Chapter VII: Introduction (7)

Newbridge, as described in the first chapter of this book, bore some testimony to the troubles of the last century when it was erected. There was a long corridor which had once been all hung with weapons, and there was a certain board in the floor of an inner closet which could be taken up when desirable, and beneath which appeared a large receptacle wherein the aforesaid weapons were stored in times of danger. Stories of ’98 were familiar to us from infancy. There was the story of Le Hunts of Wexford, when the daughter of the family dreamed three times that the guns in her father’s hall were all broken and, on inducing Colonel Le Hunt to examine them, the dream was found to be true and his own butler the traitor. Horrible stories were there, also, of burnings and cardings (_i.e._, tearing the back with the iron comb used in carding wool); and nursery threats of rebels coming up back stairs on recalcitrant “puckhawns” (naughty children—children of Puck), insomuch that to “play at rebellion” had been our natural resource as children. Born and bred in this atmosphere, it seemed like a bad dream come true that there were actual pikes imported into well-known cabins, and that there were in the world men stupid and wicked enough to wish to apply them to those who laboured constantly for their benefit. Yet the papers teemed with stories of murders of good and just landlords; yet threats each day more loud, came with every post of what Smith O’Brien and his friends would do if they but succeeded in raising the peasantry, alas! all too ready to be raised. Looking over the miserable fiasco of that “cabbage garden” rebellion now, it seems all too ridiculous to have ever excited the least alarm. But at that time, while none could doubt the final triumph of England, it was very possible to doubt whether aid could be given by the English Government before every species of violence might be committed by the besotted peasantry at our gates.

I have been told on good authority that Smith O’Brien made his escape from the police in the “habit” of an Anglican Sisterhood, of which his sister, Hon. Mrs. Monsell, was Superior.

A little incident which occurred at the moment rather confirmed the idea that Balisk was transformed for the nonce into a little Hecla; not under snow, but mud. I was visiting the fever patients, and was detained late of a summer’s evening in the village. So many were ill, there seemed no end of sick to be supplied with food, wine and other things needed. In particular, three together were ill in a house already mentioned, where there were several grown-up sons, and the people were somewhat better off than usual, though by no means sufficiently so to be able to procure meat or similar luxuries. Here I lingered, questioning and prescribing, till at about nine o’clock my visit ended; and I left money to procure some of the things required. Next morning my father addressed me:—

“So you were at Balisk last night?”

“Yes, I was kept there.”

“You stayed in Tyrell’s house till nine o’clock?”

“Yes; how do you know?”

“You gave six and sixpence to the mother to get provisions?”

“Yes; how do you know?”

“Well, very simply. The police were watching the door and saw you through it. As soon as you were gone the Club assembled there. They were waiting for your departure; and the money you gave was subscribed to buy pikes; of course to _pike me_!”

A week later, the bubble burst in the memorable Cabbage garden. The rebel chiefs were leniently dealt with by the Government, and their would-be rebel followers fell back into all the old ways as if nothing had happened. What became of the pikes no one knew. Possibly they exist in Balisk still, waiting for a Home Rule Government to be brought forth. At the end of a few months the poor schoolmaster, claimant of Newbridge, died; and as I stood by his bedside and gave him the little succour possible, the poor fellow lifted his eyes full of meaning, and said, “To think _you_ should come to help me now!” It was the last reference made to the once-dreaded rebellion.

After endless efforts my brother carried his point and drained the whole village—beaver bonnets notwithstanding. Whitewash became popular. “Middens” (as the Scotch call them, the Irish have a simpler phrase) were placed more frequently behind houses than in front of them. Costume underwent some vicissitudes, among which the introduction of shoes and stockings, among even the juvenile population, was the most remarkable feature; a great change truly, since I can remember an old woman, to whom my youngest brother had given a pair, complaining that she had caught cold in consequence of wearing, for the first time in her life, those superfluous garments.

Many were drawn into the stream of the Exodus, and have left the country. How helpless they are in their migrations, poor souls! was proved by one sad story. A steady, good young woman, whose sister had settled comfortably in New York, resolved to go out to join her, and for the purpose took her passage at an Emigration Agency office in Dublin. Coming to make her farewell respects at Newbridge, the following conversation ensued between her and myself:

“So, Bessie, you are going to America?”

“Yes, ma’am, to join Biddy at New York. She wrote for me to come, and sent the passage-money.”

“That is very good of her. Of course you have taken your passage direct to New York?”

“Well, no, ma’am. The agent said there was no ship going to New York, but one to some place close by, New-something-else.”

“New-something-else, near New York; I can’t think where that could be.”

“Yes, ma’am, New—New—I disremember what it was, but he told me I could get from it to New York immadiently.”

“Oh, Bessie, it wasn’t New Orleans?”

“Yes, ma’am, that was it! New Orleans—New Orleans, close to New York, he said.”

“And you have paid your passage-money?”

“Yes, ma’am, I must go there anyhow, now.”

“Oh, Bessie, Bessie, why would you never come to school and learn geography? You are going to a terrible place, far away from your sister. That wicked agent has cheated you horribly.”

