Here I am settled dans mes foyers in a roomy, comfortable, homely mansion, with dark black mahogany unwieldy furniture and needlework chairs ranged round the room in regiments, and a glowing embery turf fire.
We have a field before the house with a walk round it; we look upon the broad Shannon and the Clare Mountains.... We have a complete leper, a Lazarus, outside our door, which gives me a sort of Dives feel, very unpleasant to my conscience, and sumptuous fare every day, and purple and fine linen, keep running in my head, that this very day I mean to go and make a treaty of peace between this lame beggar and my conscience that I may rest. I have also a stiff straight-cut schoolmaster who opens the gate. He is of the established Church, teaches boys, makes shoes, and was a soldier.
We have fine Artillery Barracks; we have a Lunatick Asylum not so large as the Gaol, and serves three counties; which shows the country abounds more in Knaves than Fools. But oh, the misery, the desolate look of the whole country, the beggary—I shall never get used to it. And the whole country looking as if it was capable of being the richest in the world. This large river flowing on without a boat upon it, crowds of people talking and sauntering about in rags, complaining of having no work.... The whole country looks sacked. However it is reckoned very quiet just now.
This part is reckoned very rich and prosperous. Our living is excellent, meat, milk, eggs, and poultry, and fish so cheap, I feel as if it was quite a pity I cannot eat more at once.
July 6, 1827.
...We are getting a little outrageous in this county, and very much so in T’p’rary, for we lack potatoes there, and hunger sharpens the wits, so we just lift the flour and potatoes cast for our use. Is it possible that Lord Anglesey is to be our Lord-Lieutenant? Am I really to pray for him, and for the sword the King puts in his hand, every Sunday in church? Oh dear, dear! What a wretched country this is—it wearies the spirit to see it.
Miss Eden to Miss Villiers.
BIGODS, ESSEX,
Sunday, July 1827.
I have been longing for a letter from you.
I have not seen an individual out of this house since I entered it three weeks ago, except one day when we dined at Lord Maynard’s,—the most melancholy ceremony, barring a funeral, I ever assisted at. Conversation is one of the social duties not practised in Essex. Mary and I talked our level best, and they must all have thought us either the most delightful people in the world, or the most impudent.