Another considerable difference in our lives was caused by the scarcity of newspapers and periodicals. I can remember when the Dublin Evening Mail,—then a single sheet, appearing three times a week and received at Newbridge on the day after publication,—was our only source of news. I do not think any one of our neighbours took the Times or any English paper. Of magazines we had Blackwood and the Quarterly, but illustrated ones were unknown. There was a tolerable circulating library in Dublin, to which I subscribed and from whence I obtained a good many French books; but the literary appetites of the Irish gentry generally were frugal in the extreme!

The real differences, however, between Life in 1840 and Life in 1890 were much deeper than any record of these altered manners, or even any references to the great changes caused by steam and the telegraph, can convey. There were certain principles which in those days were almost universally accepted and which profoundly influenced all our works and ways. The first of them was Parental and Marital Authority. Perhaps my particular circumstances as the daughter of a man of immense force of will, caused me to see the matter especially clearly, but I am sure that in the Thirties and Forties (at all events in Ireland) there was very little declension generally from the old Roman Patria Potestas. Fathers believed themselves to possess almost boundless rights over their children in the matter of pursuits, professions, marriages and so on; and the children usually felt that if they resisted any parental command it was on their peril and an act of extreme audacity. My brothers and I habitually spoke of our father, as did the servants and tenants, as “The Master;” and never was title more thoroughly deserved.

Another important difference was in the position of women. Of this I shall have more to say hereafter; suffice it to note that it was the universal opinion, that no gentlewoman could possibly earn money without derogating altogether from her rank (unless, indeed, by card-playing as my grandmother did regularly!); and that housekeeping and needlework (of the most inartistic kinds) were her only fitting pursuits. The one natural ambition of her life was supposed to be a “suitable” marriage; the phrase always referring to settlements, rather than sentiments. Study of any serious sort was disapproved, and “accomplishments” only were cultivated. My father prohibited me when very young from learning Latin from one of my brothers who kindly offered to teach me; but, as I have recounted, he paid largely and generously that I might be taught Music, for which I had no faculties at all. Other Irish girls my contemporaries, were much worse off than I, for my dear mother always did her utmost to help my studies and my liberal allowance permitted me to buy books.

The laws which concerned women at that date were so frightfully unjust that the most kindly disposed men inevitably took their cue from them, and looked on their mothers, wives, and sisters as beings with wholly inferior rights; with no rights, indeed, which should ever stand against theirs. The deconsideration of women (as dear Barbara Bodichon in later years used to say) was at once cause and result of our legal disabilities. Let the happier women of these times reflect on the state of things which existed when a married woman’s inheritance and even her own earnings (if she could make any), were legally robbed from her by her husband, and given, if he pleased, to his mistress! Let them remember that she could make no will, but that her husband might make one which should bequeath the control of her children to a man she abhorred or to a woman of evil life. Let them remember that a husband who had beaten and wronged his wife in every possible way could yet force her by law to live with him and become the mother of his children. Personally and most fortunately (for I know not of what crime I might not have been guilty if so tried!) I never had cause of complaint on the score of injustice or unkindness from any of the men with whom I had to do. But the knowledge, when it came to me, of the legalised oppressions under which other women groaned, lay heavy on my mind. I was not, however, in those early days, interested in politics or large social reforms; and did not covet the political franchise, finding in my manifold duties and studies over-abundant outlets for my energies.

Another difference between the first and latter half of the century is, I think, the far greater simplicity of character of the older generation. No doubt there were, at the time of which I write, many fine and subtle minds at work among the poets, philosophers and statesmen of the day; but ordinary ladies and gentlemen, even clever and well-educated ones, would, I think, if they could revive now, seem to us rather like our boys and girls than our grandparents. Thousands of allusions, ideas, shades of sentiment and reflection which have become common-places to us, were novel and strange to them. What Cowper’s poetry is to Tennyson’s, what the Vicar of Wakefield is to Middlemarch, so were their transparent minds to ours. I remember once (for a trivial example of what I mean) walking with my father in his later days in the old garden one exquisite spring day when the apple trees were covered with blossoms and the birds were singing all round us. As he leaned on my arm, having just recovered from an illness which had threatened to be fatal and was in a mood unusually tender, I was tempted to say, “Don’t you feel, Father, that a day like this is almost too beautiful and delicious, that it softens one’s feelings to the verge of pain?” In these times assuredly such a remark would have seemed to most people too obvious to deserve discussion, but it only brought from my father the reply: “God bless my soul, what nonsense you talk, my dear! I never heard the like. Of course a fine day makes everybody cheerful and a rainy day makes us dull and dismal.” Everyone I knew then, was, more or less, similarly simple; and in some of the ablest whom I met in later years of the same generation, (e.g., Mrs. Somerville) I found the same single-mindedness, the same absence of all experience of the subtler emotions. Conversation, as a natural consequence, was more downright and matter of fact, and rarely if ever was concerned with critical analyses of impressions. In short, (as I have said) our fathers were in many respects, like children compared to ourselves.

