and in the vicinity of the spot which is at present my head-quarters, employ nearly two thousand persons-notwithstanding all this, I found little satisfactory in the condition of the people.

I found rents in Wicklow such as, for the most part, could never be paid by the produce of the land; and the small farmers, as well as labourers, barely subsisting. High rent was the universal complaint, and the complaint was fully borne out by the wretched manner in which I found the people-Catholic and Protestantliving. And if the question be put to them, why they take land at a rent which they know it will not bear? the reply is always the same-how were they to live? what could they do? From which answer we at once arrive at the truth-that competition for land in Ireland is but the outbiddings of desperate circumstances.

Let us follow our traveller within doors :The first I entered was a mud cabin-one apartment. It was neither air nor water tight, and the floor was extremely damp. The furniture consisted of a small bedstead, with very scanty bedding, a wooden bench, and one iron pot; the embers of some furze burnt on the floor; and there was neither chimney nor window. The rent of this wretched cabin, to which there was not a yard of land, was two pounds.

The next cabin I entered was situated on the hill side; in size and material it was like the other. I found in it a woman and her four children. There were two small bedsteads, and no furniture, excepting a stool, a little bench, and one pot. Here also were the burnt embers of some furze, the only fuel the poor in this neighbourhood can afford to use. The children were all of them in rags; and the mother regretted that, on that account, she could not send them to school. The husband of this woman was a labourer at sixpence per day eighty of which sixpences, that is, eighty days' labour, being absorbed in the rent of the cabin, which was taken out in labour; so that there was little more than fourpence halfpenny per day left for the support of a wife and four children, with potatoes at fourpence a-stone.

I entered one other cabin; it was the most comfortless of the three; it was neither air nor water tight, and had no bedstead, and no furniture, excepting a stool and a pot; and there were not even the embers of a fire. In this miserable abode there was a decently dressed woman with five children; and her husband was also a labourer at sixpence per day. This family had had a pig, but it had been taken for rent a few days before.

I found nothing to induce the belief that any improve. ment had taken place in the condition of either the small farmer or the labouring classes.

I deeply regretted to see at Avoca a proof of the bad feeling which, in that part of the country, appears to exist between the Catholic and Protestant population. I was sitting at the window of the inn, on Sunday evening, when a man, in a state of intoxication, came along the road, calling out," To the devil with the Boyne waters, and they who drink them." Presently three men, who were sitting on the bridge, followed the offender, threw him down, beat and kicked him brutally, and stamped upon his face; ten or a dozen persons were by, and no one interfered; and the men walked away, leaving the other on the ground in a state of insensibility. The explanation is this: there was till lately only one brewery at Rathdrum, the property of Catholics. Another brewery was recently set up by Protestants in the same town; and the ale brewed in it is called by the Catholics "the Boyne waters." I regret, in the outset of my book, to be obliged to record these facts.

These scenes and anecdotes leave us no heart to linger upon the "Sweet vale of Avoca," where

A labourer considers himself fortunate in having daily employment at sixpence throughout the year; and many are not so fortunate. I found some who received only fivepence. I found the small farmers living very little more comfortably than the labourers. A little buttermilk added to the potatoes made the chief difference.

Mr Inglis' next station was at Gorey, in Wexford; and there things looked better than in Wicklow. He mentions here the good effects of a system, which, upon an humble scale, is exactly, in principle, Scotch banking:

In my first perambulation in the neighbourhood of the town, I visited two very nice clean cabins, with partition walls in them, and a respectable display of crockery. One of these had been erected by the tenant, who paid thirty shillings ground rent. The sum necessary for building the cabin had been advanced by a loan society which has been established in Gorey, and from which I found a general impression that great good had resulted. Artisans and country labourers equally availed themselves of it—the shoemaker, for instance, obtained money to purchase leather; the countryman, to buy a pig or build a cabin, or to seed his patch of ground. The sums lent are from £1 to £5, and are repaid by weekly instalments, at the rate of a shilling for each £1 lent; sixpence interest on each £1 is also paid and every borrower must give two joint securities, and produce a character from two householders for honesty and sobriety. I found that the loans were repaid with wonderful punctuality, and that the society had not actually lost one penny.