The poor girl went to New Orleans, and there died of fever. The birds of passage and fish which pass from sea to sea seem more capable of knowing what they are about than the greater number of the emigrants driven by scarcely less blind an instinct. Out of the three millions who are said to have gone since the famine from Ireland to America, how many must there have been who had no more knowledge than poor Bessie Mahon of the land to which they went!

Before I conclude these reminiscences of Irish peasant life in the Forties, I must mention an important feature of it—the Priests. Most of those whom I saw in our villages were disagreeable-looking men with the coarse mouth and jaw of the Irish peasant undisguised by the beards and whiskers worn by their lay brethren; and often the purple and bloated appearance of their cheeks suggested too abundant diet of bacon and whisky-punch. They worried me dreadfully by clearing out all the Catholic children from my school every now and then on the pretence of withdrawing them from heretical instruction, though nothing was further from the thoughts or wishes of any of us than proselytizing; nor was a single charge ever formulated against our teachers of saying a word to the children against their religion. What the priests really wanted was to obstruct education itself and too close and friendly intercourse with Protestants. For several winters I used to walk down to the school on certain evenings in the week and give the older lads and lassies lessons in Geography (with two huge maps of the world which I made myself, 11 ft. by 9 ft.!) and the first steps in Astronomy and history. Several times, when the class had been well got together and began to be interested, the priest announced that _he_ would give them lessons on the same night, and they were to come to him instead of to me. Of course I told them to do so, and that I was very glad he would take the trouble. A fortnight or so later however I always learnt that the priest’s lessons had dropped and all was to be recommenced.

The poor woman I mentioned above as so devoted to her mother went to service with one of the priests in the neighbourhood in the hope that she would receive religious consolation from him. Meeting her some time after I expressed my hope that she had found it. “Ah, no Ma’am!” she answered sorrowfully, “He never spakes to me unless about the bacon or the like of that. _Priests does be dark!_” I thought the phrase wonderfully significant.

My father, though a Protestant of the Protestants as the reader has learned, thought it right to send regularly every year a cheque to the priest of Donabate as an aid to his slender resources; and there never was _openly_, anything but civility between the successive _curés_ and ourselves. We bowed most respectfully to each other on the roads, but I never interchanged a word with any of them save once when I was busy attending a poor woman in Balisk in the cramps of cholera; the disease being at the time raging through the country. With the help of the good souls who in Ireland are always ready for any charitable deed, I was applying mustard poultices, when Father M—— entered the cabin (a revolting looking man he was, whose nose had somehow been frost-bitten), and turned me out. I implored him to defer, or at least hasten his ministrations; and stood outside the door in great impatience for half an hour while I knew the hapless patient was in agony and peril of death, inside. At last the priest came out,—and when I hurried back to the bedside I found he had been gumming some “Prayers to the Holy Virgin” on the wall. Happily we were not too late with our mustard and “sperrits,” and the woman was saved; whether by Father M—— and the Virgin or by me I cannot pretend to say.

I have spoken of our village school and must add that the boys and girls who attended it were exceedingly clever and bright. They caught up ideas, were moved by heroic or pathetic stories and understood jokes to a degree quite unmatched by English children of the same humble class, as I found later when I taught in Miss Carpenter’s Ragged Schools at Bristol. The ingenuity with which, when they came to a difficult word in reading, they substituted another was very diverting. One boy read that St. John had a leathern _griddle_ about his loins; and a young man with a deep manly voice, once startled me by announcing, “He casteth out divils through,—through, through,—_Blazes_, the chief of the Divils!”

In Drumcar school a child, elaborately instructed by dear, good Lady Elizabeth M‘Clintock concerning Pharisees, and then examined:—“What was the sin of the Pharisees?” replied promptly: “_Ating camels_, my lady!”

Alas, I have reason to fear that the erudition of my little scholars, if quickly obtained, was far from durable. Paying a visit to my old home ten years later I asked my crack scholar, promoted to be second gardener at Newbridge, “Well, Andrew, how much do you remember of all my lessons?”

“Ah, Ma’am, then, never a word!”

“O, Andrew, Andrew! And have you forgotten all about the sun, the moon and stars, the day and night, and the Seasons?”

“O, no, Ma’am! I do remember now, and you set them on the schoolroom table, and Mars was a red gooseberry, and I ate him!”

CHAPTER
VII.
_IRELAND IN THE FORTIES._
_THE GENTRY._

I now turn to describe, as my memory may serve, the life of the Irish gentry in the Forties. There never has been much of a middle class, unhappily, in the country, and therefore in speaking of the gentry I shall have in view mostly the landowners and their families. These, with few and always much noted exceptions, were Protestants, of English descent and almost exclusively of Saxon blood; the Anglo-Irish families however long settled in Ireland, naturally intermarrying chiefly with each other. So great was, in my time, the difference in outward looks between the two races, that I have often remarked that I could walk down Sackville Street and point to each passenger “Protestant,” “Catholic,” “Protestant,” “Catholic”; and scarcely be liable to make a mistake.

