Now, John Bull took another view of it. He was better off at home. He had n't a spark of adventure about him. His only notion of worldly advancement led through money. You 'll not catch him becoming a soldier. Every year will make him less and less disposed to the life. Cheapen food and luxuries, reduce tariffs and the cost of foreign produce, and the laborer will think twice before he 'll give up home and its comforts, to be, as the song says,—
"Proud as a goat,
With a fine scarlet coat,
And a long cap and feather."
Turn over these things in your mind, Tom, and see if England has not made a great mistake in eradicating the very class she might have reckoned upon in any warlike emergency. Take my word for it, it is a fine thing to have at your disposal a hundred thousand fellows who can esteem a shilling a day a high premium, and who are not too well off in the world to be afraid of leaving it! How did I come here at all? What has led me into this digression? I protest to you solemnly, Tom, I don't know. I can only say that my hand trembles, and my head throbs with indignation, as I think over this insolent cant that tells us that Ireland has no chance of prosperity save in ceasing to be Irish. It is worse than a lie,—it is a mean, cowardly slander!
I must leave off this till my brain is calmer: besides, whether it is the light wines I 'm drinking, or my anger has brought it on, but I 've just got a terrible twinge of gout in my right foot.
Tuesday Evening.
I have passed a miserable twenty-four hours. They 've all the incentives to gout in this country, and yet they don't appear to have the commonest remedies against it. I sent Belton's recipe to be made up at the apothecaries', and they had never as much as heard of one of the ingredients! They told me to regulate my diet, and be careful to avoid acids,—and this, while I was bellowing like a bull with pain. It was like replying to my request for a shirt, by saying that they were going to sow flax in August It 's their confounded cookery, and the vinegar we wash it down with, has given me this!
The old housekeeper at last took compassion on my sufferings, and made me up a kind of broth of herbs that nearly finished me. She assured me that they all grew wild in the fields, and were freely eaten by the cattle. I can only say it's well that Nebuchadnezzar was n't put out to graze here! Sea-sickness was a mild nausea compared to it I 'm better now; but so low and so depressed, and with such loss of energy, that in a discussion with Mrs. D. about Mary Anne's "trousseau," as they call it, I gave in to everything!
Since this attack seized me, events have made a great progress; indeed, a suspiciously minded person would n't scruple to say that a mild poison had been administered to me to forward the course of negotiations; and in my heart and soul I believe that another bowl of the same broth would make me consent to my daughter's union with the Bey of Tunis! The poor old Dean of Lurra used to say of the Baths of Kreutznach, "I 've lost enough flesh in three weeks to make a curate!"—and, indeed, when I look at myself in the glass, I turn involuntarily around to see where's the rest of me!
Meanwhile, as I said, all has been arranged and settled, and the marriage is fixed for an early day in the coming week. I suppose it's all for the best I take it that the match is a very great one; but I own to you frankly, Tom, I 'd have fewer misgivings if the dear child was going to be the wife of some respectable man of her own country, though he had neither a castle to live in nor a title to bestow.
Foreigners are essentially and totally different from us in everything; and marrying one of them is, to my thinking, the very next thing to being united to some strange outlandish beast, as one reads of in fairy tales. I suppose that my prejudice is a very mean and narrow-minded one; but I can't get rid of it. It looks churlish and cold-hearted in me that I cannot show the same joy on the occasion that the others display; but, with all my efforts, and the very best will, I can't do it, Tom. The bridegroom, too, is not to my taste: he is one of those moping, dreamy, moonstruck fellows, that pass their lives in an imaginary sphere of thought and action; and, to my thinking, these people are distasteful to the world at large, and insufferable to their wives.