crowded with islands and lined, one might almost say, on both shores by ruined castles. From Portumna, at the head of Lough Derg, and Banagher are the rich meadow-lands of Galway, along which the river winds tranquilly, passing hundreds of beautiful islets, its banks green with rich, low-lying pasture-lands. A few miles from Shannon Bridge is Clonmacnoise, over which hang many memories of learning, of wars, and of worship. Above Athlone the waters of Lough Ree are entered, with its rocky shores full of indentations and its myriads of sparkling islands—one of the loveliest prospects to be seen in Ireland, rivalling even Killarney itself.

The actual expense of travel in Ireland is little. How could it be? The distances are {32} not great, and the cross-channel absurdly short, as sea-voyages go. One may, of course, spend “anything he likes,” as the man in the streets puts it, and get no more for it than another who disburses half as much.

The trip has, by some, been accounted an expensive one; but assuredly such is not the case. Hence it is to be hoped that this practical chapter, as the writer is pleased to think it deserves to be called, may make possible to some that which was heretofore thought to be impossible or, at least, impracticable.

What the real travel-lover wants, however, is, or ought to be, to partake of the life of the people, to see and know truthfully how they live, what they eat, what are their pleasures and their vocations, and how and why they so conduct themselves. One does not tour France to eat tables d’hôte served after a conventional menu du jour , which is much the same the world over, or to America or England, or to Germany or Russia to do the same thing. What he really wants, or what he would really like, did he but know how to get it, or were he possessed of sufficient unconventionality, would be to eat snails in Burgundy, {33} bouillabaisse in Marseilles, saddle of mutton in England, baked beans and pumpkin pie in New England, and the best of beef and hog products in Ireland. This last may sound a bit strange, but it is a fact that the larger number of bullocks brought to English ports for slaughter come from Ireland, and not from the Argentine or America, as the English fiscal reformers would have us believe.

The old though unidentified adage, “When in Rome do as the Romans do,” should be more largely applied by all whose province and wish it is to roam, as, for instance, “When abroad do as the natives do.” Thus, when in Ireland, keep away from the establishments which cater for the “tripper” pur sang ; follow the unworn track, which, perhaps, will lead you now and then into a quandary, but which will mean no great hardship or inconvenience, and, on the whole, will give one a far more interesting and satisfying view-point than any other, and a knowledge of the land and the people which is positively profound, as compared with the usual variety.

For the rest, it is urged that the traveller, either for education or pleasure, be forewarned {34} and forearmed as to the possibility of time slipping away unawares, and his not being able to accomplish all of what he may have set forth to do. This will most likely be the case; but he should curtail his tour abruptly and not by piecemeal, omitting, if necessary, the northerly portion entire, and returning to Dublin from Galway or Sligo. By no means, however, should he cut out the western highlands, or even Achill, for here lies that which is, as yet, the part of Ireland least known to the great mass of tourists.

It is taken for granted that he will feel that he must, happen what may, “do” the Killarney district; and, after all, if it is the most sentimental and daintily composed of all the land, it is not the less appealing to him who is strong of girth and rugged in his instincts. It is, moreover, the region wherein are to be found the most complete “creature comforts,” as civilization knows them, albeit the charges for them may in many cases rise to heights which are unknown outside of really fashionable tourist points. Still, in this respect, there has been a great improvement of late, and, unless one insisted upon surrounding himself {35} with those more or less unnecessary adjuncts of a metropolitan life,—which he ought to have left behind him with his other cares,—he will find that, for simple and comfortable accommodation, he will need to pay no more than in that Mecca of the cheap tourist, Brittany.

The hotel accommodations of Ireland have often been reviled; but, if not luxurious, they are at least as comfortable as in many other more popular regions, Brittany, North Spain, or Tuscany, for instance; and, while large and populous modern towns are not frequent, accommodations of an acceptable character are to be found in most places where the traveller has a right to expect them.

The many and varied elements which make Ireland attractive unconsciously weave a spell which, mayhap, will allure many another to seek for himself the charm of Ireland, in preference to all other neglected tourist points. It certainly stands first and foremost as a new touring-ground for those who would not perforce wander too far afield, or at too remote a point from a metropolitan daily paper.

Not that the mountain fastnesses or the iso {36} lated headlands and unfrequented lakes and loughs are always within quick communication with more populous centres of civilization. Far from it; one may journey many a weary hour from some remote hamlet in order to strike again the railway which is to take him to some newer and possibly more appealing centre of interest; and, when he reaches that same railway, or one of its newly made tentacles, which are for ever reaching out toward new lands to conquer, he may be forced to pass an equally lonely, though perhaps awe-inspiring, vigil at the base of some bald, bare mountain-peak, awaiting the main line connection which was due at this point a couple of hours before. All of which, were one imbued with anything but the spirit with which he ought to be imbued, might gall and chafe, with some sense of reason, but which, for the true vagabond, even though he may not choose to travel by foot and on the road, ought to be the very essence of enjoyment. {37}

CHAPTER III.

THE LAND AND ITS PEOPLE

O NE hundred or more years ago, when Arthur Young first wrote his journal of a tour in Ireland, those who had Ireland’s welfare most at heart deplored the fact that “her greatness was still practically unexplored, and the early history of her brighter days excited no interest even among her own people.”

Doctor Johnson felt this himself when he wrote, “I have long wished that Irish literature were cultivated, as Ireland is known by tradition to be a seat of piety and learning, ... and surely it would be very acceptable to be further informed regarding a people at once so ancient and illustrious.”

It has been said, too,—the words are taken from the mouth of a poor parish priest,—that “the Celt is melting like the snow: he {38} lingers in little patches in the corner of the field, and hands are stretched on every side. It is human to stretch hands to fleeting things, but as well might we try to retain the snow.”

From this it would appear that Ireland and its institutions, as they have existed in the past, and as they exist to no small extent to-day, are not yet the familiar ground that many might suppose.

Just what the reason for this indifference to its charms may be, it is impossible for any one to state; but, at all events, it is traditional to a large extent, and is a long time being lived down.

During the period of the varied fortunes of the ancient kings of Ireland’s four great divisions—from perhaps the fifth century until the coming of Henry II. of England—there was little connection between Ireland and the outside world, excepting always the Church which attached Ireland to Christendom.

It was, perhaps, small wonder that the Plantagenet Henry, who was in favour at Rome, was desirous of uniting the four kingdoms of Ireland as a Roman Catholic whole. He had already sent three bishops to Rome, and its {39} most famous of all “Irish bulls,” if the levity be pardoned, came forth naturally from Nicholas Breakspeare, the English Pope.

The Church in Ireland, or, rather, religion in Ireland, is a subject that one approaches with dread. So much so, that it had best be avoided altogether so far as its controversial elements are concerned.

The real significant ecclesiastical aspect of Ireland of the past—or of the present, for that matter—can be discussed with less trepidation.

Of the devotion of the people to their Church there can be no question, though it smacks not a little of the devotion of the ivy to the tree.

It has been said before now that “the houses of the people are indecently poor and small, and the houses of the Church are indecently rich and large. Out of the dirt and decay they rise always proud and sometimes ugly and substantial, as though to inform the world that at least one thing is not dying and despondent, but keeps its loins girded and its lamps trimmed.”

All of which is,—or was,—perhaps, true {40} enough in the abstract; but, tempus fugit , and Ireland, if not actually grown, as yet, more prosperous, or, in many parts, any less primitive, is without question becoming, throughout, more enlightened; and the traveller, walking or driving across the wastes of the west, will not cavil at the fact that the first thing to break the monotony of the horizon is a church spire or tower, or that it towers over a little group of cottages huddled about it. Sometimes, indeed, these church buildings are poor and rough; but these are becoming fewer and fewer, and are now gradually, even in the poorest districts, being replaced by more pretentious structures. The last few years have seen in Ireland a great activity in the building of these chapels, though they are not always of the artistic value of many of the older examples.

The economists and political agitators have, of late, drawn attention to the “positive sinfulness” of the increase of chapels and religious buildings side by side with the increase of poverty. This may have existed up to the last half-century, but, as surely as the seasons change, a new era for Ireland is close upon it, {41}

ST. DOULOUGH.

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and the increase of what is called the “religious vocation” is not the bugaboo that it once was.

One should pay a hearty tribute to the patriotic efforts of the Gaelic League to inspire throughout Ireland a wholesome and invigorating sense of nationality, and to guide its energies into industrial and intellectual channels. This movement, from within and without, is doing noble work, and, if it is uninterrupted in its progress by religious or political jealousies, Ireland may yet come to her own again.

More than seven centuries have rolled onward since the English have become intimately connected with Ireland, and yet how little is really known of the land and its people, in spite of all that the political economists, the ecclesiasts, and the antiquarians have written concerning it.

Professor Van Raumer, a German, in his “Letters from Three Kingdoms” (which it is only proper to say has been criticized before now as a mass of bold trivialities and solemn inaccuracies), says that he never knew what poverty meant until he travelled in Ireland. {44} Its existence, to a very large extent, is undeniable; and, in times of stress and strife, it has even become virulent; but ragged dress, frugal fare, and mean houses do not always indicate actual distress. The trouble seems to be with those who commit themselves to written observations that they never appear as apologists, but condemn, from the start, anything and everything which falls below a certain preconceived standard which they may have unknowingly set.

In spite of the fact that the population in certain parts of Ireland was proclaimed as being, at the beginning of the Victorian era, at its lowest ebb,—in many parts of Ulster conditions have since changed but little,—there was often no apparent haggardness or lack of nourishment to be observed; the children notably, like the children of the slums in great cities, were rosy, chubby, and high-spirited—a very good indication of the general health of a community. This is one of the anomalies of travel and observation which cannot be explained.

A statement was made in the public prints, at the beginning of the year 1903, that Ire {45} land had lost, in the twelvemonth previous, a population equal to that of Limerick, the fourth largest Irish municipality, and greater than that of at least one Irish county (Carlow). This awful drain by the outflow of the virile young of both sexes should be controlled by the well-wishers of Ireland’s prosperity.

What the future is to bring forth for Ireland is doubtless quite problematical; but there is no gainsaying that the hour is ripe for any action which it may seem advisable to take. It is difficult to believe that even the fieriest of the patrons of Ireland can fail to perceive England’s present willingness to make what perhaps she thinks is a sacrifice, but which in any event is intended as an atonement for the past, and an eager desire for the prosperity of the country at her doors. There are many respects in which Ireland is eminently fitted by nature for prosperity. There is hardly to be found anywhere in the world such natural facilities for the development of a great mercantile marine as exist on the eastern coast from Londonderry and Antrim to Waterford and Cork, and Belfast to-day contains one of the world’s greatest and most able ship-builders. {46} There is, it is said, no part of the country which stands at a greater distance from a waterway to the sea than four and twenty miles. The country has immense stores of iron, still unutilized, mainly because of the scarcity of native coal; but some day, in this epoch of cheap and rapid transportation, they will yield a rich harvest. There was once a considerable industry carried on in the copper-mines of counties Waterford, Wicklow, and Cork, but of late it has greatly declined. So it is with the sulphur-mines of Wicklow, which at one time yielded nearly a hundred thousand tons per annum. The bogs, which cover one-seventh part of the surface of the whole island, have never yet been turned to such economic uses as most certainly await them—the production of a really well-cured compressed peat fuel. There are vast deposits of lignite, already proved to be of great depth, but which can be worked on a large scale only at a greater expenditure of capital than has yet been applied. In point of fact, Ireland is potentially a rich country, but her mineral deposits have been practically neglected. It will be a happy day for England when she finds, as she yet may, {47}

PEAT-CHOPPERS.

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a prosperous and contented Ireland at her doors.

A prosperous Ireland means, ultimately, a healing of whatever sore remains open; and may, perhaps, mean the removal of the last bar against the real federation of the English nation. The recent visit of Britain’s king and queen may be taken as a good omen, and its effects may turn out to have been far-reaching. At its least, it stimulates good-will on either side, and does its own quota of work in the inspiration of a hopeful spirit in a natively buoyant people, who have long chafed at neglect. At its best, it may hope to make one of the loveliest countries in the world a place of popular resort, with the inevitable result that its advantages will become more widely known and better exploited than they have hitherto been.

It has long been the opinion of many Irishmen, and of many British well-wishers of Ireland, that the permanent establishment of a royal court would be of much service to the country. It is claimed that this idea is not dictated by any spirit of “flunkeyism,” but rests on a sound business basis, which, after {50} all, if a sordid view, is an essentially practical one. Such a court would promote trade, and trade would feed industries that are now starving; and, while it would carry these material blessings in its train, it would have its proper sentimental value also, and would do its share, and no small share, either, in the final reconciliation of two countries which have long, to their common disadvantage, been divided.

Any one who reads has heard considerable of “the unfinished chapter” of the nineteenth century of Ireland; how Ireland “oft doomed to death, is fated not to die;” and of “the Exodus.” Yet, after all, these affairs of apparent moment have really very little import to-day. Ireland is by no means dead, nor ever will be, as things point now.

The history of Ireland during the past hundred years has indeed been vivid. So has the history of most other lands. It is merely a sign of the times.

The year 1849 found Ireland in as wretched a condition politically, and socially, as she ever had been. 1846 and 1847 had been famine years, when people lay perishing and the land lay untilled. No crops were raised and no {51} rents were paid. The corn laws had come into effect in England, and the tax on foreign corn, which gave to Ireland a real advantage with respect to grain, was withdrawn. The economists advised cattle-raising as a substitute, and pointed to the fact that, as an English statesman had said, “Ireland was clearly intended to grow meat for the great hives of English industry.” How the transformation from a grain-raising to a cattle-growing country was to be made, instantaneously, he did not say.

The project did not receive immediate favour, as might be presumed, and was the real cause of the impetus given to migration to the United States, “the home of the free.”

The streams of fugitives swelled to dimensions that startled Christendom; but the English press burst into a pæan of joy and triumph—for now at last the Irish question would be settled! Now at last England would be at ease. Now at last this turbulent, disaffected, untamable race would be cleared out. “In a short time,” said the London Times , “a Catholic Celt will be as rare in Ireland as a red Indian on the shores of Manhattan. {52} ”

The press, indeed, in England, was most uncharitable, and, assuredly, in more instances than one, quite ignorant of that about which they were writing.

Religion was, of course, their chief point of attack. It is always a safe card to play, if one wants notoriety merely, not only for as impersonal a thing as a public journal, but for an individual as well.

The Irishmen who remained, the emigrants’ kindred, their own flesh and blood, their pastors and prelates, could not witness unmoved this spectacle, unexampled in history; the flight en masse of a population—as it then seemed, and the figures are truly astonishing—from their own beautiful land, not as adventurers, but as heart-crushed victims of expulsion. Some voices, accordingly, were raised to deplore this calamity; to appeal to England; to warn her that evil would come of it in the future. But England did not see this; at least, did not see it then . There were philosopher-statesmen ready at hand to argue that the flying thousands were “ surplus population .” This was the cold-blooded official way of expressing it; but the English press, {53} however, went farther. They called the sorrowing cavalcade, wending its way to the emigrant ship, a race of assassins, creatures of superstition, lazy, ignorant, and brutified. The London Saturday Review made the following reply to a very natural expression of sympathy and grief wrung from an Irish prelate witnessing the departure of his people:

“The Lion of St. Jarlath’s surveys with an envious eye the Irish exodus, and sighs over the departing demons of assassination and murder. So complete is the rush of departing marauders, whose lives were profitably occupied in shooting Protestants from behind a hedge, that silence reigns over the vast solitude of Ireland.”

Volumes might be filled with the same sort of comment, and yet other volumes with an impartial review of events as they really were; but even then the story would not be told, and hence the impossibility of entering into the controversial aspect of the question here.

Tears may trickle down the cheeks, and hearts may palpitate with emotion, when the sons and daughters of the soil view for the {54} last time the streams which sparkle in the glens, the lakes which bosom themselves in the mountains, and the bowers of fairyland with which every Irish wood is endowed; but, yet, one may depend upon it that as bright or a brighter future awaits the emigrant who goes out into the world than remains for him who stays at home.

It seems paradoxical to see in emigration at once the hope and the curse of Ireland; but, after all, perhaps it is not wholly a detriment. The area of Ireland is comparatively small, its productiveness limited, and its population still relatively great, in spite of the fact that some five millions have emigrated to America alone since 1840.

Manifestly it has been for years, and must be for some years yet, mainly emigration to which Ireland must look for improvement of the social conditions of those who are left behind—provided, of course, that home conditions are sufficiently encouraging to the tillers of the fields, the cattle-growers, the men and women in the great flax and linen factories, the ship-building establishments, and the fisheries. These industries alone, with the increasing {55}

A WEST OF IRELAND FARM.

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{57}

trade outside their own country for the native products, ought in a measure to win increased prosperity.

In addition, too, it is fondly hoped by many, and predicted by a few, that a great tide of tourist travel will turn toward Ireland, and that, in time, it will become as busy catering to the wants of pleasure-loving tourists as are Switzerland and Norway.

Perhaps this is not altogether to be desired, from many points of view, but it appears inevitable.

The political aspect of affairs in Ireland is ever and ever improved by the periodic and frequent visits of royalty. These ought to do much good, for the idea should be fostered that the people of Ireland have the same king as Britain across the Channel. Some there be, in both islands, who would have this forgotten, and many happy ideas for the encouragement of Irish affairs have been strangled by hands both from within and without the green isle.

Forgetfulness may account for this, but more probably it does not, and many entirely ignore the fact that Great Britain’s king has also the words “and Ireland” attached to his title. {58} At the end of a recent visit of King Edward, the London papers, almost without exception, referred to his return as a “home-coming,” as if he had returned from an alien shore.

The fact was passed unnoticed, apparently, but there was a sting in it which the Irish themselves, one may be sure, did not overlook.

The Irish land and tenant problem is one which cannot be ignored, and has given great concern to those responsible for Ireland’s welfare.

It is impossible, and it would not be meet, to attempt to deal, even superficially, with the question here; but it cannot be overlooked by one who knows anything of Ireland and the present-day aspect and conditions of life there; nor can it by even the “butterfly” tourist, who does the round of Killarney’s fair lakes in a personally conducted party. Even he, if he is at all observant, will see evidences of certain conditions of life with which he has not become acquainted elsewhere.

The question for the landlords—leaving the rights and wrongs out of it—was, and is, how rentals can be collected.

It certainly cannot always be expected to be {59}

BOG LAND, KERRY.

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paid out of the land. The eight or nine acres of reclaimed bog-land, which often constitute the tenants’ holding, can produce nothing in the nature of rent after the occupants have secured any sort of subsistence. But that is only half the case. There is, or is supposed to be, another very large class of holdings in the poorest districts, which cannot even produce a bare subsistence for an average family. It is possible that the demerits of bog-land are greatly exaggerated. When reclaimed it is, it is said, in a sense, easy to till and productive. But, on the other hand, it rapidly impoverishes itself and deteriorates by periodical flooding,—the curse of all the west,—and its productivity is but comparative.

On the De Freyne estate at Castlerea there are hundreds of acres of rich grassland with scarcely a house upon them, “cleared” years ago by the landlord when prices were high and there was a chance of profitable sales,—which sales, however, apparently did not materialize. On the other hand, there are hundreds of acres of bog-land, with the little cabins crowding close upon one another as far as the eye can see, which certainly indicates that there {62} is a demand for this class of holding. Rents are not high, as rents go elsewhere; but they cannot be paid out of the land, and the sons and the daughters, in order to live, must leave it. In cottage after cottage one may hear the same story. An old man and his wife with one daughter left at home; two sons in England; two daughters in America,—all sending over a pound now and then to keep the roof over their parents’ heads. And these people cleared the land themselves. “It was all red bog, sorr, like yon,” they tell you.

A peasant in the townland of Cloomaul gives these figures. He is sixty-seven years old, and until 1860 the rent of his holding was £5 a year. In 1860 it was raised to £11 5 s. 0 d. ; twenty-eight years later the Land Commission reduced it to £6 5 s. 0 d. Meanwhile great became the stimulus to emigration, and once again the old story of “me sons beyond the sea” is given out. In some sections there is scarce a young man or a young woman to be seen. The evictions, that throughout Ireland raise the countryside as nothing else does, only bring together, with a few rare exceptions, a band of women, children, and old men. The {63} hay harvest in England calls many of the able-bodied away temporarily, and the colonies and the United States call those who would go farther afield.

The moral aspect of the whole problem is thus put in a nutshell by the economists and Ireland’s well-wishers:

“Irish landlordism to-day represents little more than an enormous tax upon the industry of the people. It does nothing in return for the money it receives. It is, to a very large extent, non-resident. Much of it is in a bankrupt condition.”

And no wonder, when one remembers the vast proportion that is “spent out of the country.”