As I have said, my memory bridges over the gulf between a very typical _ancien régime_ household and the present order of things, and I may be able to mark some changes, not unworthy of registration. But it must be understood that I make no attempt to describe what would be precisely called _Irish society_, for into this, I never really entered at all. I wearied of the little I had seen of it after a few balls and drawing-rooms in Dublin by the time I was eighteen and thenceforward only shared in home entertainments and dinners among neighbours in our own county, with a few visits to relatives at greater distance. I believe the origin of my great boredom in Dublin balls (for I was very fond of dancing) was the extraordinary inanity of the men whom I met. The larger number were officers of Horse Artillery, then under the command of my uncle, and I used to pity the poor youths, thinking that they danced with me as in duty bound, while their really marvellous silliness and dulness made conversation wearisome in the extreme. Many of these same empty-headed young coxcombs afterwards fought like Trojans through the Crimean War and came back,—transformed into heroes! I remember my dentist telling me, much to the same purpose, that half the officers in the garrison had come to him to have their teeth looked after before they went to the Crimea and had behaved abominably in his chair of torture, groaning and moaning and occasionally vituperating him and kicking his shins. But it was another story when some of those very men charged at Balaklava! We are not, I think, yet advanced far enough to dispense altogether with the stern teaching of war, or the virtues which spring out of the dreadful dust of the battlefield.

Railways were only beginning to be opened in 1840, and were much dreaded by landed proprietors through whose lands they ran. When surveyors came to plan the Dublin and Drogheda Railway my father and our neighbour Mrs. Evans, were up in arms and our farmers ready to throttle the trespassers. I suggested we should erect a Notice-board in Donabate with this inscription:—

“Survey the world from China to Peru;
Survey not here,—we’ll shoot you if you do.”

The voyage to England, which most of us undertook at least once or twice a year, was a wretched transit in miserable, ill-smelling vessels. From Dublin to Bristol (our most convenient route) took at least thirty hours. From Holyhead to London was a two days’ journey by coach. On one of these journeys, having to stop at Bristol for two nights, I enjoyed an opportunity (enchanting at sixteen) of being swung in a basket backward and forward across the Avon, where the Suspension Bridge now stands. Preparations for these journeys of ours to England were not quite so serious as those which were necessarily made for our cousins when they went out to India and were obliged for five or six months wholly to dispense with the services of a laundress. Still, our hardships were considerable, and youngsters who were going to school or college were made up like little Micawbers “expecting dirty weather.” Elderly ladies, I remember, usually travelled in mourning and sometimes kept their little corkscrew curls in paper under their bonnet caps for the whole journey; a less distressing proceeding, however, than that of Lady Cahir thirty years earlier, who had her hair dressed, (powdered and on a cushion) by a famous hairdresser in Bath, and came over to exhibit it at St. Patrick’s ball in Dublin Castle, having passed five nights at sea, desperately ill, but heroically refusing to lie down and disarrange the magnificent structure on her aching head.

This lady by the way—of whom it was said that “Lady Cahir _cares_ for no man”—had had a droll adventure in her youth, which my mother, who knew her well and I think was her schoolfellow, recounted to me. Before she married she lived with her mother, a rather extravagant widow, who plunged heavily into debt. One day the long-expected bailiffs came to arrest her and were announced as at the hall door. Quick as lightning Lady Cahir (then, I think, Miss Townsend) made her mother exchange dress and cap with her, to which she added the old lady’s wig and spectacles and then sat in her armchair knitting sedulously, with the blinds drawn down and her back to the window. The mother having vanished, the bailiff was shown up, and, exhibiting his credentials, requested the lady to accompany him to the sponging house. Of course there was a long palaver; but at last the captive consented to obey and merely said, “Well! I will go if you like, but I warn you that you are committing a great mistake in apprehending me.”

“O, O! We all know about that, Ma’am! Please come along! I have a hackney carriage at the door.”

The damsel, well wrapped in cloaks and furbelows and a great bonnet of the period, went quietly to her destination; but when the time came for closing the door on her as a prisoner, she jumped up, threw off wig, spectacles and old woman’s cap, and disclosed the blue eyes, golden hair, and radiant young beauty for which she was long afterwards renowned. Meanwhile, of course, her mother had had abundance of time to clear out of the way of her importunate creditors.

Many details of comforts and habits in those days were very much in arrear of ours, perhaps about equally in Ireland and in England. It is droll to remember, for example, as I do vividly, seeing in my childhood the housemaids striving with infinite pains and great loss of time to obtain a light with steel and flint and a tinder-box, when by some untoward accident all the fires in the house (habitually burning all night) had been extinguished.

The first matchbox I saw was a long upright red one containing a bottle of phosphorus and a few matches which were lighted by insertion in the bottle. After this we had Lucifers which nearly choked us with gas; but in which we gloried as among the greatest discoveries of all time. Seriously I believe few of the vaunted triumphs of science have contributed so much as these easy illuminators of our long dark Northern nights to the comfort and health of mankind.

Again our grandmothers had used exquisite China basins with round long-necked jugs for all their ablutions and we had advanced to the use of large basins and footpans, slipper baths and shower baths, when, as nearly as possible in 1840, the first sponge bath was brought to Ireland. I was paying a visit to my father’s cousin, Lady Elizabeth M‘Clintock, at Drumcar in Co. Louth, when she exhibited with pride to me and her other guests the novel piece of bedroom furniture. When I returned home and described it my mother ordered a supply for our house, and we were wont for a long time to enquire of each other, “how we enjoyed our tubs?” as people are now supposed to ask: “Have you used Pears’ soap?” I believe it was from India these excellent inventions came.

