instrument of æsthetic culture which it has proved in other lands; but every traveller was struck with the natural courtesy, the instinctive tact, the gay, hospitable, and cheerful manners of the Irish peasant, and with the contrast they presented to the deplorable poverty of his lot. The country was naturally very fertile, and the cheapness of provisions in some districts was probably exceeded in no part of Europe. This cheapness was, no doubt, on the whole, an evil, and arose from the wretched condition of the country, which made it impossible for the farmer to find sufficient markets for his produce; but it, at least, secured in good years an abundance of the first necessaries of life, and stimulated the spirit of hospitality in the poorest cabin.2 Owing, probably, to the dense, smoky atmosphere of the hovels, in which a hole in the roof was often the only chimney, blindness was unusually common, and innumerable blind fiddlers traversed the land, and found a welcome at every fireside. Dancing was universal, and the poor dancingmaster was one of the most characteristic figures of Irish life. Hurling was practised with a passionate enthusiasm. The love of music was very widely spread. Carolan, the last, and it is said the greatest, of the old race of Irish bards, died in 1737. When only eighteen, he became

1 There is a letter in the Irish Record Office from Mr. William Wallard of Gallbally, in the county of Limerick, to Edward Southwell, the Chief Secretary, dated Aug. 21, 1705, urging the retention of a barrack which had been established in that neighbourhood for the protection of a linen manufacture. The writer says: 'The market is revived, and so plentiful that the soldiers buy a goose for 2d., a duck for 1d., a hen for 1d., chicken for d., and twentyfour eggs a penny in this place,

which is but half a mile from the barrack, and all other provisions proportionately cheap.' A pamphleteer in 1729 says: All the necessaries of life in Ireland are at lower prices than in any other country on this side of the globe. The people are encumbered with very few taxes, and labour is cheaper than in any neighbouring country.' On the prices in the latter half of the century, see Arthur Young's Tour, ii. 232.

2 See the striking picture in Arthur Young's Tour, ii. 118.

blind through the smallpox, and he spent most of his life wandering through Connaught. His fame now rests chiefly upon tradition, but all who came in contact with him appear to have recognised in him a great genius; and Goldsmith, who was fascinated by his music in early youth, retained his admiration for it to the end of his life.1

The gradual extension of roads was at the same time steadily reclaiming the west and south from Highland anarchy; the traditions and habits of civil war were slowly subsiding both among the conquerors and the conquered, and religious bigotry more rapidly diminished. It is, of course, impossible to mark out with accuracy the stages of this progress, but the fact is altogether incontestable. Few legislative bodies ever exhibited a more savage intolerance than the Irish Parliament in the first quarter of the eighteenth century. In the last quarter of the same century the Irish Parliament showed itself far more liberal in its dealings with Catholics than the Parliament of England, and measures which would have been utterly impossible in England were carried with scarcely perceptible difficulty in Ireland. Duelling and drinking, though both scandalously prevalent, were steadily diminishing, and, before the century had closed, the Irish gentry appear to have been little more addicted to the latter vice than the corresponding class in England.2

1 Goldsmith's Essays, vi. For further particulars about Carolan, see Nichols' Literary Illustrations of the Eighteenth Century, vii. 683-694, and Hardiman's Irish Minstrelsy. Swift's wellknown poem on O'Rourke's feast was translated from a poem by Carolan, and some of his airs were adopted by Moore for his melodies.

2 It is extremely unfortunate that the popular English conceptions of Ireland in the closing years of the eighteenth century are derived mainly from Sir Jonah Barrington, who lived in the most dissipated section of Irish society, and who habitually coloured, for the sake of effect, whatever he described. Arthur Young, writing in 1776, says: 'Drinking and

What I have written may be sufficient to show that Irish life in the first half of the eighteenth century was not altogether the corrupt, frivolous, grotesque, and barbarous thing that it has been represented; that among many and glaring vices some real public spirit and intellectual energy may be discerned. It may be added that great improvements were at this time made in the material aspect of Dublin.

