A LITTLE TOUR IN IRELAND. * AFTER a more than usually
severe disappointment in love—for he is a frequent sufferer by such accidents—our too susceptible Ox- onian lied to Ireland "to banish his regret." So at least he would have us believe, but we incline to think that to kiss the Blarney stone was his real object, as indeed the performance of that devotional ceremony was the crowning act of his pilgrimage. It is true that he took a most circuitous route to arrive at his des- tination; but that is too shallow and stale an artifice to impose on any experienced observer. Everybody has seen some enamoured greenhorn performing similar gyrations, with thepal- pable design of finding himself quite accidentally by the .4'ife of the only person in the room of whose presence he had seemed elaborately unconscious. It is but justice to this wily Oxonian to admit that he is a very agreeable companion on the devious road by which he takes us from Dublin to Cork, via Connemara. He has fine animal spirits and a keen perception of the ludicrous, as well as a considerable fund. of good. sense and cultivated taste. He knows how to be serious or merry in season; in short, he writes like a gentleman, and his book is worthy of the admirable illustrations with which Mr. John Leech has adorned it. The very least of them' a tail-piece representing a sleeping pig, is worth the prim of the volume. How we wish we could transfer some of them to our columns,—that beautiful one, for instance, in which a young lady supplies the place of the absent statue on a pyramidal stone staircase on top of Killing Hill, her drapery fluttering in the breeze, and her slender figure relieved against the sea and the sky ; or the pictorial embodiment of the following incident :— "Becoming acelimatised to the Outside Car, we began to enter into con- versation with the drivers, and found them, lice all Irishmen, quaint and witty, though their humour, perhaps, does not lie so near the surface as it did before the Famine and Father Matthew. Our charioteer this evening was eloquently invective against a London cab which preceded us, and
which he designated a baste of a tub.' 'Sure, gintlemen,' said he, and I'm for th' ould style intirely—it's illigant. I tell ye whatit is, per onners,' (and he turned to us in impressive confidence and pointed con- temptuously with his whip at the offending vehicle,) over the likes o' that with this little mare ; ' but we earnestly begged he would'nt."
No visitor to Dublin should miss seeing the beautiful Phoenix Park. There is a granite obelisk there in honour of the Duke of Wellington, and, says the Oxonian— "The names of his great battles are graven on the obelisk, Waterloo being, of course, omitted. I say of course,' because there is something so delightfully Irish in this small oversight, that it seems quite natural and appropriate : and I should as little dream of being surprised or vexed by it, as if in an Irish edition of Milton I could find no 'Paradise Lost.' " To see the Irish peasant in his primitive state, one should go to Connaught. Elsewhere he has been rapidly changing, since the termination of the great famine, into something much more com- fortable and respectable-looking than he was before, but not half so picturesque. The Claddagh a fishing village in Galway, remains pretty nearly what it has always been. "The lishman who desires a new sensation should pay a visit to the Claddagh. When we arrived, the men were at sea ; but the women, in their bright red petticoats, descending half-way down the uncovered leg, their cloaks worn like the Spanish mantilla, and of divers colours, their headkerchiefs and hoods, were grouped among the old grey ruins where the fish-market is held, and formed a tableau not to be forgotten. Though their garments are torn, and patched, and discoloured, there is a graceful simple dignity about them which might teach a lesson to Parisian milliners; and to my fancy the most becoming dress in all the world is that of a peasant girl of Connemara. Compare it, reader, with our present mode and judge. Look at the two, sculptor, and say which you will carve ? 'Say, when Santa Philomena' ia graved in marble, shall it be with flounces and hoops ? No, whatever may be the wrongs of Ireland, no lover of the picturesque and beautiful would wish to see her re-dressed (so far as the ladies are con- cerned—the gentlemen might be improved) ; no one would desire to see her rAftnt girls in the tawdry bonnets and brass-eyed boots, which stultify the faces and cripple the feet of the daughters of our English labourers. "As to the origin of these Claddagh people, I am not not sufficiently up in ethnology, to state with analytical exactness the details of their descent; but I should imagine theta to be one-third Irish, one-third Arabian, and the other Zinger°, or Spanish gipsy. I thought that I recognized in one old lady an Ojibbeway chief, who frightened me a good deal in my childhood, but she had lost the expression of ferocity, and I was, perhaps, mistaken.
