After describing, as accurately as words may, the features of a landscape, and stating that such a mountain was to the left, and such a river or town to the right, and putting down the situations and names of the villages, and the bearings of the roads, it has no doubt struck the reader of books of travels that the writer has not given him the slightest idea of the country, and that he would have been just as wise without perusing the letterpress landscape through which he has toiled. It will be as well then, under such circumstances, to spare the public any lengthened description of the road from Waterford to Dungarvan; which was the road we took, followed by benedictions delivered gratis from the beggar-hood of the former city. Not very far from it you see the dark plantations of the magnificent domain of Curraghmore, and pass through a country blue, hilly, and bare, except where gentlemen’s seats appear with their ornaments of wood. Presently, after leaving Waterford, we came to a certain town called Kilmacthomas, of which all the information I have to give is, that it is situated upon a hill and river, and that you may change horses there. The road was covered with carts of seaweed, which the people were bringing for manure from the shore some four miles distant; and beyond Kilmacthomas we beheld the Cummeragh Mountains, ‘often named in maps the Nennavoulagh,’ either of which names the reader may select at pleasure.
Thence we came to ‘Cushcam,’ at which village be it known that the turnpike-man kept the drag a very long time waiting. ‘I think the fellow must be writing a book,’ said the coachman, with a most severe look of drollery at a cockney tourist, who tried, under the circumstances, to blush, and not to laugh. I wish I could relate or remember half the mad jokes that flew about among the jolly Irish crew on the top of the coach, and which would have made a journey through the Desert jovial. When the ‘pike-man had finished his composition (that of a turnpike-ticket, which he had to fill), we drove on to Dungarvan; the two parts of which town, separated by the river Colligan, have been joined by a causeway three hundred yards along, and a bridge erected at an enormous outlay by the Duke of Devonshire. In former times, before his Grace spent his eighty thousand pounds upon the causeway, this wide estuary was called ‘Dungarvan Prospect,’ because the ladies of the country, walking over the river at low water, took off their shoes and stockings (such as had them), and tucking up their clothes, exhibited,—what I have never seen, and cannot, therefore, be expected to describe. A large and handsome Catholic chapel, a square with some pretensions to regularity of building, a very neat and comfortable inn, and beggars and idlers still more numerous than at Waterford, were what we had leisure to remark in half an hour’s stroll through the town.
Near the prettily situated village of Cappoquin is the Trappist house of Mount Meilleraie, of which we could only see the pinnacles. The brethren were presented some years since with a barren mountain, which they have cultivated most successfully. They have among themselves workmen to supply all their frugal wants, ghostly tailors and shoemakers, spiritual gardeners and bakers, working in silence, and serving Heaven after their way. If this reverend community, for fear of the opportunity of sinful talk, choose to hold their tongues, the next thing will be to cut them out altogether, and so render the danger impossible—if, being men of education and intelligence, they incline to turn butchers and cobblers, and smother their intellects by base and hard menial labour, who knows but one day a sect may be more pious still, and rejecting even butchery and bakery, as savouring too much of worldly convenience and pride, take to a wild-beast life at once? Let us concede that suffering, and mental and bodily debasement, are the things most agreeable to Heaven, and there is no knowing where such piety may stop. I was very glad we had not time to see the grovelling place; and as for seeing shoes made or fields tilled by reverend amateurs, we can find cobblers and ploughboys to do the work better.
By the way, the Quakers have set up in Ireland a sort of monkery of their own. Not far from Carlow we met a couple of cars drawn by white horses, and holding white Quakers and Quakeresses, in white hats, clothes, shoes, with wild maniacal-looking faces, bumping along the road. Let us hope that we may soon get a community of Fakeers and howling Dervises into the country. It would be a refreshing thing to see such ghostly men in one’s travels, standing at the corners of roads, and praising the Lord by standing on one leg, or cutting and hacking themselves with knives like the prophets of Baal. Is it not as pious for a man to deprive himself of his leg as of his tongue, and to disfigure his body with the gashes of a knife, as with the hideous white raiment of the illuminated Quakers?