The best effects result from this society. When Mr Inglis first began his tour, he felt the natural disgust of an Englishman at seeing the snout of the pig thrust from the cabin door, and a dung-heap piled up before it; but he soon came to correct his errors in this respect, and to rejoice at seeing the grunting inmate who "paid the rint," occupy his own warm side of the cabin; and the manure which promised potatoes, became, in his eyes, more attractive than a tumulus or round tower. To find three pigs in one cabin was a blessed condition of household affairs. From the one end of the island to the other the universal complaint is "The land is let too high." Rack-rent is the rule; the exceptions are few and far between. A singular admission was made by the agent of certain extensive properties in Wexford :—" He said, that although the price of the land let by him was not determined by competition, that is, although he did not let to the highest bidder, he, nevertheless, took more money than the land was worth; and that this he was in a manner forced to do, in order not to depart too entirely from the practice of the neighbourhood." Such a reason! Mr Inglis thus does justice upon that everspringing root of bitterness in Ireland, the Orange faction:-"Religious bitterness is carried very far in this neighbourhood; and this may be mainly ascribed to the recent institution of an Orange lodge. The results of ill-judged zeal are strikingly displayed at Gorey. There is a Protestant and a Catholic inn known by these names; the Protestant and the Catholic coach, owned by, driven by, and supported by, persons of different persuasions; and the very children playing or squabbling in the street are divided into sects. This is miserable work, for which the institutors of the Orange lodge have to answer."

In travelling between Gorey and Ferns, there chanced to be in the coach a parcel for the Bishop of Ferns; and in order to deliver it, the coach left the high road, and drove for about two miles through the domain, and past his

lordship's house. This evinced some respect for the Church."

The traveller stopped at Enniscorthy:-"One of the victims of absenteeism of the worst kind; for even the agent of Lord Portsmouth, to whom the town belongs, does not live in the neighbourhood, but in Dublin, and only visits Enniscorthy to collect rent-leaving, no doubt, some subordinate individual to scrape in the odds and ends which he has not had time to collect."

With the town of Wexford he was pleased. The cabins in the neighbourhood are not of the worst kind, the town is busy and thriving, and the people a money-getting race. Here the disposal of "farmer's daughters is matter of regular traffic-acre for acre, or pound for pound and so great is the difficulty of marrying girls without portions, that it is no unusual thing to find farmers, who are in comfortable circumstances, living as poorly as the common labourer, or the rack-rented tenant of a few acres, in order that they may save a few hundreds for fortuning off their girls.”

was obliged to pay it. This is cutting before the point; but it denotes the confident expectations of the people. In the neighbourhood of Waterford, the estates of the Waterford, Duncannon, and Devonshire families, are understood not to be severely rack-rented, and they are under good management. The smaller properties are not so well managed. The rents of the small patches in Ireland, called farms, are £4, 10s., £5, and even £7 per acre, paid for small holdings; and in all these cases, potatoes formed the sole diet of the farmer, with occasionally the back-bone of a pig. There is no possibility of living and paying such rents. Many acknowledged that their arrears never could be paid, and that they had taken the land at such rents merely as a refuge against starvation. This is universally the case where land is let by competition.

In Waterford there is a new institution, of which we see an imitation in Glasgow and in Edinburgh. With us it is in support of the Presbyterian Kirk Establishment; in Ireland,

This district and its inhabitants are familiar to every one in the south of Ireland, and are become by-words for all that indicates a superior order of things and a superior race of people. The district commences close to the town of Wexford, and extends about fifteen miles in a south-west direction. The inhabitants were originally a South Welsh colony; and till but of late years, the language of Wales was generally spoken, and is still understood by some of the older people.