Mr. T. W. Russell, M.P., contributed a recent paper to the New Liberal Review on “Disturbed Ireland.” In it he takes a very gloomy view of the present situation. He says that a grave crisis is rapidly approaching, which will shake things to their foundations in Ireland; and points out that since 1868 the whole of the Irish governing class has been disestablished and disendowed. Before that year, Ireland was governed by its Prot {64} estant landlord garrison. First by one measure of reform and then by another, every cartridge has been withdrawn from the bandoliers of the garrison, which is now as powerless as it was once all-powerful. England is dealing with an absolutely crimeless country. White gloves are the order of the day, blank court calendars are reported all over the country, yet boycotting is wide-spread, and intimidation is rampant. A conspiracy to boycott is punishable, but boycotting is not in itself an offence. Hence the great part of the country has passed under the dominion of the United Irish League. What the future will actually bring forth for “poor, distressed Ireland” it is impossible to predict, but it may be presumed that other lands will go on enriching themselves by the accumulation, as citizens, of the flower of Ireland’s flock, and that this is in fact but a natural enough thinning-out process, which has obtained among other nations before now.

What the further and yet dimmer future will be, no one can tell; but the above seems a plausible opinion which has much to justify it, both in precedent of the past and with due {65} regard to the racial characteristics of the people.

Others hold out more hope. The Right Hon. George Wyndham, M. P., chief secretary for Ireland, stands sponsor (1903) for the fact that it is the wish of the people at large that “the evening star of the Empire, shedding a sad light in the west, shall rise toward the zenith and shine out from amid the brightest constellations in the imperial empyrean.”

With Mr. Wyndham’s appointment to the secretaryship, it is thought by many Ireland’s great revival is at hand.

Already opposing partisans have begun to realize that the genius of the Celt disposes the Irish to take kindly to coöperative efforts for their welfare; and more stimulating than all else will be found to be the great Celtic revival among all classes.

Forty years ago the great Protestant revival in Ulster had for its object, or at least its main object, a passionate and more or less selfish personal aspiration.

To-day the movement is even greater, while it leaves religion aside, and is essentially national. {66}

Study has taken the place of idleness; grammars have replaced playing cards. On St. Patrick’s Day the Irish celebrate the restoration of their ancient language to its ancient dignity. The public-houses are shut up instead of being crowded. A new hope, a new motive, a new incentive,—all these are visible in Ireland. They find practicable expression in the enthusiasm with which the Irish language is being studied everywhere.

This latter may be a pure fad, but it is in no way an unhealthy one. How far the chief secretary’s attitude actually goes in behalf of Ireland, his own words will best tell.

In the House of Commons he asked:

“Was it necessary to dread any dire political consequences from the spread of the Celtic renaissance? He thought the object, the brightening of the intellect of the Irish child, was a good one; and he did not think the political consequences would be very harmful. If, as a result of such instruction, Irish lads in fifty years gave up the practice of singing, on certain anniversaries, inspiring ditties which enjoin the propriety of kicking the Crown or {67} the Pope into this or that river, and preferred to sing the Irish song:

he could not see that the change would be politically deleterious. They could not make a Scotsman into a better engineer by confiscating his heirloom; and their language was an heirloom of the Irish. Its usefulness was not immediately obvious; but that was true of most household gods, and yet a tutelary reverence for household gods had often nerved heart and hand for utilitarian contests. There was no heresy to the Union in permitting to Ireland that which they promoted in Scotland and in Wales; on the contrary, it was an article of the Unionist creed that within the ambit of the Empire there should be room for the coöperation of races, maintaining each its memory of its own past as a point of departure for converging assaults on the problems of the future.”

There can be no doubt but that the chief {68} secretary for Ireland has been baptized with the spirit of the Irish revival. He believes in Ireland. He loves the Irish people. To him the witty and mercurial Celt is much more sympathetic than the more stolid Englishman. Ireland, like the fair damozel in Spenser’s poem, has a singular fascination for the Sir Calidores and Sir Artegalds who stray within range of the magic of her charms.

As to what were the real beginnings of Ireland, and whence came the original Celt, we must for a time longer, it seems, remain in doubt. The more the pity, for the character of a people is in large measure due to inheritance. Here, for centuries long gone past, there was isolation in manners, customs, and forms of government. But then, Ireland being insular, the chances were that many people of a different race might have mixed their blood with that of the early settlers. Still, there never was a country which delighted more in legends and of which the past was more legendary. And, above all, the Irishman always respects these antiquated stories, whether authenticated by later scholarship or not. {69}

A JIG DANCER

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Therein lies the charm of association which surrounds the very shores and rocks and rills of Ireland.

Here are a few brief lines from McCarthy which express it far more succinctly and with more feeling than it would perhaps be possible for any other living historian to write, be he Irishman or not:

“Every stream, well, and cavern, every indentation of the seashore, every valley and mountain peak, has its own stories and memories of beings who did not belong to this earth. A distinguished Englishman once said that whereas in the inland counties of England he had found many a peasant who neither knew the name of the river within sight of his cottage, nor troubled himself about its early history, he never met with an Irish peasant who was not ready to give him a whole string of legends and stories about the stream which flowed under his eyes every day.”

An American writer, Horatio Krans, has recently attempted to dissect the motives of the Irish novelist of the first half of the nineteenth century. He has put his finger upon one notably weak spot in the earlier novels, {72} —the delineation of female character. He claims particularly (though the Irish novelist is not alone in this sinning) that the heroines, with a few exceptions,—Lady Geraldine in Miss Edgeworth’s “Ennui” and Baby Blake in “Charles O’Malley,”—are hopelessly conventional in speech, in sentiment, and in manner; all of which is undeniably true.

The Irish novelists of the time divided their product into two distinct classes, “the novels of the gentry” and “the novels of the peasantry,” and there is, as a fact, much in favour of the heroine of the peasantry class.

The names of the novelists of that time most generally known, and most readily recalled, are unquestionably, first of all, Goldsmith, then perhaps Miss Edgeworth, Charles Lever, Maxwell, and Samuel Lover. Among themselves they have apportioned the various types which we of a later generation have come to recognize as of the soil. The most notable, and one common to all, is that strange product of Irish life (to which, it may be observed, Oliver Goldsmith called attention), the “squireen,” who was without an idea beyond a dog, a gun, and a horse. {73}

It is a commonplace to remark here that many of the gentry of that time lived in barbaric and slovenly splendour, led devil-may-care lives, hunted during the day, and drank, played cards, and quarrelled at night.

But new forces are certainly bestirring themselves in the Ireland of to-day, and a new standard of life, a wider knowledge, and a finer culture is broadcast. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the realm of Ireland’s imaginative literature, in prose as well as verse.

Of the actual life of the times, the present-day Irish novelist draws not with so firm a hand as his predecessor, but he makes a more pleasing picture.

The duel, as an institution, is extinct to-day, but much the same mode of life as that of a former day is depicted in the stories of Miss Sommerville and Miss Martin Ross. In these modern novels are found the horse-dealing, hunt-loving gentry; but the peasants appear only as retainers and as necessary adjuncts to the occupations of their betters. The Ireland of these writers, then, is a land of happy-go-lucky and thriftless enjoyment and cheerful impecuniosity, with an occasional glimpse of {74} tragedy. Miss Katherine Tynan, too, deals with the same class and succeeds in depicting Irish landscape, in its quick-changing colours, its gloom and sunshine strangely mingled, mountain and bog, dew and rain, in a manner which suggests that her books are a genuine distillation of Ireland itself.

The soul of a country is to be sought in the literature of the people, and the literature of Ireland is yet, to the vast majority, an unopened book; and, paradoxically, it is in the pages of fiction that one seeks a record of many facts which are otherwise unwritten.

Besides the “gentry” and the “peasantry,” the two distinctive classes into which writers divide the Irish, there is another class in Ireland, and an important class, which has been practically neglected by Irish writers of fiction,—the shopkeeper. Here Ireland is at once the most aristocratic as well as the most democratic country in the world. In the learned professions you will find the sons of butchers and publicans jostling the offspring of peers and gentlemen of lineage in the race for preferment, and, like enough, beating them at their own game. In England the expected {75} sometimes happens; in Ireland even the fairy-tales may come true; and there will be found a delicate refinement in life which, those competent to explain suggest, has been imported by the daughters of the house from the convents of Ireland, of France, and of Belgium.

Few countries so small have given the same opportunities to the novelist as has Ireland. Village life is dull enough from within, no doubt; from without, unlike English village life, it is, in Ireland, quite dramatic. It has been said that the people are unconsciously dramatic and that even their grief is picturesque. The possibilities of the race are great.

An Irish villager may become a Dublin shopkeeper, a London barrister, or, in America, a politician of the first rank. He would never once so much as get a glimmering of this in his native village; but news of the outside world filters through and attracts the ingenious and soulful Irishman to the betterment of himself, and, truly enough, in many cases no doubt, to the poverty of Ireland; for it has come to be admitted that the desertion of Ire {76} land by those who have since become classed among the world’s great is one of the plausibly acceptable explanations of Ireland’s poverty.

Every French soldier was said to carry the field-marshal’s baton in his knapsack. Every Irish peasant who crosses the Atlantic has his marshal’s baton in his knotted handkerchief on the end of his blackthorn. It is a young race in modern development; its energies are fresh and unexhaustible, and therein lies a field for the novelist which is not yet worked out.

One other type should be mentioned here, if only to proclaim their unselfish devotion to their vocation,—that of the parish priest, the poor cleric who, with a parish of a few score of souls in some barren bog, finds his life-work full in ministering to their souls, and often, as well, to their bodies.

The pseudo-Irish priests of melodrama, and too frequently of novels, are huge travesties on the devoted and valiant fathers who are hidden away in innumerable corners of Ireland, surrounded only by a dwindling score of communicants. {77}

The Ireland with which the present-day traveller has most to do is the Ireland which came more or less under English influences in the time of Henry II.

The legendary and romantic period of the Phœnician settlers, the Spanish colonists, and the warfares of petty kings and chieftains has left little but a vague impress upon Irish national life and sentiment, if we except a certain imaginative and romantic temperament, which seems to be the true birthright alike of the Irish poet, peasant, and politician.

The crafty, ambitious Henry obtained from Adrian II., the first and only English Pope, in 1159, a bull authorizing him “to enter Ireland and execute therein whatever should pertain to the honour of God and the welfare of that land.”

English power in Ireland rooted, grew, and flourished, and propagated no end of internal troubles, which are to this day, if we are to believe all that we see and hear, the cause of much of Ireland’s unrest.

During four centuries Ireland was visited by but three English sovereigns, Henry II., John, and Richard II., and during the four {78} teenth and fifteenth centuries English influences gradually declined, reaching their lowest ebb at the time of Henry VII. The Reformation, under Henry VIII., took place in 1536, and was in all respects the most remarkable era of Ireland’s history, and from that time on—until the events which rose out of the tenantry laws, and home rule, and their attendant and satellite conditions—her troubles have been solely a warfare more or less dependent upon religious influences and conditions.

Commencing with the seventeenth century, the population sprang forward with leaps and bounds. Its estimated growth for the succeeding two hundred years is as follows:

According to the old historians, there were anciently many divisions of Ireland, made at various times by the several petty kings and chiefs who had possession of them. {79}

There is an element of uncertainty about all the information concerning these ancient political divisions; some, indeed, may have been purely apocryphal, hence writers have mostly contented themselves with defining and delimiting the more modern divisions of Ulster, Leinster, Munster, and Connaught.

These four great divisions were subdivided into thirty-two counties, 256 baronies, and 2,293 parishes.

The province of Ulster took in the northern part of the island, and extended from sea to sea. What has always rendered this province superior, in prosperity, to the rest of the island is its great industry of linen manufacture.

The province of Leinster, in which is situated Dublin, Wicklow, etc., has the sea only on the east. The writers of a century or more ago were prone to remark that here the inhabitants approached the nearest to English manners and customs, and with some truth this is so.

The province of Connaught, with the sea on its western boundary, containing the counties of Mayo, Galway, and Sligo, through the city of Galway early arrived at a commercial {80} prominence which later eras have not sustained.

Munster crosses the southern part of the island, extending itself northward on both the east and west coasts. Its principal and most famous city is Cork, and the whole county abounds in that wild romantic scenery which has fondly inspired so many poets and painters.

To these four provinces some ancient writers added a fifth, called Meath, formed by a small part taken from each of the other provinces, but independent of all of them.

Of the ancient commerce of Ireland Tacitus wrote: “Its channels and harbours are better known to merchants than those of Britain,” which eulogy, of course, referred to the first century.

The Phœnicians are reputed to have worked the mines which existed in the neighbourhood of the lakes of Killarney, and to have acquired the art of “extracting the celebrated Tyrian purple from the juice of shell-fish.”

Cæsar’s invasion of what are known as the British Isles was supposed to have been instigated by the export from Ireland of the “margaritas” taken from these Killarney mines. {81}

That the commerce referred to by Tacitus was that carried on by the Phœnicians, is deduced from the fact that the Romans knew nothing of the country at that time. {82}

CHAPTER IV.

ROMANCE AND SENTIMENT

T HE ingredients which most writers on Ireland, the historians, the antiquarians, the political agitators, the publicists, the poets, and, last but not least, the fictionists—from the days of Samuel Lover to George Moore and Bernard Shaw—have used as a basis for their written word have been many and varied.

Some have pictured it as a land of desolation and poverty, rich in nothing, while others have descanted elaborately upon its treasures and wealth of historical, architectural, and ecclesiological remains; the beauty of the literature of its native legends; its poetry and music; and erstwhile its native tongue, which may have a latent charm to those versed therein, but which will never become a popular speech, as an Irish member must have hoped

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The Genuine Irish Peasant

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when he recently attempted to make a speech therein in the British House of Commons.

No one but an encyclopedist could hope to embrace, within the confines of a single work, a tithe of the accessible material which should contribute to the making of an exhaustive work on the subject, and the monumental work is as yet unwritten, and, for aught the present writer knows, unplanned.

Perhaps the more interesting detail of any picture which attempts to limn the outline of an Irish landscape, is that which unmistakably indicates the unique character of the inhabitant himself.

There may live an Irishman without humour, without sentiment, without “wrongs;” men and women who marry early, without love, and settle down to a hopeless life of dreary toil, too discouraged to even resent the misery of their lot; but, if so, it is in the pages of the novelist. Those who have in them anything of the real native spirit of youth and courage emigrate, a procedure which, however, deprives the country of much of its soundest raw material. George Moore ascribes this condition to the Irish clergy, who cripple their {86} parishioners with taxes to build unnecessary churches, and who crush out of them all the joy of life by an enforced asceticism.

But all that is decidedly another story and quite apart, and is really not so obvious as is at first apparent. The real, genuine Irish peasant is not found, to-day at least, in the pages of the novelist, nor in the verses of the poet, nor in the songs of the opera-house. Tom Moore pictured him with some of the truthfulness of the time, and there is a realization of certain well-recognized local sentiment and colour in “Kathleen Mavourneen.” In the main, however, the joyous Irish peasant, as full of wit as of knavery; the poetic Irish peasant, living in an atmosphere of quaint legend and of charming superstition; the political Irish peasant, member of the Land League, and noble patriot, or treacherous ruffian, according to the attitude which we take toward the Irish question; the romantic Irish peasant, warbling cadences to the faithful girl of his heart, does not exist,—at least he does not in sufficient numbers to project himself into view at every turn, as he does in {87}

BOG LAND, KERRY.

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the comic-opera chorus and the pages of the humourous ( sic ) Irish tales of to-day.

Romance and legend have associated the shamrock, the shillalah, and the dudeen with nearly every mood of Irish fact and fancy; but the casual traveller and seeker after new sensations will see little of any one of these three more or less visionary attributes of the landscape in general. To be sure, if he insists on being brought at once under the spell of the environment which he has pictured to himself as being the one universal accessory of every patch of the “ould sod,” or of every gathering of its inhabitants, he will, if he goes to the right places to look for them, discover the whereabouts of most things of this world’s civilization, of all eras, from the stone hatchet of the ancient Celt, to the motor-bicycle of the Dublin barrister out on a holiday; and from the rancorous peat-bog with its cave-like habitation and straw-bedded floor, to the damask and fine linen of the last joint-stock enterprise of the hotel-keeper, in such advanced centres of progress as Dublin, or more particularly Belfast.

If he takes his standard of judgment from {90} the view-point of food for man, he will find it, in some remote and more poverty-stricken localities, to be something very akin to what he has always believed to be mere fodder for beasts; and again, in the aforesaid luxurious caravansaries, to be the same as that which grace the average tables d’hôte of the great establishments the world over, be they situated in Paris, Vienna, London, or San Francisco.

The “Green Isle” is always green, and the native is always picturesque. Sometimes, far away from the centres of population, he is dirty, but not offensively so, at least, not more so than the Italian or Spaniard under similar circumstances.

What memories are conjured forth, even to the untravelled, by the mere mention of such places as Killarney, Cork harbour, or Blarney Castle in the south, or Moville, Londonderry, or the Bloody Foreland in the north; and, to specialize for a moment, who among students of history does not give a deservedly high place, among the things of the world beautiful, to the arts of the early builders of Christian edifices in Ireland?

In all manner of building, theirs was an art-expression {91} as far above that of the pagan Britons in the neighbouring isle as is possible to imagine.

Ireland, indeed, in the sixth and seventh centuries, was the chief centre of Christian activity, of Christian missionary work, and of Christian art in the islands. So strong an influence was this that it is recorded that Irish missionaries went not only afield into England, but even to Italy.

The antiquarian and geologist have proved beyond a doubt—what is easy, however, for even the layman to believe—that the Ireland of to-day was originally merely one of the outlying parts of the mainland, and the expression of the customs and arts of the inhabitants of the two at that time did not then differ greatly one from the other. This was maintained, the scholars tell us, through the neolithic and the bronze ages, at which period Ireland came to part company with the mother island.

The transition came when the Romans occupied Britain. Roman towns sprang up which had no counterparts in Ireland, and {92} usage and custom developed an entirely new condition of life.

Thus Ireland retained a crudity of strength and expression which early evinced itself in its Christian art, and which was added to but slowly.

As to what may have been the early religion of the Irish, we are still in the dark. That there were druidical priests seems probable. Legend says that St. Patrick had been a slave in Ireland, having been brought from Scotland, and that even in his days of slavery he formed an affection for the country and its population. The date of St. Patrick’s coming to Ireland, as a bearer of the gospel, is said to have been in the year 430-432, when he returned from Rome after having escaped his bondage. The difficulty is to understand how, at once, Ireland became Christian and, according to the old traditions the “home of Christianity,” and, on that account, called “the Isle of Saints.”

St. Patrick’s birthplace is much in dispute, and Armorica, Gaul, Scotland, Wales, England, and Ireland contend for the honour. Much wordy warfare has left the question still undecided, but it is of little moment, since the {93} main facts in the life of this holy man are known, and his devotion to Ireland recognized by all.

To come to a latter-day aspect of Ireland, in its relation to world affairs, let us pray that there are signs that the night of hatred and the twilight of suspicion are brightening into a new dawn in partnership between Great Britain and Ireland—into a day of mutual understanding, respect, and, in the end, affection.

To realize all that this means, one must understand something of the peculiarities of the Celtic race and their finer traits, even making allowance for their less amiable qualities. To do this, without too great an expenditure of time, one could hardly do better than to digest Justin McCarthy’s recently published book (1903) entitled “Ireland and Her Story.” He will then be, if ever, in a fit mood for appreciation of the lovable and inspiring qualities to be observed in the land itself, no less than in the inhabitants themselves.

Mr. George Moore, in his play, “The Bending of the Bough,” has attempted to draw a comparison between the temperament and characteristics of two distinct classes, one resi {94} dent in a town in the Celtic north of Ireland, and the other in the Saxon south of Scotland. The work is a satire, no doubt, but it shows how widely dissimilar are the majority of the representatives of the two races, and should do much to throw additional light on the subject of the alliance of the two nations. When all is said and done, one comes naturally to the opinion that it was the Irish race, of tradition, at least, that gave the major portion of the romance and fairy-lore to European literature in general—excepting, of course, the sages of the Northland. As Mr. Yeats says, though with a pardonable bias, “Daily life has fallen, for the most part, among prosaic and ignoble things, but in our dreams (we) remember the enchanted valleys.”

The modern novelists have given us more than our due share of localized Irish. Mr. George Moore, among all their number, spares us the false, perverted language which some are wont to admire, fondly believing it to be of the earth earthy. For not attempting or perpetrating Irish dialect upon us we should all be grateful to Mr. Moore.

In Moore’s books you meet with no such {95} monstrosities as “praste” for priest, “quane” for queen, “belave” for believe, or, worst of all, “yez” for you. Another overworked word in the vocabularies of most writers of Irish fiction or narrative is sure (usually spelt “shure”). Thackeray is supposed to have understood its use better than any other, and as an example one may cite Miss Fotheringay, when she said, “Sure, I made a beefsteak pie.” The “divil” comes frequently to the fore in Irish conversation, or at least there are those who would have us so believe, but its use is more often a perversion than not.

