But whatever was the state of Ireland previous to the English conquest, its state ever since is but too well known. Hume says, after giving an account of this event, "The low state of commerce and industry, during those ages, made it impracticable for princes to support regular armies, which might retain the conquered countries in subjection; and the extreme barbarism and poverty of Ireland could still less afford means of bearing this expense. The only expedient by which a durable conquest could then be made or maintained, was by pouring in a multitude of new inhabitants, dividing among them the lands of the vanquished, establishing them in all offices of trust and authority, and thereby transforming the ancient inhabitants into a new people. By this policy the Northern invaders of old, and of late the Duke of Normandy, had been able to fix their dominion, and to erect kingdoms which remained stable on their foundations, and were transmitted to the posterity of the first conquerors. But the present state of Ireland rendered that island so little inviting to the English, that only a few of desperate fortunes could be persuaded from time to time to transport themselves into it; and instead of reclaiming the natives from their uncultivated manners, they were gradually assimilated to the ancient inhabitants, and degenerated from the customs of their own nation. It was also found requisite to bestow great military and arbitrary powers on the leaders,
Indeed, for a philosophical historian this does appear a very unphilosophical passage. If Ireland was the poor and despicable country Mr. Hume would represent it, what was it that made Henry ambitious of adding it to his already immense dominions? A sovereign does not usually seek to deprive a brother-sovereign of his possessions, and seat himself in his place, without proposing to himself some important acquisition to compensate for the iniquity practised. But Henry saw in Ireland a most delicious and fertile country; a country abounding with fine forests, with excellent pasturage, capable of producing abundantly all the fruits of the earth; watered every where by abundant streams and rivers, many of them navigable; concealing treasures of ores within the bosoms of her rocks; all this he saw, all this he coveted: it was the riches, not the poverty of Ireland, that made it the object of his ambition and cupidity. Had the inhabitants of Ireland been sunk in as low a state of moral degradation as Mr. Hume represents them, living in a country so poor and despicable, what, by exciting Henry's hopes, or awakening his fears, could stimulate him to an act of so great injustice as he projected? No: he saw this rich country inhabited by an ingenious and warlike people: he found them dangerous as neighbours, and hoped to find them as subjects a valuable support to his power. But again, I say, an act of such outrage must be varnished over; and he thought no gloss so specious as that he threw over it, of depreciating in every way the country he had sacrificed his honour and honesty to obtain. The writers of his time, then, taking their cue from the court, vilified Ireland in every way; and Mr. Hume, at all times too much disposed to abandon his better judgement when personal
And what else could be expected from the scene of rapine and plunder he describes but the consequences that did actually follow? This conquest was to be secured "by pouring in a multitude of new inhabitants, dividing among them the lands of the vanquished, establishing them in all places of trust and authority, and thereby transforming the ancient inhabitants into a new people." This was indeed the way to transform them into a new people; the worm that is trampled on will turn and wound its oppressor: and what could be expected from conduct thus lawless on one side, but retaliation on the other? By oppression they were driven to show a sense of injury in copying the evil example set them: it was the lawless invaders who assimilated them to their manners; it was the ancient inhabitants who degenerated and adopted the manners of their conquerors, not the conquerors theirs; they were driven into acts of violence and barbarism, and afterwards condemned as barbarians; as some good-natured husbands will not unfrequently scold unhappy madam till tears irresistibly flow, and then are angry with her for crying.
For four centuries this scene of animosities continued, this perpetual warfare of oppression and of ineffectual resistance; the English still masters of the island, the Irish still kicking against the yoke, till in the latter years of Queen Elizabeth's reign the formidable rebellions which had been attempted were quelled, and the country seemed finally subjugated. But was any attempt then made to conciliate? No: four revolving centuries had revolved in vain to teach lessons of experience to the ruling powers. Queen Elizabeth was in many respects a great princess; like the hen, she was a good mother to her chickens, but she was too much disposed to peck at those which did not immediately coop under her own wing: she was fond of power, and could not bear to see her power resisted. Thus at the suppression of the Irish rebellion fines and confiscations were the order of the day; the heads of the ancient septs, shorn of their honours, were doomed to linger out their remainder of life in obscurity or captivity; while the followers, instead of the masters to whom they had been accustomed to look up with an attachment little short of veneration, were now expected to pay their homage at new shrines, at shrines which to
During my respective residences in this country I mingled very much not only among what might be called my own class in society, but I endeavoured to search into the character of the inferior classes. To me it ever appeared that the Irish are a people uncommonly susceptible of kindness: I have seen the countenance sometimes lighted up with such animation at the sound of but one kind word, that I have thought to myself, What might not be done with these people if they were taken by the hands sincerely as brethren, if they were no longer forced to feel themselves but as a sort of sheep shut on the outside of the fold, not suffered to enter the holy of holies within? But the title of the wild Irish has once been bestowed upon them: nothing is so dangerous as such an epithet; for it seems as if a determination were formed that they shall still be compelled to deserve it. That they are capable of the strongest attachment, their firm and steady adherence to their clans or septs has repeatedly manifested; and nothing can be warmer even now than the attachments which I have seen manifested in the dependants of a family to the head, when they have been a lone time in his service.
