They say there are three towns to make one Limerick: there is the Irish town on the Clare side; the English town with its old castle (which has sustained a deal of battering and blows from Danes, from fierce Irish kings, from English warriors who took an interest in the place, Henry Secundians, Elizabethians, Cromwellians, and vice versâ, Jacobites, King Williamites,—and nearly escaped being in the hands of the Robert Emmetites); and finally the district called Newtown-Pery. In walking through this latter tract, you are, at first, half led to believe that you are arrived in a second Liverpool, so tall are the warehouses and broad the quays; so neat and trim a street of near a mile which stretches before you. But even this mile-long street does not, in a few minutes, appear to be so wealthy and prosperous as it shows at first glance; for of the population that throng the streets, two-fifths are barefooted women, and two-fifths more ragged men: and the most part of the shops which have a grand show with them appear, when looked into, to be no better than they should be, being empty makeshift-looking places with their best goods outside.
Here, in this handsome street too, is a handsome club-house, with plenty of idlers, you may be sure, lolling at the portico; likewise you see numerous young officers, with very tight waists and absurd brass shell-epaulettes to their little absurd frock-coats, walking the pavement—the dandies of the street. Then you behold whole troops of pear-, apple-, and plum-women, selling very raw, green-looking fruit, which, indeed, it is a wonder that any one should eat and live. The houses are bright red—the street is full and gay, carriages and cars in plenty go jingling by—dragoons in red are every now and then clattering up the street; and as upon every car which passes with ladies in it you are sure (I don’t know how it is) to see a pretty one, the great street of Limerick is altogether a very brilliant and animated sight.
If the ladies of the place are pretty, indeed, the vulgar are scarcely less so. I never saw a greater number of kind, pleasing, clever-looking faces among any set of people. There seem, however, to be two sorts of physiognomies which are common; the pleasing and somewhat melancholy one before mentioned, and a square, high-cheeked, flat-nosed physiognomy not uncommonly accompanied by a hideous staring head of dry, red hair. Except, however, in the latter case, the hair flowing loose and long is a pretty characteristic of the women of the country; many a fair one do you see at the door of the cabin, or the poor shop in the town, combing complacently that ‘greatest ornament of female beauty,’ as Mr. Rowland justly calls it.
The generality of the women here seem also much better clothed than in Kerry; and I saw many a one going barefoot whose gown was nevertheless a good one, and whose cloak was of fine cloth. Likewise it must be remarked that the beggars in Limerick were by no means so numerous as those in Cork, or in many small places through which I have passed. There were but five, strange to say, round the mail-coach as we went away; and, indeed, not a great number in the streets.
The belles-lettres seem to be by no means so well cultivated here as in Cork. I looked in vain for a Limerick guide-book: I saw but one good shop of books, and a little trumpery circulating library, which seemed to be provided with those immortal works of a year old, which, having been sold for half a guinea the volume at first, are suddenly found to be worth only a shilling. Among these, let me mention, with perfect resignation to the decrees of fate, the works of one Titmarsh: they were rather smartly bound by an enterprising publisher, and I looked at them in Bishop Murphy’s library at Cork, in a bookshop in the remote little town of Ennis, and elsewhere, with a melancholy tenderness. Poor flowerets of a season! (and a very short season too), let me be allowed to salute your scattered leaves with a passing sigh!... Besides the bookshops, I observed in the long, best street of Limerick a half-dozen of what are called French shops, with nick-nacks, German-silver chimney ornaments, and paltry finery. In the windows of these you saw a card with ‘Cigars’; in the bookshop, ‘Cigars’; at the grocer’s, the whisky-shop, ‘Cigars’: everybody sells the noxious weed, or makes believe to sell it, and I know no surer indication of a struggling, uncertain trade than that same placard of ‘Cigars.’ I went to buy some of the pretty Limerick gloves (they are chiefly made, as I have since discovered, at Cork). I think the man who sold them had a patent from the Queen, or his Excellency, or both, in his window: but, seeing a friend pass just as I entered the shop, he brushed past, and held his friend in conversation for some minutes in the street,—about the Killarney races, no doubt, or the fun going on at Kilkee. I might have swept away a bagful of walnut-shells containing the flimsy gloves; but instead walked out, making him a low bow, and saying I would call next week. He said, wouldn’t I wait? and resumed his conversation; and, no doubt, by this way of doing business, is making a handsome independence. I asked one of the ten thousand fruit-women the price of her green pears. ‘Twopence apiece,’ she said; and there were two little ragged beggars standing by, who were munching the fruit. A bookshop-woman made me pay threepence for a bottle of ink which usually costs a penny; a potato-woman told me that her potatoes cost fourteenpence a stone; and all these ladies treated the stranger with a leering, wheedling servility, which made me long to box their ears, were it not that the man who lays his hand upon a woman is an——, etc., whom ‘twere gross flattery to call a what-d’ye-call-‘em. By the way, the man who played Duke Aranza at Cork delivered the celebrated claptrap above alluded to as follows:—
‘The man who lays his hand upon a woman,
Save in the way of kindness, is a villain,
Whom ‘twere a gross piece of flattery to call a coward;’
and looked round calmly for the applause, which deservedly followed his new reading of the passage.
To return to the apple-women;—legions of ladies were employed through the town upon that traffic; there were really thousands of them, clustering upon the bridges, squatting down in doorways and vacant sheds for temporary markets, marching and crying their sour goods in all the crowded lanes of the city. After you get out of the main street the handsome part of the town is at an end, and you suddenly find yourself in such a labyrinth of busy swarming poverty and squalid commerce as never was seen—no, not in St. Giles’s, where Jew and Irishman side by side exhibit their genius for dirt. Here every house almost was a half ruin, and swarming with people; in the cellars you looked down and saw a barrel of herrings, which a merchant was dispensing; or a sack of meal, which a poor dirty woman sold to people poorer and dirtier than herself: above was a tinman, or a shoemaker, or other craftsman, his battered ensign at the door, and his small wares peering through the cracked panes of his shop. As for the ensign, as a matter of course, the name is never written in letters of the same size. You read—
