The stranger cannot fail to be struck (and haply a little frightened) by the great number of meeting-houses that decorate the town, and give evidence of great sermonising on Sundays. These buildings do not affect the Gothic, like many of the meagre edifices of the Established and the Roman Catholic churches, but have a physiognomy of their own—a thick-set citizen look. Porticos have they, to be sure, and ornaments Doric, Ionic, and what not; but the meeting-house peeps through all these classical friezes and entablatures; and though one reads of ‘imitations of the Ionic Temple of Ilissus, near Athens,’ the classic temple is made to assume a bluff, downright, Presbyterian air, which would astonish the original builder, doubtless. The churches of the Establishment are handsome and stately;—the Catholics are building a brick cathedral, no doubt of the Tudor style. The present chapel, flanked by the National Schools, is an exceedingly unprepossessing building of the Strawberry Hill or Castle of Otranto Gothic; the keys and mitre figuring in the centre—‘The cross-keys and night-cap,’ as a hard-hearted Presbyterian called them to me, with his blunt humour.
The three churches are here pretty equally balanced—Presbyterians 25,000, Catholics 20,000, Episcopalians 17,000. Each party has two or more newspaper organs; and the wars between them are dire and unceasing, as the reader may imagine. For whereas, in other parts of Ireland where Catholics and Episcopalians prevail, and the Presbyterian body is too small, each party has but one opponent to belabour; here, the Ulster politician, whatever may be his way of thinking, has the great advantage of possessing two enemies on whom he may exercise his eloquence; and in this triangular duel all do their duty nobly. Then there are subdivisions of hostility. For the Church there is a High Church and a Low Church journal; for the Liberals there is a Repeal journal and a No-repeal journal. For the Presbyterians there are yet more varieties of journalist opinion, of which it does not become a stranger to pass a judgment. If the Northern Whig says that the Banner of Ulster ‘is a polluted rag, which has hoisted the red banner of falsehood’ (which elegant words may be found in the first-named journal of the 13th October), let us be sure the Banner has a compliment for the Northern Whig in return; if the Repeal Vindicator and the priests attack the Presbyterian journals and the Home Missions, the reverend gentlemen of Geneva are quite as ready with the pen as their brethren of Rome, and not much more scrupulous in their language than the laity. When I was in Belfast, violent disputes were raging between Presbyterian and Episcopalian Conservatives with regard to the Marriage Bill; between Presbyterians and Catholics on the subject of the Home Missions; between the Liberals and Conservatives, of course. ‘Thank God,’ for instance, writes a Repeal journal, ‘that the honour and power of Ireland are not involved in the disgraceful Afghan war!’—a sentiment insinuating Repeal and something more; disowning, not merely this or that ministry, but the sovereign and her jurisdiction altogether. But details of these quarrels, religious or political, can tend to edify but few readers out of the country. Even in it, as there are some nine shades of politico-religious differences, an observer pretending to impartiality must necessarily displease eight parties, and almost certainly the whole nine; and the reader who desires to judge the politics of Belfast must study for himself. Nine journals, publishing four hundred numbers in a year, each number containing about as much as an octavo volume: these, and the back numbers of former years, sedulously read, will give the student a notion of the subject in question. And then, after having read the statements on either side, he must ascertain the truth of them, by which time more labour of the same kind will have grown upon him, and he will have attained a good old age.
Amongst the poor, the Catholics and Presbyterians are said to go in a pretty friendly manner to the National Schools; but among the Presbyterians themselves it appears there are great differences and quarrels, by which a fine institution, the Belfast Academy, seems to have suffered considerably. It is almost the only building in this large and substantial place that bears, to the stranger’s eye, an unprosperous air. A vast building, standing fairly in the midst of a handsome green and place, and with snug, comfortable red-brick streets stretching away at neat right angles all around, the Presbyterian College looks handsome enough at a short distance, but on a nearer view is found in a woful state of dilapidation. It does not possess the supreme dirt and filth of Maynooth—that can but belong to one place, even in Ireland; but the building is in a dismal state of unrepair, steps and windows broken, doors and stairs battered. Of scholars I saw but a few, and these were in the drawing academy. The fine arts do not appear as yet to flourish in Belfast. The models from which the lads were copying were not good: one was copying a bad copy of a drawing by Prout; one was colouring a print. The ragged children in a German National School have better models before them, and are made acquainted with truer principles of art and beauty.
Hard by is the Belfast Museum, where an exhibition of pictures was in preparation, under the patronage of the Belfast Art Union. Artists in all parts of the kingdom had been invited to send their works, of which the Union pays the carriage; and the porters and secretary were busy unpacking cases, in which I recognised some of the works which had before figured on the walls of the London Exhibition rooms.
The book-shops which I saw in this thriving town said much for the religions disposition of the Belfast public: there were numerous portraits of reverend gentlemen, and their works of every variety:—The Sinners’ Friend, The Watchman on the Tower, The Peep of Day, Sermons delivered at Bethesda Chapel, by so-and-so; with hundreds of the neat little gilt books with bad prints, scriptural titles, and gilt edges, that came from one or two serious publishing houses in London, and in considerable numbers from the neighbouring Scotch shores. As for the Theatre, with such a public the drama can be expected to find but little favour; and the gentleman who accompanied me in my walk, and to whom I am indebted for many kindnesses during my stay, said not only that he had never been in the playhouse, but that he never heard of any one going thither. I found out the place where the poor neglected dramatic Muse of Ulster hid herself; and was of a party of six in the boxes, the benches of the pit being dotted over with about a score more. Well, it was a comfort to see that the gallery was quite full, and exceedingly happy and noisy: they stamped, and stormed, and shouted, and clapped, in a way that was pleasant to hear. One young god, between the acts, favoured the public with a song—extremely ill sung, certainly, but the intention was everything; and his brethren above stamped in chorus with roars of delight.
As for the piece performed, it was a good old melodrama of the British sort, inculcating a thorough detestation of vice and a warm sympathy with suffering virtue. The serious are surely too hard upon poor playgoers. We never for a moment allow rascality to triumph beyond a certain part of the third act; we sympathise with the woes of young lovers—her in ringlets and a Polish cap, him in tights and a Vandyke collar; we abhor avarice or tyranny in the person of ‘the first old man’ with the white wig and red stockings, or of the villain with the roaring voice and black whiskers; we applaud the honest wag (he is a good fellow in spite of his cowardice) in his hearty jests at the tyrant before mentioned; and feel a kindly sympathy with all mankind as the curtain falls over all the characters in a group, of which successful love is the happy centre. Reverend gentlemen in meeting-house and church, who shout against the immoralities of this poor stage, and threaten all playgoers with the fate which is awarded to unsuccessful plays, should try and bear less hardly upon us.