It is well recognized that no one laughs so heartily at the attempt to revive the old Irish language as the modern Celt himself. An anecdote has recently gone the rounds that in literary Dublin, which has for its gods Yeats and George Moore, some one has recently made a printed announcement in Erse, but attached thereto, as a sort of sub-section, is a further admonition in the supposedly much hated Anglo-Saxon.

An intrepid individual once tried his small store of Gaelic on a native, who replied that he did not speak French, though from his {96} appearance, his age, particularly, he was naturally ( sic ) thought to be one of those who still spoke the venerable tongue of his race.

An Irish automobilist, who had lost his way at a cross-roads because of an enigmatic sign-board, spent much time in roundly cursing the language of his fathers as being entirely worthless and incomprehensible.

Many have taken a grim inquisitorial pleasure in showing to a likely Irishman something written in Erse characters and demanding a translation, which, of course, they could not get.

Occasionally one sees in the Irish daily papers a picturesque Greek-looking inscription, but few know what it means save the perpetrator, who probably copied it from some old phrase-book. “Ceade mille Failthe” we all know, but there our knowledge ends.

All this proclaims loudly the fact that the common people—the middle class, if you like, or what is known elsewhere as the middle class—care and know very little of the motive which inspires the profound scholars of Ireland’s ancient tongue to seek to perpetuate its use. {97}

Since, however, Celtic art is the fad of the day, it is but natural that the Celtic tongue should claim some share of attention; but to expect it to make any serious inroads in the national life, or, indeed, in the lives of the “transplanted Irish” of America and elsewhere, is sheer folly. It were easier to have hoped for the success of Volapuk, which, itself, a dozen or more years ago, died of its own sheer weight of consonants.

Now that Ireland is supposedly prospering at the hands of a solicitous foster-mother, the “Board of Agriculture,” the demand for Irish products and the interest in Irish art and history are undoubtedly increasing. So, too, the interest in Irish literature, in the abstract; but the Irish tongue itself has a poor chance for popularity.

It is well to recall that the mass of the Irish people speak the English tongue alone, a tenth part, perhaps, being able to speak both Gaelic and English, with but a very few who know Gaelic alone. In the south and west the latter is much more spoken than in the north and east, where it is fast disappearing. The Irish Gaelic, or Erse, resembles both the Scottish {98} and the Welsh Gaelic. Some common words frequently met with in travelling about Ireland are:

In the little country towns, where the blue cloaks gather thick upon the platforms of the {99}

AN IRISH LASS.

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stations, the musical Irish tongue begins to sound. “To swear in, to pray in, and to make love in,” Irish has no rival among languages dead or living. There are twenty ways and more of saying “darling,” and at least as many ways of sending a man to the devil. When the Saxon coldly orders an enemy to “go to the devil,” the Celt fiercely breathes the wish, “May the devil sit upon your breast-bone, barking for your soul!” and the “Go and hang yourself!” of the Englishman becomes “The cry of the morning be upon you!”—embodying in this brief sentence a detailed wish that the enemy may die a sudden and unprepared death in his bed, and that his relatives, entering in the morning, may find him dead, and shriek over his remains. It is a picturesque and forcible tongue, most assuredly, though one needs a glossary and a thesaurus to correctly estimate the values of these pet phrases.

The various blended emotions and sentiments current everywhere in Ireland are the product of tradition in which legend and superstitious belief play an important part. They may not actually enter into every hour {102} of one’s life, but they are ever-present and the supply is bountiful.

George Moore has said that every race has its own peculiar genius. “The Germans have music; the French and Italians have painting and sculpture; the English have, or had, poetry; and the Irish had and still have their special genius for the religious vocation.”

There is no more popular legend or superstition in Ireland, unless it be that of the Blarney Stone, than that referring to St. Patrick’s having driven the snakes from the country. According to the report of tradition, nothing venomous is ever brought forth, nourished, or lives in Ireland. Naturalists do not, however, agree with this.

The Venerable Bede evidently believed it, and that the freedom of Ireland from venom was due to the efficacious prayers of St. Patrick.

Another authority (Keating) remarks it, and finds it due to a prophecy of Moses that wherever his posterity should inhabit, the country would not be infested with poisonous creatures. The superstition is already hoary with age, but is a perennial topic of conver {103} sation and source of argument with the natives in all parts.

The literary associations of Ireland are so numerous and of so fresh a character as to suggest the compilation of a great, if not an exhaustive, work on the subject. At any rate, they are too voluminous to record here, even though the geniuses of Swift, of Lover, of Goldsmith, and of Moore stand out as if to compel attention, as they certainly do, in the same convincing manner that Swift’s “Gulliver” influenced a certain Irish bishop, who accepted the tale as the truth, “although not a little amazed at some of the things stated.”

Writers on early Irish literature have often overlooked or ignored the fact that, besides the chroniclers of fame and note who indited learned historical works or majestic verse, there are, too, existing poems by various ladies of early Ireland, generally daughters of kings. Another Meave, called the Half-red, has some of the characteristics of Queen Meave herself: “The strength and power of Meave was great over the men of Erinn,” says the introduction to her poem over the grave of her first husband, whom she deserted for a better {104} man; for it was she that would not permit any king in Tara without his having herself as wife.

Ireland’s daughters must have been a glorious and mighty race; indeed, they are so to-day, and one does not need to go back to Moore for endorsement, though he contrasts with marked effect the native elegance of Erin’s daughters with the affected fashionable city belle:

This was doubtless true enough in Moore’s time, and is so to-day, in spite of the fact that they no longer stand picturesquely around and display their charms in just the manner expressed by the poet.

One hears frequent references to the laureate Spenser’s life in Ireland, of his verses in praise of its charms, and of his undoubted love for it, which certainly was as great, if different, as that of Ireland’s recognized “national poet.” Irish sentiment has never allowed recognition to Spenser’s accomplishments, however. The Irish themselves, who are always ready to turn the dull side of the gem toward the light, are not in complete accord on the question of Spenser’s love for Erin, as one will infer from the following, taken from “A Brief Account of Ireland and Its Sorrows: {106} ”

“Among those who lived here was Spenser, a gentle poet but a rapacious freebooter. His poesy was sweet and full of charms, quaint, simple, and eloquent. His politics were brutal, venal, and cowardly. He wooed the muses very blandly, living in a stolen home, and philosophically counselled the extirpation of the Irish owners of the land, for the greater security of himself and fellow adventurers.”

The above is but a note in the gamut, but it is a true one, and it does not ring false, and, while the moral aspect of Spenser’s right to his livelihood in Ireland is left out of the question here, one can but feel that if the Irishman were less emotional and more forgiving much would come to him that he now lacks.

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A Brooch from the Hill of Tara

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CHAPTER V.

RELIGIOUS ART AND ARCHITECTURE

I T has been claimed that Ireland has no distinctive art or architecture, and that the venerable ruins of monasteries and churches, the stone crosses, the curiously interwoven traceries of stone carving, the illuminated manuscripts, and even the famous round towers themselves were all transplanted from a former home; and that the jewelry, bangles, brooches, and rings, which we fondly believe are Celtic, are nothing more than Byzantine or Eastern motives, which found their way to Ireland in some unexplained manner.

Whether this be acceptable to the average reader or not, whether he remarks the similarity between certain of the Celtic (?) motives and similar decorative effects in wood and stone known to belong to the Northmen, or whether he prefers to think them an indige {110} nous growth and development of Ireland itself, matters little, in a broad way.

Nowhere but in Ireland are there so splendidly executed and preserved traceries of the peculiar sort which is shown in the crosses at Kells and Monasterboice, and, in manuscript, in the “Book of Kells.” Nowhere are there more numerous or more gracefully proportioned round towers than in the Emerald Isle, and nowhere are there more consistently and thoroughly expressed Norman and Gothic forms than in the many ecclesiastical remains which exist to-day, though many of these establishments have not the magnitude or splendour of others elsewhere.

The palaces of the Irish kings would have, perhaps, the chief interest for us to-day, did they but exist in more tangible form than reputed sites and mere heaps of stones. From the chronicles we know that they were splendid residential establishments, but not much more.

The chief of the palaces whose splendours are celebrated in Irish history were the Palace of Emania, in Ulster, founded or built by Macha, queen of Cinbaeth the First, about {111} the year B.C. 700; Tara, in Meath; Cruachan, in Conact, built by Queen Meave, the beautiful, albeit Amazonian, Queen of the West, about the year B.C. 100; and Ailech, in Donegal, built on the site of an ancient sun-temple, or Tuatha de Danaan, fort-palace.

Kincora had not at this period an existence, nor had it for some centuries subsequently. It is said to have never been more than the local residence, though a palatial one, of Brian Boru.

Emania, next to Tara the most celebrated of all the royal palaces of ancient Erin, stood on the spot now marked by a large rath called the Navan Fort, two miles to the west of Armagh. It was the residence of the Ulster kings for a period of 855 years.

The mound or Grianan of Ailech, upon which, even for hundreds of years after the destruction of the palace, the O’Donnells were elected, installed, or “inaugurated,” is still an object of wonder and curiosity. It stands on the crown of a low hill by the shores of Lough Swilly, about five miles from Londonderry.

Royal Tara has been crowned with an im {112} perishable fame in song and story. The entire crest and slopes of Tara Hill were covered with buildings at one time; for not only did a royal palace, the residence of the Ard-Ri (or High King) of Erin, stand there, but, moreover, the legislative chambers, the military buildings, the law courts, and royal universities surrounded it. Of all these nought now remains but the moated mounds or raths that mark where stood the halls within which bard and warrior, ruler and lawgiver, once assembled in glorious pageant.

The round towers of Ireland form a subject of curious and speculative interest to him who views them for the first time, as, indeed, they do to most folk, learned or otherwise. The actual invention and construction of these round towers are clothed in much darkness. It had previously been supposed that these extraordinary erections were the work of the Danes, but this position seems to be entirely untenable on many grounds, the chief being that no similar structures exist, or probably ever have existed, in the native country of the Danes, and are, indeed, notably absent from many parts of Ireland where the Danes {113}

THE HILL OF TARA.

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are known to have been, and yet are found in other localities which were never occupied by the Danes.

The great question with regard to these lone towers is whether or no they are, or were, Christian structures. No such monuments are found elsewhere in the known world, except in India or Persia, where, manifestly, their inception was not due to Christian influences.

In a way, a very considerable way, they resemble the minarets and turret towerlets of a Cairene or Damascene mosque, where often, in the smaller mosques, at least, the sky-piercing pointed towerlet is the chief and most imposing part of the structure.

They may have been signal-towers; they may even have been refuges, though they could not shelter any very great numbers, save in the buildings which often flocked around their bases. In this case they performed much the same functions as the watch-tower or turreted donjon-keep of a castle. At any rate, they were of profound moral and significantly Christian motive, rather than pagan, as he who reads may know.

The power of the Church in Ireland grew {116} as it did elsewhere, in France in particular, largely from the foundation of those great secular religious bodies, the abbeys and monasteries.

From the time when St. Patrick—carried in slavery from Scotland to Ireland, and subsequently escaping—returned to Ireland in 430-432 to convert the island to Christianity, to the present day, is a long period for any particular institution to have survived and still continue its functions in the same abode. For this reason it is unreasonable to suppose that there is much more than tradition, however well supported, to connect the personality of St. Patrick and his immediate successors with any edifices, however humble or fragmentary, which exist to-day. If they do exist, as popular report would seem to indicate, they most likely are rebuilt structures upon the reputed ancient sites, with the bare possibility that somewhere, down in the cavernous depths of their underpinning, exist the stones of wall and pavement which may have known these early pioneers of Christianity. The art and influences of Christianity, both in Ireland and Scotland, are, from the sixth century, at least, {117}

ROUND TOWER, ARDMORE.

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similar as to the development. This was but natural, considering that its great impetus in Scotland only came in the sixth century with the advent of St. Columba, an Irish monk, who was exiled from his own country in 563, and who, coming to Iona at that time, founded a monastery there, and thence passed over to the mainland of Scotland.

In France, about 646, Arbogast, an Irish monk, founded an oratory, and Gertrude, the daughter of the illustrious Pepin, sent to Ireland for “further persons qualified to instruct the religieuse of the Abbey of Neville, not only in theology and pious studies, but in psalm-singing as well” (“ Pour instruire la communate dans le chant des Pseaumes et la meditation des choses saintes. ”). Charlemagne, too, placed the universities of Paris and Ticinum under the guidance of two Irishmen, Albin and Clements, who had previously presented themselves, saying that they had learning for sale.

The “Monasticum Hibernicum” enumerates many score of abbeys, priories, and other religious establishments in Ireland.

One is inclined, in this progressive age, to {120} marvel when he contemplates the universality, among all nations, of that religious zeal which drew its thousands from the elegance and comforts of all classes of society to the sequestered solitude of monastic life.

Its history is well known and it is generally recognized that, as the enthusiasm of the Crusades subsided, many influences, which otherwise made for the aggrandizement of the religious orders, became, if not negative, at least impotent.

There were, perhaps, some solitaries in the third century, but it was not till after the conversion of Constantine, A. D. 324, that the practice of seeking seclusion from the world became general.

Monasticism came to Rome, where St. Patrick received his inspiration, from Egypt, and made its way into Gaul, the monks of St. Martin’s time reproducing the hermit system which St. Anthony had practised in Egypt. Gallic monasticism, during the fifth and sixth centuries, was thoroughly Egyptian in both theory and practice.

St. Benedict, the founder of Western monasticism, was born about A. D. 480, and began his {121} religious life as a solitary; but when, early in the sixth century, he “wrote his rule,” “it is noteworthy,” says a French authority, “that he did not attempt to restore the lapsed practices of primitive asceticism, or insist upon any very different scheme of regular discipline.” His rule was dominated by common sense, and individualism was merged in entire submission to the judgment of the superior of the house.

Ireland was in the very forefront of the movement, though St. Patrick’s monkish possessions here did not take shape until well into the fifth century; but it was about fifty years, more or less,—authorities differ,—after St. Benedict’s death that Augustine arrived in England ( A. D. 597). He and his monks introduced the “Rule” into England. Celtic monasticism did not greatly differ from Western monasticism, which under many names, and with many variations in detail, ever since St. Benedict’s time down to our own day, has been Benedictine at bottom.

Congal, Carthag, and Columba continued in St. Patrick’s footsteps, in the sixth century, and carried monastic life to still greater splendour and perfection by their rules and foundations. {122} Then followed throughout Ireland, in a long and splendid succession, many Augustinian, Benedictine, and Cistercian foundations.

Besides their glorious ecclesiastical monuments, these bodies were possessed of great wealth in lands, and even in gold. In fact, public generosity, and the opulence of the communities which sheltered them, gave them an almost supreme power, and from obscurity they rose to be all-powerful factors in the life of the times.

The prostrating fury of the Reformation moved more slowly here than in England. Ireland had no Wyclif to raise his voice against Rome, and the people in general were, and wished to be, passive subjects of the sovereign pontiff.

The Augustinians exceeded in numbers those of any other order in Ireland, but the Arrosians, the Premonstratensians, the Benedictines, the Cistercians (a branch of the Benedictines), the Dominicans (founded by St. Dominic, a Spaniard born about 1070), and the Franciscans (founded by St. Francis of {123} Assisi), and various other orders, were also well established.

In addition, the military orders were likewise represented by the Knights Hospitallers, or Knights of St. John, and the Knights Templars, so called from the fact of their original home having been near the Holy Temple.

The heads of the monastic houses were the abbot, who governed the abbey, and whose possessions were often so great, in Ireland, as to entitle him to a seat in the parliament amongst the peers; the abbess, who presided over her nuns in much the same manner as the abbot governed his monks; and the prior, who was often the head of a great monastic foundation, and many of whom also had seats in Ireland’s parliament.

The military order of Knights Hospitallers also were builders, erecting castles on their manors, such establishments being known as commanderies, while the knight who superintended was styled preceptor, or commendator. Whenever the Knights Templars followed this example of the Knights Hospitallers, their castles were called preceptories.

The almoner had the oversight of the alms {124} which were daily distributed; the chamberlain the chief care of the dormitory; the cellarer procured the provisions for the establishment; the infirmarius took care of the sick; the sacrist was in charge of the vestments and utensils, and the precentor, or chantor, directed the choir service.

Throughout Ireland, too, were erected many hospitals, friaries, and chantries, for the most part presided over and controlled by members of the higher orders. The friaries had seldom any endowments, being inhabited only by mendicants. Chantries were endowments for the maintenance of one or more priests, who were to daily say mass for the souls of the founder and his family. There were formerly many such in Ireland, usually connected with the larger churches. Hermitages were obviously devoted to the residence of solitaries who secluded themselves from the world and followed an ascetic life of confinement in small cells.

This brief résumé is given solely from the fact that it is a commentary on many references which are made elsewhere in this volume, and not in any sense as an assumption that {125} these facts are not otherwise readily accessible to the general reader.

It shows, moreover, that monkery was cultivated in Ireland as zealously, and to as great an extent, as in any other nation in Europe, and in addition had, for centuries, supplied many brethren to other establishments throughout the known world, notably to seminaries at Rome, and in Spain, Portugal, and the Low Countries.

At the time of the Revolution the number of “regulars” in Ireland was above two thousand, and these all in addition to the regular ecclesiastical establishment and its clergy.

The mere attempt to define and describe the cathedrals of Ireland as they exist to-day, or as they existed at the disestablishment, in a work such as this, would be fated to disaster from the very first lines.

No brief explanation, even, as to why their numbers were so great, their size so attenuated, or their architectural qualifications so minor, would be satisfactory, and for that reason they must, as a class, be dismissed with a word.

The minor county cathedrals of Ireland are {126} almost unknown to all but the historian and archæologist.

The larger and more important examples—as in Dublin, Kilkenny, and Cork—are possessed of considerably more than a local repute, though none are architecturally pretentious or great, as compared with the cathedral churches of England or the Continent.

The cathedrals of Ireland are in many instances commonplace little countryside churches, insignificant and inaccessible, and many of them, in fact, of no great age or beauty; but they claim, rightly enough, along with many more ambitious edifices elsewhere, the proud distinction of once having been cathedral churches.

The largest and most splendid is St. Patrick’s at Dublin. Kilkenny, which next approaches it, falls considerably short of it in size; while St. Patrick itself takes a very low rank indeed as compared with England’s noble minsters.

The cruciform plan, with two westerly towers and a huge central spire,—the typical English type,—never fully developed in Ireland. It is stated, indeed, that no such example {127} exists in any church edifice in Ireland, though of cruciform churches with a central tower alone there are examples at Armagh, Dublin (Christchurch), Cashel, Kildare, Kilkenny, and Killaloe.

Of cruciform churches with a tower elsewhere than in the centre, specimens are found at Ardfert, Limerick, Clonfert, and Dublin (St. Patrick’s).

Waterford had formerly a curious and attractive old cathedral with a square fortified tower placed midway along its southern wall; but what amounted to nothing more than a sheer act of vandalism caused it to be pulled down and a thoroughly hideous, unchurchly, unbeautiful structure—which might be a brew-house but for its steeple—erected in its place.

Down Cathedral looks like the typical large parish church of England’s shores, and Derry from the southwest resembles nothing so much as a fortification, not unlike the cathedral of St. Samson at Dol, in Brittany.

The restored cathedral of Kildare looks too painfully new to be really beautiful. It must {128} have been much more satisfying as a ruin, judging from contemporaneous prints.

The ancient cathedral on the rock at Cashel was unroofed and dismantled in 1748, and its functions taken up by a structure described as “stately Georgian” in style, but which is very ugly.

Cloyne Cathedral, though restored and refurbished, has some resemblance left of its former outlines. It is without a spire, and is a long, low, unmajestic building, curiously placed in juxtaposition with a neighbouring round tower, which serves the province of a steeple, at least as a landmark.

Killaloe Cathedral is impressively picturesque, perhaps more so by reason of its situation than anything else, though its ample and hardy central tower gives a dignity that otherwise would be lacking.

Lismore Cathedral hardly dignifies the title, and has a weak, attenuated little spire which has no element of beauty in its make-up. Otherwise this cathedral is charming, though unpretentious.

The cathedral at Ross is curious; a long, low structure, mostly nave, surmounted at its {129}

DOWNPATRICK.

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westerly termination with a spire which of itself is not attractive, but which mingles with the landscape, from every view-point, in an exceedingly gratifying manner.

Clonfert Cathedral is a wonderful old church, one of the most curious and most beautiful in Ireland; its western doorway has a crudity almost barbaric, but it is very beautiful nevertheless.

Killala Cathedral is a severe, unelegant structure, but it has a westerly spire of considerable proportions.