In Miss Edgeworth's very fine tale of Ennui (and I know of few things in the way of fiction superior to it) I have still had one subject of regret. To give all the effect intended to the character of the hero, it was perhaps necessary he should experience the strange and complete reverse of fortune which Ellinor's abrupt disclosure of his being her son brings upon him: yet much could I have desired that her warm attachment had never been other than that of the foster-mother to the babe she had reared, than that of the dependant of the sept to its master. I wish the author's fine imagination, her thorough acquaintance with the character of her countrymen, would exercise itself upon such a subject; how exquisite a national picture would be added to those with which she has already presented the public!
I do most sincerely believe that the disposition of far the greater majority of the nation is to attach themselves warmly to the English, to forget all past feuds and animosities, to become but one people with them, to let the distinctions of this side the water and that side the water be forgotten, to forget even the humiliations they could not but feel attendant upon the Union, if they could only see that indeed an union, not in sound only, but in heart and soul. I am sure my own reception, wherever I went, may be adduced as a justification of this opinion; I must either think that I saw nothing but hypocrites, or believe that the flattering attentions I experienced were of the heart, not merely of the head; for worlds I would not think the one; I must believe the other; I must believe that the Irish are a kind and warm-hearted people, extremely disposed to show kindness themselves, and no less feelingly alive to receiving it from others.
If I am told of the troubles and commotions by which the country has been harassed within the last thirty years, the answer is obvious: I know that tumults have arisen; I know that terrible scenes have passed; I know it has appeared too palpably that there were many troubled spirits in the country: but I also know that the number of these, compared with the whole population, has been trifling. This was particularly manifest in the rebellion of 1798; had it not been a very, very small minority of the nation who were engaged in it, never would it have been so easily subdued. So futile, indeed, have all attempts at insurrection proved, that they have only shown how insignificant was the number of the disaffected, how well affected was the majority of the nation towards this country. But it is a misfortune arising from the very nature of all human affairs, that, as Dr. Leland justly observes, History records the effects arising from dangerous passions, the virtues of private life are not generally made the subject of history.
The world knows how many were concerned in these troubles, how many fell sacrifices to them on this occasion, how many on that; they will never know of the thousands who remained quiet in their homes, lamenting in secret the infatuation of their deluded countrymen; feeling but too sensibly that they had great cause of complaint, yet regretting that they had recourse to means so mistaken for seeking redress; means which could only terminate in an increase of suffering to themselves, and extend the calamity to those who were innocent of any participation in the offence.And ought not these good dispositions to receive every possible encouragement? Policy and humanity alike answer, Certainly. But do they? Truth compels the answering this in the negative. It cannot be denied but that the state of the country calls loudly for some amelioration that the situation of the inferior classes among the Irish is lamentable, is affecting. Justice, however, demands that the blame should be principally imputed where it is principally due; and in this instance, the Great among the Irish themselves are the class of persons most to be condemned. The true source of the calamities of the country is in the principal landholders absenting themselves from it, spending in foreign climes (for even England is in this respect to Ireland a foreign clime) the fortunes which ought to be participated with the poor, from the sweat of whose brows they are derived. What attachment can the dependants of any estate have to an owner of whom they know nothing, but that they must at certain times of the year pay him a certain rent, which their utmost exertions can with difficulty scrape together? What influence might not the families of distinction obtain by living as of old on their estates, petty sovereigns among the people around? by attending themselves to the promotion of their comforts, by introducing a spirit of industry among them, and by furnishing them employment, so that such a spirit might never be suffered to know a moment's abatement? We are told that the Irish are indolent by nature: alas, they are rather so by compulsion, because they have no means of being otherwise. The vast influx of factitious wealth which has of late years flowed into this country, which was thought her strength, but which has proved her weakness, has been, if possible, even more injurious to Ireland than to ourselves. It has created not a taste alone, but a craving after luxurious modes of life, which is a calamity of the most fatal kind that can afflict a nation: the parliament, which used to carry the great families of Ireland to Dublin, now transferred to London, they have been obliged to go thither; they have tasted the luxuries of the English capital, they are no longer satisfied with their own country, but hold themselves still absented from it. Here lies the great evil of the Union to Ireland. Yet, let me be just: though the country is lamentably deserted by too large a portion of the great, there are yet some righteous remaining in Sodom. There are still noblemen living principally upon their estates, I have instanced several, giving their time and attention to improvements in agriculture and manufactures,