An artist, who, in spite of the Art Union, can scarcely, I should think, flourish in a place that seems devoted to preaching, politics, and trade, has somehow found his way to this humble little theatre, and decorated it with some exceedingly pretty scenery—almost the only indication of a taste for the fine arts which I have found as yet in the country.
A fine night-exhibition in the town is that of the huge spinning-mills which surround it, and of which the thousand windows are lighted up at nightfall, and may be seen from almost all quarters of the city.
A gentleman to whom I had brought an introduction good-naturedly left his work to walk with me to one of these mills, and stated by whom he had been introduced to me to the mill-proprietor, Mr. Mulholland. ‘That recommendation,’ said Mr. Mulholland gallantly, ‘is welcome anywhere.’ It was from my kind friend Mr. Lever. What a privilege some men have, who can sit quietly in their studies and make friends all the world over!
Here is the figure of a girl sketched in the place; there are nearly five hundred girls employed in it. They work in huge long chambers, lighted by numbers of windows, hot with steam, buzzing and humming with hundreds of thousands of whirling wheels, that all take their motion from a steam-engine which lives apart in a hot cast-iron temple of its own, from which it communicates with the innumerable machines that the five hundred girls preside over. They have seemingly but to take away the work when done—the enormous monster in the cast-iron room does it all. He cards the flax, and combs it, and spins it, and beats it, and twists it; the five hundred girls stand by to feed him, or take the material from him, when he has had his will of it. There is something frightful in the vastness as in the minuteness of this power. Every thread writhes and twirls as the steam-fate orders it,—every thread, of which it would take a hundred to make the thickness of a hair.
I have seldom, I think, seen more good looks than amongst the young women employed in this place. They work for twelve hours daily, in rooms of which the heat is intolerable to a stranger; but in spite of it they looked gay, stout, and healthy; nor were their forms much concealed by the very simple clothes they wear while in the mill.
The stranger will be struck by the good looks not only of these spinsters, but of almost all the young women in the streets. I never saw a town where so many women are to be met—so many and so pretty—with and without bonnets, with good figures, in neat homely shawls and dresses. The grisettes of Belfast are among the handsomest ornaments of it; and as good, no doubt, and irreproachable in morals as their sisters in the rest of Ireland.
Many of the merchants’ counting-houses are crowded in little old-fashioned ‘entries,’ or courts, such as one sees about the Bank in London. In and about these, and in the principal streets in the daytime, is a great activity, and homely unpretending bustle. The men have a business look too, and one sees very few flaunting dandies, as in Dublin. The shopkeepers do not brag upon their signboards, or keep ‘emporiums,’ as elsewhere,—their places of business being for the most part homely; though one may see some splendid shops, which are not to be surpassed by London. The docks and quays are busy with their craft and shipping, upon the beautiful borders of the Lough;—the large red warehouses stretching along the shores, with ships loading, or unloading, or building, hammers clanging, pitch-pots flaming and boiling, seamen cheering in the ships, or lolling lazily on the shore. The life and movement of a port here give the stranger plenty to admire and observe. And nature has likewise done everything for the place—surrounding it with picturesque hills and water;—for which latter I must confess I was not very sorry to leave the town behind me, and its mills, and its meeting-houses, and its commerce, and its theologians, and its politicians.
THE Lough of Belfast has a reputation for beauty almost as great as that of the Bay of Dublin; but though, on the day I left Belfast for Larne, the morning was fine, and the sky clear and blue above, an envious mist lay on the water, which hid all its beauties from the dozen of passengers on the Larne coach. All we could see were ghostly-looking silhouettes of ships gliding here and there through the clouds; and I am sure the coachman’s remark was quite correct, that it was a pity the day was so misty. I found myself, before I was aware, entrapped into a theological controversy with two grave gentlemen outside the coach—another fog, which did not subside much before we reached Carrickfergus. The road from the Ulster capital to that little town seemed meanwhile to be extremely lively; cars and omnibuses passed thickly peopled. For some miles along the road is a string of handsome country-houses, belonging to the rich citizens of the town; and we passed by neat-looking churches and chapels, factories and rows of cottages clustered round them, like villages of old at the foot of feudal castles. Furthermore it was hard to see, for the mist which lay on the water had enveloped the mountains too, and we only had a glimpse or two of smiling comfortable fields and gardens.
Carrickfergus rejoices in a real romantic-looking castle jutting bravely into the sea, and famous as a background for a picture. It is of use for little else now, luckily, nor has it been put to any real warlike purposes since the day when honest Thurot stormed, took, and evacuated it. Let any romancer who is in want of a hero peruse the second volume, or it may be the third, of the Annual Register, where the adventures of that gallant fellow are related. He was a gentleman, a genius, and, to crown all, a smuggler. He lived for some time in Ireland, and in England, in disguise; he had love-passages and romantic adventures; he landed a body of his countrymen on these shores, and died in the third volume, after a battle gallantly fought on both sides, but in which victory rested with the British arms. What can a novelist want more? William III. also landed here; and as for the rest, ‘M’Skimin, the accurate and laborious historian of the town, informs us that the founding of the castle is lost in the depths of antiquity.’ It is pleasant to give a little historic glance at a place as one passes through. The above facts may be relied on as coming from Messrs. Curry’s excellent new Guide-book, with the exception of the history of Mons. Thurot, which is ‘private information,’ drawn years ago from the scarce work previously mentioned. By the way, another excellent companion to the traveller in Ireland is the collection of the Irish Penny Magazine, which may be purchased for a guinea, and contains a mass of information regarding the customs and places of the country. Willis’s work is amusing, as everything is, written by that lively author, and the engravings accompanying it as unfaithful as any ever made.