The farm-houses and cottages-for they are cottages rather than cabins are very thickly strewn; and, with few exceptions, the former are substantial, the latter clean and comfortable. I visited many of both; for anticipating, and always finding, as I everywhere have in Ireland, a ready welcome, I left the car, crossed the fields, and unhesitatingly lifted the latch. The farther I travelled into the district, the more striking became its characteristics; and not only did I find the interior of

the houses comfortable, but in the flower-plots and little ornamental gardens I recognised the traits which I have enumerated. In the husbandry of the district, there was everything to commend.

Farms in this barony run from ten up to fifty and sixty acres; but farms of thirty, and from thirty to forty acres, are the most usual; and with farm produce at its present prices, and with an average rent on arable land, of from £2, to £2, 10s. per acre, the farmer cannot do a great deal more than live and pay his rent. I went into the house of a farmer owning forty acres, when he and his family were about to begin dinner. It consisted of potatoes, butter-milk, sweet skimmed-milk, barley bread and butter. The farm had been four generations in the farmer's family; his great-grandfather paid six shillings per acre, his grandfather ten shillings, his father one pound, and he paid two pounds. He said he could live as I saw him live, and pay his rent, with his own and his son's labour, and lay by a trifle for his daughters.

Persons of different religious persuasions live in the utmost harmony with each other in the Barony of Forth.

On his way to Waterford, Mr Inglis visited New Ross, which he found in a decaying condition, the con-acre system in use, land very high, great want of employment, (a common complaint over all Ireland,) and crowds of ragged beggars. In this neighbourhood Mr Inglis was shewn a lease in which it was stipulated that the tenant was to pay tithe only if his landlord

education of children is, in both countries, the ostensible object. With us only a portion of the time of the associates is devoted to the object in view; but in Ireland the young men who call themselves "Brothers of the Christian Schools," bind themselves by vows. dedicate their whole lives to instruction, and Mr Inglis draws the true conclusion in believing that education will be a secondary object to the inculcation of Catholic tenets.

Mr

If the rural cabins of Ireland are too often wretched hovels, open to the elements, and destitute of anything approaching comfortable furniture, the miserable abodes of the poor in the suburbs of the towns are still worse. Inglis visited many of them in different locali ties. We take his sketch of those he saw in Waterford and in Limerick, both capital, if not first-rate Irish towns. "In Waterford," he says, "I visited some of the worst quarters of the town, and was introduced to scenes of most appalling misery. I found three and four families in hovels, lying on straw in different corners, and not a bit of furniture visible; the hovels themselves situated in the midst of the most horrid and disgusting filth. The heads of the families were out, begging potatoes round the country."

In Limerick it was still worse:

Some of the abodes I visited were garrets, some were cellars; some were hovels on the ground-floor, situated in narrow yards or alleys. I will not speak of the filth of the places; that could not be exceeded, in places meant to be its receptacles. Let the worst be imagined, and it will not be beyond the truth. In at least three-fourths of the hovels which I entered, there was no furniture of any description, save an iron pot-no table, no chair, no bench, no bedstead ;-two, three, or four little bundles of straw, with, perhaps, one or two scanty and ragged mats, were rolled up in the corners, unless where these beds were found occupied. The inmates were some of them old, crooked, and diseased; some younger, but emaciated, and surrounded by starving children; some were sitting on the damp ground, some standing, and

many were unable to rise from their little straw heaps. In scarcely one hovel could I find even a potato. In one which I entered, I noticed a small opening leading into an inner room. I lighted a bit of paper at the embers of a turf which lay in the chimney, and looked in. It was a cellar wholly dark, and about twelve feet square: two bundles of straw lay in two corners; on one, sat a bed-ridden woman; on another, lay two naked children-literally naked, with a torn rag of some kind thrown over them both. But I saw worse even than this. In a cellar which I entered, and which was almost quite dark, and slippery with damp, I found a man sitting on a little sawdust. He was naked: he had not even a shirt: a filthy and ragged mat was round him: this man was a living skeleton; the bones all but protruded through the skin: he was literally starving.

