“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.