Kilmacduagh Cathedral is a roofless ruin, kept company by a solitary round tower of a considerable height and remarkable preservation. The diocese was of a very limited extent—but eighteen miles in length by twelve in breadth.

Tuam is an ancient, and once a metropolitan, see. The present cathedral is a modern lack-lustre structure, built since 1861.

Of all Ireland’s cathedrals, Downpatrick alone has a truly imposing and commanding situation, albeit its dimensions are not grand, nor is it a very ornate or even a splendid structure. Its graveyard professes to be the {132} burial-place of St. Patrick; the simple boulder is there, at any rate, which marks the spot confidently claimed as being that where the bones of the saint rest.

In a general way, certain of the characteristics of some of the more notable of Ireland’s cathedrals are thus given.

Where great architectural charm or ruined picturesqueness of more than unusual remark are found, they are mentioned elsewhere, but the above fragmentary descriptions should serve to impress upon the mind the comparative simplicity of the ecclesiastical architecture of Ireland.

In the large towns are various modern Roman Catholic cathedrals, but their consideration is quite apart from the architectural remains which are here considered.

Ulster, the most prosperous division of modern Ireland, has been entirely despoiled of its ancient cathedrals. In the other three divisions or provinces the remains are about equally divided.

The history of church-bells in Ireland is of great moment, in that they are supposed to have been in use as early as the days of St.

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The Bell of St. Patrick

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Patrick. St. Dagans, too, had a great genius, it is said, “in making useful articles of iron, brass, and precious metals for the use of the church.” The celebrated Gildas is said to have sent St. Brigid a small bell which he had cast, while St. Adamnan mentions the use of bells “for the more speedily calling people to church.” St. Nennin’s bell, and those of certain other venerated persons, were frequently tendered to be sworn upon. Iron bells were introduced into the churches constructed in Iceland by Irish monks, and these same missionaries are reputed to have brought their bells from Ireland, for the monasteries which they built in France and Italy, in the seventh and eighth centuries. {136}

CHAPTER VI.

THE SCOTCH-IRISH BLEND

T HOSE who have studied deeply the subject of the ethnology of the Scotch and Irish races will know, and have often used as an illustration, the likeness, which is discernible to all, between the inhabitants of the Hebrides, off the coast of Scotland, and those who people the islands off Mayo and Galway, and indeed those who live on the western shores of the Irish mainland itself.

In the Scottish islands Gaelic is still spoken, of a variety easily understood by Irish-speaking people. Observing the striking similarity in language, physique, and mode of life, one is led to investigate the history, social and otherwise, of these islands, and learn something of their past records. With advantages for travel existing in this twentieth century, one is prone to underrate the intercourse that {137} took place between the peoples living widely apart in ancient times. As far as the Hebrides are concerned, their intercourse with Ireland was much greater centuries ago than it is now. In the early ages of Christianity, and for many centuries afterward, the Irish had a great disposition for roaming all over Western Europe, either as teachers, missionaries, or soldiers.

Before the Christian era, one can trace many connecting links between the Scottish Isles and Ireland. It is recorded that one of the very first Irish kings, Lugh Lamhfada, spent his early years in the island of Mull, and, closer to Christian times, Irish warriors crossed the sea to Alba for their military training. The renowned Ulster hero, Cuchullain, with several companions, visited the island of Skye for the same purpose, and a range of hills called the Cuchullins in that island still retains his name.

A little to the east of Ballycastle, toward Fair Head, is a long, projecting rock, which forms a little sheltered spot still known as Port Usnach. In the first century of our era there was here perpetrated a great massacre of the royal family and Milesian nobility of {138} Ireland, known in history as the Attacotti rebellion. The son of a Scottish princess came in after years to revenge the treachery, and was joined by a great number of local sympathizers. A great battle was fought, in which the stranger was entirely successful, with the result that he became king, and was known as Tuathal Teachtmar.

He reigned wisely and well for many years after, and the country became ever and ever more prosperous. The incident is mentioned here as showing a connecting link between Ireland and Scotland at a very remote time.

Passing through the centuries, the intercourse between Ireland and the Scottish Isles became very close indeed. About the year A. D. 500, a great colony left what is now County Antrim and sailed in their curraghs across the narrow sea that separates it from the Mull of Cantire, whence they colonized Islay, Jura, and Iona, and other Scottish islands, where their direct descendants still live. To understand this migration, one must recall that about the year 500 A. D. a great movement of this sort occurred in the north of Ireland to the opposite coast of Alba, now {139} called Scotland. Three brothers, who were paramount chiefs of a territory known as Dalriada, called Loarn, Angus, and Fergus, removed with their people to Cantire. These brothers were great-grandsons of Colla Uaish, a King of Tara, who wedded a Scottish princess. Colla Uaish was one of the three Collas who invaded Emania two centuries before the northern Irish province was ruled from Emania by the Clan Rury for over six hundred years. On leaving Antrim, Loarn, the eldest brother, occupied the territory in the west of Scotland, still known as Lorne, and from which the eldest son of the Duke of Argyle takes his title as Marquis of Lorne. The next brother, Angus, occupied the islands of Islay, Jura, and Iona. Fergus, the youngest brother, who had the largest following, occupied Cantire, Cowal, and Argyle. Fergus survived his two brothers, and, after their death, consolidated the three territories into a kingdom, which he called Dalriada, after his native territory in Ireland. This kingdom was the foundation of the Scottish kingdom, and extended from the estuary of the Clyde in the south to Lough Broom in Sutherland in the {140} north, and was separated from the Pictish kingdom on the east by a chain of mountains; it also included the Hebrides and other islands of the west coast.

Fergus’s residence in Scotland was Dunstaffnage, on the west coast, near to the Sound of Mull, which continued to be the residence of the Scottish kings for many centuries afterward. King Edward VII. traces his pedigree back through the Scottish Stuarts to this King Fergus. At a late period of his life, Fergus wished to revisit his native country, but was unfortunately wrecked on the voyage and drowned. His body was landed at Carrickfergus, from which incident that ancient town derived its name. For half a century this domain in Scotland was held by the new settlers, under three different kings, but the king of the Picts gave them a severe defeat in the year 560.

It was at this time that Columba formed the idea of going to Scotland and attempting the conversion of the Picts to Christianity. He had spent the first forty years of his life in Ireland, founding churches and monasteries, and, as an itinerant missionary, preaching all {141} over Ireland. He started from Derry, where stood his favourite monastery, and proceeded, accompanied by twelve of his followers, along the beautiful shores of Lough Foyle to Innishowen Head, where the little bay is still shown from which his curragh sailed to the Scottish Isles. It was about the year 563 when he left Ireland, and, as he was born in 521, he was then forty-two years of age. Monasticism had already taken a firm hold in Ireland, and the more zealous of the Irish monks were founding monasteries in the islands around the Irish coast, as well as on islands in the larger lakes. Islands were the favourite spots where these institutions flourished. What was for their safety and security at first,—that is, their isolated position,—ultimately, during the Danish period, led to their destruction. Columba stopped at several islands on his way. He called at Oransay with the idea of remaining, but, as he could see the summits of the mountains of Ireland from it, he proceeded to Iona, where he got a grant of land and founded his famous monastery. For two years he never left the island, getting the little community into order, building {142} his monastery, and tilling his ground. By his holy life, example, and conversation, he impressed most favourably all who came in contact with him. His little colony was like an oasis in the desert of that wild country. During this period he was studying the Pictish tongue, of the same family as the Gaelic, as the most likely means to succeed in his mission. He formed the bold resolution of going direct to King Brude, and preaching first to him, well knowing that if he succeeded with the king the nobles and people would follow. The stronghold of the king of the Picts was situated near Inverness. Columba was wise, for he took with him two of his disciples, who were Irish Picts by birth, namely, Comghal, who was born at Muckamore, and afterward founded the great monastery of Bangor, and Canice, who afterward gave his name to the church and the town of Kilkenny. King Brude was at first unwilling to receive Columba, as one learns from the history of his life, written by his successor, Adamnau, Abbot of Iona. This life, as is well known, was translated by Bishop Reeves, and, thanks to Adamnau and Bishop Reeves, there is no saint in the {143} early Irish calendar of whom so much is known. He was entirely successful in his mission to the Pictish king, who became a convert to the Christian faith. The leading nobles followed, and, for years after, his labours amongst the Pictish nation never flagged until the whole nation embraced Christianity. The result which he anticipated followed, and the mellowing influence of the gospel caused a marked improvement in the relations between the Picts and the Scots, and led to their ultimate union into one Scottish kingdom.

The monastery of Iona became celebrated over Western Europe, and for centuries afterward shone as a bright beacon of Christianity in this far-off isle of the sea. In the burial-ground known as the Relig Oran there are buried forty-eight Scottish kings, four Irish kings, eight Norwegian kings, and Egfrid, a King of Northumbria; few spots on earth contain more remains of illustrious dead than does Iona. It was the parent of many monasteries, not alone in Scotland and the isles, but in Ireland and the north of England. The monastery of Kells, in Meath, also acknowledged Iona as the head of the Columban monasteries. {144} During all the time it remained a Columban monastery, the abbots were Irishmen, that is, for a period of almost seven hundred years.

The Danish invasion of Ireland, which began toward the end of the eighth century, had an important effect on the Scottish Isles as well as on Ireland. For more than two centuries the northerners dominated everything in both countries. In the twelfth century, however, a great leader arose in Argyle, called Somerled, who drove the Northmen out of the west of Scotland as well as from the isles. He was the ancestor of the Macdonnells, Lords of the Isles, and it was he who laid the foundations of their power. This great leader was ultimately assassinated, and was succeeded by his son Randal, who had two sons, Donal and Rorie. The first was founder of the Macdonnells of Islay, and the latter of the MacRories. Islay was the territory and residence of the Macdonnells, Lords of the Isles, and Bute that of MacRory.

O’Donnell, of Tyconnell, employed these two sons of Randal to cross over and assist him against the O’Neills. They arrived in {145} their galleys in Derry in the year 1211, with over a thousand followers. Three hundred and fifty years later, Red Hugh O’Donnell employed a large number of these Scotchmen, who arrived from the isles in seventy galleys, to assist him against the English. O’Cleary, in his life of Red Hugh O’Donnell, describes these Highland mercenaries as follows: “These were recognized among the Irish soldiers by the difference of their arms and clothing, their habits and language, for their exterior dress was mottled cloaks to the calf of the leg, with ties and fastenings. Their girdles were over the loins outside the cloaks. Many of them had swords with hafts of horn, large and fit for war, from their shoulders. It was necessary for the soldier to put his two hands together at the very haft of his sword when he would strike a blow with it. Others of them had bows of carved wood, strong for use, with well-seasoned strings of hemp, and arrows, sharp-pointed, whizzing in flight.”

From this point onward it is more easy to follow the development of the special characteristics caused by the intermingling of the Scotch and Irish races. {146}

Donal was succeeded in Islay by his son Angus. He brought the Norwegian King Hako to assist the islanders against Alexander, the third King of Scotland, when they fought the battle of Largs. Angus had a son, Angus Oge, who succeeded him. He married a daughter of O’Cahan, an Irish chieftain of the family of O’Neill, who owned all the territory of the present County Derry. Angus had greatly befriended Robert Bruce in the time of his adversity; he brought him to Rathlin Island, off the Giant’s Causeway, and kept him there when pursued by his enemies. When Bruce became king, he rewarded Angus Oge by granting him the isles of Mull, Jura, Coll, and Tiree; he previously owned Islay and Cantire. Angus was succeeded by his son John, who married for his second wife Margaret Stuart, daughter of King Robert the second, the first Stuart king of Scotland. John had by her several sons and one daughter, who married Montgomery of Eglinton. John was the first of the island kings to make an alliance with England,—a policy continued by his successors, and which ultimately led to the downfall of his principality. {147}

It is easy to trace the progress by which the Macdonnells became connected with Antrim, and formed an Irish family, whose head is the Earl of Antrim. John Mor Macdonnell, son of Eion of Islay, and grandson through his mother of King Robert the Second, came to Antrim to seek the hand of Margery Bysett, the heiress to all the lands included in the Glens of Antrim. The Bysetts were an outlawed Scotch family who, about the year 1242, were exiled from Scotland on a charge of supposed murder. With their means they acquired their Irish territory. This lady’s father had married a daughter of the O’Neill, and, being the only child, the property fell to her. After the marriage between John Macdonnell and Margery Bysett in 1399, a greater number of the islanders settled in the Glens, which continued to be a favourite resort and hiding-place when any trouble arose in Scotland. The intercourse between Antrim and the Isles, particularly Islay and Cantire, from this time became very close. There was constant going to and from the Isles, and occasional forays were made as far as Castlereagh, whence large preys of cattle would be driven {148} back to the Glens, and thence to Rathlin, to be taken afterward to Islay at their convenience. In the year 1551 a feud existed between the O’Neills of Castlereagh and the Macdonnells, “and the latter made an incursion into Clannaboy, from which a great prey of cattle and other valuables were lifted and removed to Rathlin.”

The Macdonnells were able to strike a blow at England more easily through the north of Ireland than any other quarter, and the government in Dublin made up its mind to put them down. In 1551 four ships were fitted out, and a large number of soldiers placed on board to proceed to Rathlin, and, if possible, to carry off the plunder which was supposed to be stored there. The ships, on their arrival, proceeded to land an armed force of three hundred gunners and archers. The Macdonnells awaited them on the shore, prepared to give them a warm reception. By a sudden upheaval of the sea, the boats were driven high on the rocks, and, before they could recover themselves, the Macdonnells attacked and slew every man, except the two captains of the expedition. These were retained as hostages, {149}

DUNLUCE CASTLE.

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and afterward exchanged for the younger brother of the chief, the afterward celebrated Sorley Boy, who was then a prisoner in Dublin Castle.

The intimacies and relations between the Scotch and the Irish were growing more and more involved, and a new race—a blend of the most admirable qualities of both—was being propagated. The Macdonnells at this time owned Dunluce Castle, which had been taken from the MacQuillans, also Kenbane Castle and Dunanynie Castle, built on a cliff near the sea at Ballycastle. Ballycastle, previously called Port Brittas, was the place principally used for landing or embarking for Cantire. It was also from here that Fergus was supposed to have embarked when he and his brothers founded the Scottish kingdom. A little to the east of Ballycastle is Port Usnach, whence Naysi and Derdrie sailed to Alba. There were frequent intermarriages between the Macdonnells and the leading families in the north of Ireland. John Mor, as already stated, married Margery Bysett. Donald Ballach married a daughter of the O’Donnells of Donegal. John of Islay married a daughter {152} of the O’Neills. Shane Cathanach married a daughter of Savage of the Ards. James Macdonnell married Agnes, daughter of the Earl of Argyle, and their daughter married Hugh, Prince of Tyconnell, and became the mother of the celebrated Red Hugh O’Donnell. After the death of James Macdonnell, his widow, the Lady Agnes, became the second wife of Turlough Luineach O’Neill, and thus mother and daughter married the two most powerful chiefs in Ulster.

James Macdonnell died in the dungeons of Shane O’Neill, and was succeeded by his younger brother, Sorley Boy, the greatest of all the Macdonnells of Antrim. During the latter half of Queen Elizabeth’s reign, Sorley Boy was able to hold his own against all the queen’s generals, as well as against the MacQuillans, O’Cahans, and O’Neills. He died in 1589 in his castle of Dunanynie, and was buried at Bun-na-Margie Abbey. His wife was Mary O’Neill, daughter of Conn, first Earl of Tyrone, who died in 1582. He left five sons, and was succeeded by his third son, who died suddenly in Dunluce Castle on Easter Monday, 1601. {153}

His younger brother, Randal, next succeeded, who, in the reign of James the First, was, in 1618, created Viscount Dunluce, and two years later, in 1620, Earl of Antrim. James gave him a grant of all the lands lying between the Bann of Coleraine and the Corran of Larne, a territory equal to the ancient kingdom of Dalriada.

The second earl succeeded in 1644, and was created a marquis by Charles the First. He was afterward deprived of his vast property by the Cromwellians. In the reign of Charles the Second, after many difficulties had been surmounted, he had the greater part of it reconveyed to him. He died in 1682, and was succeeded by his younger brother, Alexander, who was in time succeeded by his son Randal, who died in 1721. The Macdonnells succeeded in holding a large portion of their Irish property, whilst they lost Islay and Cantire.

From these brief facts one readily evolves the process by which grew up the ancient and intimate connection between the Scotch and the Irish. One realizes full well, too, that the peoples of the north of Ireland and of the {154} Scottish Isles were of the same race and language, and to a great extent are so to-day.

In manners, customs, and arts, as well, there is a blending greatly to be remarked. In Dunvegan Castle in Scotland one is shown a drinking-cup made in the north of Ireland four hundred years ago. Naguire, of Fermanagh, in the fifteenth century, married a lady from Skye, Catherine Magrannal, and this cup was made at her expense and forwarded as a present to her relatives there. The high crosses of Ireland are reproduced in Scotland and the Isles, and the island monasteries of Ireland and Scotland were similar in both architecture and discipline, and ruins in the Flannan Islands and North Rona have their counterparts in Innismurray, Arran, and the Skelligs. {155}

CHAPTER VII.

IRISH INDUSTRIES

I T is usually supposed that there is very little romance about industry or business of any sort. In general, this is doubtless true, but there is an element which enters into certain kinds of industry, which if not exactly romantic, is assuredly not prosaic.

The cottage industries, as they have come to be popularly known, of Ireland, have this element of romanticism, or assuredly picturesqueness, which is not usually associated with the matter-of-fact throbbing loom and busy shuttle.

This particular phase of industry has of late become somewhat of a fad, so far as people taking an interest in its product goes, though there is a very real, tangible, and practical side to it for the workers, who, perforce, might otherwise be in idleness. {156}

The public-spirited men and women who have encouraged this special industry, or industries rather, for it comprehends lace-making, embroideries, and homespun woollens, are to be thanked and congratulated by reason of the success which has resulted from their efforts.

Everybody has a vague idea that there are certain products which come out of Ireland in large quantities. When called to specialize or enumerate them, they stop short at fine linen and bacon. Beyond this—what? There is but one way to find out, if one is not to visit Ireland itself, and that is from the government publications, Chamber of Commerce reports, and the like. These are dry reading, however, for some people impossible reading, and there is very little romance about them.

When one actually visits Ireland, and sees the Limerick pig in all his gaucheries, and his product in sausages, hams, and bacons, there is perhaps more romance connected with it, for there is a certain picturesqueness which invariably surrounds him. It may be a red-skirted, blue-coated colleen, or it may be a green-trousered, pot-hatted gossoon, who is

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Limerick Pigs

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driving him to market, or it may be that the environment of his home is so squalid as to be picturesque, and suggests primitive conditions and romantic times that have long gone past in other parts of the world.

To consider seriously just why the industries of Ireland are at the low ebb that they are, one has to realize that Ireland has ever been backward and unprogressive in developing her resources, though mostly this is because of oppression, as they call it in Ireland, and oppression, as a matter of fact, it is, or has been.

Primarily there is a scarcity of coal in Ireland. There are no workings that are profitable, and of a good quality, that are opened up at the present time; at any rate, not of a quality to be compared with that obtainable elsewhere and in countries which have prospered more fully than has Ireland.

One thing Ireland has, and has wofully neglected, is its supply of water-power such as has made many similar regions on the Continent of Europe thrifty and prosperous.

It might be used to generate electricity; it assuredly could do so, as there are several {160} swift flowing waters that would fill the requirements admirably,—the Falls of Ballyshannon, for instance. Perhaps some day, when some ingenious individual succeeds in getting motive-power out of the rise and fall of the tides, Ireland will become the most prosperous of any country in the world.

In the seventeenth century, smelted iron—Ireland being very rich in iron ore—was exported to London in large quantities. This trade does not exist to-day. As early as the sixth century Irish woollens were exported to Nantes, and in the fourteenth century there was a large demand for Irish serges in Italy.

The woollen industry was given a great impetus in 1667 by the Duke of Ormonde, who induced five hundred Walloon families to settle at Clonmell, at Killarney, and at Carrick-on-Suir; but in 1698 the English manufacturers persuaded the Irish Parliament to prohibit the exportation of woollens.

From Dean Swift we learn that by this act twelve thousand families were thrown out of employment in and near Dublin, and thirty thousand more elsewhere.

It is of late years only that the cottage {161}

TORC CASCADE.

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handicrafts, knitting, spinning, weaving of homespuns, and lace-making, have been given the great impetus which has now made them established industries, like the cottage cutlers of Barmen and Essen, in Germany, who fashion knife-blades from the crude product which they obtain from the large steel works near by.

Formerly paper-making was very extensively conducted in the county of Dublin; but this is no longer the case. Who does not know the famous Irish linen? Strange to say, the best quality was known as Royal Irish linen. This assuredly was an effort on the part of some astute Irishman to capture outside trade, but his astuteness apparently did not extend to other things.

