ern rain is delighted to pause and consider a strange face, whilst giving his opinion, usually wrong, upon the coming weather. In truth, the middle class in England is stupid, and the Irish peasants are clever, for a narrow education is worse than none at all. The English workman is no fool, but often sulky and brutal, and intensely suspicious of strangers; our country people are quite untrustworthy, with no sense of duty towards their neighbors, but ever so much pleasanter companions. When chance gives them the means they drink long and gaily, having the power of swallowing the very worst whisky with appreciation and gratitude, whilst they continue to remember and venerate the name of Father Mathew. When the statue of the temperance apostle was unveiled in Dublin some years ago, crowds of people came up from the country to show their loving memory of his work; there were countless bands and banners, unlimited enthusiasm. The Dublin shops closed to show that they also were in sympathy, and, after the ceremony, strangers and citizens had to appease their hunger and thirst at the public-houses. The orgy in Dublin streets that night must have made Father Mathew in heaven wish he had never lived and preached. At any rate, nobody in the country districts need ever fear being harmed or insulted by a drunken man on a fairday or a Saturday afternoon, because, although such a person is perfectly ready to fight the whole world, he only attacks foemen worthy of his steel, honest men who look at things in the same light as he does himself, and never make unpleasantness. The worst class of men in Ireland, the squireens, is almost extinct; there is no room for the men with a little land and less education, who thought themselves above the common farmer, were loud and dirty, and lived only for horses and whisky. The bad times were at least

as bad for the lean as the fat, and the squireens went under.

The Sundays would prove best to the strange Englishman that he is in a foreign country and knows nothing about Ireland. He will go to church on Sunday morning, at the usual time to the usual bell, and will find the building, as he thinks, empty, although, in fact, the vicar cannot count an absentee. He forgets that he is no longer on the side of the big battalions, whither Providence has so plainly called him. For the Protestants in the South of Ireland are singing the songs of Zion in a strange land. They have brought their own gods with them, as superior as everything else made in England; but the unfathomable, irresponsible Celt refuses to have anything to do with them. Those architects who built our churches had no insight into the future, or they would not have built for hundreds where ten would come. Henry VIII might fluctuate with every wind of doctrine, and Cromwell prove how sharp was the sword of the Lord and his earthly saints, but the Irish preferred the heavenly saints whom they knew. All that was needed to make Ireland the most loving daughter of the Mother Church was the separation order from England; mother and daugh ter were but drawn closer together by the brute arbitrament of war. Hence it is that an Irish rector is well content if he sees fifty worshippers in a building made to hold five hundred, and counts the regular communicants on the fingers of one hand. He is not overworked on weekdays, nor knows anything of the eating cares that beset the incumbent of an English parish. Work out of church hardly exists for him. Disestablishment has rendered him certain of a moderate income, however feeble his intellect may be, at the same time as it removed all inducement for clever men to enter the church. As living is cheap in the country, he marries

and has many children. But it is a lonely life for him and his wife; there are not over half a dozen families they can visit and receive, and he must wish, idle man though he be, that he could change his little colony for the thousands over whom the priest exercises patriarchal sway.

A man accustomed to live in English towns, where the lower classes have no religion, is amazed at the manner in which the Roman Catholic fold brings in all its sheep. None remain outside the door, because none dare face the pains and penalties. Partly by promises, partly by threats, most of all by performance, this Church holds rich and poor alike; it can punish and reward with eternal penalties and eternal gifts; it is the greatest power below the sky, and uses its strength unmercifully. On Sunday mornings the little groups coming from the Protestant Church, all of them well dressed and comfortable, as becomes the members of an English garrison, often meet the broad wave of frieze and corduroy coming from the Catholic Church, and are filled with a feeling of pride; they are the elect, these the Gentiles; many are called, but they are the few chosen. Some pious alien in the past has built a Presbyterian church and manse; very possibly he was one of Cromwell's settlers. lt is reported that the congregation numbers four; these four must be on a pinnacle of spiritual pride. The Sunday afternoons in winter must seem to the Presbyterians utter abomination. One can hardly say that the well-known horrors of a "Continental Sunday" flourish in the rural districts of Munster, but the people are obviously unsworn to the Solemn League and Covenant. The air is full of shouts from an upland field, where the wild lads are playing a wild game called Gaelic football, which Ireland invented of her own special grace and mere motion. In this game you can play at Rugby or Asso

ciation according to the exigencies of the moment; rules are unworthy of a free people, or one striving to be free. The full teams are rarely playing at the same moment, as couples are wont to retire for a few moments and settle differences while they are fresh. If the spectators are numerous, faction fights are apt to occur, as in the electrical atmosphere feuds eighty years old sometimes recur to the mind. Gruesome stories will be told you, if you like to listen, of matches in which three or four men were fairly killed, and comfortably buried, without the coroner or any other foreign official being informed. But there are no other forms of Sunday amusements which might provoke Sabbatarian censure, unless poaching be an exception, and that is an ordinary, everyday pursuit, whenever time can be made for it. You may easily meet in the afternoon a band of youths and dogs, carrying openly down the roads three or four rabbits or hares. The passers by will regard them with a benevolent smile, unless he happens to be a brutal oppressor of the poor, whose game-preserving soul is wrung by the sight. These simple sports are all that exist in the country; cricket is practically unknown, and all the summer a deep peace broods over the long grasses and pasture fields.

