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the winter: in Ireland no one gets up till half past five in summer, nor till half past seven in winter; partly from the laziness that sticks to their bones, partly that they think candlelight too expensive, not knowing that light and labour make the two halves of a farmer's fortune.'-p. 51, 52.

The English have even a variety of tools that we have no notion of. We have no such thing as a yoke to carry milk pails; though we burn so much land, we have no breast-plough for a man to cut sods; we have not even such things as fencing gloves, but with us, when a man wants to cut a hedge, he puts his left hand into his hat, as the best means of handling the thorns.'-p. 54, 55.

This picture of Irish laziness and bungling is bad enough, but what follows is still worse.

'I was surprised at the difference between an English and an Irish fair: at the latter, every species of the grossest fraud is practised; and a man can scarcely do business to any extent, from the perpetual wrangles he is engaged in to avoid imposition; but in an English fair, words are binding oaths, and business passes on quietly and speedily. Another great and pure feature they (the English) possess, which it grieves my heart to know how sadly we (the Irish) want,-THEIR women never drink. Almost every vice of our character I could confess here, but I should have died with shame to have allowed this.'-p. 58.

But worst of all are the following observations, which we copy because Mr. Parnell lays great stress upon his practical knowledge of his countrymen; we confess however that we copy with reluctance, (not to say disgust,) observations which appears to us grossly injurious to the Irish character, and which, had they been penned by an Englishman, we have little doubt would have been reprobated, even by Mr. Parnell himself, as libels on his unhappy country.

'I staid to mind the sheep, and thought on the different ways in which quarrels were managed here and in Ireland: and in this instance I cannot but allow, that the English show themselves as generous as we are base, cowardly and savage. For in England a man always depends upon his own courage, he never tries to raise a party or faction to join him in fighting; whereas it is only backed by a mob of friends that an Irishman will fight.-In England too it would be reckoned a monstrous shame and scandal for two men to fall upon one, or to strike a man when on the ground; but in Ireland, twenty men will basely fall upon one, and it is when they have him down on the ground, that all their savage revenge gluts itself, by trying to beat him to death. In England too a man disdains to use any other weapon but those that nature has given him-his clenched fists: but an Irish combatant never thinks himself fit for action without a stick, generally loaded with lead; or will seize a knife, to have his revenge.'--p. 63, 64.

For these perverse, and (as our author represents them) indigeHous, and national dispositions, it is absurd to pretend, in the

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wretched cant of the day, that England and the English government in Ireland are responsible. Mr. Parnell, indeed, dilates on this theme with great fluency; but when, as we have seen, he has no more forcible method of expressing his disgust at the Irish character than by contrasting it with the English, when he affirms that the Irish are as filthy and lazy as the English are cleanly and active, that the Irish are as tricky and fraudulent as the English are open and honest; when he admits that the Irish are as thoughtless and extravagant as the English are prudent; when he tells us that the Irish, both men and women are as drunken as the English are temperate; and finally, when he assures us that the Irish are as base, cowardly and treacherous, as the English are loyal, bold, and generous-we ask, how any man with a grain of logic or even common sense in his head, can attribute these abominable vices in one country to the example or influence of another which he admits to be, of all nations on the face of the earth, the freest from them? Let us take an instance from Mr. Parnell— it is a trivial one, but all his instances are trivial,-when his hero admires a waggon and team in England it is proposed to him to introduce one into his farm in Ireland:

'But I (he says) who knew how all our self-sufficient boobies would set their heads against any thing new, shook my head, and could not help telling him of our Sir Phelimy French, who brought over an English waggon and horses, but forgot to bring a driver, and when he ordered it out, it came round with eight drivers, one to every horse, and the horses not knowing what was meant by hup and hough, and the drivers as little understanding what they called the humours of the waggon, it was overturned into the ha-ha, pronounced a folly, and left to rot, no office being large enough to hold it.'—pp. 50, 51.