Many other differences might be noted between the habits of those days and of ours. _Diners Russes_ were, of course, not thought of. We dined at six, or six-thirty, at latest; and after the soup and fish, all the first course was placed at once on the table. For a party, for example, of 16 or 18, there would be eight dishes; joints, fowls and entrées. It was a triumph of good cookery, but rarely achieved, to serve them all hot at once. Tea, made with an urn, was a regular meal taken in the drawing-room about nine o’clock; _never_ before dinner. The modern five o’clock tea was altogether unknown in the Forties, and when I ventured sometimes to introduce it in the Fifties, I was so severely reprehended that I used to hold a secret symposium for specially favoured guests in my own room after our return from drives or walks. All old gentlemen pronounced five o’clock tea an atrocious and disgraceful practice.

Another considerable difference in our lives was caused by the scarcity of newspapers and periodicals. I can remember when the _Dublin Evening Mail_,—then a single sheet, appearing three times a week and received at Newbridge on the day after publication,—was our only source of news. I do not think any one of our neighbours took the _Times_ or any English paper. Of magazines we had _Blackwood_ and the _Quarterly_, but illustrated ones were unknown. There was a tolerable circulating library in Dublin, to which I subscribed and from whence I obtained a good many French books; but the literary appetites of the Irish gentry generally were frugal in the extreme!

The real differences, however, between Life in 1840 and Life in 1890 were much deeper than any record of these altered manners, or even any references to the great changes caused by steam and the telegraph, can convey. There were certain principles which in those days were almost universally accepted and which profoundly influenced all our works and ways. The first of them was Parental and Marital Authority. Perhaps my particular circumstances as the daughter of a man of immense force of will, caused me to see the matter especially clearly, but I am sure that in the Thirties and Forties (at all events in Ireland) there was very little declension generally from the old Roman _Patria Potestas_. Fathers believed themselves to possess almost boundless rights over their children in the matter of pursuits, professions, marriages and so on; and the children usually felt that if they resisted any parental command it was on their peril and an act of extreme audacity. My brothers and I habitually spoke of our father, as did the servants and tenants, as “_The Master_;” and never was title more thoroughly deserved.

Another important difference was in the position of women. Of this I shall have more to say hereafter; suffice it to note that it was the universal opinion, that no gentlewoman could possibly earn money without derogating altogether from her rank (unless, indeed, by card-playing as my grandmother did regularly!); and that housekeeping and needlework (of the most inartistic kinds) were her only fitting pursuits. The one natural ambition of her life was supposed to be a “suitable” marriage; the phrase always referring to _settlements_, rather than _sentiments_. Study of any serious sort was disapproved, and “accomplishments” only were cultivated. My father prohibited me when very young from learning Latin from one of my brothers who kindly offered to teach me; but, as I have recounted, he paid largely and generously that I might be taught Music, for which I had no faculties at all. Other Irish girls my contemporaries, were much worse off than I, for my dear mother always did her utmost to help my studies and my liberal allowance permitted me to buy books.

The laws which concerned women at that date were so frightfully unjust that the most kindly disposed men inevitably took their cue from them, and looked on their mothers, wives, and sisters as beings with wholly inferior rights; with _no_ rights, indeed, which should ever stand against theirs. The _deconsideration_ of women (as dear Barbara Bodichon in later years used to say) was at once cause and result of our legal disabilities. Let the happier women of these times reflect on the state of things which existed when a married woman’s inheritance and even her own earnings (if she could make any), were legally robbed from her by her husband, and given, if he pleased, to his mistress! Let them remember that she could make no will, but that her husband might make one which should bequeath the control of her children to a man she abhorred or to a woman of evil life. Let them remember that a husband who had beaten and wronged his wife in every possible way could yet force her by law to live with him and become the mother of his children. Personally and most fortunately (for I know not of what crime I might not have been guilty if so tried!) I never had cause of complaint on the score of injustice or unkindness from any of the men with whom I had to do. But the knowledge, when it came to me, of the legalised oppressions under which other women groaned, lay heavy on my mind. I was not, however, in those early days, interested in politics or large social reforms; and did not covet the political franchise, finding in my manifold duties and studies over-abundant outlets for my energies.

Another difference between the first and latter half of the century is, I think, the far greater simplicity of character of the older generation. No doubt there were, at the time of which I write, many fine and subtle minds at work among the poets, philosophers and statesmen of the day; but ordinary ladies and gentlemen, even clever and well-educated ones, would, I think, if they could revive now, seem to us rather like our boys and girls than our grandparents. Thousands of allusions, ideas, shades of sentiment and reflection which have become common-places to us, were novel and strange to them. What Cowper’s poetry is to Tennyson’s, what the _Vicar of Wakefield_ is to _Middlemarch_, so were their transparent minds to ours. I remember once (for a trivial example of what I mean) walking with my father in his later days in the old garden one exquisite spring day when the apple trees were covered with blossoms and the birds were singing all round us. As he leaned on my arm, having just recovered from an illness which had threatened to be fatal and was in a mood unusually tender, I was tempted to say, “Don’t you feel, Father, that a day like this is almost too beautiful and delicious, that it softens one’s feelings to the verge of pain?” In these times assuredly such a remark would have seemed to most people too obvious to deserve discussion, but it only brought from my father the reply: “God bless my soul, what nonsense you talk, my dear! I never heard the like. Of course a fine day makes everybody cheerful and a rainy day makes us dull and dismal.” Everyone I knew then, was, more or less, similarly simple; and in some of the ablest whom I met in later years of the same generation, (_e.g._, Mrs. Somerville) I found the same single-mindedness, the same absence of all experience of the subtler emotions. Conversation, as a natural consequence, was more downright and matter of fact, and rarely if ever was concerned with critical analyses of impressions. In short, (as I have said) our fathers were in many respects, like children compared to ourselves.