Meanwhile, asking pardon for this double digression, which has been made while the guard-coachman is delivering his mail-bags—while the landlady stands looking on in the sun, her hands folded a little below the waist—while a company of tall burly troops from the castle has passed by, ‘surrounded’ by a very mean, mealy-faced, uneasy-looking little subaltern—while the poor, epileptic idiot of the town, wallowing and grinning in the road, and snorting out supplications for a halfpenny, has tottered away in possession of the coin;—meanwhile, fresh horses are brought out, and the small boy who acts behind the coach, makes an unequal and disagreeable tootooing on a horn kept to warn sleepy carmen and celebrate triumphal entries into and exits from cities. As the mist clears up, the country shows round about wild but friendly; at one place we passed a village where a crowd of well-dressed people were collected at an auction of farm-furniture, and many more figures might be seen coming over the fields and issuing from the mist. The owner of the carts and machines is going to emigrate to America. Presently we come to the demesne of Red Hall, ‘through which is a pretty drive of upwards of a mile in length: it contains a rocky glen, the bed of a mountain stream—which is perfectly dry, except in winter—and the woods about it are picturesque, and it is occasionally the resort of summer-parties of pleasure.’ Nothing can be more just than the first part of the description, and there is very little doubt that the latter paragraph is equally faithful;—with which we come to Larne, a ‘most thriving town,’ the same authority says, but a most dirty and narrow-streeted and ill-built one. Some of the houses reminded one of the south, as thus—
A benevolent fellow-passenger said that the window was ‘a convanience’; and here, after a drive of nineteen miles upon a comfortable coach, we were transferred with the mail-bags to a comfortable car that makes the journey to Ballycastle. There is no harm in saying that there was a very pretty smiling buxom young lass for a travelling companion; and somehow, to a lonely person, the landscape always looks prettier in such society. The ‘Antrim coast road,’ which we now, after a few miles, begin to follow, besides being one of the most noble and gallant works of art that is to be seen in any country, is likewise a route highly picturesque and romantic; the sea spreading wide before the spectator’s eyes upon one side of the route;—the tall cliffs of limestone rising abruptly above him on the other. There are in the map of Curry’s Guide-book points indicating castle and abbey ruins in the vicinity of Glenarm; and the little place looked so comfortable as we abruptly came upon it round a rock, that I was glad to have an excuse for staying, and felt an extreme curiosity with regard to the abbey and the castle.
The abbey only exists in the unromantic shape of a wall; the castle, however, far from being a ruin, is an antique in the most complete order—an old castle repaired so as to look like new, and increased by modern wings, towers, gables, and terraces, so extremely old that the whole forms a grand and imposing-looking baronial edifice, towering above the little town which it seems to protect, and with which it is connected by a bridge and a severe-looking armed tower and gate. In the town is a town-house, with a campanile in the Italian taste, and a school or chapel opposite, in the Early English; so that the inhabitants can enjoy a considerable architectural variety. A grave-looking church, with a beautiful steeple, stands amid some trees hard by a second handsome bridge and the little quay; and here, too, was perched a poor little wandering theatre (gallery 1d., pit 2d.), and proposing that night to play ‘Bombastes Furioso, and the Comic Bally of Glenarm in an Uproar.’ I heard the thumping of the drum in the evening; but, as at Roundwood, nobody patronised the poor players: at nine o’clock there was not a single taper lighted under their awning, and my heart (perhaps it is too susceptible) bled for Fusbos.
The severe gate of the castle was opened by a kind, good-natured old porteress, instead of a rough gallowglass with a battle-axe and yellow shirt (more fitting guardian of so stern a postern), and the old dame insisted upon my making an application to see the grounds of the castle, which request was very kindly granted, and afforded a delightful half-hour’s walk. The grounds are beautiful, and excellently kept; the trees in their autumn livery of red, yellow, and brown, except some stout ones that keep to their green summer clothes, and the laurels and their like, who wear pretty much the same dress all the year round. The birds were singing with most astonishing vehemence in the dark glistening shrubberies; but the only sound in the walks was that of the rakes pulling together the falling leaves. There was of these walks one especially, flanked towards the river by a turreted wall covered with ivy, and having on the one side a row of lime-trees that had turned quite yellow, while opposite them was a green slope, and a quaint terrace-stair, and a long range of fantastic gables, towers, and chimneys;—there was, I say, one of these walks which Mr. Cattermole would hit off with a few strokes of his gallant pencil, and which I could fancy to be frequented by some of those long-trained, tender, gentle-looking young beauties whom Mr. Stone loves to design. Here they come talking of love in a tone that is between a sigh and a whisper, and gliding in rustling shot silks over the fallen leaves.
There seemed to be a good deal of stir in the little port, where, says the Guide-book, a couple of hundred vessels take in cargoes annually of the produce of the district. Stone and lime are the chief articles exported, of which the cliffs for miles give an unfailing supply; and, as one travels the mountains at night, the kilns may be seen lighted up in the lonely places, and flaring red in the darkness.
If the road from Larne to Glenarm is beautiful, the coast route from the latter place to Cushendall is still more so; and, except peerless Westport, I have seen nothing in Ireland so picturesque as this noble line of coast-scenery. The new road, luckily, is not yet completed, and the lover of natural beauties had better hasten to the spot in time, ere, by flattening and improving the road, and leading it along the sea-shore, half the magnificent prospects are shut out, now visible from along the mountainous old road; which, according to the good old fashion, gallantly takes all the hills in its course, disdaining to turn them. At three miles’ distance, near the village of Cairlough, Glenarm looks more beautiful than when you are close upon it; and, as the car travels on to the stupendous Garron Head, the traveller, looking back, has a view of the whole line of coast southward as far as Isle Magee, with its bays and white villages, and tall precipitous cliffs, green, white, and grey. Eyes left, you may look with wonder at the mountains rising above, or presently at the pretty park and grounds of Drumnasole. Here, near the woods of Nappan, which are dressed in ten thousand colours—ash-leaves turned yellow, nut-trees red, birch-leaves brown, lime-leaves speckled over with black spots (marks of a disease which they will never get over)—stands a school-house that looks like a French château, having probably been a villa in former days, and discharges, as we pass, a cluster of fair-haired children that begin running madly down the hill, their fair hair streaming behind them. Down the hill goes the car madly too, and you wonder and bless your stars that the horse does not fall, or crush the children that are running before, or you that are sitting behind. Every now and then, at a trip of the horse, a disguised lady’s-maid, with a canary-bird in her lap and a vast anxiety about her best bonnet in the bandbox, begins to scream; at which the car-boy grins, and rattles down the hill only the quicker. The road, which almost always skirts the hillside, has been torn sheer through the rock here and there; and immense work of levelling, shovelling, picking, blasting, filling, is going on along the whole line. As I was looking up a vast cliff, decorated with patches of green here and there at its summit, and at its base, where the sea had beaten until now, with long, thin, waving grass, that I told a grocer, my neighbour, was like mermaids’ hair (though he did not in the least coincide in the simile)—as I was looking up the hill, admiring two goats that were browsing on a little patch of green, and two sheep perched yet higher (I had never seen such agility in mutton)—as, I say once more, I was looking at these phenomena, the grocer nudges me and says, ‘Look on to this side—that’s Scotland yon,’ If ever this book reaches a second edition, a sonnet shall be inserted in this place, describing the author’s feelings on his first view of Scotland. Meanwhile, the Scotch mountains remain undisturbed, looking blue and solemn far away in the placid sea.