The dictionaries received a new word in Balbriggan, which was the name of the cotton hosiery first made a hundred and fifty or more years ago at Balbriggan.

Irish whiskey distilleries and the breweries of porter and stout have come to be recognized as premier establishments in their line, and, whatever the opponents of the liquor trade may say, these industries have done Ireland much good. Far more good, be it acknowledged, {164} than that other brewer, Cromwell, ever did for it.

The shipbuilding industry of Belfast ranks among the first establishments, if it is not the very first, in the world, and the allied industries, which produce ropes, cables, chains, and rigging, are likewise foremost in their class. These are mainly centred around Belfast, but an echo is heard at Londonderry, on the north coast.

Porcelain of a rare and unique quality is manufactured at Belleek. So frail and delicate and so translucent is this ware that it stands quite in a class by itself.

The paramount industry of Ireland is the spinning and weaving of linen and flax, mostly centred around Belfast. The great linen ware-houses of Belfast, with branches throughout the English-speaking world, and even on the Continent, are almost household names, and no product of a similar nature elsewhere produced at all enters into competition with the real Irish product. Besides the great establishments at Belfast, there are others, nearly as great, at Ballymena, Londonderry, Coleraine, and Lisburn.

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A Cottage Spinner

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This great industry grew up at the summary closing of the woollen mills, prospered, and, if at first it did not take the place entirely of the woollen industry, it did so finally.

In the mid-nineteenth century it has already reached huge proportions, and, while to-day the public undoubtedly buys a great deal that is not linen in the expectation that it is linen, and a great deal of linen that is not Irish linen in the hope or the belief that it is Irish linen, there is no question but that the trade has already advanced beyond the point where it was when it stood alone and supreme in the world.

The trade has reached its present magnitude from the very small beginnings of a Huguenot refugee named Crommelin, who settled originally at Lisburn.

The superiority of Irish linen is due primarily to the bleaching, which, of itself, depends upon the water and atmosphere, which at Belfast and the other places mentioned is apparently not equalled elsewhere in the world.

To get the same results, it is said that a certain German manufacturer buys Irish yarn,—that is, linen spun in Ireland,—weaves it {168} into cloth in Bohemia, sends it back to Belfast to be bleached, finally brings it back to his establishment in Germany, and sells it as—what?

The most varied and most successful cottage industries are at Limerick, Carrickmacross, Cork, Youghal, Kinsale, Crosshaven, Ardora, and Clones. Their specialty is lace of a delicate and elegant variety.

The cottage woollens are mostly made in Donegal and Connemara, while the art of embroidery is followed most extensively at Belfast, Dublin, Dalkey, Garryhill, Sligo, Strabane, and Ballintra.

There is one phase of trade that the Irish have neglected to develop of late,—the fisheries. More or less philosophically, as they think, they lay this to the Scotch, who are much more successful at the industry than themselves. This is not the fault of the Scotch; it is the folly of the Irish. At any rate, there is an inexhaustible supply of mackerel, herring, cod, hake, sole, turbot, lobsters, and even oysters to be found on the south and southwest coast of Ireland.

In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries this {169}

A COTTAGE LOOM.

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was a trade which was worked, and successfully worked, as records show, by Spaniards, Dutch and French fishermen, who came from their own fishing-grounds to angle in these more plethoric Irish waters.

It was only in the nineteenth century that the Irish took up the industry in at all a commensurate manner, and by the famine years of the late forties they had 19,833 vessels, manned by 130,000 men and boys, in the trade. Then it steadily declined through succeeding years until 1894. In 1900 there were only 6,500 registered boats, employing 25,360 men, and the harvest which they gathered from the sea had but the value of £300,000. Truly this is a sad tale, and not a creditable one. The chief fishing stations are at Kinsale, Baltimore, Valentia, and Bearhaven. There are salmon to be had in almost every river estuary, and the taking of them has not been neglected, as has deep-water fishing.

The chief industry of most countries is perhaps agriculture. Even in Ireland crops are raised,—crops of a sort must be raised,—but they are grown to nothing like the extent that they ought to be. {172}

Probably Ireland’s record is not as bad as England’s in this respect; but landlordism, whatever that vague term may really mean, is certainly responsible for the minute proportions of this industry. In 1831 1,270,000 were engaged in agriculture, approximately 65½ per cent. of the population; in 1891, 49½ per cent., showing plainly that agriculture in Ireland is rapidly on the down grade.

The most fertile counties are Tipperary and Limerick; Kerry is generally poor; but “Mounster,” as Spenser called it, was “of the sweetest soyle of Ireland.”

Cattle-raising in Ireland is truly preëminent, as bald, unromantic statistics show. In Ireland there are 138 horses per thousand of the population. In England, but 36 only. There are 996 cattle in Ireland as against 152 in England; 951 sheep as against 511; and 278 pigs as against 69.

The small farmer in Ireland is, it is true, uneducated to a surprising degree. He knows nothing of rotation of crops, and cultivates seldom more than two varieties. Artificial enrichment of the soil is a profound mystery to him, and he apparently would rather work {173}

EMBROIDERING.

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a piece of reclaimed peat-bog than the most fertile valley that ever grew the products of the field.

Truth to tell, the genuine Irish peasant hates the cultivation of the soil; he dislikes to dig in the earth, as he does to fish in the sea; but he rejoices in cattle-raising, and, above all, cattle-trading. He likes to drive them to market; he makes a regular holiday of it, and so do the rest of his family, as one who has ever met such a composite caravan on the road well knows.

It is said that twenty thousand Irish go to England every autumn for the harvest. It seems a pity that these twenty thousand workers could not have the opportunity of working at home. The author does not pretend to explain this; he recounts it simply as current rumour, which doubtless could be authenticated. {176}

CHAPTER VIII.

DUBLIN AND ABOUT THERE

T HE environment of Dublin, so far as its immediate surroundings are concerned, is exceedingly attractive to the jaded inhabitant of brick and mortar cities.

Phœnix Park, belonging anciently to the Knights Templars, is more beautiful, as a city park, than those possessed by any other city of the size of Dublin in the British Isles, and is, moreover, of great extent. It is densely wooded, has lovely glades, and is plentifully stocked with herds of deer, who seem unconsciously to group themselves picturesquely at all times.

It is in no sense grand, nor, indeed, are the views of the lovely country lying immediately to the southward; but the distant views of the Wicklow peaks are full of quiet, restful beauty, which must help to make life in a great {177}

NEW GRANGE.

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centre of population, such as Dublin, livable at all seasons of the year.

The Viceregal Lodge is in Phœnix Park, and near it is the spot where Lord Frederick Cavendish and Mr. Burke were walking together on the night of May 6, 1882, when they were assassinated by the “Invincibles.”

The “Fifteen Acres,” where now horses are exercised, was a very favourite duelling-ground in olden times. A local description of this “bloody ground” states:

“There is not a single one of its acres that has not been stained with blood over and over again, in those gray mornings of the eighteenth century, when Dublin beaux, half-sobered after a night’s debauch, used to confront one another in the dew-drenched grass, and startle the huddled herds of deer with the deadly crack of pistols at twelve paces.”

Beyond Phœnix Park is Lucan, four miles up the Liffey, near the river’s celebrated salmon-leap.

Clondalkin, six miles from Dublin, possesses one of the finest and most perfect round towers in Ireland, eighty feet in height, and forty-five in circumference at the base. {180}

The Falls of the Liffey, at Poula-Phooka, twenty miles from town, flow under a graceful viaduct. Here the foam-whitened river casts itself down a succession of rocky leaps, and through a richly wooded gorge, into the smoother plain below. This is a scenic gem, such as amateur photographers love, and its picturings are found in the album of almost every Irish traveller. Its name enshrines one of the best known of the many Celtic fairy myths,—that of the Phooka. Certainly, the wild, lofty defile of splintered rock, through which the fall leaps down, must have been exactly the sort of place to allure the goblin horse that had such an unpleasant fancy for breaking people’s necks.

The legend of the Phooka is one familiar in many forms to all lovers of folk-lore. It is claimed to be of Celtic origin, but with equal assurance it is said to be Norse, and again Indian. The apparition is a weird ghost-like horse-shape, not unlike the steed which Ichabod Crane saw mounted by a headless horseman.

Kingstown, seven miles from Dublin, has no great interest for the lover of artistic or {181} historic shrines, though the view of its harbour, with its cross-channel shipping, its fishing-boats, and its long, jutting piers, composes itself gaily enough, on a bright summer’s day, into a pleasing picture.

Originally named Dunleary, the town received its present title in 1821, after the departure of George IV. An obelisk, surmounted by a crown, and placed upon four stone balls, stands near the harbour entrance, and commemorates—what? The king’s coming? Not at all. He landed at Howth, and no one, apparently, thought that incident worthy of a memorial. The Kingstown obelisk commemorates his departure from his Irish dominions.

This seems significant, but it will not do to condemn Irish hospitality on this score. Perhaps it is an attempt at humour. If so, it is not wholly unsuccessful.

Just north of Dublin are two spots famed alike of history and legend,—at least most of the local story-tellers’ tales sound like legends,—Clontarf and Howth.

As the Hill of Howth is one of the first of Ireland’s landmarks which come to the vision {182} of the majority of visitors from England, it may perhaps be permissible to include the following lines here. They were written many years ago by a local poet whose, name is lost in obscurity, but whose verse is sufficiently apropos to-day to need no qualifying comment:

“The Hill” is a bold peninsula at the mouth of Dublin Bay, above whose waters, and those of the Irish Sea, the rugged promontory rises to the height of 563 feet. The whole mount abounds in precipitous rocky formations, blended most artistically with fields of heather and of greensward in a manner apparently possible only in Ireland. From the cliffs over-looking the sea, the outlook embraces the {183} counties of Dublin, Meath, and Louth; the Mourne Mountains and County Down, Ireland’s Eye and Lambay Island; while to the south loom the Wicklow Hills, Bray Head, Sugar Loaf Mountain, Dalkey Island, Kingstown Harbour, and Dublin, showing a variety of form which contrasts strangely with the placid sea, sky, and hills.

Howth itself is a village of one long, rambling street,—or was; of late it has grown more pretentious, and has thereby lost some of its pristine charm.

Off Howth Harbour is “Ireland’s Eye,” which in ancient works is printed Irlandsey . Thus its evolution is easily followed.

The island has some fragmentary remains of the old church of St. Nessan, showing portions of a still more ancient round tower.

The ancient castle of Howth is the family seat of the St. Lawrences, the Earls of Howth, who have held it since the time of their ancestor, Sir Armoric Tristram de Valence, who arrived here in the twelfth century. It is said that the family name was Tristram, and that even Sir Armoric never bore the present family title, but that a descendant or relative as {184} sumed it on the occasion of a battle won by him on St. Lawrence’s Day. The castle was in a great measure rebuilt by the twentieth Lord of Howth in the sixteenth century. It consists of an embattled range, flanked by towers. The interior of the castle is rich in historical associations, founded as it was by one of the most chivalrous of the Anglo-Norman settlers in Ireland.

One sad blow was struck at the founder’s dignity by the graceless Grace O’Malley, or Granuaile, or Grana Uile, a western chieftainess, who, returning from a visit to Queen Elizabeth at London, landed at Howth and essayed to tax the hospitality of the lordly owner, who refused to give her any refreshment. Determined to have her revenge, however, and to teach hospitality to the descendant of the Saxon, she kidnapped the heir and kept him a close prisoner until a pledge was obtained from his father that on no pretence whatever were the gates of Howth Castle to be closed at the hour of dinner. A painting of the incident exists, or did exist, in the oak-panelled dining-hall of the castle. In the hall also is the two-handed sword which won {185} that St. Lawrence’s Day battle. It measures, even in its mutilated state, five feet, seven inches, the hilt alone being twenty-two inches long.

St. Mary’s Abbey, Howth, is a great ruined, roofless structure, which, in spite of its decrepitude, tells a story of great and appealing interest to the student of architecture. Its foundation by Luke, Archbishop of Dublin, dates from 1234, and it is one of those picturesque ruins which, while by no means so grand, will rank in the memory with Melrose and Muckross. As a well-preserved ruin, it still exists and shows unmistakable evidences of having been inspired by some Burgundian or Lombard architect-builder.

Lying between Howth and Dublin is Clontarf, famous as the scene of Brian Boru’s victory over the Danes. Moore has perpetuated its glories in verse, thus:

Many have doubted whether the victory was really in favour of the Irish. It is generally, however, conceded to have been in their favour. Scotsmen will be interested to see the name of Lennox mentioned among the soldiers of the patriot king. An Irish manuscript, translated for the Dublin Penny Journal , after summing up the number of natives slain on the side of Brian, says:

“The great stewards of Leamhue (Lennox) and Mar, with other brave Albanian Scots, the descendants of Corc, King of Munster, died in the same cause.”

After the battle, great respect was shown to the body of the deceased king by his devoted followers, who looked upon him in the light almost of a saint. Wills, the historian, gives the following account of the progress of his corpse:

“The body of Brian, according to his will, was conveyed to Armagh. First, the clergy of Swords in solemn procession brought it to their abbey, from thence the next morning the clergy of Damliag (Duleck) conducted it {187} to the church of St. Kiaran. Here the clergy of Lowth (Lughmach) attended the corpse to their own monastery. The Archbishop of Armagh, with its suffragans and clergy, received the body at Lowth, whence it was conveyed to their cathedral. For twelve days and nights it was watched by the clergy, during which time there was a continual scene of prayers and devotion.”

Few traces remain of this dreadful encounter, and one perforce takes a good deal on faith, as one does much of history where architectural remains are practically non-existent.

An ancient preceptory of the Knights Templars, a dependency of that at Kilmainham, formerly occupied the site of Clontarf Castle, the seat of the Vernons.

Dublin is the metropolitan county of Ireland, also its chief city. The city is thought to have derived its name from the “black channel” of the river Liffey, and to have communicated the name by some expansionist process to the surrounding county, which comprised the six baronies of Coolock, Balrothery, Nethercross, Castleknock, Newcastle, and Uppercross, as well as half that of Rathdown. {188}

Dublin County, unlike most other parts of Ireland, has no silver or mirror lake. In this respect it has manifestly been cheated by nature. Neither are there any of those deforming peat-bogs with which many of Ireland’s fairest lakes are surrounded.

There is a great distinction between legendary and monumental remains; and, since Ireland is so full of both sorts, it behooves one to stop and think for a moment, when viewing some shrine to which his fancy has led him, whether it ever had a former, a real existence, or not. This opens a vast field to research, controversy, and soi-disant opinion.

Near Dublin, on the hill called Tallaght, there are mounds—existing since time immemorial—referred to by the old historians on pre-Christian Ireland as “the mortality tombs of the people of Partholan,” who first colonized Ireland. The mounds are there, and we, perforce, have to imagine the rest, but there is good ground for believing that these grass-grown mounds, the burial-places of thousands of people, are as real and tangible memorials of the pre-Christian era in the British Isles as are anywhere to be found. {189}

The history of Dublin, like that of most capitals, has been momentous. From the second century onward, it has encountered many battles, sieges, and rebellions, and has been the centre of political activity in Ireland.

For the average traveller Dublin is simply a great centre of modern life and movement; for the student of history, architecture, archæology, and such subjects it is much more.

The bird of passage, then, will only be visibly affected by that which lies on the surface, or at least nearest thereto.

He will see that Dublin possesses all the component luxuries of a great city; is progressive to the extent of having cut up its roadways with tram-lines, and disfigured its streets with telegraph and electric-light poles; and, in short, has all those attributes which make even the lover of life in a large city sooner or later wish to put it all behind him.

The greatest novelties for the visitor are the two splendidly organized bodies of constabulary,—the Dublin policemen and the Royal Irish Constabulary.

The Dublin Metropolitan Police is a fine semi-military force distinct from the Royal {190} Irish Constabulary, only acting within the metropolitan district, and is reminiscent of foreign gendarmerie , with its dark blue and silver uniform and smart appearance. The minimum height is five feet, eleven inches, so that Dublin streets seem to be policed by a race of amiable giants. In America the same type of constable is well known. It is also well known that the “force” in America is organized on somewhat different lines from that of its brothers in Dublin. The Royal Irish Constabulary, who are to be seen in the neighbourhood of Phœnix Park (and all over the country besides), are, physically, a magnificent body of men, with as good, if not a considerably better training than “Tommy Atkins” himself.

It is a curious present-day fact that Dublin, as the capital of a Catholic country, not only possesses no Catholic cathedral, but has two Protestant churches known as cathedrals.

Anti-Catholic writers have long found fault with, and traced certain of Ireland’s interior troubles to, the number and power of the Catholic places of worship. That Dublin has {191} two Protestant cathedrals has apparently escaped their notice.

It is also true that not all the Protestant churches in Ireland are overflowing with congregations, but most of the Catholic places of worship are. This may mean much or little. Just what it does mean is doubtful, but it is a well-known fact, and because of this it is recorded here.

Christchurch Cathedral was founded by Sigtryg Silkbeard, a Danish king who had become Christianized, and Donatus, a Danish bishop, in 1038. It was dedicated to the Holy Trinity, with the Danish name of Christchurch; later it was converted into a priory, which in turn was absorbed into an Anglo-Norman cathedral, erected by Strongbow and others on the former Danish foundation. The fabric is of much interest, although, owing to various mishaps, such as the slipping away of the peat-bog on which it was injudiciously built, the walls have many times fallen and been renewed. In Christchurch Cathedral Lambert Simnel was crowned in 1486, and mass was celebrated here during the sojourn of James II. Strongbow’s tomb is the most {192} noted relic of the church. It has an inscription by Sir Henry Sidney, the father of Philip Sidney, referring to “This Ancyent Monument of Richard Strangbowe, called Comes Strangulensis, Lord of Chepsto and Ogny, etc.” The crypt is of interest from being mainly built up from the rude early church of the Danish founder.

St. Patrick’s Cathedral, the cathedral without the walls of ancient Dublin, is larger and more imposing than Christchurch. It is cruciform in plan, and altogether a beautiful and stately structure, partaking largely after the style of the Anglo-Norman structures of England, but not those of Normandy. Founded by Comyn, the Anglo-Norman Archbishop of Dublin, in 1190, the ancient Celtic church of St. Patrick de Insula, which stood without the city walls, and was specially held in reverence from its association with the baptism of the saint, formed the nucleus of the new establishment, which was self-contained and fortified. Its exposed position, however, led it to be abandoned to the marauding natives, and the buildings fell into decay. The present cathedral is of the twelfth to fourteenth centuries. {193} Cromwell desecrated it, as he did many others, by using it for a justice court. Great churches have ever been despoiled by fanatics in all lands.

James II. went one step farther (being James II. this seems inexplicable to-day), and converted it into a stable.

The restoration of this shockingly desecrated shrine (at the expense of more than £140,000) is to the credit of the family of Guinness, whose name and product is a household word throughout the world.

Cromwell was a brewer, too, and supposed to have been a righteous, if stern man, but his virtues were not as great as those of his latter-day compeer.

Since the visitor to Ireland is supposed to wander about with a volume of Swift’s “Life and Letters” in his hand, and to recall at appropriate times the laurelled arbour-retreat near Celbridge, where, two hundred years ago, the luckless Vanessa waited long, and often in vain, it will be well for him to contemplate the two monuments in St. Patrick’s Cathedral, the one to Swift (who was Dean {194} of St. Patrick’s), and the other to Miss Johnson, his Stella.

Another curious religious shrine is the church of St. Fichan, founded in 1095 by the pious Dane whose name it bears, though the present structure dates only so far back as 1676. The square tower, however, is decidedly venerable, and the vaults possess the peculiar property of preserving the bodies entrusted to them in a perfect state, resembling in this respect the Egyptian mummy-pits. Dryness, one great essential to the preserving of animal matter, is complete here. But at one time, owing, it is said, to the nightly visits of a rascally sexton, for the purpose of stealing away the lead coffins from the dead, the damp night air entered and bade fair to play havoc with the mummies.

There is a story told of his releasing from its coffin the body of a lady, who, however, looked him fiercely in the face with a pair of vengeful eyes, and so terrified him that he left his lantern and ran home half-dead with fright. The lady is said to have taken advantage of the light, and to have walked {195} quietly to her own home, where for years afterward she lived a happy life!

To many, Dublin will recall, first of all among its notables of the past, or at least only second to Dean Swift, the name of Edmund Burke.

He was born in the Irish metropolis in 1729, when that city was at its flood-tide of prosperity,—when it was a centre of commerce, art, and oratory.

His parents were of the plain people, and he himself, as he told his Grace of Bedford, “was opposed at every toll-gate, obliged to show a passport, and prove his title to the honour of being useful to Ireland.”