It is plain that a professional man who has to begin a full day's work every morning can enjoy life in these dumb, inert, little Irish towns; but what of the wives and daughters? Their lives resemble that shadowy ex istence in Hades with which Achilles frightened generation after generation of the Greeks. They might maintain that it is better to be a kitchenmaid in cities, in a poor man's house who has little to eat, than to reign a local queen. For these poor women are not even in the country; they have much of the noise and smells of town; and are yet almost lonely among two or three thou

sand men and women. The Protestant rector, the doctor, the banker, make up the whole middle class, and these victims of isolation usually quarrel among themselves. Their women are debarred from their proper occupation of visiting the poor and tending the sick, there are no matins and evensong to attend, and they have to fail back on themselves. Certain pastimes are in vogue from time to time. At present hockey and golf lighten the weary path, lawn-tennis being quite out of fashion, only to be tolerated in remote country gardens, whose owners have not learnt that tennis-courts ought to become croquet lawns. Hockey, unhappily, can only be played in populous places; it is very difficult to get together twentytwo people who may endure each other as regards social position and religion. Golf is very popular, but lack of pence prevents most links being used in summer, as it would cost too much to keep the grass cut. Salvation has to be sought in the bicycle, and when the gains of the nineteenth century are finally weighed this will be found the greatest. All boys and girls ride in Ireland, because an intermediate system of education casts money broadcast through the schools, most of which finds its way to the cycle manufacturers. If the resident magistrate rides a bicycle all is well, for then the footpaths are open; but the road contractors are anti-cyclists, and do their best to keep them from being profaned by anything more modern than the ass and cart. The lack of social pastimes nowadays, when two or three are gathered together, is distressing.

What delightful games our ancestors seem to have known! We are too selfconscious, it appears, to play at them, but our maidens might, at least, try to revive them as weapons of offence. Perhaps some of them are too innocent for the nineteenth century, and some are not innocent enough. Yet the Irish

girls might be helped in the capture of a subaltern, their legitimate prey from time immemorial, by "Barley-break, or last in hell," by "Draw-gloves," or "Fox i' the hole." What game was it to which Herrick invited Lucia? "At stool-ball, Lucia, let us play." It is worth noting that Chapman, in his translation of the "Odyssey" makes Nausicaa and her maidens play at "stool-ball." There could not be a better precedent. At any rate, there is little good in people meeting to say, "Nous nous ennuyerons ensemble." The sons and brothers are, of course, in Dublin, crowding into the overcrowded professions; the girls stay at home unless weariness drives them to be nurses. There would be a great difference if they had the priceless distraction which English girls enjoy-that of doing good to ungrateful families. But the broadchested, bandy-legged Catholic priest allows no poaching in his covers. He, to be sure, is in no lack of society, and goes nowhere except where he takes unquestioned the highest seat. His despotic power does no harm to his subjects, and goes far to ruin the man himself. Some score of years ago there had been a family conference to determine whether Tim should be a ploughman or a priest, and when the cloth carried it over the corduroys his family put their shoulders to the wheel, so that after a weary waiting they received the patent of nobility. For, as at Rome a family took place among the aristocracy if an ancestor had held curule honors, in Ireland the neighbors look reverently on the cabin that has reared a priest. They justly hold that it is no small thing to have the keys of heaven, to open and shut the door of immortal life on one's fellow-men. is by no means so good for the priest himself, who is in danger of succumbing to ecclesiastical arrogance founded on the paltriest education. Englishmen brought up as peasants, taught at

It

Maynooth, and entrusted with such powers, would be always unendurable; the Irish priest is not always an impossible person. Still, one would prefer not to be the national schoolmaster under him.