Rounding Garron Head, we come upon the inlet which is called Red Bay, the shores and sides of which are of red clay, that has taken the place of limestone, and towards which, between two noble ranges of mountains, stretches a long green plain, forming, together with the hills that protect it and the sea that washes it, one of the most beautiful landscapes of this most beautiful country. A fair writer, whom the Guide-book quotes, breaks out into strains of admiration in speaking of this district; calls it ‘Switzerland in miniature,’ celebrates its mountains of Glenariff and Lurgethan, and lauds, in terms of equal admiration, the rivers, waterfalls, and other natural beauties that lie within the glen.
The writer’s enthusiasm regarding this tract of country is quite warranted, nor can any praise in admiration of it be too high; but alas! in calling a place ‘Switzerland in miniature,’ do we describe it? In joining together cataracts, valleys, rushing streams, and blue mountains, with all the emphasis and picturesqueness of which type is capable, we cannot get near to a copy of Nature’s sublime countenance; and the writer can’t hope to describe such grand sights so as to make them visible to the fireside reader, but can only, to the best of his taste and experience, warn the future traveller where he may look out for objects to admire. I think this sentiment has been repeated a score of times in this journal; but it comes upon one at every new display of beauty and magnificence, such as here the Almighty in His bounty has set before us; and every such scene seems to warn one, that it is not made to talk about too much, but to think of, and love, and be grateful for.
Rounding this beautiful bay and valley, we passed by some caves that penetrate deep into the red rock, and are inhabited—one by a blacksmith, whose forge was blazing in the dark; one by cattle; and one by an old woman that has sold whisky here for time out of mind. The road then passes under an arch cut in the rock by the same spirited individual who has cleared away many of the difficulties in the route to Glenarm, and beside a conical hill, where for some time previous have been visible the ruins of the ‘ancient ould castle’ of Red Bay. At a distance, it looks very grand upon its height; but on coming close it has dwindled down to a mere wall, and not a high one. Hence, quickly we reach Cushendall, where the grocer’s family are on the look-out for him; the driver begins to blow his little bugle, and the disguised lady’s-maid begins to smooth her bonnet and hair.
At this place a good dinner of fresh whiting, broiled bacon, and small beer was served up to me for the sum of eightpence, while the lady’s-maid in question took her tea. ‘This town is full of Papists,’ said her ladyship, with an extremely genteel air; and, either in consequence of this, or because she ate up one of the fish, which she had clearly no right to, a disagreement arose between us, and we did not exchange another word for the rest of the journey. The road led us for fourteen miles by wild mountains, and across a fine aqueduct to Ballycastle; but it was dark as we left Cushendall, and it was difficult to see more in the grey evening but that the country was savage and lonely, except where the kilns were lighted up here and there in the hills, and a shining river might be seen winding in the dark ravines. Not far from Ballycastle lies a little old ruin, called the Abbey of Bonamargy: by it the Margy river runs into the sea, upon which you come suddenly; and on the shore are some tall buildings and factories, that looked as well in the moonlight as if they had not been in ruins; and hence a fine avenue of limes leads to Ballycastle. They must have been planted at the time recorded in the Guide-book, when a mine was discovered near the town, and the works and warehouses on the quay erected. At present, the place has little trade, and half a dozen carts with apples, potatoes, dried fish, and turf, seem to contain the commerce of the market.
The picturesque sort of vehicle which is here designed, is said to be going much out of fashion in the country, the solid wheels giving place to those common to the rest of Europe. A fine and edifying conversation took place between the designer and the owner of the vehicle. ‘Stand still for a minute, you and the car, and I will give you twopence!’ ‘What do you want to do with it?’ says the latter. ‘To draw it.’ ‘To draw it?’ says he, with a wild look of surprise, ‘and is it you’ll draw it?’ ‘I mean, I want to take a picture of it; you know what a picture is?’ ‘No, I don’t.’ ‘Here’s one,’ says I, showing him a book. ‘Oh, faith, sir,’ says the carman, drawing back rather alarmed, ‘I’m no scholar!’ And he concluded by saying, ‘Will you buy the turf, or will you not? by which straightforward question he showed himself to be a real practical man of sense; and, as he got an unsatisfactory reply to this query, he forthwith gave a lash to his pony, and declined to wait a minute longer. As for the twopence, he certainly accepted that handsome sum, and put it into his pocket, but with an air of extreme wonder at the transaction, and of contempt for the giver, which very likely was perfectly justifiable. I have seen men despised in genteel companies with not half so good a cause.
In respect to the fine arts, I am bound to say that the people in the south and west showed much more curiosity and interest with regard to a sketch and its progress than has been shown by the badauds of the north; the former looking on by dozens, and exclaiming, ‘That’s Frank Mahony’s house!’ or, ‘Look at Biddy Mullins and the child!’ or ‘He’s taking off the chimney now!’ as the case may be; whereas, sketching in the north, I have collected no such spectators, the people not taking the slightest notice of the transaction.
The little town of Ballycastle does not contain much to occupy the traveller: behind the church stands a ruined old mansion with round turrets, that must have been a stately tower in former days. The town is more modern, but almost as dismal as the tower. A little street behind it slides off into a potato-field—the peaceful barrier of the place; and hence I could see the tall rock of Bengore, with the sea beyond it, and a pleasing landscape stretching towards it.
Dr. Hamilton’s elegant and learned book has an awful picture of yonder head of Bengore; and hard by it the Guide-book says is a coal-mine, where Mr. Barrow found a globular stone hammer, which, he infers, was used in the coal-mine before weapons of iron were invented. The former writer insinuates that the mine must have been worked more than a thousand years ago, ‘before the turbulent chaos of events that succeeded the eighth century.’ Shall I go and see a coal-mine that may have been worked a thousand years since? Why go see it? says idleness. To be able to say that I have seen it. Sheridan’s advice to his son here came into my mind;[32] and I shall reserve a description of the mine, and an antiquarian dissertation regarding it, for publication elsewhere.
Ballycastle must not be left without recording the fact that one of the snuggest inns in the country is kept by the postmaster there; who has also a stable full of good horses for travellers who take his little inn on the way to the Giant’s Causeway.