Another and a sad change has taken place in the amount of animal spirits generally shared by young and old in the Thirties and Forties and down, I think, to the Crimean War, which brought a great seriousness into all our lives. It was not only the young who laughed in joyous “fits” in those earlier days; the old laughed then more heartily and more often than I fear many young people do now; that blessed laugh of hearty amusement which causes the eyes to water and the sides to ache—a laugh one hardly ever hears now in any class or at any age. An evidence of the high level of ordinary spirits may be found in the readiness with which such genuine laughter responded to the smallest provocation. It did not need the delightful farce of the Keeley’s acting (though I recall the helpless state into which Mr. Keeley’s pride in his red waistcoat reduced half the house), but even an old, well-worn, good story, or family catch-word with some ludicrous association, was enough to provoke jovial mirth. It was part of a young lady’s and young gentleman’s home training to learn how to indulge in the freest enjoyment of fun without boisterousness or shrieks or discordance of any kind. Young people were for ever devising pranks and jests among themselves, and even their seniors occupied themselves in concocting jokes, many of which we should now think childish; the order of the “April Fool,” being the general type. Comic verse making; forging of love letters; disguising and begging as tramps; sending boxes of bogus presents; making “ghosts” with bolsters and burnt cork eyes to be placed in dark corners of passages; these and a score of such monkey-tricks for which nobody now has patience, were common diversions in every household, and were nearly always taken good-humouredly. My father used to tell of one ridiculous deception in which the chief actress and inventor was that very _grande dame_ Elizabeth Hastings, Countess of Moira, daughter of the Methodist Countess of Huntingdon. Lady Moira, my father and two other young men, by means of advertising and letters, induced some wretched officer to walk up and down a certain part of Sackville Street for an hour with a red geranium in his buttonhole, to show himself off, as he thought, to a young lady with a large fortune who proposed to marry him. The conspirators sat in a window across the street watching their victim and exploding with glee at his peacock behaviour. The sequel was better than the joke. The poor man wrote a letter to his tormentress (whom he had at last detected) so pitiful that her kind heart melted, and she exerted her immense influence effectually on his behalf and provided for him comfortably for life.

Henry, the third Marquis of Waterford, husband of the gifted and beautiful lady whose charming biography Mr. Hare has recently written, was the last example I imagine in Ireland of these redundant spirits. It was told of him, and I remember hearing of it at the time, that a somewhat grave and self-important gentleman had ridden up to Curraghmore on business and left his bay horse at the door. Lord Waterford, seeing the animal, caught up a pot of whitewash in use by some labourer and rapidly _whitewashed the horse_; after which exploit he went indoors to interview his visitor, and began by observing, “That is a handsome grey horse of yours at the door.” “A bay, my Lord.”

“Not at all. It is a grey horse. I saw you on it.”

Eventually both parties adjourned to the front of the house and found the whitewashed horse walking up and down with a groom. “You see it is grey,” said the Marquis triumphantly.

Certainly no one in those days dreamed of asking the question, “Is Life worth Living?” We were all, young and old, quite sure that life was extremely valuable; a boon for which to be grateful to God. I recall the amazement with which I first read of the Buddhist and Brahmin Doctrine that Existence is _per se_ an evil, and that the reward of the highest virtue will be Absorption, or Nirvana. The pessimism which prevails in this _fin de siècle_ was as unknown in the Forties as the potato disease before the great blight.

