important thing must be extremely difficult, to require the application of an expedient so costly. We will, however, give the author's words. • His claret, which was excellent, he called Orthodoxy, as he said it keeps the clergy sober.' No tourist could walk half an hour in the streets without having his attention arrested by a striking novelty of cast in the temper, the rhetoric, and the profaneness, of the rough part of the population. Our author gives a sample. Many of the low people in Dublin are abandoned in the extreme. I heard some women in the streets swearing by the living Jesus, by the holy Paul, by the blood of the Holy Ghost, and the like. One of them, after cursing another, and praying that the devil might hunt her soul, all of a sudden, added, "Arrah, come honey, though you were at Kilkenny and I at Dublin, by the holy cross I would speak well of you." The other replied, Get you gone; I was a lady when your skin appeared through your clothes.' He dips a little into that sort of slang which at least borders on profaneness, in telling of two Methodist preachers he heard in the precincts of Dublin.-He mentions the keeper of a pothouse who was additionally successful from the attractive nature of the inscription on his sign, "Coffins made and mended." -He compassionates the horses in Dublin; and they surely will appear worthy of something much more than mere compassion (though that beneficent thing called law, cannot afford them even this), when we are told that they are to be pitied in comparison with those in England. Mr. Hall made an excursion to the Hill of Hough;' he says it is a peninsula on the north side of the bay of Dublin,' -exactly the position where we remember to have contemplated, in former years, a beautiful prospect from a fine eminence call the Hill of Howth. Whether this be merely an alteration of name, or an actual substitution of a new hill on that site, this early notice of the change is a benefit conferred on the makers of maps. Who is to have the chief benefit we cannot tell of a whole square which Mr. Hall has built at his own expense, and made a compliment of to the city,-a square, he avers, not inferior in splendour to the finest in London, and named by him Marien-square. We must not undertake to accompany the author on his expedition, but limit ourselves to a very few brief notices. A large proportion of the contents of these slight and dear volumes has no peculiar relation to Ireland. One part of this superfluous matter consists of prosing generalizings and moralizings, worked in that comfortable style of common-place of which the edification may be received without effort amidst the noise of brats and the fumes of tobacco. The flattest truisms are set forth with all possible gravity; and, low as our esti-· mate may justly be of the measure of wisdom existing in the community, we have nevertheless paused with a feeling really approaching to astonishment that any writer of an expensive book could think it needful, at this time of day, to deliver such indoctrinations as are found, at rather short intervals, throughout this work. Our testimony on this point must be taken or rejected according to our reputed credibility; we decline to support it by citations, because a few extracted samples would not prove the abundance of the material in question, and to make numerous extracts would be no good use of time. Another class of matters foreign to Ireland, but occupying an ample space, is the multitude of particulars smuggled from natural and civil history, with little attention to the genuineness of their quality, and thrown and heaped in the rudest disorder in this literary receiving-house. There are also large contribu-tions from the author's general collection of stories and anecdotes, brought in without scruple or ceremony when any thing the tourist happens to see or hear sets his imagination a-going through all the farrago of its associations. On first entering the streets of Dublin, he cannot make a just remark on the ill construction of the paltry little cars which waste so much of the horse's strength, without going into a history, for ages back, of the carriages, and the stages in the improvement of the carriages, contrived for the conveyance of the grand biped. Let him hear of an eel of unusual size, and you shall have an account of whatever has presumed to live in any resemblance to the shape of an eel, be it fish, or be it serpent, from the stock of eatable striplings found stowed in a water-rat's nest, on the bank of the river Ellen in Cumberland, to the monster which stopped the march of the legions of Regulus on the bank of a river in Africa. If he chances to think of making a remark on any particular form or gesture of respectful civility, he is bound to enumerate, forthwith, all the uncouth or ludicrous modes of salutation reported by honest or lying travellers to be in use in any part of the world. And then if he comes across any droll piece of folly, or a good Irish joke, he has seen and heard so many queer and funny things in the British part of christendom, that he can in an instant accommodate the Hibernian foolery with its match, or with a whole retinue of kindred drolleries if he pleases. He is, besides, a great inventor, and fills many pages with projects; as, for instance, of a machine for digging the ground with a surprizing facility-of a mode of founding the piers of bridges on wool-packs, in imitation of some of the ancients-of making pot-ashes from the thistles and other weeds in churchyards and on the sides of roads of a good vinous liquor to be made from the stalks of vine leaves of boiling fern tops into mock asparagus-of making good tea of furze bloom-of turning nettles and rushes into a species of leather-of manufacturing a kind of hemp from bean-stalks-with many other schemes; schemes, however, which we have no right to treat with indiscriminate ridicule many of them would fail, of course, in the experiment; but, as to several of them, the experiment would be worth making. As critics of the more rigid, religious, and moral school, we must censure the clergyman for not duly respecting the sanctity of religion, in his jocose and careless way, sometimes, of touching on topics so nearly related to it as to require conscientious