In the middle of the eighteenth century it was in dimensions and population the second city in the Empire, containing, according to the most trustworthy accounts, between 100,000 and 120,000 inhabitants. Like most things in Ireland, it presented vivid contrasts, and strangers were equally struck with the crowds of beggars, the inferiority of the inns, the squalid wretchedness of the streets of the old town, and with the noble proportions of the new quarter, and the brilliant and hospitable society that inhabited it. The Liffey was spanned by four bridges, and another on a grander scale was undertaken in 1753. St. Stephen's Green was considered the largest square in Europe.

duelling are the two charges which have long been alleged against the gentlemen of Ireland; but the change of manners that has taken place in that kingdom is not generally known in England. Drunkenness ought no longer to be a reproach. . . . Nor have I ever been asked to drink a single glass more than I had an inclination for. I may go further, and assert that hard drinking is very rare among people of fortune.'Tour, ii. 238. Campbell gives a similar testimony. With respect to drinking I have been happily disappointed. The bottle is circulated freely, but not to that excess we have heard it was.'

Philosophical Survey of the South of Ireland, p. 39. The decline of drinking is also noticed in Luckombe's Tour through Ireland (1780), and Twiss (who generally took a very unfavourable view of Irish life) declared that neither hospitality nor drinking was carried to great excess. Tour in Ireland in 1775. Crumpe, in 1793, speaks of the middlemen alone as the class among whom what remains of the ferocious spirit of drinking which formerly disgraced the kingdom is still to be found.'-Essay on the Best Means of providing Employment for the People, p. 237.

The quays of Dublin were widely celebrated, but the chief boast of the city was the new Parliament House, which was built between 1729 and 1739 for the very moderate sum of 34,000l., and was justly regarded as far superior in beauty to the Parliament House at Westminster. In the reigns of Elizabeth and of the early Stuarts the Irish Parliament met in the Castle under the eyes of the Chief Governor. It afterwards assembled at the Tholsel, in Chichester House, and during the erection of the Parliament House in two great rooms of the Foundling Hospital. The new edifice was chiefly built by the surveyor-general, Sir Edward Pearce, who was a member of the Irish Parliament, and it entitles him to a very high place among the architects of his time. In ecclesiastical architecture the city had nothing to boast of, for the churches, with one or two exceptions, were wholly devoid of beauty, and their monuments were clumsy, scanty, and mean; but the college, though it wanted the venerable charm of the English universities, spread in stately squares far beyond its original limits. The cheapness of its education, and the prevailing distaste for industrial life which induced crowds of poor gentry to send their sons to the university, when they would have done far better to send them to the counter, contributed to support it, and in spite of great discouragement, it appears on the whole to have escaped the torpor which had at this time fallen over the universities of England. It was said before the middle of the century to have

Compare Lord Mountmorres' Hist. of the Irish Parliament, i. 390, 391. Gilbert's Hist. of Dublin, iii. 73-77.

2It is peculiar to this island that almost every family in it of any fortune or substance send their sons to the college in order

to qualify them for the preferments in their own country.'— Madden's Proposal for the General Encouragement of Learning in Dublin College (Dublin, 1732), p. 10. See, too, Arthur Young's Tour, ii. 343.

contained about 700 students. A laboratory and anatomical theatre had been opened in 1710 and 1711. The range of instruction had been about the same time enlarged by the introduction of lectures on chemistry, anatomy, and botany, and a few years later by the foundation of new lectureships on oratory, history, natural and experimental philosophy. The library was assisted by grants from the Irish Parliament. It was enriched by large collections of books and manuscripts bequeathed during the first half of the eighteenth century by Palliser, Archbishop of Cashel, by Gilbert, the Vice-Provost and Professor of Divinity, and by Stearn, the Bishop of Clogher, and its present noble readingroom was opened in 1732.2 Another library-comprising that which had once belonged to Stillingfleet-had been founded in Dublin by Archbishop Marsh, and was incorporated by Act of Parliament in 1707.

The traces of recent civil war and the arrogance of a dominant minority were painfully apparent. The statue of William III. stood as the most conspicuous monument opposite the Parliament of Ireland. A bust of the same Sovereign, bearing an insulting distich reflecting on the