‘“Will it please ye walk to the roof of the old castle and see the beam on which the lords of the place execute the refractory?” “Nay, marry,” say you, “by my spurs of knighthood, I have seen hanging enough in merry England, and care not to see the gibbets of Irish kernes.” The harper would have taken fire at this speech reflecting on his country; but luckily here Gulph, your English squire, entered from the pantler (with whom he had been holding a parley), and brought a manchet of bread, and bade ye, in the Lord De Clare’s name, crush a cup of Ypocras, well spiced, pardi, and by the fair hands of the Lady Adela.
‘“The Lady Adela!” say you, starting up in amaze. “Is not this the year of grace 1600, and lived she not three hundred years syne?”
‘“Yes, Sir Knight, but Bunratty tower hath another lily: will it please you see your chamber?”
‘So saying, the seneschal leads you up a winding stair in one of the turrets, past one little dark chamber and another, without a fireplace, without rushes (how different from the stately houses of Nonsuch or Audley End!), and, leading you through another vast chamber above the baronial hall, similar in size, but decorated with tapestries and rude carvings, you pass the little chapel (“Marry,” says the steward, “many would it not hold, and many do not come!”), until at last you are located in the little cell appropriated to you. Some rude attempts have been made to render it fitting for the stranger; but, though more neatly arranged than the hundred other little chambers which the castle contains, in sooth ‘tis scarce fitted for the serving-man, much more for Sir Reginald, the English knight.
‘While you are looking at a bouquet of flowers, which lies on the settle—magnolias, geraniums, the blue flowers of the cactus, and in the midst of the bouquet, one lily; whilst you wonder whose fair hands could have culled the flowers—hark! the horns are blowing at the drawbridge and the warder lets the portcullis down. You rush to your window, a stalwart knight rides over the gate, the hoofs of his black courser clanging upon the planks. A host of wild retainers wait round about him: see, four of them carry a stag, that hath been slain, no doubt, in the aboriginal forest of Carclow. By my fay! (say you), ‘tis a stag of ten.
‘But who is that yonder on the grey palfrey, conversing so prettily, and holding the sportive animal with so light a rein?—a light green riding-habit and ruff, a little hat with a green plume—sure it must be a lady, and a fair one. She looks up. O blessed Mother of Heaven, that look! those eyes that smile, those sunny golden ringlets! It is—it is the Lady Adela: the lily of Bunrat——’
If the reader cannot finish the other two volumes for him or herself, he or she never deserves to have a novel from a circulating library again; for my part, I will take my affidavit the English knight will marry the Lily at the end of the third volume, having previously slain the other suitor at one of the multifarious sieges of Limerick. And I beg to say that the historical part of this romance has been extracted carefully from the Guide-book: the topographical and descriptive portion being studied on the spot. A policeman shows you over it, halls, chapels, galleries, gibbets, and all. The huge old tower was, until late years, inhabited by the family of the proprietor, who built himself a house in the midst of it: but he has since built another in the park opposite, and half a dozen ‘peelers,’ with a commodity of wives and children, now inhabit Bunratty. On the gate where we entered were numerous placards offering rewards for the apprehension of various country offenders; and a turnpike, a bridge, and a quay have sprung up from the place which Red Redmond (or anybody else) burned.
On our road to Galway the next day, we were carried once more by the old tower, and for a considerable distance along the fertile banks of the Fergus lake, and a river which pours itself into the Shannon. The first town we came to is Castle Clare, which lies conveniently on the river, with a castle, a good bridge, and many quays and warehouses, near which a small ship or two were lying. The place was once the chief town of the county, but is wretched and ruinous now, being made up for the most part of miserable thatched cots, round which you see the usual dusky population. The drive hence to Ennis lies through a country which is by no means so pleasant as that rich one we have passed through, being succeeded ‘by that craggy, bleak, pastoral district which occupies so large a portion of the limestone district of Clare.’ Ennis, likewise, stands upon the Fergus—a busy little narrow-streeted, foreign-looking town, approached by half a mile of thatched cots, in which I am not ashamed to confess that I saw some as pretty faces as over any half-mile of country I ever travelled in my life.
A great light of the Catholic church, who was of late a candlestick in our own communion, was on the coach with us, reading devoutly out of a breviary, on many occasions, along the road. A crowd of black coats and heads, with that indescribable look which belongs to the Catholic clergy, were evidently on the look-out for the coach; and as it stopped one of them came up to me with a low bow, and asked if I was the Honourable and Reverend Mr. S——? How I wish I had answered him I was! It would have been a grand scene. The respect paid to this gentleman’s descent is quite absurd—the papers bandy his title about with pleased emphasis—the Galway paper calls him the very Reverend. There is something in the love for rank almost childish: witness the adoration of George IV.; the pompous joy with which John Tuam records his correspondence with a great man; the continual my-lording of the Bishops, the Right-Honourabling of Mr. O’Connell—which title his party-papers delight on all occasions to give him—nay, the delight of that great man himself when first he attained the dignity; he figured in his robes in the most good-humoured simple delight at having them, and went to church forthwith in them, as if such a man wanted a title before his name!