I much wish that some strong thinker would undertake the useful task of tracking this mental and moral _anæmia_ of the present generation to its true origin, whether that origin be the ebb of religious hope and faith and the reaction from the extreme and too hasty optimism which culminated in 1851, and has fallen rapidly since 1875, or whether, in truth, our bodily conditions, though tending to prolong life and working power to an amazing degree, are yet less conducive to the development of the sanguine and hilarious temperament common in my youth. I have heard as a defence for the revolution which has taken place in medical treatment—from the depletory and antiphlogistic to the nourishing and stimulating, and for the total abandonment of the practice of bleeding—that it is not the doctors who have altered their minds, but the patients, whose bodies have undergone a profound modification. I can quite recall the time when (as all the novels of the period testify), if anybody had a fall or a fit, or almost any other mishap, it was the first business of the doctor to whip out his lancet, bare the sufferer’s arm, and draw a large quantity of blood, when everybody and the aforesaid novels always remarked; “It was providential that there was a doctor at hand” to do it. I have myself seen this operation performed on one of my brothers in our drawing-room about 1836, and I heard of it every day occurring among our neighbours, rich and poor. My father’s aunt, whom I well remember, Jane Power Trench (sister of the first Lord Clancarty), who lived in Marlborough Buildings in Bath, was habitually bled every year just before Easter, having previously spent the entire winter in her bedroom of which the windows were pasted down and the doors doubled. A few days after the phlebotomy the old lady invariably bought a new bonnet and walked in it up to the top of Beacon Hill. She continued the annual ritual unbroken till she died at 79. Surely these people were made of stronger _pâte_ than we? In corroboration of this theory I may record how much more hardy were the gentlemen of the Forties in all their habits than are those of the Nineties. When my father and his friends went on grouse-shooting expeditions to our mountain-lodge, I used to provide for the large parties only abundance of plain food for dinners, and for luncheons merely sandwiches, bread and cheese, with a keg of ale, and a basket of apples. By degrees it became necessary (to please my brother’s guests) to provide the best of fish, fowl and flesh, champagne and peaches. The whole odious system of _battues_, rendering sport unmanly as well as cruel, with all its attendant waste and cost and disgusting butchery, has grown up within my recollection by the extension of luxury, laziness and ostentation.

To turn to another subject. There was very little immorality at that time in Ireland either in high or low life, and what there was received no quarter. But there was, certainly, together with the absence of vice, a lack of some of the virtues which have since developed amongst us. It is not easy to realise that in my lifetime men were hanged for forgery and for sheep-stealing; and that no one agitated for the repeal of such Draconian legislation, but everybody placidly repeated the observation (now-a-days so constantly applied to the scientific torture of animals), that it was “NECESSARY.” Cruelties, wrongs and oppressions of all kinds were rife, and there were (in Ireland at all events) none to raise an outcry such as would echo now from one end of England to the other.

The Protestant pulpit was occupied by two distinct classes of men. There were the younger sons of the gentry and nobles, who took the large livings and were booked for bishoprics; and these were educated at Oxford and Cambridge, were more or less cultivated men and associated of course on equal terms with the best in the land. Not seldom they were men of noble lives, and extreme piety; such for example, as the last Protestant Archbishop of Tuam, and a certain Archdeacon Trench, whom I remember regarding with awe and curiosity since I had heard that he had once got up into his own pulpit, and (like Maxwell Gray’s _Dean Maitland_) made a public confession of all his life’s misdoings. The second class of Irish clergymen in those days were men of a rather lower social grade, educated in Trinity College, often, no doubt, of excellent character and devotion but generally extremely narrow in their views, conducting all controversies by citations of isolated Bible-texts and preaching to their sparse country congregations with Dublin brogues which, not seldom, reduced the sublimity of their subjects to bathos. There was one, for example, who said, as the peroration of his sermon on the Fear of Death:—

“Me brethren the doying Christian lepps into the arrums of Death and makes his hollow jaws ring with eternal hallelujahs!”

I have myself heard another read the concluding chapters of the gospels, substituting with extraordinary effect the words “two Meal-factors,” for the “two malefactors,” who were crucified. There was a chapter in the Acts which we dreaded to hear, so difficult was it to help laughing when we were told of “_Perthians_ and _Mades_, and the dwellers in _Mesopotamia_ and the parts of Libya about _Cyraine_, streengers of _Roum_, Jews and Proselytes, _Crates_ and Arabians.” It was also hard to listen gravely to a vivid description of Jonah’s catastrophe, as I have heard it, thus: “The weves bate against the ship, and the ship bate against the weves;” (and, at last) “The Wheel swallowed Jonah!”

They had a difficult place to hold, these humbler Irish clergymen, properly associating with no class of their parishioners; but to their credit be it said, they were nearly all men of blameless lives, who did their duty as they understood it, fairly well. The disestablishment of the Irish Church which I had regarded beforehand with much prejudice, did (I have since been inclined to think), very little mischief, and certainly awakened in the minds of the Irish squirearchy who had to settle their creed afresh, an interest in theology which was never exhibited in my earlier days. I was absolutely astounded on paying a visit to my old home a few years after disestablishment and while the Convention (commonly called the _Contention_!) was going on, to hear sundry recondite mysteries discussed at my brother’s table and to find some of my old dancing partners actually greedily listening to what I could tell them of the then recent discovery of Mr. Edmund Ffoulkes,—that the doctrine of the Double Procession of the Holy Ghost had been invented by King Reccared.

As regards any moral obligation or duty owed by men and women to the lower animals, such ideas were as yet scarcely beginning to be recognised. It was in 1822, the year in which I was born, that brave old Richard Martin carried in Parliament the first Act ever passed by any legislature in the world on behalf of the brutes. Tom Moore had laughed at this early _Zoophilist_.