Through this involved procedure, wherein his reputation as an agitator loomed quite as large as his powers of oratory, for sixty-seven long years he laboured at the business of state-craft; but, after all, he is best known to us for his labours in letters.

Some one has said that “Rulers govern, but it is literature that enlightens,” and, concerning Burke, who shall not say that his writings and his speeches, which latter have come to be accepted as but another form of literary expression, {196} were not even more productive of good than were his political agitations. To Americans Burke should be doubly endeared. He favoured American independence, though he was against the revolution in France.

Richard Steele, though schooled at the Charterhouse in London, where he first met that other master of delicately phrased English, Addison, was born in Dublin in 1672 (d. 1729).

Steele has been reviled as a “fashionable tippler, an awful spendthrift, and a creature of broken promises;” but it has remained for an American, Donald G. Mitchell, to glorify him as “An Irish dragoon, not a grand man or one of great influence, but so kindly by nature, and so gracious in speech and writing, that the world has not yet done pardoning and pitying.” It is in the latter aspect that Dublin is wont to think of Sir Richard Steele,—as the “Irish dragoon” of as many virtues as faults.

It would be impossible to mention, even, the many celebrities whose names are identified with Dublin. Statecraft and letters alone number them in hundreds, and that great in {197} stitution of learning, Trinity College, stands high among its kind.

The site of Trinity College was previously occupied by an important monastery, suppressed by Henry VIII. The university was founded by Queen Elizabeth, and endowed with the monastic property and many very valuable private bequests. The college is Alma Mater to a long line of famous men,—Ussher, Congreve, Swift, Goldsmith, Burke, to mention but a very few.

In the centre of the imposing front is the main gateway, flanked by the statues of Edmund Burke and Oliver Goldsmith.

In days gone by, Donogh O’Brien, when driven from his titular sovereignty by his nephew Tarlagh, journeyed to Rome, taking with him his illustrious father’s crown and harp as gifts to the Pope.

By some means or other, the harp—the once famous harp which had sounded through Tara’s halls—found its way back to Ireland, and is now, with the “Book of Kells,” the chief treasure of the library of Trinity College.

The architectural splendour of Dublin is not very great, although certain of the chief buildings, {198} other than the churches, are in many ways remarkable.

Dublin Castle is a group of buildings covering ten acres of ground and dating from 1205, when a castle was erected for the defence of the city. Since the time of Queen Elizabeth it has been the official residence of the viceroy. The buildings are grouped around two courts, with a chief gateway on Cork Hill. The presence-chamber, ballroom (Hall of St. Patrick), portrait-chamber, and private drawing-room are handsome and historic apartments. The lower court contains the Bermingham Tower (formerly the state prison and now used as a depository for state records), the chapel royal, and the armory.

The Bank of Ireland, formerly the Irish Parliament House, has a finely designed Ionic façade, with various adorning statues and escutcheons.

The National Gallery of Ireland ranks among the world’s great collections of pictures, and is exceedingly rich in portraiture. Some one has said that there are but three truly great—in just what way the reader may judge for himself—business streets in the world. The {199}

DUBLIN CASTLE.

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first is the Rue de la Paix in Paris; the second, Princes Street in Edinburgh; and the Third, Sackville Street in Dublin. All will at once notice and admire its great width, its splendid dimensions, and its singularly attractive disposition of public and commercial buildings. The chief is the general post-office, with a fine portico and pediment bearing figures of Hibernia, Mercury, and Fidelity.

The little parish of Laracor, north of Dublin, came to Swift shortly after his return to Ireland as chaplain to Lord Berkeley. “Here he had a glebe and a horse, and became domesticated,” so far as it was possible for the man to be domesticated anywhere.

Swift’s fluctuations between Ireland and London have been the subject of much comment and criticism. He had by no means settled down to the “jog-trot duties” of a small Irish vicar. Swift, the churchman, the litterateur, and the politician were much one and the same thing; and, in spite of his indiscretions, he did good service, though, to be sure, his sincerity was doubted. A story is told, of the occasion when he was urged for Bishop of Hereford, that the Archbishop of York {202} stated to his queen “that inquiries should first be made as to whether the man is really a Christian.” He did not achieve the office, but was reconciled with the less influential deanery of St. Patrick’s at Dublin.

Swift was born in Dublin at a house in Hoey’s Court, now (?) disappeared, in 1667. He died in 1745, and is buried, not among the literary giants at Westminster, but in St. Patrick’s at Dublin, the venue of his deanship.

Swift as a satirist was unassailable in his time, and his literary reputation in general is without doubt—by reason of its versatility—greater than many a more prolific writer.

The first announcement of this master, at once comic and caustic, was the “Tale of a Tub” and “The Battle of the Books,” when followed in rapid review various political and social tracts, the inimitable “Gulliver” (1727) and the “Polite Conversation.” “Cadenus and Vanessa” appeared without the author’s consent soon after the death of its heroine, Miss Hester Vanhomrigh, in 1723; but the “Diary to Stella,” the lady whom he afterward married, did not appear until long after the author’s death. {203}

Swift’s literary reputation—“at the head of the English prose-writers”—has been best summed up by his friend Pope in six short lines:

As the river Liffey, which flows through Dublin, joins the Irish Sea, it expands into a noble bay, which is guarded on the one side by the Hill of Howth, and on the other by Killiney Hill, near Kingstown.

Dublin has long been famous for the manufacture of poplin, dear to the hearts of the ladies. For many years the manufacture had declined, but a recent stimulus appears to have been given it. It was about the year 1780 that the trade first assumed a degree of importance in Dublin, though it had been introduced by the French Huguenots in the reign of William III. From that period till the Union in 1800, it had been gradually increasing in extent; {204} but suddenly declined after the transference of the Irish Parliament to London; and Irishmen are fain to link the two events together as cause and effect.

As the author has had occasion to say before, Ireland is not the saddened, sodden, blighted land that the calamity howlers and pessimists in general would have us believe.

Certainly, in that beauteous country which lies immediately to the southward of Dublin, from Kingstown to Queenstown, there is no great evidence of sorrowing poverty; though, to be sure, there are in many parts no indications of great prosperity. There is a sort of happy mean in the lives of the Irish people; and, since the inhabitants of this particular region are domiciled in so lovely a spot, apparently they concern themselves little with regard to material wealth.

From Dublin, south, is a veritable fairy-land of splendid hills and groves, the famous garden of the county of Wicklow. Bray is admittedly the best situated watering-place in the kingdom. But, more than all else, its chief importance lies in its position as the gateway to all the beauties of County Wicklow, whose {205} residents go farther, and call it the Garden of Ireland. One may truthfully say of Wicklow, as of the other mountainous counties of Ireland, “the more one sees of it, the more one wants to see.” Its roads for the cyclist or the automobilist are, like the Irish character, a blend of the seducing and the bold, corrugated and rough in places, but withal fascinating and appealing, if only for their variety. Powerscourt, the Dargle, the Glen of the Downs, and the Devil’s Glen are the chief points of interest upon which one first comes from Dublin. The Dargle is a wooded glen of extreme beauty, three miles from Bray, from which a little mountain stream runs at the bottom of the gorge, quite hidden at times in a depth of wooded bank which must approximate three hundred feet.

Powerscourt is beautiful enough, but it is more or less of the suburban order of attractiveness, lying as it does so near to Dublin.

The waterfall at Powerscourt is the finest in Ireland. It pours down in a long, diagonal slope over a rocky precipice three hundred feet high. When George IV. came to Powerscourt, the whole fall had been dammed up on the {206} cliff above, with the object of letting it loose when the royal party approached, so that a fine effect might be ensured. All this trouble and expense, however, was thrown away, as the “ First Gentleman in Europe ” lunched so liberally at Powerscourt House that he found himself unequal to the exertion of seeing anything of the demesne.

The Dargle is rather of the conventional order of rivulet. It is not much of a stream at its fullest, but charmingly set in the woods, with mountain-tops rising over the trees, and some dainty waterfalls rather difficult to find. The four miles of road eastward to Bray are quite worth covering to see what the Dargle develops into near the coast; and, also, for the sake of the trim, rose-clad cottages, which here suggest none of that state of poverty we associate so recklessly with Ireland. One may see on the roadside notice-boards the intimation “These lands are poisoned,” and dogs, could they read, would be informed of danger to their persons. In Ireland they advertise in the papers that they are poisoning their lands “from this date,” and no dog has any remedy against the proprietors if he suffers in consequence {207}

ENNISKERRY.

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of his illiteracy, or perhaps his meanness in not subscribing to that particular paper.

The metropolis of the Dargle valley is Enniskerry, which sounds interesting, and proves upon acquaintance to be so, though there is nothing of great moment connected with its past or present.

A few miles farther inland is Naas, the latter-day importance of which is based almost wholly upon its proximity to the race-track of the plain of Curragh and Punchestown. Naas is a delightfully quaint old town, its broad High Street being lined with little whitewashed houses, many of them tumbling down after long centuries of service. It has been narrated dolefully how Naas had once been the residence of the Kings of Leinster, but had now fallen from its high estate.

From Naas to the Punchestown race-course is down a long and winding road through typical Irish scenery. The land along the roadside is dotted with little Irish cabins, with thatched roofs and whitewashed walls, and in the low doorways are gathered old grannies and swarms of little barelegged children. On race-days it is pretty to see these little dwellings, {210} each with its piece of bunting tied to the chimney-stack.

One may see also such sights as a chubby bareheaded boy with his arm affectionately around the neck of a fine fat pig; boy and animal equally interested in passers-by.

It does not strike one as a genuine emotion, however; but, rather, as if it were got up for the occasion and for the delectation of the throngs who attend this most famous of all Irish race-meets. It is quite on a par with the flags and festoons which decorate Naas itself on these occasions, and the legends in old Celtic and English, which the cottagers en route display. “The top of the morning to ye,” “Come back to Erin,” “A hundred thousand blessings on ye,” and “A real Irish greeting” are, after all, too forced to pass current with visitors from across channel as genuine spontaneous emotion.

On the occasion of the spring race-meeting at Punchestown, the little town of Naas is very animated. Inside the station-yard all the morning there is a mass of cabs and cars, which are taken by storm every time a train arrives from Dublin, and then with their load of pas {211} sengers bump, smash, or blarney their way out. Music resounds everywhere. Even the local police have a band. This of course greatly facilitates the departure of the cars, for the horses of scores of them run away every time the band strikes up.

The three miles of narrow country lanes between Naas and Punchestown are a flying procession of cars from eight o’clock till midday, most of them moving at a cheerful stretching gallop, while children and race-card-sellers run gaily in and out, and English or transatlantic visitors hold on for dear life, wondering when and where all this recklessness will end.

The Wicklow mountains stand out in bold relief toward the east, and the clearness of the atmosphere ensures a magnificent view of a course which is situated in one of the finest bits of natural hunting country in the kingdom. The enclosures of Punchestown are very “select,” although a good deal of the riffraff is wont to assemble outside. The Irish police are extremely tolerant, and a thriving business is done in games of hazard, which have lately been ruthlessly extinguished at Epsom and Newmarket, in England. The roulette-table, {212} the man with three cards, and his comrade with the thimble and the pea are among the recognized adjuncts of Punchestown. The country folk on the whole appear to enjoy the “sport,” and if, as is usually the case, the odds happen to be against them, they grin and bear it with naïve good humour. The bookmakers are a noisy, but, on the whole, an honest and withal humourous crowd, some offering to lay a starting price at “Newmarket, Stewmarket, or any old market,—starting price anywhere and everywhere,” while a rival will go so far as to declare: “We pay you whether you win or not.”

On a recent occasion, when King Edward visited the Punchestown races in state, it was even a more brilliant event than usual. Here a great concourse of people awaited the arrival of the king and queen, and the grand stand was closely packed with a representative assembly of Irish aristocracy. The racing provided some very excellent sport. There were very full fields; and, when the horses got away, there was a splendid splash of colour, as the jockeys in all the tints of the rainbow streamed along the emerald course. {213}

The return from Punchestown on this occasion, as the writer has reason to remember, was far and away a wilder nightmare than any “Derby-day drive back to town” which could possibly be recalled. Imagine a solid, motionless block of cars nearly a mile long, with drivers, passengers, and police storming, threatening, and entreating, till at last a passage is slowly forced to the little wayside station at Naas. Here the railway officials had long ago given up the traffic problem in despair, and every train apparently got back to Dublin, or did not get back, by the unaided wit of the engine-driver. Yet one arrived at last, and a request to the officials for a full return of the killed and wounded was met with derision.

From the newspaper accounts the next morning we learned that:

“At a quarter to six, nearly half an hour late, the king and queen arrived in Dublin, and were met by all that was left of the population. They drove rapidly to the Viceregal Lodge, along roads crowded with cheering humanity, and looked very much pleased with their reception. {214} ”

For ourselves, after this informal procedure, we had retired to our hotel to remove somewhat the stains of pleasure-making,—which are often as ineradicable as those of battle,—and, after the inevitable “meat tea” of the smaller hostelries throughout the British Isles, followed Mr. Pepys’s practice, “ and so to bed .”

Near Curragh is Monasterevan, with its ruined refuge-sanctuary, and Lea Castle. A prominent woody eminence is Spire Hill, beyond which are the picturesque ruins of Strongbow’s Castle on the isolated rock of Dunamase. Beyond is Maryborough and the plantations of Ballyfin, which clothe the feet of the Slievebloom mountains, and frame the flat bogland district. At Aghaboe, i. e. , Ox-field House, stands the ancient abbey founded by St. Canice in the sixth century.

Near the river Suir is a plain-fronted, square-towered edifice, known as Loughmore Castle, and a near-by ridge with a curious notched appearance has for its name Sliav Ailduin,—the Devil’s Bit Mountain. Here is Thurles, the scene of William Smith O’Brien’s capture. Here, also, Doctor Cullen summoned {215} a Romish council in the mid-nineteenth century.

Within three miles of Thurles is Holy Cross, where “ the wearied O’Brien laid down at the feet of Death’s angel his cares and his crown .”

Across the plain of Curragh is Kildare, i. e. , Wood of Oaks, where St. Bridget founded a nunnery, in which the vestal sisterhood {216} guarded the ever-burning fire, so beautifully and picturesquely alluded to by Moore:

This convent of St. Bridget’s was founded in the fifth century, and its perpetual fire was kept burning until the Reformation. The house where it originally burned is still in evidence, and the cathedral castle and round tower (130 feet in height) form a triumvirate of venerable attractions for all.

To the northward is the Hill of Allen, once crowned, it is said, with three royal residences belonging to the Kings of Leinster.

Wicklow Gap, Glendalough, and the Seven Churches next command attention, as one journeys toward Wicklow town.

Glendalough is thirty miles from Dublin, locally known—and perhaps more widely—as “The Valley of the Seven Churches.” It is the locale of the legend of St. Kevin and Kathleen. The antiquarians have evolved an elaborate thread of legend and tradition concerning {217}

GLENDALOUGH.

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the founder of an ancient seat of learning here, but most of them ultimately lost themselves in the intricacies of the web which they wove. Moore, with all his popular and sentimental methods, gave the story—though in this case he has tuned his lute with sadness—much more pleasantly and lucidly, when he told of St. Kevin, who, like St. Anthony, was tempted by the lovely Kathleen, herself so enamoured of him that she was willing even to “lie like a dog at his feet.”

These must have been trying times for St. Kevin, for, to continue Moore’s words, we learn that:

Thirteen hundred years ago, when England was still in a state of modified barbarism, Glendalough was of great importance. It was {220} then that the famous churches, whose ruins still stand to-day, were built. Nearly a thousand years ago, Glendalough had her mansions; her treasure-houses, where the chieftains kept their stores of gold and silver, precious stones, and armour; her famous colleges, to which came students of high lineage from all Western Europe. It became known the world over as a place of sacred associations, great learning, and immense wealth. In the Dark Ages, there could be but one end to a city possessing the last advantage, especially as it was small and easy to besiege. After endless trouble from both Danes and English, the latter nation finally sacked and burned the place in 1398. Glendalough never really lifted up her head again, and is to-day but a hamlet of a few score of cottages. “Dracolatria”—the serpent worship of the Irish pagans—is supposed to have flourished here for ages before the founding of the Seven Churches by St. Kevin; and various legends and traditions, written and oral, are still current with reference to the practice.

Glendalough will endear itself to all who have not hearts of stone. St. Kevin’s ruins {221}

ST. KEVIN’S KITCHEN.

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are up and down the glen, and his hermit bed still stands in the dug out of the cliffs. That old, old cemetery of Reefert Church, with the thorn-bushes around it, is reckoned among the unique things in Ireland for its tomb of King O’Toole. The present cemetery, all about and within the ruins of the “cathedral,” is also characteristically Irish and charming. There is a monument here which bears the inscription: “We append a record, as far as obtainable, of clergymen buried in this church,” but has not a single name on it. Is this Irish humour, or is it an indication of Irish poverty? The “oldest inhabitant” could not tell the writer.

Hosts of other dead are commemorated in stone, and, moss-covered, the headstones loll here at all angles, as do they elsewhere in Ireland. Just below is St. Kevin’s “kitchen,” with a tower like that of the broken, but still striking, round tower not far beyond. Formerly, it was one of the hermit’s churches (it was never a kitchen, in fact, and no one seems to be able to explain the nomenclature); but it has now been turned into a little museum of decidedly commonplace attractions. {224}

In the church, the “lady-church” of this group of churches, is the reputed burial-place of St. Kevin.

As might be expected, no memorial exists of the holy man but the walls of this tiny church, if even they have genuinely survived his epoch,—the sixth and seventh centuries. No indications point to the exact resting-place of his bones, and the most that is known is that he died at Glendalough in 618 A. D. at the advanced age of 102. “And that is a doubtful fact,” says the local cicerone.

Wicklow itself is a picturesque crescent-shaped coast town. Its name is borne by the Gap at Glendalough, the county, and that famous headland which juts out into St. George’s Channel, as only a few promontories do outside the school geographies.

The ancient Irish called it Gill-Mantain; but, when it fell before the onrush of the Danes, its name was changed to Wykinlo. The chief architectural remains are those of a Franciscan friary of the reign of Henry III., and an Anglo-Norman castle completed in the fourteenth century. Between Wicklow and {225}

THE VALE OF AVOCA.

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Arklow lies the celebrated Vale of Avoca. It has been made immortal by the poet Moore; but, though its fame is well deserved, and it is a spot beloved by all who have ever seen it, it is in reality no more beautiful than other similar spots elsewhere.

The Vale of Avoca shares with Killarney, Blarney Castle, and the Giant’s Causeway a popularity which is not equalled by any other of the beauties of Ireland. Here “in this most pleasant vale,” where the Avonbeg joins the Avonmore, is the “Meeting of the Waters.” Moore lavished his choicest phraseology upon its charms; and tourists—since there have been tourists—have devotedly stood by, book in hand, and attempted to fit in the poet’s words with each tree and stone and rivulet. For the most part they have not been successful; and the words the poet sung—

might quite as readily have applied to any other spot as fair.

It will never do to disparage Moore’s poetry, and least of all in a chronicle of Irish experiences; but, once and again, an idol does really shatter itself, or at least totters unsteadily on its base; and when one has made the round of all Ireland’s fairest beauties, and heard Moore’s melodies dinned into his ears by importunate touts and mendicants without number, the sentiment is apt to grow thin, and sooner or later the soul rebels. At this point, then, the author’s patience gave out, and so he records his mood, however unseemly it may otherwise appear.

It is indeed a pretty valley, strangely pretty, if you like; and one can hardly remain unmoved and unemotional before its expanse of green, its oaks and beeches, its rocks and rills, its ivies, and more than all else its sunsets. But when one has said with Prince Puckler Muskau—that much-quoted royal German so {229}

THE MEETING OF THE WATERS.

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useful to makers of guide-books—that it is all “exquisitely beautiful,” one has said the first and the last word on the subject. It should be visited and seen in all its beauties; but the experience will not awaken in the hearts of many the emotions which we may presume Moore felt.

Near by is Avondale, the former home of Charles Stewart Parnell. Where the Avonbeg unites with the Avonmore is formed “The Meeting of the Waters.” Many painters have limned its beauties; and, like Killarney, Loch Katrine, and Richmond Vale, on the Thames, replicas of its charms used years ago to find their way in the “table books of art” and “Treasuries,” with which our parents and grandparents used to decorate a small table set before the front window of the parlour.

The part played by the Norman invasion of Ireland has been neglected and overlooked by many in favour of that more portentous invasion of England.

In Ireland the Normans first landed in a little creek on Bannon Bay on the Wexford coast. The advance-guard was composed of thirty knights, sixty men in armour, and three {232} hundred foot-soldiery, under Robert Fitzstephen. This brought on the siege of Wexford, of which the annals, as well as the many remains of ruined castles and churches founded by the invaders, tell.