The road to the Causeway is bleak, wild, and hilly. The cabins along the road are scarcely better than those of Kerry, the inmates as ragged, and more fierce and dark-looking. I never was so pestered by juvenile beggars as in the dismal village of Ballintoy. A crowd of them rushed after the car, calling for money in a fierce manner, as if it was their right; dogs as fierce as the children came yelling after the vehicle; and the faces which scowled out of the black cabins were not a whit more good-humoured. We passed by one or two more clumps of cabins, with their turf and corn-stacks lying together at the foot of the hills; placed there for the convenience of the children, doubtless, who can thus accompany the car either way, and shriek out their ‘Bonny gantleman, gie us a hap’ny.’ A couple of churches, one with a pair of its pinnacles blown off, stood in the dismal open country, and a gentleman’s house here and there: there were no trees about them, but a brown grass round about—hills rising and falling in front, and the sea beyond. The occasional view of the coast was noble; wild Bengore towering eastwards as we went along; Raghery Island before us, in the steep rocks and caves of which Bruce took shelter when driven from yonder Scottish coast, that one sees stretching blue in the north-east.
I think this wild gloomy tract through which one passes is a good prelude for what is to be the great sight of the day, and got my mind to a proper state of awe by the time we were near the journey’s end; and turning away shorewards by the fine house of Sir Francis Macnaghten, went towards a lone handsome inn, that stands close to the Causeway. The landlord at Ballycastle had lent me Hamilton’s book, to read on the road; but I had not time then to read more than half a dozen pages of it. They described how the author, a clergyman distinguished as a man of science, had been thrust out of a friend’s house by the frightened servants one wild night, and butchered by some White Boys, who were waiting outside, and called for his blood. I had been told at Belfast that there was a corpse in the inn: was it there now? It had driven off, the car-boy said, ‘in a handsome hearse and four to Dublin the whole way.’ It was gone, but I thought the house looked as if the ghost was there. See, yonder are the black rocks stretching to Portrush; how leaden and grey the sea looks! how grey and leaden the sky! You hear the waters roaring evermore, as they have done since the beginning of the world. The car drives up with a dismal grinding noise of the wheels to the big lone house; there’s no smoke in the chimneys; the doors are locked; three savage-looking men rush after the car: are they the men who took out Mr. Hamilton—took him out and butchered him in the moonlight? Is everybody, I wonder, dead in that big house? Will they let us in before those men are up? Out comes a pretty smiling girl, with a curtsey, just as the savages are at the car, and you are ushered into a very comfortable room; and the men turn out to be guides. Well, thank Heaven it’s no worse! I had fifteen pounds still left; and, when desperate, have no doubt should fight like a lion.
THE traveller no sooner issues from the inn by a back door, which he is informed will lead him straight to the Causeway, than the guides pounce upon him, with a dozen rough boatmen who are likewise lying in wait; and a crew of shrill beggar-boys, with boxes of spars, ready to tear him and each other to pieces seemingly, yell and bawl incessantly round him. ‘I’m the guide Miss Henry recommends,’ shouts one. ‘I’m Mr. Macdonald’s guide,’ pushes in another. ‘This way,’ roars a third, and drags his prey down a precipice; the rest of them clambering and quarrelling after. I had no friends: I was perfectly helpless. I wanted to walk down to the shore by myself, but they would not let me, and I had nothing for it but to yield myself into the hands of the guide who had seized me, who hurried me down the steep to a little wild bay, flanked on each side by rugged cliffs and rocks, against which the waters came tumbling, frothing, and roaring furiously. Upon some of these black rocks two or three boats were lying: four men seized a boat, pushed it shouting into the water, and ravished me into it. We had slid between two rocks, where the channel came gurgling in; we were up one swelling wave that came in a huge advancing body ten feet above us, and were plunging madly down another (the descent causes a sensation in the lower regions of the stomach which it is not at all necessary here to describe), before I had leisure to ask myself why the deuce I was in that boat, with four rowers hurrooing and bounding madly from one huge liquid mountain to another—four rowers whom I was bound to pay. I say, the query came qualmishly across me why the devil I was there, and why not walking calmly on the shore.
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A ROW TO THE GIANT’S CAUSEWAY
A ROW TO THE GIANT’S CAUSEWAY
The guide began pouring his professional jargon into my ears. ‘Every one of them bays,’ says he, ‘has a name (take my place, and the spray won’t come over you): that is Port Noffer, and the next, Port na Gange; them rocks is the Stookawns (for every rock has his name as well as every bay); and yonder—give way, my boys,—hurray, we’re over it now; has it wet you much, sir?—that’s the little cave; it goes five hundred feet under ground, and the boats goes in it easy of a calm day.’
‘Is it a fine day or a rough one now?’ said I; the internal disturbance going on with more severity than ever.
‘It’s betwixt and between; or, I may say, neither one nor the other. Sit up, sir; look at the entrance of the cave: don’t be afraid, sir; never has an accident happened in any one of these boats, and the most delicate ladies has rode in them on rougher days than this. Now, boys, pull to the big cave; that, sir, is six hundred and sixty yards in length, though some says it goes for miles inland, where the people sleeping in their houses hears the waters roaring under them.’
The water was tossing and tumbling into the mouth of the little cave. I looked,—for the guide would not let me alone till I did,—and saw what might be expected: a black hole of some forty feet high, into which it was no more possible to see than into a millstone. ‘For Heaven’s sake, sir,’ says I, ‘if you’ve no particular wish to see the mouth of the big cave, put about and let us see the Causeway and get ashore.’ This was done, the guide meanwhile telling some story of a ship of the Spanish Armada having fired her guns at two peaks of rock, then visible, which the crew mistook for chimney-pots—what benighted fools these Spanish Armadilloes must have been—it is easier to see a rock than a chimney-pot; it is easy to know that chimney-pots do not grow on rocks:—but where, if you please, is the Causeway?
‘That’s the Causeway before you,’ says the guide.
‘Which?’
‘That pier which you see jutting out into the bay right ahead.’
‘Mon Dieu! and have I travelled a hundred and fifty miles to see that?’
I declare, upon my conscience, the barge moored at Hungerford Market is a more majestic object, and seems to occupy as must space. As for telling a man that the Causeway is merely a part of the sight; that he is there for the purpose of examining the surrounding scenery; that if he looks to the westward he will see Portrush and Donegal Head before him; that the cliffs immediately in his front are green in some places, black in others, interspersed with blotches of brown and streaks of verdure;—what is all this to a lonely individual lying sick in a boat, between two immense waves that only give him momentary glimpses of the land in question, to show that it is frightfully near, and yet you are an hour from it? They won’t let you go away—that cursed guide will tell out his stock of legends and stories. The boatmen insist upon your looking at boxes of ‘specimens,’ which you must buy of them; they laugh as you grow paler and paler; they offer you more and more ‘specimens’; even the dirty lad who pulls number three, and is not allowed by his comrades to speak, puts in his oar, and hands you over a piece of Irish diamond (it looks like half-sucked alicompayne), and scorns you. ‘Hurray, lads, now for it, give way!’ how the oars do hurtle in the rullocks, as the boat goes up an aqueous mountain, and then down into one of those cursed maritime valleys where there is no rest as on shore!