Another and a sad change has taken place in the amount of animal spirits generally shared by young and old in the Thirties and Forties and down, I think, to the Crimean War, which brought a great seriousness into all our lives. It was not only the young who laughed in joyous “fits” in those earlier days; the old laughed then more heartily and more often than I fear many young people do now; that blessed laugh of hearty amusement which causes the eyes to water and the sides to ache—a laugh one hardly ever hears now in any class or at any age. An evidence of the high level of ordinary spirits may be found in the readiness with which such genuine laughter responded to the smallest provocation. It did not need the delightful farce of the Keeley’s acting (though I recall the helpless state into which Mr. Keeley’s pride in his red waistcoat reduced half the house), but even an old, well-worn, good story, or family catch-word with some ludicrous association, was enough to provoke jovial mirth. It was part of a young lady’s and young gentleman’s home training to learn how to indulge in the freest enjoyment of fun without boisterousness or shrieks or discordance of any kind. Young people were for ever devising pranks and jests among themselves, and even their seniors occupied themselves in concocting jokes, many of which we should now think childish; the order of the “April Fool,” being the general type. Comic verse making; forging of love letters; disguising and begging as tramps; sending boxes of bogus presents; making “ghosts” with bolsters and burnt cork eyes to be placed in dark corners of passages; these and a score of such monkey-tricks for which nobody now has patience, were common diversions in every household, and were nearly always taken good-humouredly. My father used to tell of one ridiculous deception in which the chief actress and inventor was that very grande dame Elizabeth Hastings, Countess of Moira, daughter of the Methodist Countess of Huntingdon. Lady Moira, my father and two other young men, by means of advertising and letters, induced some wretched officer to walk up and down a certain part of Sackville Street for an hour with a red geranium in his buttonhole, to show himself off, as he thought, to a young lady with a large fortune who proposed to marry him. The conspirators sat in a window across the street watching their victim and exploding with glee at his peacock behaviour. The sequel was better than the joke. The poor man wrote a letter to his tormentress (whom he had at last detected) so pitiful that her kind heart melted, and she exerted her immense influence effectually on his behalf and provided for him comfortably for life.

Henry, the third Marquis of Waterford, husband of the gifted and beautiful lady whose charming biography Mr. Hare has recently written, was the last example I imagine in Ireland of these redundant spirits. It was told of him, and I remember hearing of it at the time, that a somewhat grave and self-important gentleman had ridden up to Curraghmore on business and left his bay horse at the door. Lord Waterford, seeing the animal, caught up a pot of whitewash in use by some labourer and rapidly whitewashed the horse; after which exploit he went indoors to interview his visitor, and began by observing, “That is a handsome grey horse of yours at the door.” “A bay, my Lord.”

“Not at all. It is a grey horse. I saw you on it.”

Eventually both parties adjourned to the front of the house and found the whitewashed horse walking up and down with a groom. “You see it is grey,” said the Marquis triumphantly.

Certainly no one in those days dreamed of asking the question, “Is Life worth Living?” We were all, young and old, quite sure that life was extremely valuable; a boon for which to be grateful to God. I recall the amazement with which I first read of the Buddhist and Brahmin Doctrine that Existence is per se an evil, and that the reward of the highest virtue will be Absorption, or Nirvana. The pessimism which prevails in this fin de siècle was as unknown in the Forties as the potato disease before the great blight.

I much wish that some strong thinker would undertake the useful task of tracking this mental and moral anæmia of the present generation to its true origin, whether that origin be the ebb of religious hope and faith and the reaction from the extreme and too hasty optimism which culminated in 1851, and has fallen rapidly since 1875, or whether, in truth, our bodily conditions, though tending to prolong life and working power to an amazing degree, are yet less conducive to the development of the sanguine and hilarious temperament common in my youth. I have heard as a defence for the revolution which has taken place in medical treatment—from the depletory and antiphlogistic to the nourishing and stimulating, and for the total abandonment of the practice of bleeding—that it is not the doctors who have altered their minds, but the patients, whose bodies have undergone a profound modification. I can quite recall the time when (as all the novels of the period testify), if anybody had a fall or a fit, or almost any other mishap, it was the first business of the doctor to whip out his lancet, bare the sufferer’s arm, and draw a large quantity of blood, when everybody and the aforesaid novels always remarked; “It was providential that there was a doctor at hand” to do it. I have myself seen this operation performed on one of my brothers in our drawing-room about 1836, and I heard of it every day occurring among our neighbours, rich and poor. My father’s aunt, whom I well remember, Jane Power Trench (sister of the first Lord Clancarty), who lived in Marlborough Buildings in Bath, was habitually bled every year just before Easter, having previously spent the entire winter in her bedroom of which the windows were pasted down and the doors doubled. A few days after the phlebotomy the old lady invariably bought a new bonnet and walked in it up to the top of Beacon Hill. She continued the annual ritual unbroken till she died at 79. Surely these people were made of stronger pâte than we? In corroboration of this theory I may record how much more hardy were the gentlemen of the Forties in all their habits than are those of the Nineties. When my father and his friends went on grouse-shooting expeditions to our mountain-lodge, I used to provide for the large parties only abundance of plain food for dinners, and for luncheons merely sandwiches, bread and cheese, with a keg of ale, and a basket of apples. By degrees it became necessary (to please my brother’s guests) to provide the best of fish, fowl and flesh, champagne and peaches. The whole odious system of battues, rendering sport unmanly as well as cruel, with all its attendant waste and cost and disgusting butchery, has grown up within my recollection by the extension of luxury, laziness and ostentation.

To turn to another subject. There was very little immorality at that time in Ireland either in high or low life, and what there was received no quarter. But there was, certainly, together with the absence of vice, a lack of some of the virtues which have since developed amongst us. It is not easy to realise that in my lifetime men were hanged for forgery and for sheep-stealing; and that no one agitated for the repeal of such Draconian legislation, but everybody placidly repeated the observation (now-a-days so constantly applied to the scientific torture of animals), that it was “NECESSARY.” Cruelties, wrongs and oppressions of all kinds were rife, and there were (in Ireland at all events) none to raise an outcry such as would echo now from one end of England to the other.