There is one point to which I cannot help more particularly adverting. We never cease hearing the wretchedness of the Irish cabins made the subject of animadversion; and very wretched indeed they are for the most part: but I have not yet found the true cause of their wretchedness explained. The landholders do not, as in England, provide cottages for the poor on their estates, each labourer provides his own habitation; the inevitable consequence of this is, that, the means being very slender, it must be built at the least possible expense, that the whole family, human beings and animals together, must be squeezed into the smallest space in which they can be contained: the inevitable result is, that they live in a degree of filth which I am confident is no less injurious to the mental than the corporeal health. What do I say? no less? It is infinitely more injurious. I have seen troops of healthy-looking children issue forth from these cabins, but I am sure the moral man cannot live in such a way without being exceedingly degraded. The remedy of this evil would be a very important step towards introducing more general habits of order and regularity. Is it possible for the infant mind to be impressed with any notion of such habits, when at the first dawning of its tender ideas they are presented with spectacles so directly opposite? Their ideas must be formed after what they do see, they cannot be formed after what they do not see. "Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it." Let him be accustomed to see nothing but neatness and order around him, depend upon it when he grows up he will not sigh for a mud cabin and filth. A very laudable spirit seems now to be awakened among the gentry who remain at their posts, and attend to the welfare of their poorer neighbours, for educating the children of these classes; but I do think that an indispensable step towards rendering education of any avail, is first to provide the poor with more decent homes.
Let me not be understood by any means to disparage the spirit of educating the poor, I only wish to see the very laudable desire of ameliorating their situation
Again: "I will tell you what those absentees ought to do; they ought to promote the establishment of Houses of Refuge, Houses of Industry, and School-Houses, and set the example upon their own estates of building decent cottages, that the Irish peasantry may at least enjoy as much comfort as is enjoyed by an English sow for an English farmer would refuse to eat the flesh of a hog so ill lodged and fed as an Irish peasant." Once more: "I do not encourage you to expect any immediate amendment or public benefit from the plans in agitation for the education of the poor; it is in vain to flatter yourselves that you can improve their minds if you neglect their bodies. Where have you ever heard of a people anxious for education, who had not bread to eat or clothes to cover them? I have never known people under such circumstances feel any great appetite for moral instruction."
At the moment of writing this, I am favoured with a pamphlet from Ireland, sent me by the author, an Irish barrister, (whose name I suppose I must not mention, as it is not affixed to the work,) upon the subject of educating the poor. Most sincerely do I concur with this gentleman's ideas as to the general good likely to result from giving the poor the opportunity of learning the duties of their station upon sound principles; I can never persuade myself but that a man must be a better member of the community who is able to inform and enlarge his mind through the medium of books, who has such a resource to occupy his hours of leisure, than he who, sunk in ignorance, has no refuge but the public-house to fill up his time when the labours of the day are over. Yet I wish he had carried his views one step further, and had seen the necessity of providing the poor with more decent lodging, as an essential preliminary to the cultivation of their minds; had seen how important it is, in order to prepare their minds for moral and religious instruction, that in future, when their eyes are first opened, when their ideas first begin to expand, they may fall upon something better than the wretchedness now presented to them. As they
Carrying still further their prejudices, the young men a step higher in the scale of society, who come over here, are too commonly included under one general head, and to that head is given the title of fortune-hunters. A lady carried her ideas so far upon this subject, that she positively asserted there was an association formed in Dublin for the purpose of fitting out fortune-hunters to England. The plan of it she said was this: Upon a certain subscription paid, the fortune-hunter was supplied with every thing necessary to enable him to cut the proper dash in England; his destination being commonly Bath or some other dashing-watering place, where he could with more facility insinuate himself into company than in London; and he had an unlimited power to draw upon the fund for all necessary supplies till the object of his mission was obtained, in being blessed with the hand of some wealthy English fair-one. Then, all the money he had received was to be reimbursed to the general fund, with the addition of a certain bonus for the use of it, regulated according to the length of time he had been accommodated with the money, and the greater or less value of the prize obtained. Now really those who could believe in so absurd a tale, must have a measure of faith fit for the reception of any thing no fiction of giants or enchanters could be more extravagant.