In place of forty hovels, I might have visited hundreds. In place of seeing, as I did, hundreds of men, women, and children, in the last state of destitution, I might have seen thousands. I entered the alleys, and visited the hovels, and climbed the stairs at a venture; I did not select; and I have no reason to believe that the forty which I visited, were the abodes of greater wretchedness than the hundreds which I passed by.

I found many hand-loom weavers, who worked from five in the morning till eight at night, and received from a task-master from half-a-crown to four shillings a-week. Many of these men had wives and families; and I need scarcely say, that confinement, labour, scanty subsistence, and despair, were fast reducing these men to the condition of the others.

The notion that Ireland, from some inherent vice in the character of her sons, if not in her soil, cannot compete with England in manufac tures, if it were not sufficiently disproved by the flourishing linen trade of the North, is further dispelled by facts. On his way to Curraghmore, the magnificent seat of the Marquis of Waterford, Mr Inglis visited the cotton-factory of Mayfield, in that neighbourhood; an establishment which, he asserts, competes successfully with Manchester. He says, "I regretted deeply to learn, not from the proprietor of the mill only, but from other sources, that Lord Waterford's family have thrown every obstacle in the way of this establishment; and that, only the other day, an attempt had been made to take advantage of some manorial rights, and to demolish the mill-dams. Pity it is, that the aristocracy should, even by open acts, separate themselves from the interests of the people around them. The enterprising Quaker, Mr Malcomson, who has established this factory, has done more for the neighbourhood than Lord Waterford and all the Beresfords have ever done; and his lordship's pride ought to be, less in his magnificent domain, and fine stud, than in the comfortable condition of the surrounding peasantry, and in the establishment which has produced it."

are adorned with evergreens and flowers. The family of Duncannon are everywhere well spoken of, though there is reason for the suspicion Mr Inglis entertains, that beautiful cottages, where the wages of labour are but four shillings and sixpence a-week, without provisions, is a doubt. ful sign of the comfort of the inmates. In setting out from Waterford, the coach was, as usual, beset by clamorous beggars. "A commercial traveller chanced to be seated next to the door, and, while the coach waited for the mail. bags, he was assailed by a torrent of importunity. One little sixpence, your honour! it's but a half-penny a-piece for the poor crathurs.' The young man answered, that he had nothing less than half-crowns. May your honour never have less,' said two or three together-wits really jumping. I dare say,' said he, you would take my coat off my back.' And, if your honour gave it with good-will, may-be we would,' said another."

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We cannot follow Mr Inglis in his perambulations through the many beautiful demesnes he visited in Ireland. His own confessed drawback embitters to us the enjoyment of those scenes of high cultivation, and of unequalled natural beauty. All the heart can wish may be concentrated within the walls of the domain. "But beyond, all this disappears: private wealth and humanity can extend their influence only to a limited distance; and beyond the circle of that influence, rags and beggary are found. I am led to make this observation here, because there are several resident landlords about Thomastown; and because there is but one opinion round the country, as to the worth of Mr Power, as a resident landlord; and yet I found the condition of the people, generally, to be wretched. I met in my walks, wives and mothers begging about the country; carrying their sacks home with a few potatoes, and under their arms a little bundle of sticks-the only fire-wood they could afford-picked up by the road-side. These were not common mendicants; but, as I personally ascertained, were the wives and daughters of labourers, who could find no employment: many had not even the means of obtaining seed to put into their little patches of potato ground. The cabins I found wretched in the extrememany without even a pig in them."

At Woodstock, near Thomastown, the tourist visited a school instituted by the proprietors. The school is superintended by Lady Louisa Tighe, and taught by a Protestant; but such is the influence of kindness and tolerance, that the children of the Catholics in the village attend without any exception. Mr Inglis chanced to visit Kilkenny soon after the debate on the repeal question. In that protracted debate, the prosperous manufactures of Kilkenny were boast

factory was so flourishing, that it was said the weavers of Kidderminster had petitioned for repeal, least they should be ruined by Irish competition. When visited, ONE MAN was found at work, and ONE wheel, out of eleven, going, to

prevent the machinery from rotting. Piles of goods were seen, for which there was no demand, and unemployed workmen were wandering about like spectres.