The Protestant pulpit was occupied by two distinct classes of men. There were the younger sons of the gentry and nobles, who took the large livings and were booked for bishoprics; and these were educated at Oxford and Cambridge, were more or less cultivated men and associated of course on equal terms with the best in the land. Not seldom they were men of noble lives, and extreme piety; such for example, as the last Protestant Archbishop of Tuam, and a certain Archdeacon Trench, whom I remember regarding with awe and curiosity since I had heard that he had once got up into his own pulpit, and (like Maxwell Gray’s Dean Maitland) made a public confession of all his life’s misdoings. The second class of Irish clergymen in those days were men of a rather lower social grade, educated in Trinity College, often, no doubt, of excellent character and devotion but generally extremely narrow in their views, conducting all controversies by citations of isolated Bible-texts and preaching to their sparse country congregations with Dublin brogues which, not seldom, reduced the sublimity of their subjects to bathos. There was one, for example, who said, as the peroration of his sermon on the Fear of Death:—

“Me brethren the doying Christian lepps into the arrums of Death and makes his hollow jaws ring with eternal hallelujahs!”

I have myself heard another read the concluding chapters of the gospels, substituting with extraordinary effect the words “two Meal-factors,” for the “two malefactors,” who were crucified. There was a chapter in the Acts which we dreaded to hear, so difficult was it to help laughing when we were told of “Perthians and Mades, and the dwellers in Mesopotamia and the parts of Libya about Cyraine, streengers of Roum, Jews and Proselytes, Crates and Arabians.” It was also hard to listen gravely to a vivid description of Jonah’s catastrophe, as I have heard it, thus: “The weves bate against the ship, and the ship bate against the weves;” (and, at last) “The Wheel swallowed Jonah!”

They had a difficult place to hold, these humbler Irish clergymen, properly associating with no class of their parishioners; but to their credit be it said, they were nearly all men of blameless lives, who did their duty as they understood it, fairly well. The disestablishment of the Irish Church which I had regarded beforehand with much prejudice, did (I have since been inclined to think), very little mischief, and certainly awakened in the minds of the Irish squirearchy who had to settle their creed afresh, an interest in theology which was never exhibited in my earlier days. I was absolutely astounded on paying a visit to my old home a few years after disestablishment and while the Convention (commonly called the Contention!) was going on, to hear sundry recondite mysteries discussed at my brother’s table and to find some of my old dancing partners actually greedily listening to what I could tell them of the then recent discovery of Mr. Edmund Ffoulkes,—that the doctrine of the Double Procession of the Holy Ghost had been invented by King Reccared.

As regards any moral obligation or duty owed by men and women to the lower animals, such ideas were as yet scarcely beginning to be recognised. It was in 1822, the year in which I was born, that brave old Richard Martin carried in Parliament the first Act ever passed by any legislature in the world on behalf of the brutes. Tom Moore had laughed at this early Zoophilist.

But in the history of human civilisation, “Martin’s Act” will hereafter assuredly hold a distinct place of honour when many a more pompous political piece of legislation is buried in oblivion. For a long time the new law, and the Society for Prevention of Cruelty which arose to work it, were objects of obloquy and jest even from such a man as Sydney Smith, who did his best in the Edinburgh Review to sneer them down. But by degrees they formed, as Mr. Lecky says every system of legislation must do, a system of moral education. A sense of the Rights of Animals has slowly been awakened, and is becoming, by not imperceptible degrees, a new principle of ethics. In my youth there were plenty of good people who were fond of dogs, cats and horses; but nothing in their behaviour, or in that of any one I knew at that time, testified to the existence of any latent idea that it was morally wrong to maltreat animals to any extent. Pious sportsmen were wont to scourge their dogs with frightful dog-whips, for any disobedience or mistake, with a savage violence which I shudder to remember; and which I do not think the most brutal men would now exhibit openly. Miss Edgeworth’s then recent novel of Ennui had described her hero as riding five horses to death to give himself a sensation, without (as it would appear) forfeiting in the author’s opinion his claims to the sympathies of the reader. I can myself recall only laughing, not crying as I should be more inclined to do now, at the spectacle of miserable half-starved horses made to gallop in Irish cars to win a bribe for the driver, who flogged them over ruts and stones, shouting (as I have heard them) “Never fare! I’ll batther him out of that!” The picture of a “Rosinante,” from Cervantes’ time till a dozen or two years ago, instead of being one of the most pathetic objects in the world,—the living symbol of human cruelty,—was always considered a particularly laughable caricature. Only tender-hearted Bewick in his woodcut, Waiting for Death, tried to move the hearts of his generation to compassion for the starved and worn-out servant of ungrateful man.

The Irish peasantry do not habitually maltreat animals, but the frightful mutilations and tortures which of late years they have practised on cattle belonging to their obnoxious neighbours, is one of the worst proofs of the existence in the Celtic character of that undercurrent of ferocity of which I have spoken elsewhere.

Among Irish ladies and gentlemen in the Forties there was a great deal of interest of course in our domestic pets, and I remember a beautiful and beloved young bride coming to pay us a visit, and asking in a tone of profound conviction: “What would life be without dogs?” Still there was nothing then existing, I think, in the world like the sentiment which inspired Mathew Arnold’s Geist or even his “Kaiser Dead.” The gulf between the canine race and ours was thought to be measureless. Darwin had not yet written the Descent of Man or made us imagine that “God had made of one blood” at least all the mammals “upon earth.” No one dreamed of trying to realise what must be the consciousness of suffering animals; nor did anyone, I think, live under the slightest sense of responsibility for their well-being. Even my dear old friend, Harriet St. Leger, though she was renowned through the county for her attachment to her great black Retrievers, said to me one day, many years after I had left Ireland, “I don’t understand your feelings about animals at all. To me a dog is a dog. To you it seems to be something else!”

