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spurning chariot, whose steeds are the winged dragons of puffery, blatant with purchased praise! Hide your diminished heads, ye wizards and witches of antiquity! Mighty was mummery in its day, but mammon is mightier far.

Meanwhile the winnows move always faster, and the chaff-heaps of oblivion are white. A few scattered grains have we picked up to regale you with, O readers, in a dearth of better fare. We might have been solemn and sour throughout, and shown good cause enough, but, after all, to what purpose?—what we bade you to was sound and wholesome, and for what we offered you not, why waste in idle grumb

bookseller saying:-I am going to make a book of these neat little scraps I bought from you. Throw me in some rubbish, gratis, if you would have the thing your own; otherwise I'll put you in some one else's hands, and then see what a figure you'll cut. The poor devil of an author, in terror of being edited, scratches his head, grumbles, demurs, bargains at length for a bonus of a few pounds, or the wiping out of an equivalent score, and so the miracle is wrought. A few random sketches in a magazine, with other useless odds and ends, are thrown into the wonder-working cauldron of the modern male Medea, and out comes, in two or three half-guinea volumes, neatly bound in cloth, and gilt on the back-ling the cheerfulness of our frugal repast? a new work. For truly a new work it is, 'Tis true these latter have been lean harand now for the first time the world hears vests, and we could not avoid some brief of it; even the before unwilling parent can- allusion to the mishaps of the time; but not help being proud of the glorious bant- still men manage to exist, and better days, ling, new christened as it is, if not new richer harvests, are surely, though slowly, born-rechauffé, bodily and spiritually, by coming. And for this dust that chokes and the magician of Paternoster-row, or the blinds us, will not the winds that raised it, Colchian of Burlington-street, lords of the also carry it away? Be ye content and "inky Euxine," dwellers by the English thankful then for what our leniency has Phasis, where is the real golden fleece, and won for you; where we have gleaned and fleecers too in plenty-riders in earth-gathered, ye also may search and glean.

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WE can really stand this no longer. Patience is said to be a virtue; but it may run to seed, and so become a vice. Charity suffereth long and is kind; for charity is not easily provoked;" but when it is provokedwell, no matter, we won't get into a passion. Dignity, come up, and save us from giving our libellers the satisfaction of seeing how much they have vexed us.

Vexed?-'twould vex a saint. Here we are, as a nation and a country, bespattered, and bedaubed, and be-rebelled, and, in all manner of ways bedevilled, by a set of jobbers in literature, antiquities, and the picturesque, until, like the metamorphosed clown in the play, we utterly scoff at our alleged identity. Never, of a verity, since time began, did an over-ruling nation amuse themselves so cheaply and deliberately at their vassals' expense, as our bookmaking masters do. The Spartans made their Helots drunk, that they might jibe and make fun of their degradation. But the race of Bull are of a more sedate turn. They like domestic pastimes better than their types of Lacedæmon did. Drunkenness is a lie to nature, but then it is an evanescent lie. Nature comes back to the debauched and belied slave; and nature will not be laughed at even by slave owners: for nature is good and true; nature is our mother; and there is no falsehood in maternity. The ridiculous, the ribald, and the grotesque, are but forms of the false, in greater or in less degree; and our worshipful good masters being somewhat indolent grown, and besides, as we have said, of a domestic moral turn, they prefer to reach the provender, whereon their vanity and scorn of the residue of mankind is daily fed, through the patent process of a stereotype edition.

Hence the absurd caricatures of America and the Americans, which abound in Great Britain. A scamp who has broken his indentures, or a ne'er-do-weel who has robbed

successive sets of creditors, when all other expedients fail, has this sure resource of writing libels upon some country not lately done, as the trade have it. He must live somewhere; travelling is rather costly to be sure; but then it is incredible how far a little judicious travelling may be made to go, in the sketchy way. A good guide book can, by most Englishmen of ordinary schooling, be turned into a very pleasant-that is saleable-book on any given country, within six months from the date of the order. Latitude, and longitude reckoning from Greenwich, are matters of discount in the bargain; and very fairly so. It would be absurd to pay as much per sheet for Italy as for Nova Zembla. A man to go anywhere out of Europe requires capital; so, six or seven per cent. is allowed for that. Then there is life insurance, which is usually rather high for your interesting (that is, devilish ill-looking) Paternoster Row-ian. Generally speaking, the English lose, and the Scotch gain, by this part of the transaction, as indeed they frequently do by all the other parts. For a true born Sassenach looks hungry, when he is hungry. For the life of him he can't look otherwise: he is out of spirits, and very miserable. But Alexaundher knows better how to worm his way. He knows that to be treated well, you must contrive to look as if you were used to it. As we once heard him declare-" There's naething so depressin to a man's aixpactations, as not to be able to luke as eef ye dedn't care a when-stane aboot them."