“Place me midst O’Rourkes, O’Tooles,
The ragged royal blood of Tara!
Place me where Dick Martin rules
The houseless wilds of Connemara

But in the history of human civilisation, “Martin’s Act” will hereafter assuredly hold a distinct place of honour when many a more pompous political piece of legislation is buried in oblivion. For a long time the new law, and the Society for Prevention of Cruelty which arose to work it, were objects of obloquy and jest even from such a man as Sydney Smith, who did his best in the _Edinburgh Review_ to sneer them down. But by degrees they formed, as Mr. Lecky says every system of legislation _must_ do, a system of _moral education_. A sense of the Rights of Animals has slowly been awakened, and is becoming, by not imperceptible degrees, a new principle of ethics. In my youth there were plenty of good people who were fond of dogs, cats and horses; but nothing in their behaviour, or in that of any one I knew at that time, testified to the existence of any latent idea that it was _morally wrong_ to maltreat animals to any extent. Pious sportsmen were wont to scourge their dogs with frightful dog-whips, for any disobedience or mistake, with a savage violence which I shudder to remember; and which I do not think the most brutal men would now exhibit openly. Miss Edgeworth’s then recent novel of _Ennui_ had described her hero as riding five horses to death to give himself a sensation, without (as it would appear) forfeiting in the author’s opinion his claims to the sympathies of the reader. I can myself recall only laughing, not crying as I should be more inclined to do now, at the spectacle of miserable half-starved horses made to gallop in Irish cars to win a bribe for the driver, who flogged them over ruts and stones, shouting (as I have heard them) “Never fare! I’ll _batther_ him out of that!” The picture of a “_Rosinante_,” from Cervantes’ time till a dozen or two years ago, instead of being one of the most pathetic objects in the world,—the living symbol of human cruelty,—was always considered a particularly laughable caricature. Only tender-hearted Bewick in his woodcut, _Waiting for Death_, tried to move the hearts of his generation to compassion for the starved and worn-out servant of ungrateful man.

The Irish peasantry do not habitually maltreat animals, but the frightful mutilations and tortures which of late years they have practised on cattle belonging to their obnoxious neighbours, is one of the worst proofs of the existence in the Celtic character of that undercurrent of ferocity of which I have spoken elsewhere.

Among Irish ladies and gentlemen in the Forties there was a great deal of interest of course in our domestic pets, and I remember a beautiful and beloved young bride coming to pay us a visit, and asking in a tone of profound conviction: “What _would_ life be without dogs?” Still there was nothing then existing, I think, in the world like the sentiment which inspired Mathew Arnold’s _Geist_ or even his “_Kaiser Dead_.” The gulf between the canine race and ours was thought to be measureless. Darwin had not yet written the Descent of Man or made us imagine that “God had made of one blood” at least all the mammals “upon earth.” No one dreamed of trying to realise what must be the consciousness of suffering animals; nor did anyone, I think, live under the slightest sense of responsibility for their well-being. Even my dear old friend, Harriet St. Leger, though she was renowned through the county for her attachment to her great black Retrievers, said to me one day, many years after I had left Ireland, “I don’t understand your feelings about animals at all. To me a _dog is a dog_. To you it seems to be something else!”

Another difference was, that there was very little popularity-hunting in the Forties. The “working man” was seen, but not yet heard of; and, so far as I remember, we thought as little of the public opinion of our villages respecting us as we did of the public opinion of the stables. The wretched religious bigotry which, as we knew, made the Catholics look on us as infallibly condemned of God in this world and the next, was an insuperable barrier to sympathy from them, and we never expected them to understand either our acts or motives. But if we cared little or nothing what they thought of us, I must in justice say that we did care a great deal for _their_ comfort, and were genuinely unhappy in their afflictions and active to relieve their miseries. When the famine came there was scarcely one Irish lady or gentleman, I think, who did not spend time, money and labour like water to supply food to the needy. I remember the horror with which my father listened to a visitor, who was not an Irishwoman but a purse-proud _nouveau riche_ married to a very silly baronet in our neighbourhood, who told him that her husband’s Mayo property had just cost them £70. “That will go some way in supplying Indian meal to your tenants,” said my father, supposing that to such purpose it must be devoted. “O dear, no! We are not sending it for any such use,” said Lady —. “We are spending it _on evictions_!” “Good God!” shouted my father; “how shocking! At such a time as this!”

It has been people like these who have ever since done the hard things of which so much capital has been made by those whose interest it has been to stir up strife in the “distressful country.”

I happen to be able to recall precisely the day, almost the hour, when the blight fell on the potatoes and caused the great calamity. A party of us were driving to a seven o’clock dinner at the house of our neighbour, Mrs. Evans, of Portrane. As we passed a remarkably fine field of potatoes in blossom, the scent came through the open windows of the carriage and we remarked to each other how splendid was the crop. Three or four hours later, as we returned home in the dark, a dreadful smell came from the same field, and we exclaimed, “Something has happened to those potatoes; they do not smell at all as they did when we passed them on our way out.” Next morning there was a wail from one end of Ireland to the other. Every field was black and every root rendered unfit for human food. And there were nearly eight millions of people depending principally upon these potatoes for existence!

The splendid generosity of the English public to us at that time warmed all our Anglo-Irish hearts and cheered us to strain every nerve to feed the people. But the agitators were afraid it would promote too much good feeling between the nations, which would not have suited their game. I myself heard O’Connell in Conciliation Hall (that ill-named place!) endeavour to belittle English liberality. He spoke (a strange figure in the red robes of his Mayoralty and with a little sandy wig on his head) to the following purpose:—

“They have sent you over money in your distress. But do you think they
do it for love of you, or because they feel for you, and are sorry for
your trouble? Devil a bit! _They are afraid of you!_—that is it! _They
are afraid of you._ You are eight millions strong.”