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Now here is an Irish gentleman endeavouring to introduce English improvements in the shape of a waggon and eight horses, but the self-sufficiency of his booby countrymen' (we wish Mr. Parnell would be somewhat more tender in his language) defeats his scheme. How is the English government to blame for the national perverseness of which this is a small example?

We have not now room, nor is this the proper occasion for inquiring into the effect which any modern system of political government may have had on the Irish nation. It is a subject which we perhaps may hereafter have opportunities of discussing under other auspices than Mr. Parnell's. We shall content ourselves with stating one fact which is wholly suppressed by all such flimsy theory-mongers as we have here to do with. Ireland, for the last century, has, in every thing that relates to morals, manners, and domestic economy, (the points in which she is most deficient,) been governed by herself. An English viceroy, and generally, but not always, an

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English chief secretary, have been nominally and ostensively at the head of the political government; but the real power and the whole of the internal legislation and economy of the country have been in the hands of the Irish themselves. The Houses of Lords and Commons, the Privy Council, the Judges, the Magistracy, the Lawyers, the parochial Clergy,-in short, all the governing, all the influencing classes, have been, almost without exception, Irish. Has the accidental presence-as Lords-Lieutenant or Secretaries— of the Dukes of Ormond, Devonshire, and Dorset,-of Lords Townsend, Chesterfield, Carteret, Halifax and Cornwallis, of Mr. Addison, Mr. Hamilton, Mr. Windham, or Mr. Elliot,* men all eminent, and some of them immortal for their genius, their talents, their wisdom and their virtues; has the accidental presence, we ask, of one or two of these illustrious persons at the council-table in Dublin, so infected and poisoned the very air of Ireland as to reduce the happy, high-minded, and admirable Irish to the state of vice and misery in which Mr. Parnell is pleased to place them?

One word more upon this topic.-England conquered Ireland, not at once, not completely, but in a lingering war of many melancholy ages, accompanied and followed by mutual injuries, and mutual hatred; but whatever misfortunes arose (and many did no doubt arise) out of the English invasion, it cannot be, on the other hand, denied, that all the improvements of Ireland, whether in forms or in essentials, have been imported from England—the blessed light of the reformation, the happy principles of the revolution, the cheering arts of civilization, every thing in religion and politics, in agriculture and manners, every thing valuable, however high or low, from the parliament and the pulpit down to the plough and the spinning-wheel, are the produce of the English connexion. Nay, to descend to minuter objects, even Mr. Parnell himself, with all his patriotism, is a boon, and that of no very old date, from England to Ireland.

Of the vigour and anxiety of this patriotism, our readers could have no conception, if Mr. Parnell had not favoured them with the following description of the melancholy state to which he is reduced for the good of his country.

Like the nightingale that is said to lean its breast against a thorn, that sleep may not interrupt its song, this aching pity for poor Ireland has kept the author constantly thinking, studying, writing, talking, in hopes that by exertion or good fortune he might be the means of bettering her condition. One claim at least to attention he may be allowed, which is having minutely, carefully, and unremittingly studied the subject.

We have only selected a few from the long list of able and worthy men, now no more, who have been, since the revolution, Lords-Lieutenant and Secretaries in Ireland. 'To

To the governing powers he of course has applied, but not very often, as every little chance of success with them would be lost by inportunity. But success, indeed, he never had to boast of.'-Introduction, pp. xii. xiii.