Another difference was, that there was very little popularity-hunting in the Forties. The “working man” was seen, but not yet heard of; and, so far as I remember, we thought as little of the public opinion of our villages respecting us as we did of the public opinion of the stables. The wretched religious bigotry which, as we knew, made the Catholics look on us as infallibly condemned of God in this world and the next, was an insuperable barrier to sympathy from them, and we never expected them to understand either our acts or motives. But if we cared little or nothing what they thought of us, I must in justice say that we did care a great deal for their comfort, and were genuinely unhappy in their afflictions and active to relieve their miseries. When the famine came there was scarcely one Irish lady or gentleman, I think, who did not spend time, money and labour like water to supply food to the needy. I remember the horror with which my father listened to a visitor, who was not an Irishwoman but a purse-proud nouveau riche married to a very silly baronet in our neighbourhood, who told him that her husband’s Mayo property had just cost them £70. “That will go some way in supplying Indian meal to your tenants,” said my father, supposing that to such purpose it must be devoted. “O dear, no! We are not sending it for any such use,” said Lady —. “We are spending it on evictions!” “Good God!” shouted my father; “how shocking! At such a time as this!”

It has been people like these who have ever since done the hard things of which so much capital has been made by those whose interest it has been to stir up strife in the “distressful country.”

I happen to be able to recall precisely the day, almost the hour, when the blight fell on the potatoes and caused the great calamity. A party of us were driving to a seven o’clock dinner at the house of our neighbour, Mrs. Evans, of Portrane. As we passed a remarkably fine field of potatoes in blossom, the scent came through the open windows of the carriage and we remarked to each other how splendid was the crop. Three or four hours later, as we returned home in the dark, a dreadful smell came from the same field, and we exclaimed, “Something has happened to those potatoes; they do not smell at all as they did when we passed them on our way out.” Next morning there was a wail from one end of Ireland to the other. Every field was black and every root rendered unfit for human food. And there were nearly eight millions of people depending principally upon these potatoes for existence!

The splendid generosity of the English public to us at that time warmed all our Anglo-Irish hearts and cheered us to strain every nerve to feed the people. But the agitators were afraid it would promote too much good feeling between the nations, which would not have suited their game. I myself heard O’Connell in Conciliation Hall (that ill-named place!) endeavour to belittle English liberality. He spoke (a strange figure in the red robes of his Mayoralty and with a little sandy wig on his head) to the following purpose:—

“They have sent you over money in your distress. But do you think they do it for love of you, or because they feel for you, and are sorry for your trouble? Devil a bit! They are afraid of you!—that is it! They are afraid of you. You are eight millions strong.”

It was as wicked a speech as ever man made, but it was never, that I know of, reported or remarked upon. He spoke continually to similar purpose no doubt, in that Hall, where my cousin—afterwards the wife of John Locke, M.P. for Southwark—and I had gone to hear him out of girlish curiosity.

The part played by Anglo-Irish ladies when the great fever which followed the famine came on us, was the same. It became perfectly well known that if any of the upper classes caught the fever, they almost uniformly died. The working people could generally be cured by a total change of diet and abundant meat and wine, but to the others no difference could be made in that way, and numbers of ladies and gentlemen lost their lives by attending their poor in the disease. It was very infectious, or at least it was easily caught in each locality by those who went into the cabins.

There were few people whom I met in Ireland in those early days whose names would excite any interest in the reader’s mind. One was poor Elliot Warburton, the author of the Crescent and the Cross, who came many times to Newbridge as an acquaintance of my brother. He was very refined and, as we considered, rather effeminate; but how grand, even sublime, was he in his death! On the burning Amazon in mid-Atlantic he refused to take a place in the crowded boats, and was last seen standing alone beside the faithful Captain at the helm as the doomed vessel was wrapped in flames. I have never forgotten his pale, intellectual face and somewhat puny frame, and pictured him thus—a true hero.

His brother, who was commonly known as Hochelaga, from the name of his book on Canada, was a hale and genial young fellow, generally popular. One rainy day he was prompted by a silly young lady-guest of ours to sing a series of comic songs in our drawing-room, the point of the jokes turning on the advances of women to men. My dear mother, then old and feeble, after listening quietly for a time, slowly rose from her sofa, walked painfully across the room, and leaning over the piano said in her gentle way a few strong words of remonstrance. She could not bear, she said, that men should ridicule women. Respect and chivalrous feeling for them, even when they were foolish and ill-advised, were the part, she always thought, of a generous man. She would beg Mr. Warburton to choose some other songs for his fine voice. All this was done so gently and with her sweet, kind smile, that no one could take offence. Mr. Warburton was far from doing so. He was, I could see, touched with tender reverence for his aged monitress, and rising hastily from the piano, made the frankest apologies, which of course were instantly accepted. I have described this trivial incident because I think it illustrates the kind of influence which was exercised by women of the old school of “decorum.”

Another man who sometimes came to our house, was Dr. Longley, then Bishop of Ripon, afterwards Archbishop of Canterbury. He was a very charming person, without the slightest episcopal morgue or affectation, and with the kindest brown eyes in the world. His wife was niece, and, I believe, eventually heiress, of our neighbour Mrs. Evans; and he and his family spent some summers at Portrane in the Fifties when we had many pleasant parties and picnics. I shall not forget how the Bishop laughed when the young Longleys and I and a few guests of my own, inaugurated some charades, and our party, all in disguise, were announced on our arrival at Portrane, as “Lady Worldly,” “Miss Angelina Worldly,” “Sir Bumpkin Blunderhead,” and the “Cardinal Lord Archbishop of Rheims.”

