“hath a pleasant seat; the air
Nimbly and sweetly recommends itself
Unto our gentler senses;”
and it commands a fine view “over the water and over the Lee” over lake and meadow, and over “the Groves of Blarney,” renowned in song. The landscape rewards your exertions, when you have ascended the narrow staircase of the sole remaining tower, and this somewhat resembles (“magna componere”) an excellent “Stilton,” which has gone the way of all good cheeses, and is now a hollow ruin—a ruin on which some sentimental mouse might sit, like Marins at Carthage, and bitterly recall the past.
Looking down this cavity, made gloomier by the dark ivy and wild myrtle, which grow from floor to battlement, one feels that fainty thrill and chilliness which is equally unpleasant and indescribable, and gladly divert our attention, first to the stone displaced by a cannon shot, in the days of the incomparable Lady Jeffreys, when
“Oliver Cromwell, he did her pummell,
And broke a breach all in her battlement,”
and then to another stone lower down in the tower, and bearing the inscription, “Cormac Macarthy Fort is Me Fieri Fecit, a.d. 1446,” which may be translated liberally,
“Cormac Macarthy, bould as bricks,
Made me in Fourteen Forty-six.”
This is said to be the original Blarney Stone, but as no man could possibly kiss it, unless (as Sir Boyle Roche observed) he happened to be a bird, or an acrobat, twelve feet long, and suspending himself by his feet from the summit of the Tower, we were content to believe in the conventional granite, which now bears the name, and which, being situated at the top of one of the turrets, is very accessible for osculation.
Of this lapideous phenomenon, the author of “The Groves of Blarney” sings,
“There is a stone there, that whoever kisses,
Oh, he never misses to grow eloquent;
'Tis he may clamber to a lady's chamber.
Or become a member of parliament.
“A clever spouter he'll sure turn out, or
An out-an-outer, to be let alone:
Don't hope to hinder him, or to bewilder him,
Sure he's a pilgrim from the Blarney Stone!”
Now it is my conviction, primarily suggested by my own sensations, and subsequently confirmed by what I noticed in others, as I lingered on that ancient tower, that the majority of those who kiss the Blarney Stone, do wish and try to believe in it. We English have so scanty a stock of superstitions, and some of these so wanting in refinement and dignity, as, for instance, the “crossing out” of an isolated magpie, the ejection of spilt salt over the left shoulder, deviations into the gutter to avoid a ladder, the mastication of pancakes upon Shrove Tuesday, and the like, that we are glad of any pretext for gratifying that innate love of the marvellous, which exists, more or less, in us all,—ay, and will exist, until John Bright is Premier of England, and our Fairy Tales and Arabian Nights, and all our books of pleasant fiction are solemnly burnt at Oxford, before a Synod of costive Quakers.