All this ancient history pales, in the minds of the native bar-parlour frequenters one meets in these parts, before the more vivid, or at least more readily recollected “ little affair ” of Vinegar Hill and “the Men of ’98,” the site of which, with Enniscorthy, lies just to the northward. A half-century ago historians wrote of this as a “matter yet fresh in the memory of living men,” and the great rebellion—so great at least to Ireland—has been dealt with by writers of all shades of opinion ad infinitum . Even the music-hall songs have perpetuated the belligerent aspect of the inhabitants of Enniscorthy, to say nothing of Killaloe. Nevertheless, the incident of the Norman invasion of Ireland, and the parts played therein by Fitzgerald, Diarmid, the traitorous M’Murrogh, Roderick, Strongbow the Dane, and Prendergast,—named in Irish history as “the faithful Norman,”—presents an inextricable tangle of creeds and races which re {233} quires a singularly astute historian to place in line.

It is now seven hundred years since the name of Prendergast was linked with honour and chivalry in Ireland; but something of his earnestness and spirit still lives amongst those who bear his name, if we may judge from the tenor of a modern work by one Prendergast, entitled “The Cromwellian Settlement of Ireland.”

Aubrey de Vere, in his “Lyrical Chronicle of Ireland,” has emblazoned Prendergast’s valour in verse:

Round the coast from Wexford to Waterford one passes the famous Tuskar lighthouse, which, with the Saltee light-vessel, thirty miles to the southward, and Carnsore Point, which lies between, forms the turning-point—or the corner which must be rounded—of the vast sea-borne traffic bound up the St. George’s Channel from the Atlantic.

The chief historical monument of Waterford, with the exception of the reconstructed castle and Ballinakil House, the last halting-place of the fleeing Stuart king, is a squat circular building known as “Reginald’s Tower.” It sits close to the quayside, and is by far the most notable landmark, viewed from either sea or land, which the city possesses. Its erection is credited to Reginald, the Dane, some nine hundred and odd years ago. Kingsley, in “Hereward the Wake,” weaves much of romance around its sturdy walls.

In 1171, when Strongbow and Raymond le Gros took Waterford, it was inhabited by

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Reginald’s Tower: Waterford

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Danes, who, with the exception of the prince of the Danes and a few others, were put to death. It was here that Earl Strongbow was married to Eva, daughter of the King of Leinster; and here, too, that Henry II. first landed in Ireland to take possession of the country which had been granted to him by the bull of Pope Adrian.

Near Waterford is Dungarvan, once a fishing-town of considerable importance. Its fishermen were bold, and went far out to sea, for it was a Dungarvan man who was captured and made to act as pilot by the corsairs of Algiers, who sacked the town of Baltimore, close to Cape Clear, in 1631, when all the inhabitants were killed or carried off into slavery. A curious page of the Irish history, and one which reads more like romantic legend than fact. This man’s name was Hackett, and the story tells that his service to the Algerians was repaid, by his outraged countrymen, with the halter.

Between Cork—with its poetic associations of the Shandon Bells, the river Lee, and of Blarney Castle—and the glens and vales of Wicklow, there is no spot to equal in pictur {238} esqueness and romantic environment the celebrated valley of the Blackwater, which, forming a broad estuary, mingles with the waters of the Atlantic at Youghal Harbour. The great beauties of the Blackwater only unfold themselves as one ascends the stream some twenty miles above Youghal, but the whole lower river has a placid charm which is quite inexplicable.

For what is Youghal famous, say the untravelled? In matters Irish, for many things, but the most lively interest is awakened by the recollection of Myrtle Grove, the one-time residence of Sir Walter Raleigh, Governor of the Virginia Colony in the New World, who, though he had never been there, is popularly supposed to have introduced its tobacco into Great Britain. As a matter of fact, he did not, but some one of his understudies did; and it was at Myrtle Grove that his servant sought to save him from incineration by deluging him with water while he was smoking his favourite pipe. There is doubtless somewhat of legend about this; and the incident has been worn threadbare in its use by an enterprising firm of tobacco manufacturers; but, since Myrtle {239}

SIR WALTER RALEIGH’S COTTAGE, YOUGHAL.

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Grove really exists, and Raleigh really lived there, there is some excuse for it.

It was here, too that the potato, since become a too staple article of diet, was first introduced to Irish soil.

Truly Raleigh is entitled to a reputation as a true benefactor of the race exceeding that due to his reputed chivalry to Queen Elizabeth. Without potatoes and tobacco, what might not have happened to the British race long before now? {242}

CHAPTER IX.

KILKENNY TO CORK HARBOUR

I F Lismore is the most celebrated and stately of Irish castles, Kilkenny, at least, comes more nearly to the popular conception of the feudal stronghold of the romancers and poets, and, withal, it is historic and is second in preeminence, only, to any other in the land.

Kilkenny itself is an ancient city, and it is something of a city as the minor centres of population go. “Does it not contain,” says the proud inhabitant, “nearly fifteen thousand souls?” It does, indeed, but it is more justly famous for its archæological remains than for its manufactures of woollens, which formerly was great.

Probably the most novel impression the stranger will get of Kilkenny will be that which he gains at the annual agricultural show or fair, when the effect produced by the cheering {243} of the crowds will sound unlike anything ever heard elsewhere. It is a fact that this cheering is peculiar to Kilkenny. These are no hurrahs of the ordinary British kind, but every time the feelings of the people find a vent, a long, shrill wail resounds over the fields, rising and falling, at its loudest, like the shriek of a steamer’s siren, and, when more subdued, like the moaning of a winter wind. Perhaps this is the modern descendant of the banshee’s wail.

The history of the modern political and social events which took place at Kilkenny, in times past, make curious and interesting reading. Many “parliaments” were held here, and, in 1367, one of them ordained that death should be the punishment of any Englishman who married an Irishwoman. This was manifestly bigoted, uncharitable, and unkind, and no wonder that here, and elsewhere in Ireland, English domination has so often been reviled.

Its most famous and important political function took place in 1642, when was held the Rebel, or Roman Catholic, Parliament, which gave to Kilkenny the name of “The City of Confederation,” though the same act culminated in its siege by Cromwell, and its {244} ultimate downfall into the hands of “the Protector.” The outcome of all this to-day has been the indissoluble endearment of Kilkenny to all Irishmen of “the faith.”

The history of Kilkenny’s famous castle is more acceptable to those who love Ireland in a familiar way. It is famous, some one has already said, as being “one of the few places where Cromwell treated an Irish gentleman politely.”

The chronology of this stronghold of the middle ages—still the seat of the Marquis of Ormonde, the founder of whose ancestors, Theobald FitzWalter, was one of the retinue of Henry II.—is as follows:

It was built in 1195 on the site of a former edifice, erected by Strongbow in 1172. Donald O’Brien destroyed it in the following year, but again it took form as the ancestral home of a race of men whose members have all figured more or less prominently in Irish annals since the coming of the Normans.

It is one of the most ancient habitable buildings in the land, and also one of the most picturesque. Its massive gray towers and ivy-grown walls stand high upon a natural rampart {245}

KILKENNY CASTLE.

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and overlook the slow-drifting river. The old stone bridge that spans this river here mayhap was often crossed by Congreve and Swift on their way to school in the city. Above, the castle rises boldly against the wistful blue of Irish skies, while at night it looks like a true palace of enchantment when the moon rises beyond its turrets and towers, and throws indistinct, distorted, and mysterious shadows on the river’s surface. One feels a sense of complete repose,—but a repose that is interrupted by the occasional shriek of a locomotive, the drowsy bell of some convent, or the sharp notes of a military bugle.

A later Theobald became the sixth Butler of Ireland, and was made the Earl of Carrick. His son was created Earl of Ormonde, and married Eleanor de Bohun, the granddaughter of Edward I.

The second earl, James, became known as “the Noble Earl,” from being the great grandson of Edward I., and became Lord Chief Justice of Ireland, and he it was, the second earl of the house of Ormonde,—the direct ancestor of the present marquis,—who, in 1391, {248} acquired the castle from another branch, which had sprung from Theobald FitzWalter.

The Ormondes were a true race of noblemen, as history tells, although their story is too elaborate to chronicle completely here.

The fourth earl, it is said,—by tradition, of course, and in this case quite unsupported,—was favoured by the sun’s having remained stationary in its course long enough for him to have achieved a victory over a hereditary enemy.

The fifth earl became Lord High Treasurer of England, but was unfortunately beheaded, so his career did not end exactly gloriously. The sixth earl was smitten by the fervour of the Crusades and died in Jerusalem, and one of the daughters of the seventh earl married Sir William Boleyn and became the mother of the unfortunate Queen Anne, and grandmother of Elizabeth.

One of the most famous men of the line was James, the twelfth earl, who, for services to Charles I., was created a marquis and raised to a dukedom by Charles II. Bishop Burnett states that “He was of graceful appearance, a lively wit, and a cheerful temper; a man of {249} great expense, but decent even in his vices, for he always kept up the forms of religion; too faithful not to give always good advice, but, when bad ones were followed, too complaisant to be any great complainer.” For thirty years he was Chief Governor and Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, when he incurred the hatred of a bold rascal, Thomas Blood, the son of a black-smith, and a staunch supporter of Cromwell. After the Restoration even, Blood plotted against royalty, one of his schemes being to surprise Dublin Castle and to seize the lord lieutenant. This plot was discovered, and Blood managed to escape, though his accomplices were hanged. Blood swore that he who ordered their execution should share their fate. A price was set upon the scoundrel’s head, but he came to London, and set about his vengeance on the Duke of Ormonde.

The Earl of Ossory, the duke’s son, joined the invading forces of William of Orange, fought for him at the Battle of the Boyne, and entertained him sumptuously at Kilkenny Castle. Later, he became a favourite of Queen Anne, and succeeded Marlborough as commander-in-chief of the land forces of Great {250} Britain. Suspected of plotting for the Stuarts, he was attainted, his estates confiscated, his honours extinguished, and a price set upon his head by the Parliament of George I.

The titles being extinguished, the earl’s brother was allowed to purchase Kilkenny Castle; but neither he nor his heirs and successors assumed the titles until 1791, when the Irish Parliament decided that the Irish Act of Attainder affected estates only, and not Irish titles, though the English attainder included the loss of both. The Earldom of Ormonde, a purely Irish title, was therefore restored to John Butler, who became seventeenth in the line. The rank due to earls’ daughters was allowed to his sisters, of whom Lady Eleanor became famous as one of the eccentric recluses known as the Ladies of Llangollen. The eighteenth earl was created a marquis in 1816.

A writer in a recent review recounts a visit to Kilkenny Castle which presents a wealth of detail that makes interesting reading for the inquisitive. Among other things, she says,—assuredly it was a person of the feminine persuasion who wrote:

“In the evening there was a great recep {251} tion at the castle of the county gentry, about four hundred ladies and gentlemen being included. If the castle was picturesque in the day, it was doubly so at night. The town itself was illuminated by countless fairy lamps, which marked the lines of the streets with points of light, and outlined the old stone bridges which cross the little river Nore, and—as it should—the full moon rose in a sapphire sky behind the castle, whose shadow fell softly upon the placid mirror of the water below, and the pale moonlight gleamed upon the white houses and walls of the lower town. Every hotel and inn—and there are many from some unexplained reason—was crowded with guests invited to the castle, while in the doorways one caught glimpses of officers in uniform and levee dress, and women in white gowns with jewels that flashed in the lamplight, waiting for their carriages and coaches to convey them to the castle entrance. Many of their vehicles were of strange archaic shape, and might have done service in Kilkenny when William the Silent was the guest of another Lord Ormonde in the days of long ago. The streets were crowded with Kilkenny folk in {252} quaint old-world garments,—men in broad-brimmed, low-crowned hats, gray breeches, and stockings, and others with leaden buckles; women with shawls over their heads; here and there a monk in brown habit with rope girdle, and groups of soldiers.

“Meanwhile, at the castle a brilliant scene was taking place in the long picture-gallery, with its priceless paintings by old masters, where the guests were being received. In the adjoining dining-room, glowing in the candlelight, gleamed the wonderful and historic gold plate of Kilkenny Castle, estimated to be worth a million and a quarter sterling.

“It was much after midnight before the guests left the castle, and far into the early hours the city of Kilkenny was noisy with the merriment of its citizens, who were loath to end a day that will be long remembered in their history.”

The above account is quoted here because it seems, to the writer, to present in a few words the conventionalities of the occasion in a frame of picturesqueness and environment which similar functions “in town” lack in almost every way. {253}

ST. CANICE’S STEPS AND THE ROUND TOWER, KILKENNY.

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Certainly, convention is robbed of half its banality and insincerity under such conditions, and, though most of us know it only in costume novels, sword-and-cloak dramas, and comic-opera settings, it is pleasurable to know that such things do really exist to-day.

In our day, Kilkenny Castle has been repaired, preserved, and restored, as was its due, but with that paternal care and affection which would not allow a child to be ill or inappropriately dressed. The adaptations and modernizations have not discounted its grand towers, battlements, and bastions, and though, chiefly, it is a modern building which contains the greater part of the domestic establishment of the present Marquis of Ormonde, the three massive central towers stand to-day practically unaltered as to their walls.

In every way the castle suggests Spenser’s epithet, “Faire Kilkenny.” Its picture-gallery reputedly contains the best private collection in Ireland,—portraits by Holbein, Lely, Van Dyck, Kneller, and Sir Joshua, of men who have illustrated those tragedies of history which, with time, have assumed the rich colouring of romance. Their curious watchful {256} eyes have scanned royal guests; indeed, more than one of that now silent company have intermarried with the scions of royalty.

In Kilkenny itself—though, for that matter, the castle abuts upon the Market Place—is the Cathedral of St. Canice, founded about 1180, which is the gem of Kilkenny’s architectural remains. It is a cruciform church in plain, simple Gothic style, small but stately, and has in its collection of monuments the most varied and rich in Ireland. It also possesses the “Chair of St. Kieran.” Both the east and the west windows are notable, and there is a well-preserved round tower over one hundred feet high at the corner of the south transept.

St. John’s (thirteenth century), with some beautiful windows; St. Mary’s, older even than the cathedral; the Black Abbey; the Franciscan Friary; and the modern Roman Catholic Cathedral complete the galaxy of ecclesiastical monuments of Kilkenny.

The Blackwater River is called by the guide-books one of the largest in Ireland. The description is, however, misleading. It is neither a very great river, a very long one, nor a very {257}

RHINCREW CASTLE.

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important one in the world of commerce; but it is, truly, a romantic and picturesque one.

Its panorama presents the following views, which are highly important and interesting:

Just above the bridge on Youghal quay (Youghal derives its name from yew-wood) rises a cliff which is surmounted by a ruined Knights Templars’ preceptory, known as Rhincrew Castle and founded by Raymond le Gros in 1183. Ardsallat follows; and the square castle keep of Temple Michael, one of the ancient fortresses of the Geraldines, is near Ballintra.

On the island of Molana are the ruins of the Abbey of Molanfidas, a most ancient institution, founded by St. Fachman in 501. Raymond le Gros is claimed to have been buried here, but no definite trace of the exact location appears to be known.

Northward and westerly, to its source near Killarney, the Blackwater—most picturesquely and significantly named—is a unique succession of attractions such as is lacked by most streams of its size. Strancally Castle is now but a moss-grown rock; but it possesses a traditional tale of horror, which gives the {260} waters at this point the name of “The Murdering Hole.” The Knockmeledown Mountains, a bare, bleak range, stand out to the northward in strong contrast to the fertile river-bottom.

Dromona Castle, in part a modern structure, which abuts upon a more ancient structure, is the remains of an old castle of the Fitzgeralds. This ancient building was the birthplace of the Countess Catherine Desmond, who died only, at the age of 140 years, by reason of having fallen from a cherry-tree. It is not recorded as to how or why this sprightly old lady came to be in, or up, a cherry-tree on that fatal occasion, but Sir Walter Raleigh is blamed for the whole affair, in that he first domesticated the cherry-tree in Ireland, having brought the first member of that family from Grand Canary and replanted it near by.

At the bend of the river, where it turns sharply to the westward, the steamboat journey of the tourist comes abruptly to an end at the most lovely and interesting of all the kaleidoscopic views which it exhibits,—the little town of Cappoquin. Cappoquin is a quaint townlet of perhaps a thousand souls and a {261}

CAPPOQUIN.

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single inn, and high above it rises the long ridge of Mount Melleray, capped, in its turn, by a Trappist convent, which carries on an industrial enterprise of the first rank.

The Abbey of Mount Melleray lies at the foot of the Knockmeledowns, and is an institution traditionally celebrated as being the domicile of the most severe and rigorous monkish discipline; unequalled elsewhere in any land. The monks are, by their rules, vegetarians, and they observe the rule punctiliously. They drink no stimulants, not even tea,—which is probably a good thing,—and five or six hours’ sleep suffices for their resting moments. The rest is work, incessant and laborious, and, greatest hardship of all,—at least it will seem so to many of us,—is that they preserve a “discreet and wholesome silence” at all times, this rule being only relaxed in their necessary intercourse with visitors and the outside world. Of course, this procedure does not differ greatly from the general practice in the monasteries of the Trappists elsewhere, except that it is more punctiliously observed here.

The abbey was originally a foundation of {264} the Cistercian monks, who were driven from France by the Revolution of 1830; but to-day it is peopled by natives of Ireland.

In all this region, no castle, country-seat, abbey, or church is more famous or splendid than Lismore Castle, another foundation of the Earl of Montaigne, afterward King John of England (1185). It is to-day the Irish home of the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire. Lismore Castle is one of the most beautiful seats in all Ireland. It has even been mentioned, among the people here, as a prospective royal residence, though, like enough, this is not to be taken as anything more than irresponsible gossip, based on a wish that is father to the thought. It has been in the possession of the Cavendish family since 1748, and the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire spend some time every year in residence here in the midst of their Irish tenantry. Royalty has frequently visited Lismore Castle. It was an ancient fortress, and dates back to the days of King John. It has been the scene of many a hard-fought fight, especially in the wars of the Commonwealth, when Lord Castlehaven captured it from the Roundheads in 1645. The {265}

LISMORE CASTLE.

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present Duke of Devonshire and his predecessor have modernized the castle and equipped it with interior luxuries without interfering in any way with its noble and hoary exterior.

Lismore is in the very heart of the Blackwater country, amid some of the most lovely scenery in the south of Ireland. Through Lismore Glen, where the woods are thick on either side and the road is canopied over with the spreading green foliage, one enters the Gap, a famous pass in the Knockmeledown Mountains, where the hills rise on one side to frowning heights, crowned in the gold of the gorse, which gives an additional glory to the land, and, on the other side, fall sheer down in an almost precipitous steep, across which there is a vast and enchanting view over the rolling plains of Tipperary. As one passes through the Gap, either on a car or coach, or on foot, the sun streams down with dazzling brightness, and the little villages and townships, the tapering spires, the tall watch-towers of antiquity, the whitewashed cottages, and gray stone houses, standing solitary on green fields, the ranges of purple hills, and the clumps of woods {268} are all suffused with the yellow mellowing glow of a glorious summer sun.

To all who visit the Blackwater, Lismore should be doubly dear; first, because of its being a fine example of the fortified domestic Gothic architecture of its time, and, secondly, because its present occupant is generous enough to open its interior to view.

A MS. of very ancient date was recently discovered by some workmen repairing the older portion of the castle. It is a most precious work on vellum, recounting contemporary history in a manner which classes it as one of the famous chronicles of English history, worthy, perhaps, to rank with Froissart, Doomsday, and St. Albans. It is known as the “Book of Lismore,” and is now considered one of the chief treasures of the castle.

One leaves Lismore with a certain feeling of sadness, if he is observant and studies the straws and the winds.

Not many years ago the long mountain road, which runs from Lismore to the Knockmeledown Mountains, had four or five little hamlets dotted along it; to-day scarcely one house remains, and hardly a sign of life, except a {269} few sheep snatching at the precarious grazing. Of the 42,000 acres belonging to the Duke of Devonshire, only half are under cultivation, and this is a very large proportion compared to the rest of the surrounding estates.

Lismore, the town, has itself shrunk considerably during the past few years. The aching desolation of it all gets on one’s nerves after a time, and, during a sojourn in this beautiful region, admiration of the scenery is mingled with wonder as to whether nothing can or ever will be done to brighten the mournful economic aspect of the agrarian situation.

Irish names have often a knack of being frankly pugnacious, so that even a peaceful lord chief justice has had to bear the inciting-to-murder sobriquet of Killowen. But the mountains, which form the background to Lismore and Clogheen, the Knockmeledowns, are capable of an entirely pacific interpretation. Commonly one says, “We are knocked down all in a heap” by this or that which takes us by surprise, and these mountains surprise all by their beauty. There is no lovelier sight in Ireland, and, if an air of melancholy prevails, it is because the scene is “somehow sad {270} by excess of serenity,” to quote a recent phrase of Mr. Henry James, concerning a similar aspect elsewhere.