It was as wicked a speech as ever man made, but it was never, that I know of, reported or remarked upon. He spoke continually to similar purpose no doubt, in that Hall, where my cousin—afterwards the wife of John Locke, M.P. for Southwark—and I had gone to hear him out of girlish curiosity.

The part played by Anglo-Irish ladies when the great fever which followed the famine came on us, was the same. It became perfectly well known that if any of the upper classes caught the fever, they almost uniformly died. The working people could generally be cured by a total change of diet and abundant meat and wine, but to the others no difference could be made in that way, and numbers of ladies and gentlemen lost their lives by attending their poor in the disease. It was very infectious, or at least it was easily caught in each locality by those who went into the cabins.

There were few people whom I met in Ireland in those early days whose names would excite any interest in the reader’s mind. One was poor Elliot Warburton, the author of the _Crescent and the Cross_, who came many times to Newbridge as an acquaintance of my brother. He was very refined and, as we considered, rather effeminate; but how grand, even sublime, was he in his death! On the burning _Amazon_ in mid-Atlantic he refused to take a place in the crowded boats, and was last seen standing alone beside the faithful Captain at the helm as the doomed vessel was wrapped in flames. I have never forgotten his pale, intellectual face and somewhat puny frame, and pictured him thus—a true hero.

His brother, who was commonly known as _Hochelaga_, from the name of his book on Canada, was a hale and genial young fellow, generally popular. One rainy day he was prompted by a silly young lady-guest of ours to sing a series of comic songs in our drawing-room, the point of the jokes turning on the advances of women to men. My dear mother, then old and feeble, after listening quietly for a time, slowly rose from her sofa, walked painfully across the room, and leaning over the piano said in her gentle way a few strong words of remonstrance. She could not bear, she said, that men should ridicule women. Respect and chivalrous feeling for them, even when they were foolish and ill-advised, were the part, she always thought, of a generous man. She would beg Mr. Warburton to choose some other songs for his fine voice. All this was done so gently and with her sweet, kind smile, that no one could take offence. Mr. Warburton was far from doing so. He was, I could see, touched with tender reverence for his aged monitress, and rising hastily from the piano, made the frankest apologies, which of course were instantly accepted. I have described this trivial incident because I think it illustrates the kind of influence which was exercised by women of the old school of “_decorum_.”

Another man who sometimes came to our house, was Dr. Longley, then Bishop of Ripon, afterwards Archbishop of Canterbury. He was a very charming person, without the slightest episcopal _morgue_ or affectation, and with the kindest brown eyes in the world. His wife was niece, and, I believe, eventually heiress, of our neighbour Mrs. Evans; and he and his family spent some summers at Portrane in the Fifties when we had many pleasant parties and picnics. I shall not forget how the Bishop laughed when the young Longleys and I and a few guests of my own, inaugurated some charades, and our party, all in disguise, were announced on our arrival at Portrane, as “Lady Worldly,” “Miss Angelina Worldly,” “Sir Bumpkin Blunderhead,” and the “Cardinal Lord Archbishop of Rheims.”

Our word was “Novice.” I, as Lady Worldly, in my great-grandmother’s petticoat and powdered _toupee_, gave my daughter Angelina a lecture on the desirability of marrying “Sir Bumpkin Blunderhead” who was rich, and of dismissing Captain Algernon who was poor. Sir Bumpkin then made his proposals, to which Angelina emphatically answered “No.” In the second scene I met Sir Bumpkin at the gaming table, and fleeced him utterly; the end of his “VICE” being suicide on the adjacent sofa. Angelina then, in horror took the veil, and became a “_No-vice_,” duly admitted to her Nunnery by the Cardinal Lord Archbishop of Rheims (my youngest brother in a superb scarlet dressing gown) who pronounced a Sermon on the pleasures of fasting and going barefoot. Angelina retired to her cell, but was soon disturbed by a voice outside the window (Henry Longley’s); and exclaiming “Algernon, beloved Algernon!” a speedy elopement over the back of the sofa concluded the fate of the _Novice_ and the charade.

There was another charade in which we held a debate in Parliament on a Motion to “abolish the sun and moon,” which amused the bishop to the last degree, especially as we made fun of Joseph Hume’s retrenchments; he being a particular friend and frequent guest of our hostess. The abolition of the Sun would, we feared, affect the tax on parasols.

At Ripon, as Dr. Longley told me, the Palace prepared for him (the first bishop of the new see) had, as ornaments of the front of the house, two full-sized stone (or plaster) Angels. One day a visitor asked him: “Pray, my Lord, is it supposed by Divines that Angels wear the order of the Garter?” On inspection it proved that the Ripon Angels had formerly done service as statues of the Queen and Prince Albert, but that wings had been added to fit them for the episcopal residence. Sufficient care, however, had not been taken to efface the insignia of the Most Illustrious Order; and “_Honi soit qui mal y pense_” might be dimly deciphered on the leg of the male celestial visitant.