Mr Inglis confirms every previous trust-worthy account of the great majority of the Irish being favourable to Repeal. He found the whole of the lower and a great proportion of the middle classes Repealers; and Protestants quite as keen as Catholics. He does not believe that the priests incite the people, but that the people force their clergy to comply with their wishes, which, if they resist, they lose their influence.

A few miles from Kilkenny, there is a choice specimen of an absentee town, placed under the tender mercies of an absentee proprietor, who "does what he likes with his own." It is Callen; and the correspondence which the superior, Lord Clifden, has lately held in the London newspapers with Mr Inglis upon his description of this wretched place, tempts us to transfer this picture at full length. Mr Inglis has vindicated his original statements, insolently questioned by Lord Clifden, with commendable spirit:

I had heard, even in England, of the wretched condition of a town in the county of Kilkenny, called Callen; and finding that this town was but eight miles from I never travelled Kilkenny, I devoted a day to Callen.

through a more pleasing and smiling country than that which lies between Kilkenny and Callen; and I never entered a town reflecting so much disgrace upon the owner of it as this. In so execrable a condition are the streets of this town, that the mail-coach, in passing through it, is allowed twelve minutes extra; an indulgence which can surprise no one who drives, or rather attempts to drive through the street, for no one who has the use of his limbs would consent to be driven. And yet, will it be credited, that a toll is levied, on the entrance into the town, of every article of consumption; and that not one shilling of the money so received is laid out for the benefit of the town. The potatoes, coal, butter-milk, with which the poor wretches who inhabit this place supply their necessities, are subject to a toll, which used to produce £250 per annum; but which, having been resisted by some spirited and prying person who questioned the right of toll, the receipts have been since considerably diminished. It was with some difficulty that I obtained a sight of the table of tolls; but I insisted on my right to see it, and satisfied myself, that potatoes and butter-milk, the food of the poor, pay a toll to Lord Clifden, who, out of the revenue of about £20,000 per annum, which he draws from this neighbourhood, lays out not one farthing for the benefit of his people.

I had not yet seen in Ireland any town in so wretched a condition as this. I arrived in it very early in the morning; and having been promised breakfast at a grocer's shop, (for there is no inn in Callen,) I walked through the outskirts of the town, and round a little common which lies close to it, and there I saw the people crawling out of their hovels,-they and their hovels not one shade better than I have seen in the sierras of Granada, where the people live in holes excavated in the banks. Their cabins were mere holes, with nothing within them (I speak of two which I entered) excepting a little straw, and one or two broken stools. And all the other outskirts of the town are in nearly a similar condition. Ranges of hovels, without a ray of comfort or a trace of civilization about them, and people either in a state of actual starvation, or barely keeping body and soul together. All this I saw, and cannot be deceived; and from the inquiries which I made of intelligent persons, the Protestant clergyman

VOL. II.-NO. L

among the number, I may state, that in this town, containing between four and five thousand inhabitants at least one thousand are without regular employment; six or seven hundred entirely destitute; and that there are upwards of two hundred actual mendicants in the town-persons incapable of work. Is there any one so blind as to contend, that this is a state of things which ought to continue; and that an absentee nobleman should be permitted to draw, without deduction for the support of the infirm poor, the splendid income which he wrings out of a people left to starvation or crime? An attempt was made by some philanthropic persons to have the common enclosed and cultivated, which would have given some employment; but the project was unsuccessful,the great resisted it. And again, will any one say, that Lord Clifden, or others situated like his Lordship, ought not to be forced to consent to a proposal tending to give employment to those of whom his own rack-rents and ejectments have made paupers? Let any one who desires to see a specimen of an absentee town visit Callen. And Lord Clifden is the more reprehensible, since he occasionally visits the country, and is not ignorant of its condition. It is true, that his lordship drives as rapidly through his town as the state of the street will admit ; but it happened fortunately, that upon one occasion, the carriage broke down, and this patriotic and tenderhearted nobleman was forced to hear the execrations of the crowd of naked and starving wretches who thronged around him.