Our word was “Novice.” I, as Lady Worldly, in my great-grandmother’s petticoat and powdered toupee, gave my daughter Angelina a lecture on the desirability of marrying “Sir Bumpkin Blunderhead” who was rich, and of dismissing Captain Algernon who was poor. Sir Bumpkin then made his proposals, to which Angelina emphatically answered “No.” In the second scene I met Sir Bumpkin at the gaming table, and fleeced him utterly; the end of his “Vice” being suicide on the adjacent sofa. Angelina then, in horror took the veil, and became a “No-vice,” duly admitted to her Nunnery by the Cardinal Lord Archbishop of Rheims (my youngest brother in a superb scarlet dressing gown) who pronounced a Sermon on the pleasures of fasting and going barefoot. Angelina retired to her cell, but was soon disturbed by a voice outside the window (Henry Longley’s); and exclaiming “Algernon, beloved Algernon!” a speedy elopement over the back of the sofa concluded the fate of the Novice and the charade.

There was another charade in which we held a debate in Parliament on a Motion to “abolish the sun and moon,” which amused the bishop to the last degree, especially as we made fun of Joseph Hume’s retrenchments; he being a particular friend and frequent guest of our hostess. The abolition of the Sun would, we feared, affect the tax on parasols.

At Ripon, as Dr. Longley told me, the Palace prepared for him (the first bishop of the new see) had, as ornaments of the front of the house, two full-sized stone (or plaster) Angels. One day a visitor asked him: “Pray, my Lord, is it supposed by Divines that Angels wear the order of the Garter?” On inspection it proved that the Ripon Angels had formerly done service as statues of the Queen and Prince Albert, but that wings had been added to fit them for the episcopal residence. Sufficient care, however, had not been taken to efface the insignia of the Most Illustrious Order; and “Honi soit qui mal y pense” might be dimly deciphered on the leg of the male celestial visitant.

A lady nearly related to Mrs. Longley, who had married an English nobleman, adopted the views of the Plymouth Brothers (or as all the Mrs. Malaprops of the period invariably styled them, the “Yarmouth Bloaters”), which had burst into sudden notoriety. When her husband died leaving her a very wealthy woman, she thought it her duty to carry out the ideas of her sect by putting down such superfluities of her establishment as horses and carriages, and a well appointed table. She accordingly wrote to her father and begged him to dispose of all her plate and equipages. Lord C—— made no remonstrance and offered no arguments; and after a year or two he received a letter from his daughter couched in a different strain. She told him that she had now reached the conviction that it was “the will of God that a peeress should live as a peeress,” and she begged him to buy for her new carriages and fresh plate. Lord C——’s answer must have been a little mortifying. “I knew, my dear, that you would come sooner or later to your senses. You will find your carriages at your coachmakers and your plate at your bankers.”

Mrs. Evans, née Sophia Parnell, the aunt of both these ladies, and a great-aunt of Charles Stewart Parnell, was, as I have said, our nearest neighbour and in the later years of my life at Newbridge my very kind old friend. For a long time political differences between my father and her husband,—George Hampden Evans, M.P., who had managed to wrest the county from the Tories,—kept the families apart, but after his death we were pleasantly intimate for many years. She often spoke to me of the Avondale branch of her family, and more than once said: “There is mischief brewing! I am troubled at what is going on at Avondale. My nephew’s wife” (the American lady, Delia Stewart) “has a hatred of England, and is educating my nephew, like a little Hannibal, to hate it too!” How true was her foresight there is no need now to rehearse, nor how near that “little Hannibal” came to our Rome! Charles Parnell was very far from being a representative Irishman. He was of purely English extraction, and even in the female line had no drop of Irish blood. His mother, as all the world knows, was an American; his grandmother was one of the Howards of the family of the Earls of Wicklow, his great-grandmother a Brooke, of a branch of the old Cheshire house; and, beyond this lady again, his grand-dames were Wards and Whitsheds. In short, like other supposed “illustrious Irishmen”—Burke, Grattan, Goldsmith, and Wellington—Mr. Parnell was only one example more of the supremacy of the Anglo-Saxon intellect in every land of its adoption.

Mrs. Evans had known Madame de Stael, Condorcet and many other interesting French people in her youth, and loved the Condorcets warmly. She described to me a stiff, old-fashioned dinner at which she had been present when Madame de Stael was a guest. After dinner, the ladies, having retired to the drawing-room, sat apart from Madame de Stael in terror, and she looked them over with undisguised contempt. After a while she rose and, without asking the consent of the mistress of the house, rang the bell. When the footman appeared, she delivered the startling order: “Tell the gentlemen to come up!” The sensation among the formal and scandalized ladies upstairs, and the gentlemen just settling down to their usual long potations below, may be well imagined.