Before we devote to the execration of mankind such men as Lord Colchester, the Duke of Wellington and Mr. Peel, for not having in their respective administrations taken the advice of this Irish nightingale, (by the way, Mr. Parnell is the only nightingale that has ever been heard in Ireland,) let us consider a little what are the remedies which he proposes. For evils so extended, for vices so inveterate, it might be expected that this senatorial songster would propose some wide and powerful charm which should assuage all the bad passions, and excite and invigorate all the nobler and more virtuous feelings of the human heart. In tracing upon paper his schemes of reformation he has no obstacles, no difficulties, no prejudices to contend with;-in a political romance a legislator may do what he pleases and as he pleases, and it is therefore not too much to look to Mr. Parnell's favourite Maurice for such acquirements and attributes as fit him for the example and prototype of a regenerated peasantry. Let us see

The first, and (if we may judge by the stress laid upon it) the most important is, that the day-labourers in Ireland should, instead of potatoes and milk, eat wheaten bread and cold meat! Our readers will think that we are, what is vulgarly called, quizzing them we protest we are not.-Mr. Parnell makes and re-makes this proposition as most important towards bettering the condition of poor Ireland,' and not on the mere grounds that cold meat is the more nourishing food, but that it is the cheapest, and would save the labourer's family a world of time and pains.

A poor girl who can earn two-pence a-day is diverted, he says, from her work in carrying potatoes to the workman in the field; this waste of time would be prevented by the labourer's carrying a sandwich in his pocket!

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Maurice works task-work, and as he is so well fed, he says he is able to work better than many grown up men. Indeed, he says eating meat is the cheapest and best, for besides being able to earn so much more, he can take his cold meat and bread with him, and look for work five miles off; but if he ate potatoes, I should be forced to carry them twice a day through all weathers, which would oblige him to work only near home; besides, I (Una) should lose the most of what I earn by spinning, and wear out my shoes and clothes; have to pay for medicines two or three times a year, from colds; and what he thinks worst of, be in company with all the labourers during their meals, without mentioning the idle tattered girls who carry them their meals; and any how he cannot endure that I should leave the house unless he is with me. Now

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he takes his cold meat and bread with him, and asks no more till he comes home to supper.'-pp. 29, 30.

This is a happy instance of Mr. Parnell's good sense. Because when he happens to make a hasty repast, it generally consists of bread and cold meat, these articles become in his mind associated with the idea of frugal fare;-' bread and cold meat,-always at hand, -got in a moment,-without trouble or expense!' In the fervour of his romance he quite forgets that in order to make bread, wheat must be ground to flour, kneeded into dough, fermented with yeast, and baked in an oven; he forgets too that cold meat must have been once hot, and that the market, the butcher, the spit, the pot, the fuel, and all the unobserved but essential details of cookery must take up at least as much time and expense as boiling a pot of potatoes and carrying them to the reaper in the field. Would to God that the food of the Irish peasantry could be improved! but surely none but a visionary would think of changing it altogether and, above all, changing it for such reasons of economy as have occurred to Mr. Parnell!

Mr. Parnell's next improvement is to introduce the shorthandled spade, and, with admirable consistency, the long-handled scythe.

'The father walked stiff, and had a great stoop from using their shorthandled spade and shovel.—After he returned from his day's work, he used to take a turn at his own garden, and in three hours in the evening, did more and better work, than an Irish labourer would do in a whole day. It was all from the short handled spade: their spade is all spade, and will lift twice as much as our broadest shovel; our fac is all handle, it lifts but little, and half of that falls off, as we do not lift with our arms, but by sticking one knee under the long-handled fac, a thing which no Englishman would comprehend. When I return, I will make my fortune by cutting three feet off the handle of my fac.'-p. 70, 71.

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Though I made twice the efforts of my companions, I could but just keep up with them; and while they cut close, and even without distressing themselves, my mowing, with all my exertions, was execrable; being used to our straight handled scythes, I stooped too low, and did not understand the set of mine; so that I was the derision of the whole field. At last one of them, better natured than the rest, said, "Lord love thee, lad, thou wilt kill thyself, and break thy back at this fashion ; what queer sort of a tool hast thou been used to cut with?" So, desiring me to stand more upright, and setting my scythe not quite so flat, I found that I could mow with much more ease than ever I had done before, and before I left the field, they all pronounced that I promised well.'-p. 59.

This good gentleman appears to know so little about the true value of his own remedies that he proposes them with contradictory re

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