We have a railway running through the town, a line more than sixty miles long, which serves a rich country of deep pasture, whence long trains full of bullocks are always being shunted up and down under loud protest. At each extremity of the line are two large cities. The unpunctuality of its trains hurts no one and irritates no one; time is long and cheap in Ireland. Perhaps the "Celtic melancholy," about which so much is said, sees clearly that man, brief man, is ridiculous if he lashes himself to fury because he must wait a few minutes breathing God's good air at a country station. Modern methods have so far prevailed upon our altruistic company-that it labors not for its own selfish interests the share lists show-as to bring excursion trains to the Sunday football matches. As soon as the match is ended the train draws up into the station and stays there; somebody on the engine blows its steam whistle loudly to remind the passengers that they are but sojourners, and have no abiding-place in Cullagh

more.

One would think the precaution unnecessary, for these lucky folk, enviously regarded by the townspeople, are asserting ostentatiously in all the public-houses that they are travellers, bona-fide travellers. The train slowly fills; those that have come betimes sit down and wait a couple of hours with not an unkind thought towards guard or station-master; when the police are of opinion that all are safely gathered in, the whistling ceases and our visitors depart. Four or five miles away the up trains stop at a little station to give in their tale of tickets before reaching a junction. On occasions a

train has arrived late, so that when in the station

Sweetly over the village the bell of the Angelus sounded.

It is said that on the instant ticket-collector, guard, and porter retire to their devotions, the passengers waiting patiently, unless they be "black Presbyterians" or Englishmen. It is part of our new Imperialistic creed to believe that the railway does away with the old-world obstacles and progress; the Soudan will take to studying English literature and science as soon as the iron horse supersedes the camel. Ireland is one of those despised nations, "half sullen and half wild," who would above all things be left to themselves. The people are gentle and cheerful; they have ever had the strangest power of winning over the stranger, but they will neither worry nor be worried. The past stands side by side with the present; it is not a palimpsest to be laboriously deciphered. Two miles to our east the railroad runs directly over a holy well. At the side of the embankment is a round pool, black and forbidding, fed by a never-failing spring; here where the trains thunder by to catch the packet-boat for England, the country people drink of the sacred water, and pray for release from their afflictions. When going away they hang their bandages, sad, fluttering rags, on the tree beside the well. Perhaps it may be likened to the tree Ygdrasil, with root fixed in heaven, or to some it may appear like to that whose timetossed branches Æneas saw in the porch of Avernus:

Ulmus ораса, igens, quam sedem
Somnia volgo
Vana tenere ferunt, foliisque sub omni-
bus haerent.

There would have been no railways in "Ireland for the Irish," but they are

cheerfully accepted as part of an imperfect scheme of existence. A journey to any place has the merit of giving an excuse for merry-making, and softskinned and thin-skinned folk have to travel first or second class. There are many skinfuls of whisky in the thirdclass carriages, and indeed a man needs something to cheer him when seated on a narrow, cushionless ledge against a hard, wooden wall. The Englishman, by perseverance, has made the railway companies see to his comfort; we never persist in making ourselves unpleasant. No magistrates outside this country would have been so rightminded as those who refused to punish a farmer for pitching out of window a man who objected to smoking, and gaily proceeded to fine the complainant for leaving a train when in motion.

Generation after generation of English people have considered Ireland as a necessary evil, a thorn in the flesh, inserted by Providence for its own good ends. The very bagmen at the country hotels feel and show that it is an inferior country to which they are selling superior articles. It would be interesting to trace the feeling with which Ireland is mentioned in English literature before the present century. The burden of complaint, the "Quousque tandem, Catilina, abutere patientia nostra?" may be noticed through the Elizabethan dramatists, though, indeed, Shakespeare is more generous. His honest insular hatred spent itself on the French and weasel Scots; his love was Cornhill Magazine.

for Italy, and to Ireland he gave neither

praise nor blame. Yet we feel, especially we who live in the South, that there is no man in England, unless he be an umbrella-maker or waterproofmaker, but has reason every week to thank a careful heaven that placed Ireland to defend England from the Atlantic. It is a national boast with Englishmen that in their climate a man can spend more days out of doors than anywhere else. They are blind to the reason. In this matter, as in some others, Ireland is England's whippingboy. Were not this deluged island at hand to take the moisture out of the Atlantic rain-clouds, England would be drenched with rain. The farmers would have even more pessimistic ideas on the advantage of sowing wheat, and cricket would not be the national game. Cricketers feel a little anxiety for the morrow's game when they read in the evening paper that the barometer is falling fast at Valentia; but on that morrow most of Ireland will be blotted out by the dark rain, and farmers, athletes, sportsmen, foiled once again. Only so much rain as Munster, Connaught, and Leinster cannot manage between them-and their capacity is enormous and sorely tried-will pass on to England, the spoilt darling of fortune. Observe how cunningly Ireland is placed at right angles to the path of the wet southwesters-she protects England like an umbrella held to front the wind.

Ernest Ensor.

Frederick Langbridge.