Self. "Gracious Heaven! But, surely, he did not do such a thing?"
Woman. "But he did it, your honor. The neighbor had no money: it was a hum; he never took the field of us at all; we never were able to get a penny more from any one than we gave; but when my husband went to pay the rent at the next rent-day, the steward would not take it. He said he had orders to have two pounds a year more; and from that day we have had it regularly to pay."
What a fall out of the poetry of Psyche to the iron realities of Ireland! This screwing system on the poor, which you find almost every where, soon makes us cease to wonder at the wretchedness and the wild outrages of the people there. At one splendid place where I was, the lord of the estate and the gentry were all bowling away on the Sunday morning to a church three miles distant. When I asked why they did not stay at their own, this was the reply: "The clergyman had given great offense by saying in one of his sermons that their dogs were better lodged and fed than their neighbors!" Poor Ireland! where such is the distortion of circumstances that the poor are too poor to have the truth told about them to ears polite even from the pulpit, and where the squirearchy live in splendid houses, and in state emulating the peerage, surrounded by hovels and wretchedness, such as the world besides can not parallel. The condition of Ireland is fatal in its effects on all classes. The poor are reduced to a misery that is the amazement of the whole world; and the squirearchy, who live in daily contemplation of this misery, are rendered utterly callous to it. They go on putting on the screw of high rental to the utmost limit, and surrounded, as it were, only by serfs, naturally grow selfish beyond our conceptions in England, haughty, and ungracious. I believe that no country, except Russia, can furnish such revolting examples of ignorant and churlish insolence as Ireland can from the ranks of its solitary squirearchy—so utterly opposed to the generally generous, courteous, and hospitable character of its people.
JOHN KEATS.
"Where is the youth for deeds immortal born,
Who loved to whisper to the embattled corn,
And clustered woodbines, breathing o'er the stream,
Endymion's beauteous passion for a dream!
Why did he drop the harp from fingers cold,
And sleep so soon with demigods of old!
Oh, who so well could sing Love's joys and pains?
He lived in melody, as if his veins
Poured music; from his lips came words of fire,
The voice of Greece, the tones of Homer's lyre."
Ebenezer Elliott.
We come now to one whose home and haunts on the earth were brief;