and in some fear of oversleeping the hour for the coach in the morning, I reiterated, and ‘sealed with a silver token,’ my request to be waked at six. Fortunately for a person who possesses Sancho’s ‘alacrity at sleep,’ the noise of a coach rattling over the pavement woke me just in time to save my coffee and my place. I returned to my chamber the moment before mounting the coach for something I had forgotten, and as the clock was striking eight, the faithful damsel knocked at my door and informed me that it was past six.”
Mr Willis is a fortunate traveller. Often as we have stopped at the Donegal Arms, we never had the good fortune to see the pink heels or bare legs of a chambermaid; and the moral economy of the house must be greatly changed also, when they allow the gentlemen to be called by the said bare-legged damsels; a duty which, in our visits at it and all other respectable hotels, always devolved on that useful personage called Boots. We do not think, however, that this change of the system—leaving the calling of the gentlemen to the chambermaids—would work well, except in the case of American travellers. Still, however, as he says, he was in time, and started off—no longer in St Patrick’s track, but on King William’s route to the battle of the Boyne—and arrives in Drogheda to dinner. He tells us that the country is very bare of wood, and then proceeds in the following words to describe the habitations.
“But what shall I say of the human habitations in this (so called) most thriving and best-conditioned quarter of Ireland? If I had not seen every second face at a hovel-door with a smile on it, and heard laughing and begging in the same breath everywhere, I should think here were human beings abandoned by their Maker. Many of the dwellings I saw upon the roadside looked to me like the abodes of extinguished hope—forgotten instincts—grovelling, despairing, nay, almost idiotic wretchedness. I did not know there were such sights in the world. I did not know that men and women, upright, and made in God’s image, could live in styes, like swine, with swine—sitting, lying down, cooking and eating in such filth as all brute animals, save the one ‘unclean,’ revolt from and avoid. The extraordinary part of it, too, is, that it seems almost altogether the result of choice. I scarce saw one hovel, the mud-floor of which was not excavated several inches below the ground-level without; and as there is no sill, or raised threshold, there is no bar, I will not say to the water, but to the liquid filth that oozes to its lower reservoir within. A few miles from Drogheda, I pointed out to my companions a woman sitting in a hovel at work, with the muddy water up to her ancles, and an enormous hog scratching himself against her knee. These disgusting animals were everywhere walking in and out of the hovels at pleasure, jostling aside the half-naked children, or wallowing in the wash, outside or in—the best-conditioned and most privileged inmates, indeed, of every habitation. All this, of course, is matter of choice, and so is the offal-heap, situated, in almost every instance, directly before the door, and draining its putrid mass into the hollow, under the peasant’s table. Yet mirth does live in these places—people do smile on you from these squalid abodes of wretchedness—the rose of health does show itself upon the cheeks of children, whose cradle is a dung-heap, and whose play-fellows are hogs! And of the beings who live thus, courage, wit, and quenchless love of liberty, are the undenied and universal characteristics. Truly, that mysterious law of nature by which corruption paints the rose and feeds the fragrant cup of the lily, is not without its similitude! Who shall say what is clean, when the back of the most loathsome of reptiles turns out, on examination, more beautiful than the butterfly? Who shall say what extremes may not meet, when, amid the filth of an Irish hovel, spring, like flowers, out of ordure, the graces of a prince in his palace?”
All this, the reader will remark, was seen from the top of a stage-coach on a drenching wet day! What wonderful powers of observation he must have! The penciller next treats us to a song, descriptive of an Irish cabin, which he tells us was sung for him by one of the most beautiful women he saw in Ireland. His memorable arrival in Drogheda is thus described:—
“As we drove into Drogheda, we entered a crowd, which I can only describe as suggesting the idea of a miraculous advent of rags. It was market-day, and the streets were so thronged that you could scarce see the pavement, except under the feet of the horses; and the public square was a sea of tatters. Here and all over Ireland I could but wonder where and how these rent and frittered habiliments had gone through the preparatory stages of wear and tear. There were no degrees—nothing above rags to be seen in coat or petticoat, waistcoat or breeches, cloak or shirt. Even the hats and shoes were in rags; not a whole covering, even of the coarsest material, was to be detected on a thousand backs about us: nothing shabby, nothing threadbare, nothing mended, except here and there a hole in a beggar’s coat, stuffed with straw. Who can give me the genealogy of Irish rags? Who took the gloss from these coats, once broadcloth? who wore them? who tore them? who sold them to the Jews? (for, by the way, Irish rags are fine rags, seldom frieze or fustian). How came the tatters of the entire world, in short, assembled in Ireland? for if, as it would seem, they have all descended from the backs of gentlemen, the entire world must contribute to maintain the supply.”
