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No, whatever may be the wrongs of Ireland no lover of the picturesque and beautiful would wish to see her re-dressed (so far as the ladies are concerned—the gentlemen might be improved); no one would desire to see her peasant girls in the tawdry bonnets and brass-eyed boots, which stultify the faces and cripple the feet of the daughters of our English labourers.
As to the origin of these Claddagh people, I am not sufficiently “up” in ethnology, to state with analytical exactness the details of their descent; but I should imagine them to be one-third Irish, one-third Arabian, and the other Zingaro, or Spanish gypsy. 1 I thought that I recognised in one old lady an Ojibbeway chief, who frightened me a good deal in my childhood, but she had lost the expression of ferocity, and I was, perhaps, mistaken.
The men are all fishermen (very clumsy ones, according to Miss Martineau, who talks about harpoons as if they were crochet needles, in her interesting “Letters from Ireland”); but they give up their cargoes to the women on landing, only stipulating that from the proceeds they may be supplied with a good store of drink and tobacco, and so get due compensation on the shore for their unvarying sobriety at sea.
1 Wales is also represented by members of the Jones family.
The original John may have come over with Thomas Joyce, who
was good enough to appropriate “the Joyce Country” to
himself and family, in the reign of Edward the First.
They live (some 1500 souls in all) in a village of miserable cabins, the walls of mud and stone, and for the most part windowless, the floors damp and dirty, and the roofs a mass of rotten straw and weeds. The poultry mania—(and if it is not mania to give ten guineas for a bantam, in what does insanity consist? l)—must be here at its height, for the cocks and hens roost in the parlour. But “the swells” of the Claddagh are its pigs. They really have not only a “landed expression,” as though the place belonged to them, but a supercilious gait and mien; and with an autocratic air, as though repeating to themselves the spirited verses of Mr. A. Selkirk, they go in and out, whenever and wherever they please. I saw one of them, bold as the beast who upset Giotto, 2 knock over a little child with his snout; and I have a sad impression that the juvenine was whipped for interfering with the royal progress. Frank solemnly declared that he saw one, as portrayed with his back against the lintail of his home, and smoking his evening pipe.
1 This form of delirium is by no means of modern origin.
Opvi-ôofiavta, a passionate love of rare birds, was known
among the ladies of Athens.
2 We read in Lanzi's History of Painting, that as Giottowas walking with his friends, one Sunday, in the Via del
Cocomero at Florence, he was overthrown by a pig running
between his legs. Whereupon the painter, albeit he was in
his best clothes, philosophically recognised a just
retribution, “for,” said he, “although I have earned many
thousand crowns with the bristles of these animals, I never
gave to one of them a spoonful of swill in my life!”