When her husband died, Mrs. Evans built in his memory a fine Round Tower on the plan and of the size of the best of the old Irish towers. It stands on high ground on what was her deer-park, and is a useful landmark to sailors all along that dangerous coast, where the dreadful wreck of the Tayleur took place. On the shore below, under the lofty black cliffs, are several very imposing caverns. In the largest of these, which is lighted from above by a shaft, Mrs. Evans, on one occasion, gave a great luncheon party, at which I was present. The company were all in high spirits and thoroughly enjoying the pigeon-pies and champagne, when some one observed that the tide might soon be rising. Mrs. Evans replied that it was all right, there was plenty of time, and the festival proceeded for another half-hour, when somebody rose and strolled to the mouth of the cavern and soon uttered a cry of alarm. The tide had risen, and was already beating at a formidable depth against both sides of the rocks which shut in the cave. Consternation of course reigned among the party. A night spent in the further recesses of that damp hole, even supposing the tide did not reach the end (which was very doubtful), afforded anything but a cheerful prospect. Could anybody get up through the shaft to the upper cliff? Certainly, if they had a long ladder. But there were no ladders lying about the cave; and, finally, everybody stood mournfully watching the rising waters at the mouth of their prison. Mrs. Evans all this time appeared singularly calm, and administered a little encouragement to some of the almost fainting ladies. When the panic was at its climax, Mrs. Evans’ own large boat was seen quietly rounding the projecting rocks and was soon comfortably pushed up to the feet of the imprisoned party, who had nothing to do but to embark in two or three detachments and be safely landed in the bay outside, beyond the reach of the sea. The whole incident, it is to be suspected, had been pre-arranged by the hostess to infuse a little wholesome excitement among her country guests.

Our small village church at Donabate was not often honoured by this lady’s presence, but one Sunday she saw fit to attend service with some visitors; and a big dog unluckily followed her into the pew and lay extended on the floor, which he proceeded to beat with his tail after the manner of impatient dogs under durance. This disturbance was too much for the poor parson, who did not love Mrs. Evans. As he proceeded with the service and the rappings were repeated again and again, his patience gave way, and he read out this extraordinary lesson to his astonished congregation:—“The Pharisee stood and prayed thus with himself. Turn out that dog, if you please! It’s extremely wrong to bring a dog into church.” During the winter Mrs. Evans was wont to live much alone in her country house, surrounded only by her old servants and multitudes of old books. When at last, in old age, she found herself attacked by mortal disease she went to Paris to profit by the skill of some French physician in whom she had confidence, and there, with unshaken courage she passed away. Her remains, enclosed in a leaden coffin, were brought back to Portrane, and her Irish terrier who adored her, somehow recognised the dreadful chest and exhibited a frenzy of grief; leaping upon it and tearing at the pall with piteous cries. Next morning, strange to say, the poor brute was, with six others about the place, in such a state of excitement as to be supposed to be rabid and it was thought necessary to shoot them all. One of them leaped the gate of the yard and escaping bit two of my father’s cows, which became rabid, and were shot in my presence. Mrs. Evans was buried beside her beloved husband in the little roofless and ruined church of Portrane, close by the shore. On another grave in the same church belonging to the same family, a dog had some years previously died of grief.

A brother of this lady, who walked over often to Newbridge from Portrane to bring my mother some scented broom which she loved, was a very singular and pathetic character. He was a younger brother of that sufficiently astute man of the world, Sir Henry Parnell, afterwards Lord Congleton, but was his antipodes in disposition. Thomas Parnell, “Old Tom Parnell,” as all Dublin knew him for forty years, had a huge ungainly figure like Dr. Johnson’s, and one of the sweetest, softest faces ever worn by mortal man. He had, at some remote and long forgotten period, been seized with a fervent and self-denying religious enthusiasm of the ultra-Protestant type; and this had somehow given birth in his brain to a scheme for arranging texts of the Bible in a mysterious order which, when completed, should afford infallible answers to every question of the human mind! To construct the interminable tables required for this wonderful plan, poor Tom Parnell devoted his life and fortune. For years which must have amounted to many decades, he laboured at the work in a bare, gloomy, dusty room in what was called a “Protestant Office” in Sackville Street. Money went speedily to clerks and printers; and no doubt the good man (who himself lived, as he used to say laughingly, on “a second-hand bone,”) gave money also freely in alms. One way or another Mr. Parnell grew poorer and more poor, his coat looked shabbier, and his beautiful long white hair more obviously in need of a barber. Once or twice every summer he was prevailed on by his sister to tear himself from his work and pay her a few weeks’ visit in the country at Portrane; and to her and all her visitors he preached incessantly his monotonous appeal: “Repent; and cease to eat good dinners, and devote yourselves to compiling texts!” When his sister—who had treated him as a mother would treat a silly boy—died, she left him a small annuity, to be paid to him weekly in dribblets by trustees, lest he should spend it at once and starve if he received it half-yearly. After this epoch he worked on with fewer interruptions than ever at his dreary text-books in that empty, grimy office. Summer’s sun and winter’s snow were alike to the lonely old man. He ploughed on at his hopeless task. There was no probability that he should live to fill up the interminable columns, and no apparent reason to suppose that any human being would use the books if he ever did so and supposing them to be printed. But still he laboured on. Old friends—myself among them—who had known him in their childhood, looked in now and then to shake hands with him, and, noticing how pale and worn and aged he seemed, tried to induce him to come to their homes. But he only exhorted them (like Tolstoi, whom he rather resembled), as usual, to repent and give up good dinners and help him with his texts, and denounced wildly all rich people who lived in handsome parks with mud villages at their gates, as he said, “like a velvet dress with a draggled skirt.” Then, when his visitor had departed, Mr. Parnell returned patiently to his interminable texts. At last one day, late in the autumn twilight, the porter, whose duty it was to shut up the office, entered the room and found the old man sitting quietly in the chair where he had laboured so long—fallen into the last long sleep.

