Their joy, and find this earth enough for woe,
Lose in that one their all—perchance a mite—
But who in patience parts with all delight?"
Pleasant days they were when, through the soft spring weather, I wandered round the coasts of Kerry, Clare, and Galway, hooking salmon in broad pools, where the vexed water rests a while from its labors under wooded cliffs, and at the tail of roaring rapids, specked with white foam-clots, or sea-trout in the estuaries where the great rivers hurry down to their stormy meeting with the Atlantic rollers.
Every where I met the frank, cheery welcome that you must cross the Channel to find in its perfection.
It is sad to see how widely over that fair land the abomination of desolation has cast its shadow. Many halls are tenantless besides those of Tara. The ancient owners of the soil—where are they? Not a country in Europe but is conscious of these restless, careless, homeless Zingari. In distant provincial towns of France you hear their enormous blunders in grammar and musical Milesian brogue breaking the uniformity of dull legitimist soirées. Hombourg and Baden are irradiated with the glory of their whiskers. You find their blue eyes and open, handsome features diversifying the sameness of wooden-faced Austrian squadrons. Nay, has it not been whispered that the proudest name in Ireland attained a bad eminence in the Grecian Archipelago as the captain of the wickedest of those long low craft that, in the purple dawn or ivory moonlight, steal silently out from behind the headlands of the Cyclades?
But let us do justice to those who remain behind.
The sceptre of Connemara has passed away from the ancient dynasty. If the penultimate monarch could rise from his peaceful grave, his place would know him no more. If he traveled through all his thirty miles of seaboard, the Scotch laborers would doff their hats more respectfully to the steward of the "Law Life" than to the humane old homicide. The royal writ, which he defied from his place at St. Stephen's, might be served now, I imagine, without danger of the bailiff's breaking his fast on the same. Claret flows soberly from long-necked bottles whose corks bear the brand of the wine-merchant, high priced and legal, instead of from the cask of which the snug sandy cove and the roguish-looking hooker could have told tales. But, in spite of visionary rents, and poor-rates sternly real, the Irish squire still clings to the exercise of that hospitality which has been an heirloom with the tribes since the days of Strongbow.
One of my longest halting-places was at Ralph Mohun's, by whom, though personally unknown to him, I was made very welcome as a friend of Guy's. My host deserves a more especial mention, for his history was a sad, though not an uncommon one.
He began life in a Cavalry regiment, wherein he conducted himself with fair average propriety till he met Lady Caroline Desborough. He fell in love with her—most people did—but, unluckily, when she married Mr. Mannering, to whom she had been predestined since her début, he could not bring himself to wear the willow decently and in order, like her other disappointed admirers.