“Hills peep o'er hills, and Alps on Alps arise,”
and where nature, with a calm, majestic dignity, which must impress, and ought to improve, claims at once our reverence and love, awes us with her grandeur, but charms us more with her smile.
The tourist readily foregoes and forgets the temporary loss of little comforts to which he has been accustomed. There is but one really great deprivation to which he is subject,—the want of ladies' society. English ladies can go, do go, and will go everywhere; but, generally speaking, they are unwilling, wisely unwilling, to encounter a wet day on an Irish car, or the carpetless, comfortless rooms of the Connaviara inns.
Indeed, the fine gentleman, who chiefly loves the tips of his moustaches, the sleeve-links of his shirt, and the toes of his gleaming boots,—the dandy, [Greek word], who can't live without his still champagne, by Jove, his soups and sauces, and golden plovers, his Nesselrode pudding, and petit verre en suite,—will find sad discomfiture in Connamara. Neither Apicius Coelius nor Lady Clutterbuck have prepared the way for his daintyship, and when the bacon, which accompanies the breastless fowls, shall display its prismatic hues, his forlorn spirit shall sigh in vain for the pleasant hams of Piccadilly, while, in vain, he imprecates on the unskilful cook the fate of Mr. Richard Rouse. 1
1 A cook, who, in the year 1530, attempted to poison Fisher,
Bishop of Rochester, and was boiled to death—out of
compliment to his profession. See Froude's History of
England, vol. i., p. 288. A writer in the Athenaum (Jan. 13,
1844,) remarks, in a very amusing article on the Irish
Census, “There is no cookery in Ireland, because there is
nothing to cook. We occasionally, to be sure, throw them a
bone of contention, and they make a broil of it. Their
cookery goes no further.”
At morn, moreover, lazily turning in his bed to ring for valet or waiter, how shall his superb dignity be perturbed to find, that there exists no belle alliance between the upper and lower house, and that his highness must go to the stair top, and hallo, for whatever his emergencies require. No marble bath awaits him now, with its tepidly congenial joys; but there stands at his door a little tub, which he contemplates as ruefully as the stork of the fable the shallow dish of the fox, and which just contains a sufficiency of water to perplex a rat of irresolute mind, whether he should walk or swim. The accommodation is, in fact, so limited, that Frank, in attempting some daring flight of ablution, broke his tiny bath to pieces, and away streamed the water to announce the fact down stairs.
