When breakfast was done—(he took but one cup of tea, and says that, from having been a great consumer of tea and refreshing liquids before, a small cup of tea, and one glass of water at dinner, now serve him for his day’s beverage)—he took the ladies of our party to see his burying-ground—a new and handsome cemetery, lying a little way out of the town, and where, thank God! Protestants and Catholics may lie together, without clergymen quarrelling over their coffins.
It is a handsome piece of ground, and was formerly a botanic garden; but the funds failed for that undertaking, as they have for a thousand other public enterprises in this poor disunited country; and so it has been converted into a hortus siccus for us mortals. There is already a pretty large collection. In the midst is a place for Mathew himself—honour to him living or dead! Meanwhile, numerous stately monuments have been built, flowers planted here and there over dear remains, and the garden in which they lie is rich, green, and beautiful. Here is a fine statue, by Hogan, of a weeping genius that broods over the tomb of an honest merchant and clothier of the city. He took a liking to the artist, his fellow-townsman, and ordered his own monument, and had the gratification to see it arrive from Rome a few weeks before his death. A prettier thing even than the statue is the tomb of a little boy, which has been shut in by a large and curious grille of ironwork. The father worked it, a blacksmith, whose darling the child was, and he spent three years in hammering out this mausoleum. It is the beautiful story of the pot of ointment told again at the poor blacksmith’s anvil; and who can but like him for placing this fine gilded cage over the body of his poor little one? Presently you come to a Frenchwoman’s tomb, with a French epitaph, by a French husband, and a pot of artificial flowers in a niche—a wig, and a pot of rouge, as it were, just to make the dead look passably well. It is his manner of showing his sympathy for an immortal soul that has passed away. The poor may be buried here for nothing; and here, too, once more thank God! each may rest without priests or parsons scowling hell-fire at his neighbour unconscious under the grass.
CHAPTER VI
CORK—THE URSULINE CONVENT
THERE is a large Ursuline convent at Blackrock, near Cork, and a lady who had been educated there was kind enough to invite me to join a party to visit the place. Was not this a great privilege for a heretic? I have peeped into convent chapels abroad, and occasionally caught glimpses of a white veil or black gown; but to see the pious ladies in their own retreat was quite a novelty—much more exciting than the exhibition of Long Horns and Short Horns by which we had to pass on our road to Blackrock.
The three miles’ ride is very pretty. As far as Nature goes, she has done her best for the neighbourhood; and the noble hills on the opposite coast of the river, studded with innumerable pretty villas, and garnished with fine trees and meadows, the river itself dark blue under a brilliant cloudless heaven, and lively with its multiplicity of gay craft, accompany the traveller along the road; except here and there where the view is shut out by fine avenues of trees, a beggarly row of cottages, or a villa wall. Rows of dirty cabins, and smart bankers’ country-houses, meet one at every turn; nor do the latter want for fine names, you may be sure. The Irish grandiloquence displays itself finely in the invention of such; and, to the great inconvenience, I should think, of the postman, the names of the houses appear to change with the tenants: for I saw many old houses with new placards in front, setting forth the last title of the house.
I had the box of the carriage (a smart vehicle that would have done credit to the ring), and found the gentleman by my side very communicative. He named the owners of the pretty mansions and lawns visible on the other side of the river: they appear almost all to be merchants, who have made their fortunes in the city. In the like manner, though the air of the town is extremely fresh and pure to a pair of London lungs, the Cork shopkeeper is not satisfied with it, but contrives for himself a place (with an euphonious name, no doubt) in the suburbs of the city. These stretch to a great extent along the beautiful, liberal-looking banks of the stream.
I asked the man about the Temperance, and whether he was a temperance man? He replied by pulling a medal out of his waistcoat pocket, saying that he always carried it about with him for fear of temptation. He said that he took the pledge two years ago, before which time, as he confessed, he had been a sad sinner in the way of drink. ‘I used to take,’ said he, ‘from eighteen to twenty glasses of whisky a day; I was always at the drink; I’d be often up all night at the public; I was turned away by my present master on account of it;’—and all of a sudden he resolved to break off. I asked him whether he had not at first experienced ill-health from the suddenness of the change in his habits: but he said—and let all persons meditating a conversion from liquor remember the fact—that the abstinence never affected him in the least, but that he went on growing better and better in health every day, stronger and more able of mind and body.
The man was a Catholic, and in speaking of the numerous places of worship along the road as we passed, I’m sorry to confess, dealt some rude cuts with his whip regarding the Protestants. Coachman as he was, the fellow’s remarks seemed to be correct; for it appears that the religious world of Cork is of so excessively enlightened a kind, that one church will not content one pious person; but that, on the contrary, they will be at Church of a morning, at Independent Church of an afternoon, at a Darbyite congregation of an evening, and so on, gathering excitement or information from all sources by which they could come at it. Is not this the case? are not some of the ultra-serious as eager after a new preacher, as the ultra-worldly for a new dancer? don’t they talk and gossip about him as much? Though theology from the coach-box is rather questionable (after all, the man was just as much authorised to propound his notions as many a fellow from an amateur pulpit), yet he certainly had the right here, as far as his charge against certain Protestants went.
The reasoning from it was quite obvious, and I’m sure was in the man’s mind, though he did not utter it, as we drove by this time into the convent gate. ‘Here,’ says coachman, ‘is our church. I don’t drive my master and mistress from church to chapel, from chapel to conventicle, hunting after new preachers every Sabbath. I bring them every Sunday and set them down at the same place, where they know that everything they hear must be right. Their fathers have done the same thing before them; and the young ladies and gentlemen will come here too; and all the new-fangled doctors and teachers may go roaring through the land, and still here we come regularly, not caring a whit for the vagaries of others, knowing that we ourselves are in the real old right original way.’
I am sure this was what the fellow meant by his sneer at the Protestants, and their gadding from one doctrine to another; but there was no call and no time to have a battle with him, as by this time we had entered a large lawn covered with haycocks, and prettily, as I think, ornamented with a border of blossoming potatoes, and drove up to the front door of the convent. It is a huge old square house, with many windows, having probably been some flaunting squire’s residence; but the nuns have taken off somewhat from its rakish look, by flinging out a couple of wings, with chapels, or buildings like chapels, at either end.