We have often compassionated unhappy countries, as we were perennially reminded in the advertising columns of the Athenæum, how repeatedly and mercenarily they were done. Forgive us, reader, for the use of the peddling and mercenary word; had we any other that would at our bidding represent all that mystery of mammon, whereby the arts,

1.-Illustrations of Ireland, published in Monthly Parts; Engravings by the most eminent Artists; the Letter-press by N. P. Willis, Esq., London: VERTUE.

2.-Lewis's Topographical Dictionary.

3.-Ireland,-Her Scenery, People, and Character. By Mr. and Mrs. S. C. Hall. London: FISHER AND CO.

the history, the literature, the institutions, and the picturesque scenery of a country is pelfed, we should not stain our pages by the patois phrase. But what can you call dirt, except-dirt? If you use charitable synonymes or polite paraphrases, people will never find out what you mean. If a warning against being gulled is requisite, and that the detection of imposture is desirable, above all things it is essential that there should be no mistake upon the matter. When a country is taken in hands by a Scotchman-then all that can be said for that country is, that it is-done. Often, as we were saying, have we compassionated ill fated countries turned without compunction into small change, their traditions traduced, their antiquities discredited, their annals misrepresented, their great men held up to view in ridiculous, or mean, or erroneous points of view; and all because a hungry lowlander and a British wholesale broker in Voyages and Travels unite to have it so done.

But, God help us, it has at length come to our turn to be done. Long experience in wholesale ironmongery, wholesale haberdashery, and wholesale of all other kinds, has taught our immigrating neighbours what a softhearted, easygoing, unsuspecting race of men inhabit Ireland. And we are beginning at last-too late to discover the purpose and system of these interlopers. Scotchmen may be very good people in their own country; but we have always been of opinion that no people are improved by becoming exiles for money's sake in another land. If a man will cut loose from father-land, and cast lifeanchor on another shore, and if with all his heart he can say unto his adopted land, be thou my refuge and my dwelling place, here will I spend my days, and within thy confines shall my bones be laid; if he teach his children to love and honour that land, because it is unto them as a native land, then God forbid we should say unto such a one-brokenhearted it may be in his bearin' place, and involuntarily an outcast from the burying ground of his parents;-go whence you came, we will accord you no lot amongst us. Far be such language from us. Scattered as our race has for centuries been, over the wide length and breadth of the exile world, and cowardly and basely as Irishmen have been treated in too many places, the memory of kindliness and shelter, or brotherliness and honour in adversity, comes over our spirit from France and America and Spain; and as five good men deemed enough to turn aside infinite anger,

were

so the heart of Ireland, for the sake of the hospitality and sympathy shown us by those who were afar off, blunts the keen edge of our resentment towards those who are more near. It cannot fairly be laid to our charge, that we have nationally omitted the duties of hospitality. Many as there have been to rise up against us, the reproach of the injured or the slighted stranger has never, we believe, been heard. Many a houseless wanderer,— many an outcast from more sunny climes,many an unhappy exile for his own fault or folly, has come to sit down by our hearth:— which of these have we betrayed or spurned? In good sooth, we have exercised in times past far too little just and selfprotective jealousy. Our public offices and private warehouses have by degrees not only ceased to be exclusively Irish, but have absolutely become exclusive of Irish. The dialect spoken there no longer bears a resemblance to the vernacular. It has grown into a guttural, harsh, snap-penny jargon, ill compounded of Manchester twang and Glasgow snarl, with a bad imitation of both, induced by the despondent conviction amongst the few natives that still lurk about the premises, that their chance of non-expulsion and non-starvation, rests chiefly on the cultivation of whatever powers of mimicry they may happen to possess.

