BOOKS.

A FRENCHWOMAN'S TRAVELS IN IRELAND.* WE should advise the reader who wants to know something of Ireland without entering into the storm of her politics, to learn French at once, if he be not already familiar with that inimitable language, and read Mademoiselle de Bovet's very full account of the people and the scenery as they are, and not as they are misrepresented, whether by scheming M.P.'s in Parliament, or that curious creature the British Home- ruler who reminds us of some of the heroes in Wonderland, or violent Orangemen, or, in short, nearly everybody who has given an account of an Irish tour, from Carlyle to Mr. Morley. It is indeed difficult to believe that one lady, even were she Ida Pfeiffer or Mrs. Bishop (generally known as Miss Bird), • Troia Ibis en Mande. Par N.A. de Boyd. Paris : Hachette et Ole. 1881.

could have picked up all the knowledge amassed in this closely printed volume, and certainly not in three months' travel. It is probable that Mademoiselle de Bovet belonged to a party of agreeable and well-informed French tourists. There are tokens of co-operation when the car-driver's amenities are addressed to " your honour " and not to "my lady ; " and, indeed, how can we believe, though we know she is an excellent English scholar, that an unaided Parisian lady, a " Gyp," let us say, could master the correct spelling of so many Gaelic names, much less translate their meaning and place them so appositely in legendary and mediaeval history. There is a special value in the writer's very acute and sensible judgment of all she saw of the agrarian struggle, though she has the wisdom not to apportion to either

side the rights and wrongs of it. Her notes of what she observed are fresh and just in a degree that probably no English, and certainly no Irish, traveller could attain. She is civilised as befits a woman of the rifle Lumiere, but she is sympathetic in her appreciations of the unique pathos of

Irishmen's virtues, notwithstanding their incurable foibles and almost defiance of material order. Being French, the countrymen of Hoehe, the heirs of Fontenoy glory, still remembered in the poorest Munster cabin, the party were received cordially, without that suspicion of veiled purpose which meets English travellers. No doubt a hint that what was said might find its way into the French papers, put the various persons interviewed on their mettle. The Killarney bard, McSweeny, never addressed to an English-speaking tourist the romantic language he offered to Mademoiselle de Bovet ; but she had a clear and independent judgment of Kerry affairs, and writes her chapter on them with a common-sense and honesty that might be imitated with advantage by English M.P.'s, whether at Glenbeigh or Woodford. Yet the author's touch is light and kindly, and it is delightful to escape politics and all controversies in her record of avoidable sufferings and heart-wringing hunger and misery that—well, might so easily

never exist. It is also delightful that she has no nostrums to cure these evils, and does not pity and patronise in a way offensive to all concerned. She is a good sailor, and her bright impressions begin even before she lands, while the first sparkle of her wit is spent on the ugly obelisk which congratulates George IV., not on his landing, but on his leaving the Irish shore. Dublin is full of surprises to her, especially in the matter of female dress, which is perhaps the object of her

only real vexation during her tour. She is remarkably accurate in her very full description of the antiquities and monuments of the Irish capital ; but the orgies of a public-house in the Liberties, of which there is a good sketch, the varied fortunes of William III.'s statue in College Green, and the loafing power of the men on the steps of Nelson's pillar, have made the most vivid impression of the many she records :—

" A legion of tatterdemalions pass their time there, smoking pipes, talking politics, and folding their arms. They are the husbands, brothers, and sons of the poor creatures who can be hired in any numbers to do the roughest work at sixpence a day. The men pretend they do nothing because they have nothing to do. It is more than 150 years since Swift found the same excuse for the habitual laziness of his countrymen. It may be true, but doubtless during this lapse of time they have acquired a taste for it, for it does not seem in any way to distress them."

Our indefatigable Frenchwoman has a good deal to say of Guinness's porter, which she could only have viewed from afar, as she compares it to " bottled blacking." and the statistics of Dublin's proudest modern success are sandwiched between a sketch of Strongbow's career and an account of the " Cathach " of the O'Donnells, in which we discover a commendable faith and a respect for hypothesis that quite reasonably accompany all her archaeological observations. " Why not ?" she asks. Why not P we repeat, with respect for so impartial and acute an eye-witness. The departure of Lord. Londonderry from Ireland at the close of his Viceroyalty gives her the note of popular sensibility to " squadthrons and platoons, with their music playing chines ; " while a visit to the scene of Lord Frederick Cavendish's murder gave her another hint of the insensibility of the Irish conscience to an "unfortunate occurrence" like that, unless the feelings are enlisted on the side of the Ten Commandments.

Mademoiselle de Bovet travelled all round that mountainous edge of Ireland which, leaving at all points access to invaders,

bred petty chiefs in its fastnesses, and hindered rather than helped the Highland virtues of some great central chain, such as the Swiss, or even the mountain groups of Scotland. Her first enchantment is Glendalough, and we know no description of that Irish Chartreuse as good as hers. She has no scoff for the dim past of Irish learning and sanctity before they

ruined by the cruelties and meannesses of modern faction. With true artistic feeling, she recognises the harmonies of the scenery with its -legends and its sacred relics. Nor is she pedantic or long-winded ; to her the atmosphere is full of beautiful colour, the people, so foreign to us, have the same charm and grace in their inconsequences as have the variable -effects of shower and sunshine. Yet her sympathy enables her to say of them truths that Englishmen, remembering the past, have no right to utter. What can be truer than the following remarks after a vivid description of agrarian miseries in Kerry and a peasant's bankruptcy?-