At last, after they had pulled me enough about, and sold me all the boxes of specimens, I was permitted to land at the spot whence we set out, and whence, though we had been rowing for an hour, we had never been above five hundred yards distant. Let all cockneys take warning from this; let the solitary one caught issuing from the back door of the hotel, shout at once to the boatmen to be gone—that he will have none of them. Let him, at any rate, go first down to the water to determine whether it be smooth enough to allow him to take any decent pleasure by riding on its surface. For after all, it must be remembered that it is pleasure we come for—that we are not obliged to take those boats.—Well, well! I paid ten shillings for mine, and ten minutes before would cheerfully have paid five pounds to be allowed to quit it; it was no hard bargain after all. As for the boxes of spar and specimens, I at once, being on terra firma, broke my promise, and said I would see them all —— first. It is wrong to swear, I know; but sometimes it relieves one so much!
The first act on shore was to make a sacrifice to Sanctissima Tellus; offering up to her a neat and becoming Taglioni coat, bought for a guinea in Covent Garden only three months back. I sprawled on my back on the smoothest of rocks that is, and tore the elbows to pieces: the guide picked me up; the boatmen did not stir, for they had had their will of me; the guide alone picked me up, I say, and bade me follow him. We went across a boggy ground in one of the little bays, round which rise the green walls of the cliff, terminated on either side by a black crag, and the line of the shore washed by the poluphlosboiotic, nay, the poluphlosboiotatotic sea. Two beggars stepped over the bog after us, howling for money, and each holding up a cursed box of specimens. No oaths, threats, entreaties, would drive this vermin away; for some time the whole scene had been spoilt by the incessant and abominable jargon of them, the boatmen, and the guides. I was obliged to give them money to be left in quiet, and if, as no doubt will be the case, the Giant’s Causeway shall be a still greater resort of travellers than ever, the county must put policemen on the rocks to keep the beggars away, or fling them in the water when they appear.
And now, by force of money, having got rid of the sea and land beggars, you are at liberty to examine at your leisure the wonders of the place. There is not the least need for a guide to attend the stranger, unless the latter have a mind to listen to a parcel of legends, which may be well from the mouth of a wild simple peasant who believes in his tales, but are odious from a dullard who narrates them at the rate of sixpence a lie. Fee him and the other beggars, and at last you are left tranquil to look at the strange scene with your own eyes, and enjoy your own thoughts at leisure.
That is, if the thoughts awakened by such a scene may be called enjoyment; but for me, I confess, they are too near akin to fear to be pleasant; and I don’t know that I would desire to change that sensation of awe and terror which the hour’s walk occasioned, for a greater familiarity with this wild, sad, lonely place. The solitude is awful. I can’t understand how those chattering guides dare to lift up their voices here, and cry for money.
It looks like the beginning of the world, somehow: the sea looks older than in other places, the hills and rocks strange, and formed differently from other rocks and hills—as those vast dubious monsters were formed who possessed the earth before man. The hilltops are shattered into a thousand cragged fantastical shapes; the water comes swelling into scores of little strange creeks, or goes off with a leap, roaring into those mysterious caves yonder, which penetrate who knows how far into our common world. The savage rock-sides are painted of a hundred colours. Does the sun ever shine here? When the world was moulded and fashioned out of formless chaos, this must have been the bit over—a remnant of chaos! Think of that!—it is a tailor’s simile. Well, I am a cockney: I wish I were in Pall Mall! Yonder is a kelp-burner: a lurid smoke from his burning kelp rises up to the leaden sky, and he looks as naked and fierce as Cain. Bubbling up out of the rocks at the very brim of the sea rises a little crystal spring: how comes it there? and there is an old grey hag beside it, who has been there for hundreds and hundreds of years, and there sits and sells whisky at the extremity of creation! How do you dare to sell whisky there, old woman? Did you serve old Saturn with a glass when he lay along the Causeway here? In reply, she says, she has no change for a shilling: she never has; but her whisky is good.
This is not a description of the Giant’s Causeway (as some clever critic will remark), but of a Londoner there, who is by no means so interesting an object as the natural curiosity in question. That single hint is sufficient; I have not a word more to say. ‘If,’ says he, ‘you cannot describe the scene lying before us—if you cannot state from your personal observation that the number of basaltic pillars composing the Causeway has been computed at about forty thousand, which vary in diameter, their surface presenting the appearance of a tesselated pavement of polygonal stones—that each pillar is formed of several distinct joints, the concave end of the one being accurately fitted into the concave of the next, and the length of the joints varying from five feet to four inches—that although the pillars are polygonal, there is but one of three sides in the whole forty thousand (think of that!), but three of nine sides, and that it may be safely computed that ninety-nine out of one hundred pillars have either five, six, or seven sides;—if you cannot state something useful, you had much better, sir, retire and get your dinner.’
Never was summons more gladly obeyed. The dinner must be ready by this time; so, remain you, and look on at the awful scene, and copy it down in words if you can. If at the end of the trial you are dissatisfied with your skill as a painter, and find that the biggest of your words cannot render the hues and vastness of that tremendous swelling sea—of those lean solitary crags standing rigid along the shore, where they have been watching the ocean ever since it was made—of those grey towers of Dunluce standing upon a leaden rock, and looking as if some old, old princess, of old, old fairy times, were dragon-guarded within—of yon flat stretches of sand where the Scotch and Irish mermaids hold conference—come away too, and prate no more about the scene! There is that in nature, dear Jenkins, which passes even our powers. We can feel the beauty of a magnificent landscape, perhaps; but we can describe a leg of mutton and turnips better. Come, then, this scene is for our betters to depict. If Mr. Tennyson were to come hither for a month, and brood over the place, he might, in some of those lofty heroic lines which the author of the ‘Morte d’Arthur’ knows how to pile up, convey to the reader a sense of this gigantic desolate scene. What! you too are a poet? Well then, Jenkins, stay! but believe me, you had best take my advice, and come off.