When one Scotchman gets into an establishment, workshop, or office, every Irishman in it may consider himself served with a contingent notice to quit. Within three months, there will be in that concern a vacancy, as sure as the rising of the sun ; and that vacancy will be filled up "by an extreemely staidy auctive young mon, a cousin of my mether's." Our middle classes are eaten out of their own land by English stewards, and agents, and officials; and our working men are whispered and circumvented out of employment, by an indefatigable swarm of Caledonian sappers and miners.

One of the effects of this state of things has been the suppression and discouragement of every thing Irish, in art and literature, in Ireland. Atmosphere, contact, association, all that in other lands contribute to naturalize and domesticate foreign settlers, have no more effect upon our quarter-masters than the south wind upon Lapland icebergs. They are not to be won or thawed. They have learned political horticulture, and when they undergo transplantation, gather their roots into a hard bulb of Saxon loam, or Pictish gravel, as the case may be; and within that narrow circumference they fat

cleanly; tisn't pleasant; tisn't cheap, even at "a shilling."

It is with sincere regret that we are com

ten and flourish, always with the reserved intention of making off in the end, to their ancient soil. Thus it comes to pass that every Irish jour-pelled to add to our list of anti-national nal has to struggle with unfair and unnatural difficulties; with un-Irish and untrue prejudices; with exotic hostility in high places; and above all, with the debauched and diseased notions among ourselves, which a long reign of officious and denationalizing intrusion has generated and prolonged. And thus also it happens that works of a more miscellaneous description, professing to illustrate or describe the country, find toleration among a large and moneyed class of the soidisant Irish public.

Were it not for these pestiferous causes, we might possibly have been spared the excessively disagreeable and dirty task of handling such a production as "Ireland Illustrated;" which by many degrees exceeds in misrepresentation and impertinence, anything we have yet had the misfortune to encounter. The work professes to give engraved views of our most distinguished scenes and public edifices. What merit the original sketches may possess we are unable to say; but the execution of the plates is as indifferent as any un-Irishman need desire. With one or two uninteresting exceptions, the delineations are unfaithful, and the impression conveyed unlike the reality. But all this we might ascribe to blundering or indifference. They are only Irish views; and what Cockney engraver can be expected to take as much trouble about them, as he would about the illustrations of any other country? Were there nothing more deliberate in the affair therefore, than the bad worth given for the purchaser's money, we might leave things to find their own level, as the strange mis-representative of Kilkenny is wont to say.

But our charity gives up the ghost when a professed caricaturist, like Mr. N. P.Willis, is engaged to do the literary descriptions that form two thirds of the monthly libel. The reading world is pretty familiar with that gentleman's knack at burlesque; and there being a laughable side to most things in this anomalous world, we should not have been angry at "Inklings" of travel in Ireland, by the smartest young man that America has yet been answerable for. But we object very much to dull fudge. We have rather an aversion to witless, driftless, and wanton abuse. We dont wish to be praised or flattered as a people, or as a country; but some how or other, we dont like to be vomited upon once a month, even by the smartest and flippantest of yankee inklers. Tisn't

works, the recent production of Mr. and Mrs. Hall. If acquaintance with their former writings had not filled us with hope, it had contributed at least to disarm our apprehensions that from them we were in danger of elaborate, serious, and systematic depreciation. The clever though perpetually half-Irish sketches of Irish life, for which the English public have long been indebted to Mrs. Hall, were not with us exciting topics either of praise or blame. We took it for granted that the worthy authoress really believed they were true likenesses of character and society here; and as we saw no likelihood of any great harm arising from the errors they contained, we chose rather to acquiesce than to quarrel.

But whether we are to attribute any or all of the increased disposition to burlesque and to disparage her native land, which her new work displays, to the circumstance of her husband having united in its composition, or to some other cause to us unknown and by us uncared for, we feel that it were a tame surrender of the rights of popular censorship, if we suffered such a work to pass,-not into circulation, for that we take to be impossible, save among an anti-national clique who love libels upon every thing in the country they are ashamed to own-but into toleration, without recording our marked and almost unqualified reprehension of its tone, so far as it has yet gone.