Readers, such of you as have been in Drogheda, did you ever see any thing like this? People of Drogheda, do you recognise yourselves in this picture here drawn of you? We are sure you cannot. But he is not done with you yet. He had been rather unlucky in the pursuit of his favourite subjects for study in Belfast—namely, the beggars; but this disappointment was atoned for in Drogheda. He describes them thus:—
“I had been rather surprised at the scarcity of beggars in Belfast, but the beggary of Drogheda fully came up to the travellers’ descriptions. They were of every possible variety. At the first turn the coach made in the town, we were very near running over a blind man, who knelt in the liquid mud of the gutter (the calves of his legs quite covered by the pool, and only his heels appearing above), and held up in his hands the naked and footless stumps of a boy’s legs. The child sat in a wooden box, with his back against the man’s breast, and ate away very unconcernedly at a loaf of bread, while the blind exhibitor turned his face up to the sky, and, waving the stumps slightly from side to side, kept up a vociferation for charity that was heard above all the turmoil of the market place. When we stopped to change horses, the entire population, as deep as they could stand, at least with any chance of being heard, held out their hands, and in every conceivable tone and mode of arresting the attention, implored charity. The sight was awful: old age in shapes so hideous, I should think the most horrible nightmare never had conceived. The rain poured down upon their tangled and uncovered heads, seaming, with its cleansing torrents, faces so hollow, so degraded in expression, and, withal, so clotted with filth and neglect, that they seemed like features of which the very owners had long lost, not only care, but consciousness and remembrance; as if, in the horrors of want and idiotcy, they had anticipated the corrupting apathy of the grave, and abandoned every thing except the hunger which gnawed them into memory of existence. The feeble blows and palsied fighting of these hag-like spectres for the pence thrown to them from the coach, and the howling, harsh, and unnatural voices in which they imprecated curses on each other in the fury of the struggle, have left a remembrance in my mind, which deepens immeasurably my fancied nadir of human abandonment and degradation. God’s image so blasted, so defiled, so sunk below the beasts that perish, I would not have believed was to be found in the same world with hope.”
But we, and our readers too, have probably had enough of Mr Willis’s “Pencillings by the Way” in Ireland—pencillings which would seem to have been sketched with a material to which he is apparently very partial, namely, dirt. And now, in return for the favour which this gentleman and his coadjutor have conferred upon us, by their exertions to enable us to improve our acquaintance with ourselves, we shall communicate our own opinion of them, and hope they will be equally benefited by the knowledge. We think, then, that they are a pair of gentlemen who must have a wonderfully good opinion of themselves, and that not altogether without reason, inasmuch as they possess in common one quality, which shall be nameless, but in which not even we, natives of the Emerald Isle as we are, can pretend to compete with them. We do not think that there are any two Irishmen living, who would travel into a foreign country to represent its scenery like the one, or sketch the manners and characteristics of its inhabitants like the other, and expect that they should be rewarded by the purchase of their works by that people or in that country. Mr Bartlett is but an indifferent artist, unacquainted even with some of the rudiments of his art, who has acquired the trade-knack of making pretty pictures by imitating the works of others, and by a total disregard of the real features of the scenes which he undertakes to depict. Mr Willis is a more accomplished sketcher in his line; and his delineations might be of value, if his conceited ambition to produce effect did not continually mar whatever intrinsic worth they might otherwise possess; but as it is, he is little better than a pert and flippant caricaturist. Neither one nor the other of these gentlemen, in short, would seem qualified for the task which they have so daringly undertaken; and we think it would have been well, if, before they resolved upon going through with it, they had been mindful of the Eastern proverb, “A lie, though it promise good, will do thee harm, and truth will do thee good at the last.” Applying this to ourselves as critics, we feel in conclusion bound to acknowledge that the prints in this work, considered as engravings, are deserving of the highest praise.
X. Y.