That there may be needy young men occasionally, who transport themselves from the other side of the Irish Channel to this, in hopes of making their fortunes among the fair of this country by a good address, by pleasing manners and polite attentions, which they prefer as an easier way of establishing themselves in life than drawing on their own industry and application; that such things may occur, is very likely: but it does not follow, because some instances of the kind have happened, that an Irishman and a fortune-hunter are synonymous terms. And let us be just was such a thing never done by an Englishman? Have none of them spent their little all to enable themselves to cut a dash at some public place where females of fortune were to be found, in hopes of carrying off one, as the phrase is? Can such a question be answered in the negative? I think that is more than any one will venture to do. The truth is, that the cases in which this is done are blazoned abroad in the world; they are made the topics of public conversation, of public animadversion; while no
I shall be thought, perhaps, by my countrymen to cast the severest reflection that can be cast upon the Irish, when I say that they perpetually reminded me of the French. There is a much stronger resemblance in them to the French national character than to the English; and this resemblance is equally forcible in the lower as in the higher classes of society. Nothing is more comic than to observe the difference between an English mechanic and a French or Irish one. I once, when travelling in France, wanted something done to the lid of a trunk, which I thought in some danger of splitting in two. I did not wish, however, to be long delayed by the job; and recollecting how an English carpenter or trunk-maker would have chiselled and planed a piece of wood, and fitted and fitted it over again before he could have been satisfied to nail it upon the trunk, and how much time all this would take, I was rather afraid of submitting my wounded servant to such a process; I thought I should be impatienté at the longueur, and I tried to persuade myself that the case was not of a very pressing nature. Yet the more I examined, the more imminent the danger appeared; and at length I desired that a carpenter might be sent for, stating what I wanted. Veni, vidi, vici, says Caesar; and so it was with the carpenter: I need not have been so much afraid of delay. He brought with him a hammer, a few nails, and a rough spline: the latter was knocked on in two minutes, and all was accomplished. It did not look quite so neat as if it had come from the hands of an English workman; it held the lid together, however, and all was well: but the rapidity with which the whole was performed was amusing and highly characteristic. The same is very much the case with the Irish: ardent in their pursuits, rapid in their movements, they
A very marked difference is, however, to be observed between the inhabitants of the two extremes of Ireland which I visited, the north-east or county of Antrim, and the south-west, including the counties of Cork and Kerry, strongly supporting the belief that their origin is to be traced to different sources. In the south of Ireland the people are much darker than in the north; and here was the country where the Milesians from Spain, according to all the traditions, both written and oral, were first established. Now the dark complexion, eyes and hair, have been ever, and still are, the distinguishing characteristics of all the Southern nations of Europe; as the fair complexion, blue eyes, and light hair, sometimes deviating into red, were, and are still, of the Northern. The one are bleached by colds and snows, the others darkened by the warmth of the sun. Now, every possible presumptive evidence leads to the belief that the north of Ireland, or perhaps all Ireland and Scotland, were originally peopled from the Northern nations of Europe, the parts which formed the ancient Scandinavia; while the South, if originally peopled by the same, afterwards became the settlement of an Iberian colony, whose descendants remain there to this day. A close and constant intercourse has always subsisted between the inhabitants of the north of Ireland and Scotland, so that they ever have been, as it were, one and the same people. In more than one part the coasts come so near as within eighteen miles of each other: the distance is no more between Port Patrick in Scotland and Donaghadee in Ireland, and between the Mull of Cantire in Scotland and the county of Antrim in Ireland. Indeed there can scarcely be a doubt, from the name, that Port Patrick was originally an establishment of the Irish. It is well known that the Irish are in ancient records called Scots; but at the Milesian conquest, these people coming from the land of Iberia, one of the leaders also bearing the name of Heber, thence the name of Hibernia, afterwards given to the island, was derived; whilst the
To those who are fully convinced that an Irishman cannot speak without a bull dropping from his mouth (by the way rather a more inconvenient thing to be continually passing through the small orifice of the mouth, than the vipers, frogs, and toads of the unfortunate princess in the Contes de ma Mere l'Oie to those who are fully impressed with this belief, and hence infer that the Irish are all puzzlepated, I would earnestly recommend that their memories be sometimes directed towards the long catalogue of Irish names which may be cited as eminently distinguished in Literature and the Arts and Sciences.32 I will not swell my pages with attempting to note all who might be particularized: a moment's recollection will suggest a very long list; but I must advert to a few of the most distinguished. In the name of Swift alone a host is mentioned, in more remote times Archbishop Usher, one of the most celebrated scholars of his day, and that at a period when literature was much less generally diffused than it is at present a succession of Sheridans, Goldsmith, certainly a wit and