Between Lismore and Cork, via Mallow, is Mitchelstown, which presents an unusual series of attractions of the purely sentimental order. Mitchelstown’s Castle, Skereenarint (a “place for dancing in the wood”), and the Caves of Coolagarranroe are the chief points of interest. It is also the seat of an ancient bishopric, founded by St. Carthage in the seventh century.

Health-giving and time-honoured Mallow, famed of Tacitus (Hist., lib. i., c. 67) as the locus amoens salubrium aquarium frequens , is hardly of great moment for the traveller of to-day, except as the gateway from the north to Killarney.

Just north of Mallow, in the County Cork, is the rushing river Awbeg, the “Mulla bright and fair,” “Mulla mine,” of Spenser. The poet himself lived at Kilcoman Castle, some six miles off.

Near by is Buttevant, the Boutez-en-Avant, derived from the war-cry of David de Barry. Significantly and strongly French, it reminds {271} one of the “Push forward” manœuvre of Barry’s men against the followers of MacCarthy. The old name of this place was Kilnamullach, i. e. , Church of the Curse. The abbey in ruins reminds one that it was—

Cashel, known as “Cashel of the Kings,” was the residence of the ancient Kings of Ulster. The famous rock of Cashel is an eminence which rises abruptly above the surrounding plain, and holds upon its summit a grand assemblage of windowless and roofless ruins. These include various ecclesiastical buildings and monuments of a great age,—a cathedral, Cormac’s Chapel, an episcopal palace, and various other edifices. Cormac’s Chapel and its round tower, commemorating the virtues of Cormac MacCullinan, “at once King and Archbishop of Cashel,” are justly reckoned as {272} among the best preserved and most curious erections in the country. In that they were supposed to have been erected in Cormac’s time (he was born in 831), they certainly must be considered as in a remarkable state of preservation, and, in every way, chronicles in stone of the first importance.

Cormac has ascribed to his credit, too, the celebrated “Psalter of Cashel” and “Cormac’s Glossary,” though there appears to be some doubt as to whether he was the author or patron who inspired the production of these works.

The “pointed” cathedral is of later date, and was, in part, destroyed by fire in 1495. To-day it is a ruin, but a magnificent one, and its outlines and proportions mark it as an important landmark for miles around the great plain which surrounds “the rock.”

The round tower’s exact history is obscure; but, like most of its fellows, it is of undoubted Christian significance. Twenty feet from the ground, it is connected with the cathedral itself, while its completed height rises ninety feet or more. Curiously enough, it is constructed from quite a different stone from that

{273}

{274}

The Cross of Cashel

{275}

used in the other buildings on the rock, and the supposition is that it stood for centuries, silent and solitary, before the cathedral itself took form, and perhaps before even Cormac’s Chapel. The Cross of Cashel is another celebrated feature of artistic and historical worth.

The “rock” was originally surrounded by a wall, which, though now gone nearly to ruin, gives indications of great strength. In 1647 it was stormed by Lord Inchquin, who took it and put to death the clergy who had taken refuge thereon.

END OF VOLUME I.

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Index

A , B , C , D , E , F , G , H , I , J , K , L , M , N , O , P , Q , R , S , T , U , V , W , Y .

Achill, 27 , 34 .
Adamnan, St., 135 .
Addison, 196 .
Adrian II., 39 , 77 , 237 .
Aghaboe, 214 .
Ailech, Palace of, 111 .
Albin, 119 .
Angus of Dalriada, 139 .
Angus Oge, 146 .
Anne, Queen, 249 .
Antrim, 45 , 138 , 139 , 147 , 148 , 152 , 153 .
Arbogast, 119 .
Ardfert, 127 .
Ardora, 168 .
Ardsallat, 259 .
Arklow, 227 .
Armagh, 111 , 127 , 186 , 187 .
Arran, 154 .
Athlone, 31 .
Attacotti Rebellion, The, 138 .
Avoca (see Vale of Avoca).
Avonbeg, The, 227 , 231 .
Avondale, 231 .
Avonmore, The, 227 , 231 .
Awbeg, The, 270 .

Balbriggan, 163 .
Ballach, Donald, 151 .
Ballinakil House, Waterford, 234 .
Ballintra, 168 , 259 .
Ballycastle, 137 , 151 .
Ballyfin, 214 .
Ballymena, 164 .
Ballyshannon, Falls of, 160 .
Balrothery, 187 .
Baltimore, 171 , 237 .
Banagher, 31 .
Bann of Coleraine, The, 153 .
Bannon Bay, 231 .
Bantry Bay, 23 , 27 .
Barry, David de, 270-271 .
Battle of the Boyne, 249 .
Bearhaven, 171 .
Belfast, 20 , 28 , 45 , 89 , 164 , 168 .
Belleek, 164 .
Berkeley, Lord, 201 .
Blackwater, The, 238 , 256-268 .
Blarney Castle, 10 , 19 , 90 , 102 , 227 , 237 .
Blarney Stone, The (see Blarney Castle).
Blood, Thomas, 249 .
Bloody Forehead, The, 90 .
Boleyn, Anne, 248 . {278}
Boru, Brian (see Brian Born).
Bray, 183 , 204 , 205 , 206 .
Breakspeare, Nicholas (see Adrian II.).
Brian Bora, 67 , 111 , 185-187 .
Bridget, St., 215-216 .
Brigid, St., 135 .
Bun-na-Margie Abbey, 152 .
Burke, Edmund, 195-196 , 197 .
Burke, Thomas, 179 .
Burnett, Bishop, 248 .
Buttevant, 270 .
Bysett, Margery, 147 , 151 .

Canice, St., 142 .
Cape Clear, 237 .
Cappoquin, 260 .
Carlow, 45 .
Carrickfergus, 140 .
Carrickmacross, 168 .
Carrick-on-Suir, 160 .
Cashel, 27-275 .
Cathedral, 127 , 128 , 271-275
Cormac’s Chapel, 271 , 275 .
Cross, 275 .
Psalter, 272 .
Rock, 271-275 .
Castlehaven, Lord, 264 .
Castleknock, 187 .
Castlerea, 61 .
Castlereagh, 147 , 148 .
Cathanach, Shane, 152 .
Cavendish, Lord Frederick, 179 .
Caves of Coolagarranroe, 270 .
Celbridge, 193 .
Charles I., 248 .
Charles II., 248 .
Cinbaeth the First, 110 .
Clannaboy, 148 .
Clare Mountains, 31 .
Clements, 119 .
Clifden, 23 .
Clogheen, 269 .
Clondalkin, 179 .
Clones, 168 .
Clonfert, 127 , 131 .
Clonmacnoise, 31 .
Clonmell, 160 .
Clontarf, 181 , 182 , 185-187 .
Castle, 187 .
Cloomaul, 62 .
Cloyne, 128 .
Coleraine, 153 , 164 .
Colla Uaish, 139 .
Columba, St., 119 , 121 , 140-144 .
Comyn, Archbishop of Dublin, 192 .
Conact, 111 .
Congal, 121 .
Congreve, 197 , 247 .
Conighal, 142 .
Conn of Tyrone, 152 .
Connaught, 22 , 79-80 .
Connemara, 22 , 23 , 27 , 168 .
Coolock, 187 .
Corc, King of Munster, 186 .
Cork, 4 , 19 , 24 , 27 , 45 , 46 , 80 , 90 , 168 , 237 , 270 .
Cathedral, 126 .
Cormac, 271-275 .
Corran of Larne, The, 153 .
Crommelin, 167 .
Cromwell, 153 , 164 , 193 , 233 , 243-244
Crosshaven, 168 .
Cruachan, Palace of, 111 .
Cuchullain, 137 .
Cullen, Dr., 214 .
Curragh, 209 , 214 , 215 .

Dagans, St., 135 .
Dalkey, 21 , 168 , 183 .
Dalriada, 139 , 153 . {279}
Damliag, 186 .
Dargle, The, 205 , 206 , 209 .
De Freyne, 61 .
Derdrie, 151 .
Derry (see Londonderry).
Derry, County, 146 .
Devil’s Bit Mountain, 214 .
Devil’s Glen, 205 .
Devonshire, Dukes of, 264-267 , 269 .
Diarmid, 232 .
Donatus, Bishop, 191 .
Donegal, 24 , 28 , 111 , 151 , 168 .
Down, 127 , 183 .
Downpatrick Cathedral, 131 .
Dromod, 31 .
Dromona Castle, 260 .
Dublin, 7 , 19 , 21 , 22 , 27 , 28 , 34 , 79 , 86 , 95 , 148 , 160 , 163 , 168 , 176-205 , 210 , 213 , 216 .
Bank of Ireland, 198 .
Bermingham Tower, 198 .
Castle, The, 151 , 198 , 249 .
Christchurch Cathedral, 127 , 191-192 .
Comyn, Archbishop, 192 .
Cork Hill, 198 .
“Fifteen Acres,” 179 .
Hoey’s Court, 202 .
Liffey, The (see Liffey).
Luke, Archbishop, 185 .
National Gallery, 198 .
Phœnix Park, 176 , 179 , 190 .
Police Force, 189-190 .
Sackville St., 198 .
St. Fichan, Church of, 194 .
St. Patrick de Insula, Church of, 192 .
St. Patrick’s Cathedral, 126 , 127 , 192-194 , 202 .
Trinity College, 197 .
Viceregal Lodge, 179 .
Duleck, 186 .
Dunamase, 214 .
Dunanynie Castle, 151 , 152 .
Dungarvan, 237 .
Dunleary (see Kingstown).
Dunluce Castle, 151 , 152 .

Edgeworth, Miss, 72 .
Edward I., 247 .
Edward VII., 212-213 .
Elizabeth, Queen, 184 , 197 , 198 , 241 , 248 .
Emania (and Palace of), 110 , 111 , 139 .
Enniscorthy, 232 .
Enniskerry, 209 .

Fachman, St., 259 .
Fair Head, 137 .
“Faithful Norman, The,” 233-234 .
Fergus of Dalriada, 139 .
Fermanagh, 154 .
Fitzgeralds, The, 260 .
Fitzstephen, Robert, 232 .
FitzWalter, Theobald, 244 , 248 .

Galway, 27 , 31 , 34 , 79 , 136 .
Garryhill, 168 .
George I., 250 .
George IV., 181 , 205-206 .
Geraldines, The, 259 .
Giant’s Causeway, 10 , 19 , 28 , 146 , 227 .
Gildas, 135 .
Gill-Mantain (see Wicklow).
Glen of the Downs, 205 .
Glendalough, 216-224 .
Glengarriff, 27 .
Glens of Antrim, The (see Antrim).
Goldsmith, 72 , 130 , 197 . {280}
Granuaile or Grana Uile (see O’Malley, Grace).
Greenore, 20 , 28 .
Guinness Family, 193 .

Hackett, 237 .
Henry II., 38 , 77 , 237 , 244 .
Henry III., 224 .
Henry VII., 78 .
Henry VIII., 78 , 197 .
Hill of Allen, 216 .
Holy Cross, 215 .
Howth, 181 , 183-185 .
Castle of, 183-185 .
Earls of, 183 .
Hill of, 21 , 181-183 , 203 .
St. Mary’s Abbey, 185 .

Inchquin, Lord, 275 .
Innishowen Head, 141 .
Innismurray, 154 .
Ireland’s Eye, 83 .

James II., 191 , 193 .
James, Henry, 270 .
John, King, 77 , 264 .
Johnson, Dr., 37 .
Johnson, Esther (“Stella”), 194 , 202 .

Keating, 102 .
Kells, 110 .
Book of Kells, The, 110 , 197 .
Monastery of Kells, The, 143 .
Kenbane Castle, 151 .
Kerry, County, 27 , 172 .
Kevin, St., 216-224 .
Kilcoman Castle, 270 .
Kildare, 215-216 .
Cathedral, 127 .
Kilkenny, 142 , 242-244 , 251-252 , 256 .
Castle, 242 , 244-256 .
Cathedrals of St. Canice, 126 , 127 , 142 , 256 .
The Churches of, 256 .
Killala Cathedral, 131 .
Killaloe, 28 , 31 , 232 .
Cathedral, 127 , 128 .
Killarney, 15 , 19 , 23 , 24 , 27 , 31 , 34 , 58 , 80 , 90 , 160 , 227 , 231 , 259 , 270 .
Killiny Hill, 203 .
Killowen, 269 .
Kilmacduagh Cathedral, 131 .
Kilmainham, 87 .
Kilnamullach, 271 .
Kincora, Palace of, 67 , 111 , 185 .
Kingstown, 7 , 20 , 180-181 , 183 , 203 , 204 .
Kinsale, 168 , 171 .
Knockmeledown Mountains, 260 , 263 , 267 , 268 , 269-270 .
Krans, Horatio, 71-72 .

Lambay Island, 183 .
Laracor, 201 .
Larne, 20 , 28 , 153 .
Lea Castle, 214 .
Lee, The, 237 .
Leinster, 22 , 79 , 209 , 216 , 237 .
Leixlip, 182 .
Lever, Charles, 72 .
Liffey, The, 19 , 179 , 187 , 203 .
Falls of, 180 .
Limerick, 27 , 31 , 45 , 156 , 168 , 172 .
Cathedral, 127 .
Lisburn, 164 , 167 .
Lismore, 267 , 269 , 270 .
Book of Lismore, 268 .
Castle, 242 , 264-268 .
Cathedral, 128 . {281}
Gap, 267 .
Glen, 267 .
Loarn of Dalriada, 139 .
Londonderry, 3 , 45 , 90 , 111 , 141 , 145 , 164 .
Cathedral, 127 .
Lough Derg, 31 .
Lough Foyle, 141 .
Lough Ree, 31 .
Lough Swilly, 111 .
Loughmore Castle, 214 .
Louth, County, 183 .
Lover, Samuel, 72 , 82 , 103 .
Lowth, 187 .
Lucan, 179 .
Lugh Lamhfada, 137 .
Lughmach, 187 .
Luke, Archbishop of Dublin, 185 .

MacCarthy, 271 .
MacCullinan, Cormac, 271-275 .
Macdonnell, Alexander, 153 .
Macdonnell, James, 152 .
Macdonnell, John More, 147 , 151 .
Macdonnell, Randal, 153 .
Macdonnells, The, 148 , 151 , 152 , 153 .
Macha, Queen, 110 .
MacQuillans, The, 151 , 152 .
Mallow, 24 , 27 , 270 .
Marlborough, 249 .
Maryborough, 214 .
Maxwell, 72 .
Mayo, 79 , 136 .
McCarthy, Justin, 71 , 93 .
Meath, 80 , 111 , 143 , 183 .
Meave, Queen, 103 , 111 .
Meave, The “Half-Red,” 103 .
“Meeting of the Waters,” The, 227 , 231 .
Mitchell, Donald G., 196 .
Mitchelstown, 270 .
M’Murrogh, 232 .
Molana, Island of, 259 .
Molanfidas, Abbey of, 259 .
Monasterboice, 110 .
Monasterevan, 214 .
Mononia, 185 .
Moore, George, 82 , 85 , 93 , 94-95 , 102 .
Moore, Thomas, 86 , 103 , 104-105 , 185-186 , 216 , 219 , 227-231 .
Mount Melleray, 263 .
Abbey of, 263-264 .
Mourne Mountains, 183 .
Moville, 3 , 90 .
Muckamore, 142 .
Muckross Abbey, 10 , 185 .
Munster, 22 , 79-80 , 172 , 186 .
“Murdering Hole, The,” 260 .
Muskau, Prince Puckler, 228 .
Myrtle Grove, Youghal, 238-241 .

Naas, 209-213 .
Naguire of Fermanagh, 154 .
Navan Fort, 111 .
Naysi, 151 .
Nennin, St., 135 .
Nethercross, 187 .
Newcastle, 187 .
Nore, The, 251 .

O’Brien, Donald, 244 .
O’Brien, Donogh, 197 .
O’Brien, William Smith, 214-215 .
O’Cahans, The, 146 , 152 .
O’Cleary, 145 .
O’Donnell of Tyconnell, 144-145 . {282}
O’Donnell, Red Hugh, 145 , 152 .
O’Donnells, The, 111 , 151 .
O’Malley, Grace, 184 .
O’Neill, Mary, 152 .
O’Neill, Shane, 152 .
O’Neill, Turlough Luineach, 152 .
O’Neills, The, 144 , 146 , 147 , 148 , 152 .
Ormonde, Duke of, 160 .
Ormonde Family, 244-251 , 255 .
O’Toole, King, 223 .
Ox-field House, 214 .

Parnell, Charles Stuart, 231 .
Patrick, St., 92 , 102 , 116 , 120 , 121 , 132 .
Port Brittas, 151 .
Port Usnach, 137 , 151 .
Portumna, 31 .
Poula-Phooka, 180 .
Powerscourt, 205-206 .
Prendergast, Maurice, 232-234 .
Punchestown, 209-213 .

Queenstown, 3 , 15 , 19 , 204 .

Raleigh, Sir Walter, 238-241 , 260 .
Rathdown, 187 .
Rathlin Island, 146 , 147 .
Raymond le Gros, 234 , 259 .
Reefert Church, 223 .
Reeves, Bishop, 142 .
Reginald’s Tower, Waterford, 234 .
Rhincrew Castle, 259 .
Richard II., 77 .
Roderick, 232 .
Ross Cathedral, 128 .
Ross, Miss Martin, 73 .
Rruy, The Clan, 139 .
Russell, T. W., 63 .

Saltee Light-Vessel, 234 .
Savage of the Ards, 152 .
Seven Churches (see Glendalough).
Shandon Bells, 237 .
Shannon Bridge, 31 .
Shannon, The, 28-31 .
Shaw, Bernard, 82 .
Sidney, Sir Henry, 192 .
Sidney, Sir Philip, 192 .
Sigtryg Silkbeard, 191 .
Simnel, Lambert, 191 .
Skelligs, The, 154 .
Skereenarint Castle, 270 .
Sliav Ailduin, 214 .
Slievebloom Mountains, 214 .
Slievemore, 19 .
Sligo, 23 , 27 , 31 , 34 , 79 , 168 .
Sommerville, Miss, 73 .
Sorley Boy, 151-152 .
Spenser, 68 , 105-106 , 172 , 255 , 270 .
Spire Hill, 214 .
St. Canice Abbey, Aghaboe, 214 .
St. Fichan, Dublin, Church of, 194 .
St. Kiaran, Church of, 187 .
St. Lawrences, The, 183-184 .
St. Mary’s Abbey, Howth (see Howth).
St. Nessan, Church of, Ireland’s Eye, 183 .
St. Patrick de Insula, Dublin, Church of, 192 .
Steele, Sir Richard, 196 .
Sterne, 6 , 14 , 16 .
Stevenson, R. L., 6 .
Strabane, 168 .
Strancally Castle, 259 . {283}
Strongbow, Richard, 191-192 , 232 , 234 , 237 , 244 .
Strongbow’s Castle, 214 .
Sugar Loaf Mountain, 183 .
Suir, The, 214 .
Swift, Dean, 103 , 160 , 193-194 , 195 , 197 , 201-203 , 247 .

Tallaght, 188 .
Tara, Hill of (Palace), 104 , 111-112 , 139 , 197 .
Temple, Michael, 259 .
Thurles, 214-215 .
Tipperary, 31 , 172 , 267 .
Tralee, 27 .
Trinity College (see Dublin).
Tristam (see Valence).
Tuam Cathedral, 131 .
Tuathal Teachtmar, 138 .
Tuskar Lighthouse, 234 .
Tyconnell, 144 .
Tyconnell, Hugh, Prince of, 152 .
Tynan, Miss Katherine, 74 .
Tyrone, Conn, Earl of, 152 .

Ulster, 22 , 44 , 65 , 79 , 110 , 111 , 132 , 152 .
Uppercross, 187 .
Ussher, 197 .

Vale of Avoca, 227-231 .
Valence, Sir Armoric Tristam de, 183 .
Valentia, 171 .
Van Raumer, Prof., 43-44 .
“Vanessa” (see Vanhomrigh, Hester).
Vanhomrigh, Hester, 193 , 202 .
Venerable Bede, The, 102 .
Vere, Aubrey de, 233 .
Vernons, The, 187 .
Vinegar Hill, 232 .

Waterford, 20 , 24 , 45 , 46 , 234-237 .
Cathedral, 127 .
Wexford, 24 , 231-234 .
Wicklow, 24 , 46 , 79 , 176 , 183 , 204-205 , 211 , 216 , 224 , 237 .
William III., 203 , 249 .
Wills, the historian, 186 .
Wood of Oaks (see Kildare).
Wykinlo (see Wicklow).
Wyndham, George, 65-68 .

Yeats, Mr., 94 , 95 .
Youghal, 24 , 168 , 238 , 259 .
Young, Arthur, 7-8 , 37 .

{284}