caution. He must also be told, that his references to Methodism and Methodists betray either ignorauce or something worse. For instance, in one place there is a lengthened grave homily, delivered with an air of superior wisdom, on the absurdity and mischief of neglecting the practical duties of life under pretence of being occupied in devotional employments; and this lecture is so made as to convey the implication that he calls the Methodists are generally guilty of this irreligious absurdity. Now had it been worth his while to inform himself accurately about a subject which he could not be content to let alone, he would have found that the class of people he means by the term Methodists, (knowing little more about them, probably, than that they are so called) not only disclaim zealously this imputed principle of the commutation of practical duties for devotional offices, but do zealously, on a comprehensive estimate, surpass the rest of the community in secular diligence. Without professing any great deference to Mr. Hall's authority, we can easily believe that he is correct in representing the mass of the native Irish population as actuated by a mortal animosity against a domination that has been so contemptuously careless of their welfare, and so sportive with their sufferings. We transcribe some of his observations, made at Boyle. Whatever may be said to the contrary, the great body of the people, in this as well as many other parts of the country, are again disposed to rebel. Expelled from their cabins and little farms, by the grazing and monopolizing system, to seek for shelter in towns where every thing is dear; or driven into bogs and mountains, where, by continual hard labour and economy, they can scarcely pick up a scanty subsistence, they anxiously wish for an alteration in the order of affairs; and if there be any truth in what they not only whisper, but often speak openly, thousands would join any leader who might hold out to them even a probability of success. I mention this, as I am sorry to think these poor deluded people, (as happened to them in 1798,) may, by such commotions, bring themselves into unplea sant circumstances, if not to utter ruin.' To those who take a minute view of the interior and south of Ireland, the fire which has been smouldering ever since the Union seems ready to burst into a flame.' The great body of the people conceive themselves oppressed; and oppressed subjects, when driven to necessity, often become the most dangerous and inveterate foes. They are actuated by a spirit of revenge against their former tyrants, which cannot be supposed to influence the natives of foreign countries.' V. II. p. 46. When, however, he talks, in the same part of the book, as if it were doubtful whether the sense of injury and the sentiment of rancour have not become too deep and fixed in the minds of the people to have left a possibility of conciliation, he talks, as indeed he often does, very thoughtlessly. The whole view of mankind, through regions and ages, is full of proofs that nothing in universal nature is so placable as an injured people is towards an offending government, or rather, we should say, would be placable, if oppressive governments ever, of their own motion, repented and reformed, and is tolerant of those that scorn to do the one or the other. The fact is even one of the most opprobrious parts of the history of the world. It is impossible for a lover of justice and liberty to survey that history without being indignant, and without being tempted to despise human nature, at beholding the innumerable instances of the wretched and besotted servility and prostration with which nations have endured bad governments; have suffered themselves to be sometimes cajoled, sometimes insulted, and oftener still revengefully punished, when they have complained; have accepted very trifling and even illusory concessions as indemnification for great sufferings; and have relented towards fallen and expelled tyrannies, so as to permit the resumption of power without the condition of any effectual security against their renewed abuses of it, and their revenge. Art. VI. Don Emanuel, a Poem in three Cantos; with Notes. By Art. VII. The Death of Prince Bagration, or the French defeated in Russia and Poland, in 1812 and 1813, a Poem. By the Rev. R. Patrick, A. M. Chaplain to the Dowager Marchioness of Townshend, and Vicar of Schiel Cotes; author of a Charity Sermon on the Vices and Charities of a Sea Port; and of a Numeral Chart in two hundred languages. 4to. pp. 20. Longman and Co. 1813. Art. VIII. Joseph, a religious Poem, Historical, Patriarchal, and X. Characteristics of Men, Manners, and Sentiments: or, The Voyage of Life, the second Edition, revised, and other Poems. By the Rev. David Lloyd, Vicar of Llanbister, fcap, 8vo pp. xii. 340. Cadell and Davies, 1813. IT is not without some apprehension of giving offence to each of the authors of the above works, that we have ventured to associate them at the head of this article: but as this is the only method by which we can make room for a notice of their productions, we are persuaded that they will excuse the indignity, and prefer being thus noticed, to the more mortifying alternative of silent neglect. Even ladies and poets, when they cannot have their own carriage, must submit to the horrid convenience of a stage coach, with its worst circumstance--the company. We by no means intend, however, to intimate that the above works are of the same degree or description of merit : our extracts will enable our readers to discriminate between them, according to their taste:--but we conceive there are some points of common resemblance on which we may safely rest a few concluding observations. We may be allowed to reverse the order in which we have given their titles, in proceeding to the task of selection. The Rev. David Lloyd appears to be an intelligent and estimable clergyman. We are sorry that our only acquaintance with him, is in the character of a poet, and that our stern duty leads us rather to pronounce on the merits, than the sentiments and intention, of his volume. He thus meekly deprecates criticism in an address to Reviewers. 'Ye veteran sages who delight to roam Thro' fields of lit'rature, wielding many a tome VOL. X. |