' These things are certainly heart-breaking. Well, after a week's imprisonment for having stolen some potatoes out of his -own garden, from which he has been dispossessed after years of debt and struggle—his children meantime taken to the workhouse —the agent gives him a trifle which enables him and his family to hang on awhile among the neighbours. He recovers more or less from his distress, and as soon as he has the chance, without even a penny in hand, he takes another farm in the neighbourhood on about the same conditions. As for the tenant who has' grabbed' his former farm, he too not only promises the same rent which crushed his predecessor but he binds himself to pay four years of arrears, besides a considerable sum for good will.' It is sheer insanity ! In a short time he will be reduced to the same poverty and go through the same agonies. He knows it will be so, for he has seen the same process repeated twenty times. His father, brother, he himself have all gone down under the same burden. Never mind ! And so it is that misery—black. lamentable, dismal misery—is perpetuated in Ireland. Is it the intelligence of the tenant which is at fault ? Whoever has closely observed the quick-witted and knowledgable peasants will not admit that. Imprudence then ? That is nearer the truth, but obstinacy is at the bottom. Reckoning on Providence, for he is a good Christian, on the power that exists in inertia, on the promises of those who are fighting in his cause, he persists in dogged expectation of the impossible. Are the National agitators and the English Home-rulers right or wrong in keeping up Paddy's hopes ? I carefully avoid the answer. These are political questions, and I have already ventured too far."

Well may she ask why the courteous and acute people she saw are fed on the poison of hate and illusion, and waste their loyalty on their dishonest leaders. There is pathos in the fact that the author found in innumerable cottages, portraits of Gladstone, Parnell, and even Marshal MacMahon, the last, representative of the elder exiles fresh in Irish memory, as when Sarsfield followed the Stuarts to France with some forty thousand of the flower of Irish manhood. In truth, between the amusing lines of these charming impressions, a great deal is to be learnt. So far from undervaluing Ireland, she exhorts Parisians to go straight to Glengariffe, as in many ways equal to the Mediterranean coast. Could they keep their tempers as she did under the rain which she forgave because of the beauties it added to the landscape? Could they condone the good-humoured incompetence and comic dirt of the innkeepers, and be sufficiently rewarded as she was by the joys of natural beauty ? No one but Miss Lawless -describes the Burren and the cliffs of Clare as this French lady does. We translate a fragment of her aesthetic delight as she drove from Moher to Lisdoonvarna :- " We passed through the solitude of wild moors, undulating in -soft lines that swept towards the beach along which our road ran. Nothing but some poor cabins in dry stone, sheltered from the -sea-drift by pyramids of turf-sods, their roofs held down by nets weighted with large shingles, their thin columns of smoke rising towards the darkening sky. On the roadside, cows, donkeys, which are innumerable, and geese in strings like hanks of onions, looked gravely at us as we passed. Presently the moon rose, bathing in bluish-white the quieted sea, and the islands on the horizon grew dim in a violet haze. All things breathed, not sadness, but an infinitely sweet melancholy, in the caressing soft- ness of an August night, and the sense of a great peace in which the soul was soothed to sleep. Poor land, poor people no doubt, on these forgotten shores of Clare ! but moral and material trouble is never at its bitterest for those who live in close inter- course with Nature. Her unmoved calm engenders resignation."

Not all the journalistic trumpeters who narrated Mr. Balfour's recent visit to Achill, described it as Mademoiselle -de Bovet, who, we imagine, must be a plein air artist in oil, not water-colour. Of the Curraun she writes :—

" When there is full sunshine in this place, the effect is mar- vellous. Imagine a vast bog girt by mountains, and of which the red tone heightened to purple by the carpet of blossoming heath, gives the impression of a country calcined by heat. The comparison sounds absurd, but the violence of colour recalls the lAahis of Estramadura. Not a tree, or a shrub, or even a crow. It is like a desert ruined by fire from heaven. Nevertheless, un- expected folds in the level, unseen at a distance, deeply furrow - the moor and betray the course of a foaming torrent, the water of which, yellowed in its course through the turf, looks like heady ale. So entirely do these great folds of the surface mask the lie of the land, that it is bewildering to come ongreat gashes, straight or curved, which deeply trench the mountain bases and spread into lagunes that might be inland lakes at high-tide, but which show at the ebb the bands of yellow sea-weed at their edges. This symphony ,of purple-brown, these fragments of sleeping sea give the riale note of their transparent aqua-marine, to which replies the milky blue of the streams streaking the distant flanks of the mountains. Again, their strong violet melts to mauve under the play, of light so as to reduce the cleverest Dutch artist to despair. Add to all this, the extreme delicacy of a blue sky slightly greening towards the horizon, dappled with creamy or grey clouds through which the sun gleams and gilds them. Wrap the whole in a soft atmosphere which melts all outlines, and add. to it the sweet, sad charm of silence and solitude, and as the best of descriptions, which this is not, has never given an accurate impression of a landscape, you will at once start for the too little known country where such strangely beautiful things can be seen within thirty-six hours of the boulevard."

This is but one of a hundred equally well-noted pictures, and with a sense of pleasant surprise we find ourselves, after reading this book, proud of our West Britain, and grateful to this keen yet kindly friend who revives our old hopes for the future of so attractive a country, so pleasant a people were they once out of their long low-fever and delirium. Why need we stop to say that Mademoiselle de Bovet adds fresh ferocity to the word " sassenach " by spelling it " sacsannach," or that the Brehon. Tanist is not converted into a " Thane " by the mere insertion of an " h," or that the St. Lawrence family does not pretend descent from Tristram of Lyonesse These are but motes in a bright and cheering ray lighting the dim distance of the island which is so near and yet so estranged from us.