The worthy landlady made her appearance with the politest of bows and an apology,—for what does the reader think a lady should apologise in the most lonely rude spot in the world?—because a plain servant-woman was about to bring in the dinner, the waiter being absent on leave at Coleraine! O heaven and earth! where will the genteel end? I replied philosophically that I did not care twopence for the plainness or beauty of the waiter, but that it was the dinner I looked to, the frying whereof made a great noise in the huge lonely house; and it must be said, that though the lady was plain, the repast was exceedingly good. ‘I have expended my little all,’ says the landlady, stepping in with a speech after dinner, ‘in the building of this establishment; and though to a man its profits may appear small, to such a being as I am it will bring, I trust, a sufficient return’; and on my asking her why she took the place, she replied that she had always, from her earliest youth, a fancy to dwell in that spot, and had accordingly realised her wish by building this hotel—this mausoleum. In spite of the bright fire, and the good dinner, and the good wine, it was impossible to feel comfortable in the place; and when the car-wheels were heard, I jumped up with joy to take my departure and forget the awful lonely shore, that wild, dismal, genteel inn. A ride over a wide gusty country, in a grey, misty, half-moonlight, the loss of a wheel at Bushmills, and the escape from a tumble, were the delightful varieties after the late awful occurrences. ‘Such a being’ as I am, would die of loneliness in that hotel; and so let all brother cockneys be warned.
Some time before we came to it, we saw the long line of mist that lay above the Bann, and coming through a dirty suburb of low cottages, passed down a broad street with gas and lamps in it (thank Heaven, there are people once more!), and at length drove up in state, across a gas-pipe, in a market-place, before an hotel in the town of Coleraine, famous for linen and for Beautiful Kitty, who must be old and ugly now, for it’s a good five-and-thirty years since she broke her pitcher, according to Mr. Moore’s account of her. The scene as we entered the Diamond was rather a lively one—a score of little stalls were brilliant with lights; the people were thronging in the place making their Saturday bargains; the town clock began to toll nine; and hark! faithful to a minute, the horn of the Derry mail was heard tootooing, and four commercial gentlemen, with Scotch accents, rushed into the hotel at the same time with myself.
Among the beauties of Coleraine may be mentioned the price of beef, which a gentleman told me may be had for fourpence a pound; and I saw him purchase an excellent codfish for a shilling. I am bound, too, to state, for the benefit of aspiring Radicals, what two Conservative citizens of the place stated to me, viz.:—that though there were two Conservative candidates then canvassing the town, on account of a vacancy in the representation, the voters were so truly liberal that they would elect any person of any other political creed, who would simply bring money enough to purchase their votes. There are 220 voters, it appears; of whom it is not, however, necessary to ‘argue’ with more than fifty, who alone are open to conviction; but as parties are pretty equally balanced, the votes of the quinquagint, of course, carry an immense weight with them. Well, this is all discussed calmly standing on an inn steps, with a jolly landlord and a professional man of the town to give the information. So, Heaven bless us, the ways of London are beginning to be known even here. Gentility has already taken up her seat in the Giant’s Causeway, where she apologises for the plainness of her look; and, lo! here is bribery as bold as in the most civilised places—hundreds and hundreds of miles away from St. Stephen’s and Pall Mall. I wonder, in that little island of Raghery, so wild and lonely, whether civilisation is beginning to dawn upon them?—whether they bribe and are genteel? But for the rough sea of yesterday, I think I would have fled thither to make the trial.
The town of Coleraine, with a number of cabin suburbs belonging to it, lies picturesquely grouped on the Bann river; and the whole of the little city was echoing with psalms as I walked through it on the Sunday morning. The piety of the people seems remarkable; some of the inns even will not receive travellers on Sunday; and this is written in an hotel, of which every room is provided with a Testament, containing an injunction on the part of the landlord to consider this world itself as only a passing abode. Is it well that Boniface should furnish his guest with Bibles as well as bills, and sometimes shut his door on a traveller, who has no other choice but to read it on a Sunday? I heard of a gentleman arriving from shipboard at Kilrush on a Sunday, when the pious hotel-keeper refused him admittance; and some more tales, which to go into would require the introduction of private names and circumstances, but would tend to show that the Protestant of the north is as much priest-ridden as the Catholic of the south;—priest and old-woman-ridden, for there are certain expounders of doctrine in our Church, who are not, I believe, to be found in the Church of Rome; and woe betide the stranger who comes to settle in these parts, if his ‘seriousness’ be not satisfactory to the heads (with false fronts to most of them) of the congregations.
Look at that little snug harbour of Portrush; a hideous new castle standing on a rock protects it on one side, a snug row of gentlemen’s cottages curve round the shore facing northwards, a bath-house, an hotel, more smart houses, face the beach westward, defended by another mound of rocks. In the centre of the little town stands a new-built church; and the whole place has an air of comfort and neatness which is seldom seen in Ireland. One would fancy that all the tenants of these pretty snug habitations, sheltered in this nook far away from the world, have nothing to do but to be happy, and spend their little comfortable means in snug little hospitalities among one another, and kind little charities among the poor. What does a man in active life ask for more than to retire to such a competence, to such a snug nook of the world; and there repose with a stock of healthy children round the fireside, a friend within call, and the means of decent hospitality wherewith to treat him?
Let any one meditating this pleasant sort of retreat, and charmed with the look of this or that place as peculiarly suited to his purpose, take a special care to understand his neighbourhood first, before he commit himself by lease-signing or house-buying. It is not sufficient that you should be honest, kind-hearted, hospitable, of good family—what are your opinions upon religious subjects? Are they such as agree with the notions of old Lady This, or Mrs. That, who are the patronesses of the village? If not, woe betide you! you will be shunned by the rest of the society, thwarted in your attempts to do good, whispered against over evangelical bohea and serious muffins. Lady This will inform every new arrival that you are a reprobate, and lost; and Mrs. That will consign you and your daughters, and your wife (a worthy woman, but, alas! united to that sad worldly man!) to damnation. The clergyman who partakes of the muffins and bohea before mentioned, will very possibly preach sermons against you from the pulpit: this was not done at Portstewart to my knowledge, but I have had the pleasure of sitting under a minister in Ireland who insulted the very patron who gave him his living, discoursing upon the sinfulness of partridge-shooting, and threatening hell-fire as the last ‘meet’ for fox-hunters; until the squire, one of the best and most charitable resident landlords in Ireland, was absolutely driven out of the church where his fathers had worshipped for hundreds of years, by the insults of this howling evangelical inquisitor.