While these reflections were going on, the beautiful Blackwater river suddenly opened before us, and driving along it for three miles through some of the most beautiful, rich country ever seen, we came to Lismore. Nothing can be certainly more magnificent than this drive. Parks and rocks covered with the grandest foliage; rich handsome seats of gentlemen in the midst of fair lawns, and beautiful bright plantations and shrubberies; and at the end, the graceful spire of Lismore church, the prettiest I have seen in, or, I think, out of Ireland. Nor in any country that I have visited have I seen a view more noble—it is too rich and peaceful to be what is called romantic, but lofty, large, and generous, if the term may be used; the river and banks as fine as the Rhine; the castle not as large, but as noble and picturesque as Warwick. As you pass the bridge, the banks stretch away on either side in amazing verdure, and the castle-walks remind one somewhat of the dear old terrace of St. Germains, with its groves, and long grave avenues of trees.
The salmon-fishery of the Blackwater is let, as I hear, for a thousand a year. In the evening, however, we saw some gentlemen who are likely to curtail the profits of the farmer of the fishery—a company of ragged boys, to wit—whose occupation, it appears, is to poach. These young fellows were all lolling over the bridge, as the moon rose rather mistily, and pretended to be deeply enamoured of the view of the river. They answered the questions of one of our party with the utmost innocence and openness, and one would have supposed the lads were so many Arcadians, but for the arrival of an old woman, who suddenly coming up among them poured out, upon one and all, a volley of curses, both deep and loud, saying that perdition would be their portion, and calling them ‘shchamers’ at least a hundred times. Much to my wonder, the young men did not reply to the voluble old lady for some time, who then told us the cause of her anger. She had a son,—‘Look at him there, the villain.’ The lad was standing, looking very unhappy. ‘His father, that’s now dead, paid a fistful of money to bind him ‘prentice at Dungarvan: but these shchamers followed him there; made him break his indentures, and go poaching and thieving and shchaming with them.’ The poor old woman shook her hands in the air, and shouted at the top of her deep voice; there was something very touching in her grotesque sorrow, nor did the lads make light of it at all, contenting themselves with a surly growl, or an oath, if directly appealed to by the poor creature.
So, cursing and raging, the woman went away. The son, a lad of fourteen, evidently the fag of the big bullies round about him, stood dismally away from them, his head sunk down. I went up and asked him, ‘Was that his mother?’ He said, ‘Yes.’ ‘Was she good and kind to him when he was at home?’ He said, ‘Oh yes.’ ‘Why not come back to her?’ I asked him; but he said ‘he couldn’t.’ Whereupon I took his arm, and tried to lead him away by main force; but he said, ‘Thank you, sir, but I can’t go back,’ and released his arm. We stood on the bridge some minutes longer, looking at the view; but the boy, though he kept away from his comrades, would not come. I wonder what they have done together, that the poor boy is past going home? The place seemed to be so quiet and beautiful, and far away from London, that I thought crime couldn’t have reached it; and yet, here it lurks somewhere among six boys of sixteen, each with a stain in his heart, and some black history to tell. The poor widow’s yonder was the only family about which I had a chance of knowing anything in this remote place; nay, in all Ireland; and, God help us, hers was a sad lot!—A husband gone dead,—an only child gone to ruin. It is awful to think that there are eight millions of stories to be told in this island. Seven million nine hundred and ninety-nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-eight more lives that I, and all brother cockneys, know nothing about. Well, please God, they are not all like this.
That day, I heard another history. A little old disreputable man in tatters, with a huge steeple of a hat, came shambling down the street, one among the five hundred blackguards there. A fellow standing under the sun portico (a sort of swaggering, chattering, cringing touter, and master of ceremonies to the gutter) told us something with regard to the old disreputable man. His son had been hanged the day before at Clonmel, for one of the Tipperary murders. That blackguard in our eyes instantly looked quite different from all other blackguards—I saw him gesticulating at the corner of a street, and watched him with wonderful interest.
The church with the handsome spire, that looks so graceful among the trees, is a cathedral church, and one of the neatest-kept and prettiest edifices I have seen in Ireland. In the old graveyard Protestants and Catholics lie together—that is, not together; for each has a side of the ground, where they sleep, and, so occupied, do not quarrel. The sun was shining down upon the brilliant grass—and I don’t think the shadows of the Protestant graves were any longer or shorter than those of the Catholics. Is it the right or the left side of the graveyard which is nearest heaven, I wonder? Look, the sun shines upon both alike, ‘and the blue sky bends over all.’