Nor is the country around Callen fortunate in its other landlords. The land of Lord Dysart, another large proprietor, is frightfully rack-rented. Land, at a distance from any market, is let at £4 and £4 : 10s. per acre; and I know of five acres let at a rent, the whole produce of which would barely pay the rent of one acre. The Marquis of Ormonde is another proprietor; but his land is not so much overset'; and the general opinion appears to be that he is anxious to do right.

I walked back to Kilkenny from Callen in the evening, without any fear of robbery, in a country where half the people are starving. Robbery, singular to tell, is a crime of unfrequent occurrence; and I look upon it, that a traveller is in less danger on the highways of Ireland, than in any other part of the British dominions.

In travelling over part of the Bog of Allen, after stating that about £7 per acre is the estimated cost of reclaiming bog land, Mr Inglis remarks, "Twenty millions have lately been given to the West India planters; some say, to extinguish a name, and make good a theory. At all events it is undeniable, that the condition of the Irish poor is immeasurably worse than that of the West India slaves; and if but seven millions were thrown upon the bogs of Ireland, a million of acres might be reclaimed, and employment and food afforded to the hundreds of thousands who now, for want of employment and bread, disorganize the country, force absenteeism, tax the people of England for the preservation of law and order, and peril the very existence of the empire." Far are we from agreeing to what some say," yet we commend the hint to, the proper quarter. Around Thurles, in Tipperary, the farmers allowed that they could live, which is saying a great deal in Ireland. The wages were so high as eightpence a-day, with diet, and good land was let so low (we say low for Ireland) as three and four pounds an acre.

In Cashel, Mr Inglis found the Catholic population 7000, the Protestant communicants 150. He found the Protestant archbishop "universally disliked, even by those dependent upon him, and of the same religious persuasion. He does no

D

good; and, by all accounts, is a close, hardman, in every sense far overpaid by the 10 or £12,000 a-year which he enjoys." In the city of this well-paid Christian dignitary, potatoes had at this time become so dear that bread was substituted for them. A baker's shop chanced to be situated precisely opposite to the inn; and Mr Inglis saw very many children buy a halfpenny worth of bread, and divide it into two or three pieces for the supper of as many.

Many false and exaggerated reports of atrocities and outrages are in constant circulation in Ireland, though it cannot be denied that such cases are but too frequent. With almost no exception, where they do not originate in the hereditary feuds of local factions, they arise from competition for land, or resistance to tithes. In Dublin, the tourist had heard, that in such counties as Tipperary and Kilkenny, where employment was the most plentiful, and best paid, disturbances occurred constantly. He denies that there is anything like constant employment for the population, and concludes that want of work, and not superfluity of money, is the true cause of the frequent outbreaks in those places.

A Catholic chapel has been lately erected at Mr the beautifully-situated town of Cahir. Inglis found the doors of the chapel guarded by the priest and four assistants, who, by main force, resisted the entrance of every worshipper who did not contribute to the fund for the

completion of the edifice. The traveller paid toll for a number of them, or furnished them with copper entrance-money, and saw them then admitted. Has he never seen poor people repulsed at the doors of richly-endowed and finished churches?

With the scenery of the valley of the Suire Mr Inglis was charmed. The climate, too, is delightful; green-house plants and the half hardy shrubs thriving luxuriantly in the open air, and leading the traveller to think, that before he had seen Ireland, he had overrated the exclusive capabilities of the Norman islands. "In the valley there are deep woods, and green slopes, and a sparkling river; and two fine mountain ranges-the Galtee and Lismore hills; and, if one descends as far, the ruined castle of Ardfinane, and its village, the property of Lord Donoughmore, who sadly neglects it. A great part of the population is Protestant; and the place is, altogether, miserably poor."