"The men are all fishermen (very clumsy ones, according to Miss Mar- tineau, who talks about harpoons as if they were crochet-needles, in her in- teresting Letters from Ireland '); but they give up their cargoes to the women on landing, only stipulating that from the proceeds they may be sup- plied with a good store of drink and tobacco, and so get duecompensation on the shore for their unvarying sobriety at sea.
"They live (some IRO souls in all) in a village of miserable cabins, the walls of mud and stone, and for the most part windowless, the floors damp and dirty, and the roofs a mans of rotten straw and weeds. The poultry mania—(and if it is not mania to give ten guineas for a bantam, in what does insanity consist ? )—must be here at its height, for the cocks and hens roost in the parlour. But the swells' of the Claddagh are its pigs. They really have not only a landed expression,' as though the place be- longed to them, but a supercilious gait and mien ; and with an autocratic air, as though repeating to themselves the spirited verses of Mr. A. Selkirk, they go in and out whenever and wherever they please. I saw one of them bold as the beast who upset Giotto, knock over a little child with his snout ; and I have a sad impression that the juvenine was whipped for interfering
with the royal progress.• • •
"It was washing-day at one of the cabins, and a great variety of wearing apparel was hung out to dry. We could not discover a single article which
• A Little Tour in Ireland. Being a Visit to Dublin, Galway, Connemara, Athlone, Limerick, Klllarney, Gkngarriff, Cork., Ste. By an Oxonian. With Il- lustrations by John Leech. Published by Bradbury and Evans.
at all resembled anything known to us, or which a schoolboy would have accepted for any part of his Faux. Nevertheless, one likes the people of the Claddagh ; they seem to be honest, industrious, and goed-tempe" red and they have, at least, one great virtue—like Lady Godiva they are 'clothed on with chastity.' Sir Francis Head, who had the ball means of getting information from the police, and used them with his exhaustive energy, could not hear that there had ever been an illegitimate child born in the Claddagh. They never intermarry with strangers, and their marriages are generally preceded by an elopement,' (vide the article on Galway,' in the Encyclopmelia Itritannica, which one is surprised to find discoursing cm such festive plessantries,) and followed by a boisterous merry-making.' " From Galway our traveller conducts us by way of Limeriok and Killarney to Cork and the famous castle adjacent, of which
the poet sings—:
" There is a stone there, that whoever kisses, Oh, he never misses to grow eloquent ; 'Tis he may clamber to a lady's chamber, Or become a Member of Parliament. A clever spouter he'll sure to turn out, or An out-and-outer, to be let alone : i Don't hope to bider him, or to bewilder him, Sure he's a pilgrim from the Blarney Stone!'
"Now," says the Oxonian "it is my conviction, primarily suggested by my own sensations and subsequently confirmed by what I noticed in others, as I lingered on that ancient tower, that the majority of those who kiss the Blarney Stone, do wish and try to believe in it. We English have so scanty a stock of superstitions, and some of these so wanting in refinement and dignity, as, for instance, the crossing out' of an isolated magpie, the ejection of spilt salt over the left shoulder, deviations into the gutter to avoid a ladder, the mastication of pancakes upon Shrove Tuesday, and the like, that we are glad of any pretext for gratiing that innate love of the marvellous, which exists, more or less, in us all—aye, and will exist, until John Bright is Premier of England, and our Fairy Tales and Arabian Nights, and all our books of pleasant fiction are solemnly burnt at Oxford, before a Synod of costive Quakers."
There,—he might as well have made this confession at the be- ginning. He did go to Ireland to kiss the talismanic block, and small blame to him. A carman, with whom he soon afterwards conversed, assured him—and Irish carmen are good judges in such eases—that he had "brought away a dale o vartue from th' ould stone atop o' Blarney." May it win for him a double first, and may the girl of his heart confess its soft influence.
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