NEW EDITIONS —Arthur Young's Tour in Ireland (1776 - 1779) Edited, with Introduction
and Notes, by Arthur Wollaston Hutton. 2 vols. (Bell and Son.)—Young's Tour has been re- printed for the first time without any omissions, and the editor has added various papers which the author wrote after the publi- cation of the work on the same subject. It is scarcely necessary to say that, though there is something in these two volumes which never was of much interest, and now is of none, there is, on
the other hand, abundance of valuable matter. The conditions of life in Ireland have not materially changed since Young wrote about it ; agriculture is now, as it was then, its main industry.
This, of course, gives to the book a modern reference, and we con- tinually seem to read between the lines what bears directly on questions still hotly debated, Some of the prices quoted by Young are almost incredibly low. The price of beef varied from 3id. in Dublin to 2d. in Forth ; the highest figure for butter is 8d., the lowest 2d. ( ! ) The provincial price of chickens varied between is. in Dublin and lid. in County Antrim ; while Turkeys wore sold at Prospect for 6d., a goose actually fetch- ing twice as much. In England, however, at the same time, the average price of butter was Cid., and of meat (taking beef, mutton, veal, and pork together), 30, Here is an observation which has a very close bearing on the "Three acres and a cow" panacea. "Ill-fed cattle, we know from the experience of English commons, are far from being so advantageous to a man as they at first seem ; accidents happen without a resource to supply the loss, and leave the man much worse off than him who, being paid in money, is independent of such wants."—The Scenery of the Heavens, by J. E. Gore (Sutton and Co.), appears in a second edition, and A Dead Man's Diary, by Coulson Kernahan (Ward, Lock, and Bowden), in a fourth.—We have also received a new edition of Res Judicatee, by Augustine Birrell (Elliot Stock).
Previous page