This is the perpetual conclusion.

Clonmel is one of the most prosperous towns in the south of Ireland. Its trade lies in the great Irish staples of corn, bacon, and butter. Its corn-mills look like great factories; and 50,000 pigs are, on the average, killed in the year. There also, Bianconi, the Italian, who came to Ireland a wandering two-penny printseller, has placed the centre of his extensive establishment. From Clonmel his jaunting-cars radiate in every direction, reaching to fifty towns in the south and west. He has between five and six hundred horses constantly employed. His vehicles are more expeditious than the Irish

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mail; on good roads, they go at the rate of about nine miles an hour, and the fares are very cheap. One cause of the prosperity of Clonmel is the absence of religious dissension. The 15,000 Catholics, and the 3000 Protestants, of various sects, live amicably together. There are a number of Friends here, and Mr Inglis "noticed, among the Quakeresses, more smartness of dress, and a greater disregard of the strict costume, than in any other place he had ever visited.”

The population of Clonmel wears a respectable look; one sees few ragged and bare-footed people, and few idlers. There is an appearance of something doing; a bustle and throng, evidently arising from people having an object in view. The shops, too, are good, well filled, and well frequented. Nor must I omit another unequivocal sign of improvement. I found two very respectably. stocked booksellers' shops, and two respectable circulating libraries. These were the first libraries I had seen, since leaving Kilkenny: neither at Thurles, Cashel-the archiepiscopal city of Cashel-nor at Tipperary, is there any circulating library or book society.

Mitchelstown is, we think, less known to British readers than many of the other places which Mr Inglis visited, and, upon this account, we select his description of a spot interesting from its beauty and its misery :

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I like greatly the situation of Mitchelstown-fine mountain boundaries form its horizon; and its neighbourhood offers an agreeable diversity of scenery, in the inequalities of its surface, and the abundance of wood: but above all, there is here the splendid domain of the Earl of Kingston. It possesses, what I believe no other town of the same size, or of even much larger dimensions, country town-there is that besides, but a square can boast a square; not the mere market-place of a surrounded by well-built houses, and as large as some of the smaller of the London squares. Que half of this square, consisting of about seventeen houses, is called the College; and is an endowment of the Kingston family, for the reception of reduced respectable families, who have a free house and £40 per annum.

Free admission into Lord Kingston's park is a great advantage possessed by all the inhabitants. The gardens even are open to all respectable persons. Lord Kingston's domain contains about twelve hundred English acres ; and whether in forest paths, or grassy walks, or wide gravel roads, offers all that can be desired, either for the gay promenade or the solitary ramble. The house-Mitchelstown castle-is one of the most magnificent in Ireland: it is built in the castellated form; and both from its extent and height, is a most imposing object from every part of the surrounding country, seen, as it generally is, towering above the surrounding woods. The interior is not unworthy of the external appearance of the edifice. It has a magnificent gallery, fine suits of apartments, and all, besides, that comfort can add to splendour,

Mitchelstown and its neighbourhood have suffered grievously, by the late affliction which has fallen upon the Kingston family :—the deprivation of an expenditure of £40,000 per annum, has been most seriously felt in the country; and the deterioration of Mitchelstown and its neighbourhood has fast followed the misfortune to which I have alluded;-if I were to search Ireland throughout, I could not find a better illustration of the difference between residence and non-residence, than in the present situation of Mitchelstown.

The evils which have resulted from the misfortune of

the Kingston family affect the whole of the lower classes in the town and its vicinity-when I was in Mitchelstown, the distress was so urgent, that in order to prevent the actual starvation of hundreds, a public meeting was held, and a subscription entered into; and the scenes, which the investigation that followed, for the distribution of meal, &c., laid open, were of the most aggravated mistry. Will it be believed, that, in a town containing