I never saw much of Irish society out of our own county. Once, when I was eighteen, my father and I went a tour of visits to his relations in Connaught, travelling, as was necessary in those days, very slowly with post-horses to our carriage, my maid on the box, and obliged to stop at inns on the way. Some of these inns were wretched places. I remember in one finding a packet of letters addressed to some attorney, under my bolster! At another, this dialogue took place between me and the waiter:—

“What can we have for dinner?”

“Anything you please, Ma’am. Anything you please.”

“Well, but exactly what can we have?”

(Waiter, triumphantly): “You can have a pair of ducks.”

“I am sorry to say Mr. Cobbe cannot eat ducks. What else?”

“They are very fine ducks, Ma’am.”

“I dare say. But what else?”

“You might have the ducks boiled, Ma’am!”

“No, no. Can we have mutton?”

“Well; not mutton, to-day, Ma’am.”

“Some beef?”

“No, Ma’am.”

“Some veal?”

“Not any veal, I’m afraid.”

“Well, then, a fowl?”

“We haven’t got a fowl.”

“What on earth have you got, then?”

“Well, then, Ma’am, I’m afeared if you won’t have the fine pair of ducks, there’s nothing for it but bacon and eggs!”

We went first to Drumcar and next (a two days’ drive) to Moydrum Castle which then belonged to my father’s cousin, old Lady Castlemaine. Another old cousin in the house showed me where, between two towers covered with ivy, she had looked one dark night out of her bedroom window on hearing a wailing noise below, and had seen some white object larger than any bird, floating slowly up and then sinking down into the shadow below again, and yet again. Of course it was the Banshee; and somebody had died afterwards! We also had our Banshee at Newbridge about that time. One stormy and rainy Sunday night in October my father was reading a sermon as usual to the assembled household, and the family, gathered near the fire in what we were wont to call on these evenings “Sinner’s chair” and the “Seat of the Scornful,” were rather somnolent, when the most piercing and unearthly shrieks arose apparently just outside the windows in the pleasure ground, and startled us all wide awake. At the head of the row of servants sat our dear old housekeeper “Joney” then the head-gardener’s wife, who had adopted a child of three years old, and this evening had left him fast asleep in the housekeeper’s room, which was under part of the drawing-room. Naturally she and all of us supposed that “Johnny” had wakened and was screaming on finding himself alone; and though the outcries were not like those of a child, “Joney” rose and hastily passed down the room and went to look after her charge. To reach the housekeeper’s room she necessarily passed the servants’ hall and out of it rushed the coachman—a big, usually red-faced Englishman, whom she declared was on that occasion as pale as death. The next instant one of the housemaids, who had likewise played truant from prayers, came tottering down from a bedroom (so remote that I have always wondered how any noise below the drawing-room could have reached it), and sunk fainting on a chair. The little boy meanwhile was sleeping like a cherub in undisturbed repose in a clothes basket! What that wild noise was,—heard by at least two dozen people,—we never learned and somehow did not care much to investigate.

After our visit at Moydrum my father and I went to yet other cousins at Garbally; his mother’s old home. At that time—I speak of more than half a century ago,—the Clancarty family was much respected in Ireland; and the household at Garbally was conducted on high religious principles and in a very dignified manner. It was in the Forties that the annual Sheep Fair of Ballinasloe was at its best, and something like 200,000 sheep were then commonly herded at night in Garbally Park. The scene of the Fair was described as curious, but (like a stupid young prig, as I must have been) I declined the place offered me in one of the carriages and stopped in the house on the plea of a cold, but really to enjoy a private hunt in the magnificent library of which I had caught a glimpse. When the various parties came back late in the day there was much talk of a droll mishap. The Marquis of Downshire of that time, who was stopping in the house, was a man of colossal strength, and rumour said he had killed two men by accidental blows intended as friendly. However this may be, he was on this occasion overthrown by sheep! He was standing in the gangway between the hurdles in the great fair, when an immense flock of terrified animals rushed through, overset him and trampled him under their feet. When he came home, laughing good humouredly at his disaster, he presented a marvellous spectacle with his rather voyant light costume of the morning in a frightful pickle. Another agreeable man in the house was the Lord Devon of that day, a very able and cultivated man (whom I straightway interrogated concerning Gibbon’s chapter on the Courtenays!); and poor Lord Leitrim, a kindly and good Irish landlord, afterwards most cruelly murdered. There were also the Ernes and Lord Enniskillen and many others whom I have forgotten, and a dear aged lady; the Marchioness of Ormonde. Hearing I had a cold, she kindly proposed to treat me medically and said: “I should advise you to try Brandy and Salt. For my own part I take Morrison’s pills whenever I am ill, if I cannot get hydropathic baths; but I have a very great opinion of Tar-water. Holloway’s ointment and pills, too, are excellent. My son, you know, joined Mr. ——” (I have forgotten the name) “to pay £15,000 to St. John Long for his famous recipe; but it turned out no good when he had it. No! I advise you decidedly to try brandy and salt.”

From Garbally we drove to Parsonstown, where Lady Rosse was good enough to welcome us to indulge my intense longing to see the great telescope, then quite recently erected. Lord Rosse at that time believed that, as he had resolved into separate stars many of the nebulæ which were irresolvable by Herschel’s telescope, there was a presumption that all were resolvable; and consequently that the nebular hypothesis must be abandoned. The later discovery of gaseous nebulæ by the spectroscope re-established the theory. I was very anxious on the subject, having pinned my faith already on the Vestiges of Creation (then a new book), in sequence to Nichol’s Architecture of the Heavens: that prose-poem of science. Lord Rosse was infinitely indulgent to my girlish curiosity, and took me to see the process of polishing the speculum of his second telescope; a most ingenious piece of mechanism invented mainly by himself. He also showed me models which he has made in plaster of lunar craters. I saw the great telescope by day, but, alas, when darkness came and it was to have been ready for me to look through it and I was trembling with anticipation, the butler came to the drawing-room door and announced: “A rainy night, my lord”! It was a life-long disappointment, for we could not stay another day though hospitably pressed to do so; and I never had another chance.