We take up the first number of "Ireland, its scenery, character, &c." and what do we find? Two pages of the commonest commonplace upon steam and steam boats,the interesting fact that the passage from Holyhead to Dublin usually occupies six hours, and that from Liverpool to Dublin twelve, the assurance that a great many pigs and eggs perform the voyage in safety every day in the year,-an unacknowledged quotation from the stereotyped puffs of the Steam Packet Companies, touching "fittings up and accommodation," the never before articulated hit at the English for knowing more of the continent than they do of Ireland,-and by way of cayenne to this sad and cold crambe repetita, a solemn and unreasoned denunciation of the Repeal of the Union. If Mr. Hall has any ambition to inveigh upon that much vexed topic, surely the whole wide world of newspaperism and pamphletism is open to him, without invading in this absurd and ill bred fashion, the

Is no corner to be left sacred? Are we to be driven to buff and cabal on our loungers and sofas, or across our oak-root work tables, to the peril of ancient china and ormolu? Is this the aim of Mr. Hall, to scatter his damped fireworks under sham labels, into those last refuges of quiet and undisturbed society in Ireland, where men of different creeds and politics meet to forget their wearisome divisions? We arraign Mr. Hall of this peculiar sin, because, we cannot believe our fair countrywoman is answerable therefor.

neutral ground of drawing room literature. | pied by Barry the painter, and not a sentence about one of the most original and truly notable men of his kind that ever lived. Then we have the really valuable subject of those dim dwelling places of the wretchedthe public prisons, mentioned, not to tell us any thing of the morale, which one would imagine such places might easily enough suggest; but apparently for no better purpose than to give an account of a murder and robbery committed by two men who were duly convicted, and one of whom having done his best to escape out of jail, didn't succeed; together with an accurate description of his person, and features: all which, if " communicated" in time to the Weekly Dispatch, or the Age, might have been "most acceptable," but which it utterly baffles our comprehension to account for, as an illustration even of Irish crime. For Mr. Hall must know, or he assuredly ought to know, that neither the offence nor the delinquents he has wasted so many words upon, nor the characteristics however true he has given of them, are in the least degree illustrative of either the sins or the offenders, which are ordinarily to be found in Ireland. To what end then have we instances, which are samples of nothing?

The next attractive topic, to which no fewer than five extensive pages are devoted, is mendicancy. Reader-if you want to be made sick of cheap charity, and if you would seek thoroughly to know the inspired meaning of that precept, which commandeth thee not to suffer thy right hand to know what thy left hand giveth, read and reckon the number of halfpence which the beggars of Cork received, by their own account, from Mr. and Mrs. Hall. In the name of-beggary, what do the public want with these unmeaning chronicles? Still worse, however, are the minute and disgusting records of slang, witless and pointless, which help to fill these dreary pages. Think of such specimens of Irish humour as these: "May the spotted fever split ye in four halves;" and, "Foxy-head, Foxy-head," being called out by one to another, "May you never see the Dyer," was the instant answer. Who are they, we would ask, that these exquisite specimens are intended for? Is this the way to give strangers any new motive to visit our country? Or, what is far more important, is this the way to raise the self-esteem and honest estimation of our people by themselves?

The next item is a story not devoid of natural interest, but written in a dialect that seems, as a witty friend of ours once said of the language of a cockney-fied Kerryman, to have been born half way across the channel. Cork being selected as the starting point of observation, we have a few particulars of the buildings and scenery of that city and neighbourhood. What a delicious volume of gossip George Petrie or Father Prout would put together-without effort or blemish or one unwelcome thought being suffered to intrude of the rich materials that lie along the pleasant banks of that sweet river Lee. Somebody surely gave our authors hints of topics upon setting out, for many of the best are noted, aimed at, and-missed. Thus we have a little sketch of the house once occu

The

We had hoped to find some improvement in the succeeding numbers, but unhappily we have been disappointed. Every body may be supposed to know his own business best; Mr. Hall knows his market better, doubtless, than we do; and if "Misrepresentations of Ireland, her People and Scenery" are still in demand in London, the principles of free trade declare that it is right and proper there should be an adequate supply. What Londoners write or read of us is matter of comparatively small concern in our regard. old Spanish proverb says, "the injurer cannot afford to be just;" and the belief is not new in Ireland, that the instinct of injury, which is stronger than reason or interest far, compels and will continue to compel the feeling of England, to think as ill of us as it can find excuse for. Of such it were unworthy of us to complain. History will try both us and you; you may buy what ephemeral slanders you like; but the judgment of time, and the verdict of surrounding nations, rich as you are, you cannot buy; and to that tribunal we appeal.

One regret only we do feel and own,that a witness against her country should have been found among our countrywomen. We heartily acquit Mrs. Hall of any ill intention. In any portions of the work that we can discriminate as hers, there is but lit

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