So much as this I did not hear at Portstewart; but I was told that at yonder neat-looking bath-house a dying woman was denied a bath on a Sunday. By a clause of the lease by which the bath-owner rents his establishment, he is forbidden to give baths to any one on the Sunday. The landlord of the inn, forsooth, shuts his gates on the same day, and his conscience on week-days will not allow him to supply his guests with whisky or ardent spirits. I was told by my friend, that because he refused to subscribe for some fancy charity, he received a letter to state that ‘he spent more in one dinner than in charity in the course of the year.’ My worthy friend did not care to contradict the statement, as why should a man deign to meddle with such a lie? But think how all the fishes, and all the pieces of meat, and all the people who went in and out of his snug cottage by the seaside must have been watched by the serious round about! The sea is not more constant roaring there, than scandal is whispering. How happy I felt, while hearing these histories (demure heads in crimped caps peering over the blinds at us as we walked on the beach), to think I am a cockney, and don’t know the name of the man who lives next door to me!
I have heard various stories, of course from persons of various ways of thinking, charging their opponents with hypocrisy, and proving the charge by statements clearly showing that the priests, the preachers, or the professing religionists in question, belied their professions wofully by their practice. But in matters of religion, hypocrisy is so awful a charge to make against a man, that I think it is almost unfair to mention even in the cases in which it is proven, and which,—as, pray God, they are but exceptional,—a person should be very careful of mentioning, lest they be considered to apply generally. Tartuffe has been always a disgusting play to me to see, in spite of its sense and its wit; and so, instead of printing, here or elsewhere, a few stories of the Tartuffe kind which I have heard in Ireland, the best way will be to try and forget them. It is an awful thing to say of any man walking under God’s sun by the side of us, ‘You are a hypocrite, lying as you use the Most Sacred Name, knowing that you lie while you use it.’ Let it be the privilege of any sect that is so minded, to imagine that there is perdition in store for all the rest of God’s creatures who do not think with them; but the easy countercharge of hypocrisy, which the world has been in the habit of making in its turn, is surely just as fatal and bigoted an accusation as any that the sects make against the world.
What has this disquisition to do à propos of a walk on the beach at Portstewart? Why, it may be made here as well as in other parts of Ireland, or elsewhere as well, perhaps, as here. It is the most priest-ridden of countries; Catholic clergymen lord it over their ragged flocks, as Protestant preachers, lay and clerical, over their more genteel co-religionists. Bound to inculcate peace and goodwill, their whole life is one of enmity and distrust.
Walking away from the little bay and the disquisition which has somehow been raging there, we went across some wild dreary highlands to the neighbouring little town of Portrush, where is a neat town and houses, and a harbour, and a new church too, so like the last-named place that I thought for a moment we had only made a round, and were back again at Portstewart. Some gentlemen of the place, and my guide, who had a neighbourly liking for it, showed me the new church, and seemed to be well pleased with the edifice; which is, indeed, a neat and convenient one, of a rather irregular Gothic. The best thing about the church, I think, was the history of it. The old church had lain some miles off, in the most inconvenient part of the parish, whereupon the clergyman and some of the gentry had raised a subscription in order to build the present church. The expenses had exceeded the estimates, or the subscriptions had fallen short of the sums necessary; and the church, in consequence, was opened with a debt on it, which the rector and two more of the gentry had taken on their shoulders. The living is a small one; the other two gentlemen going bail for the edifice not so rich as to think light of the payment of a couple of hundred pounds beyond their previous subscriptions—the lists are therefore still open; and the clergyman expressed himself perfectly satisfied either that he would be reimbursed one day or other, or that he would be able to make out the payment of the money for which he stood engaged. Most of the Roman Catholic churches that I have seen through the country have been built in this way,—begun when money enough was levied for constructing the foundation, elevated by degrees as fresh subscriptions came in, and finished—by the way, I don’t think I have seen one finished—but there is something noble in the spirit (however certain economists may cavil at it) that leads people to commence these pious undertakings with the firm trust that ‘Heaven will provide.’
Eastwards from Portrush, we came upon a beautiful level sand which leads to the White Rocks, a famous place of resort for the frequenters of the neighbouring watering-places. Here are caves, and for a considerable distance a view of the wild and gloomy Antrim coast as far as Bengore. Midway, jutting into the sea (and I was glad it was so far off), was the Causeway; and nearer, the grey towers of Dunluce.
Looking north, were the blue Scotch hills and the neighbouring Raghery Island. Nearer Portrush are two rocky islands, called the Skerries, of which a sportsman of our party vaunted the capabilities, regretting that my stay was not longer, so that I might land and shoot a few ducks there. This unlucky lateness of the season struck me also as a most afflicting circumstance. He said also that fish were caught off the island—not fish good to eat, but very strong at pulling, eager of biting, and affording a great deal of sport. And so we turned our backs once more upon the Giant’s Causeway, and the grim coast on which it lies; and as my taste in life leads me to prefer looking at the smiling fresh face of a young cheerful beauty, rather than at the fierce countenance and high features of a fierce dishevelled Meg Merrilies, I must say again that I was glad to turn my back on that severe part of the Antrim coast, and my steps towards Derry.
BETWEEN Coleraine and Derry there is a daily car (besides one or two occasional queer-looking coaches), and I had this vehicle, with an intelligent driver, and a horse with a hideous raw on his shoulder, entirely to myself for the five-and-twenty miles of our journey. The cabins of Coleraine are not parted with in a hurry, and we crossed the bridge, and went up and down the hills of one of the suburban streets, the Ban flowing picturesquely to our left; a large Catholic chapel, the before-mentioned cabins, and farther on, some neat-looking houses and plantations, to our right. Then we began ascending wide lonely hills, pools of bog shining here and there amongst them, with birds, both black and white, both geese and crows, on the hunt. Some of the stubble was already ploughed up, but by the side of most cottages you saw a black potato-field that it was time to dig now, for the weather was changing and the winds beginning to roar. Woods, whenever we passed them, were flinging round eddies of mustard-coloured leaves; the white trunks of lime and ash trees beginning to look very bare. Then we stopped to give the raw-backed horse water; then we trotted down a hill with a noble bleak prospect of Lough Foyle and the surrounding mountains before us, until we reached the town of Newtown Limavaddy, where the raw-backed horse was exchanged for another not much more agreeable in his appearance, though, like his comrade, not slow on the road.
Newtown Limavaddy is the third town in the county of Londonderry. It comprises three well-built streets, the others are inferior; it is, however, respectably inhabited; all this may be true, as the well-informed Guide-book avers, but I am bound to say that I was thinking of something else as we drove through the town, having fallen eternally in love during the ten minutes of our stay. Yes, Peggy of Limavaddy, if Barrow and Inglis have gone to Connemara to fall in love with the Misses Flynn, let us be allowed to come to Ulster and offer a tribute of praise at your feet—at your stockingless feet, O Margaret! Do you remember the October day (‘twas the first day of the hard weather), when the way-worn traveller entered your inn? But the circumstances of this passion had better be chronicled in deathless verse.