Lord Rosse had guessed already that Robert Chambers was the author of the Vestiges. He explained to me the reason for the enormous mass of masonry on which the seven-foot telescope rested, by the curious fact that even where it stood within his park, the roll of a cart more than two miles away, outside, was enough to make the ground tremble and to disturb the observation.

There was a romantic story then current in Ireland about Lord and Lady Rosse. It was said that, as a young man, he had gone incog. and worked as a handicraftsman in some large foundry in the north of England to learn the secrets of machine making. After a time his employer, considering him a peculiarly promising young artisan, invited him occasionally to a Sunday family dinner when young Lord Parsons, as he then was, speedily fell in love with his host’s daughter. Observing what was going on, the father put a veto on what he thought would be a mésalliance for Miss Green, and the supposed artisan left his employment and the country; but not without receiving from the young lady an assurance that she returned his attachment. Shortly afterwards, having gone home and obtained his father, Lord Rosse’s consent, he re-appeared and now made his proposals to Mr. Green, père, in all due form as the heir of a good estate and an earldom. He was not rejected this time.

I tell this story only as a pretty one current when I saw Lord and Lady Rosse; a very happy and united couple with little children who have since grown to be distinguished men. Very possibly it may be only a myth!

I never saw Archbishop Whately except when he confirmed me in the church of Malahide. He was no doubt a sincerely pious man, but, his rough and irreverent manner (intended, I believe, as a protest against the Pecksniffian tone then common among evangelical dignitaries) was almost repulsive and certainly startling. Outside his palace in Stephen’s Green there was at that time a row of short columns connected from top to top by heavy chains which fell in festoons and guarded the gardens of the square. Nothing would serve his Grace (we were told with horror by the spectators) than to go of a morning after breakfast and sit on these chains smoking his cigar as he swung gently back and forth, kicking the ground to gain impetus.

On the occasion of my confirmation he exhibited one of his whims most unpleasantly for me. This was, that he must actually touch, in his episcopal benediction, the head, not merely the hair, of the kneeling catechumen. Unhappily, my maid had not foreseen this contingency, but had thought she could not have a finer opportunity for displaying her skill in plaiting my redundant locks; and had built up such an edifice with plaits and pins, (on the part of my head which necessarily came under the Archbishop’s hand) that he had much ado to overthrow the same! He did so, however, effectually; and I finally walked back, through the church to my pew with all my chevelure hanging down in disorder, far from “admired” by me or anybody.

Of all the phases of orthodoxy I think that of Whately,—well called the Hard Church,—was the last which I could have adopted at any period of my life. It was obviously his view that a chain of propositions might be constructed by iron logic, beginning with the record of a miracle two thousand years ago and ending with unavoidable conversion to the love of God and Man!

The last person of whom I shall speak as known to me first in Ireland, was that dear and noble woman, Fanny Kemble. She has not mentioned in her delightful Records how our acquaintance, destined to ripen into a life-long friendship, began at Newbridge, but it was in a droll and characteristic way.

Mrs. Kemble’s friend “H.S.”—Harriet St. Leger—lived at Ardgillan Castle, eight Irish miles from Newbridge. Her sister, the wife of Hon. and Rev. Edward Taylor and mother of the late Tory Whip, was my mother’s best-liked neighbour, and at an early age I was taught to look with respect on the somewhat singular figure of Miss St. Leger. In those days any departure from the conventional dress of the time was talked of as if it were altogether the most important fact connected with a woman, no matter what might be the greatness of her character or abilities. Like her contemporaries and fellow countrywomen, the Ladies of Llangollen, (also Irish), Harriet St. Leger early adopted a costume consisting of a riding habit (in her case with a skirt of sensible length) and a black beaver hat. All the empty-headed men and women in the county prated incessantly about these inoffensive garments, insomuch that I arrived early at the conviction that, rational and convenient as such dress would be, the game was not worth the candle. Things are altered so far now that, could dear Harriet reappear, I believe the universal comment on her dress would rather be: “How sensible and befitting”! rather than the silly, “How odd”! Anyway I imagine she must have afforded a somewhat singular contrast to her ever magnificent, not to say gorgeous friend Fanny Kemble, when at the great Exhibition of 1851, they were the observed of observers, sitting for a long time side by side close to the crystal fountain.

Every reader of the charming Records of a Girlhood and Recollections of Later Life, must have felt some curiosity about the personality of the friend to whom those letters of our English Sevigné were addressed. I have before me as I write an excellent reproduction in platinotype from a daguerreotype of herself which dear Harriet gave me some twenty years ago. The pale, kind, sad face is, I think inexpressibly touching; and the woman who wore it deserved all the affection which Fanny Kemble gave her. She was a deep and singularly critical thinker and reader, and had one of the warmest hearts which ever beat under a cold and shy exterior. The iridescent genius of Fanny Kemble in the prime of her splendid womanhood, and my poor young soul, overburdened with thoughts too great and difficult for me, were equally drawn to seek her sympathy.

It happened once, somewhere in the early Fifties, that Mrs. Kemble was paying a visit to Miss St. Leger at Ardgillan, and we arranged that she should bring her over some day to Newbridge to luncheon. I was, of course, prepared to receive my guest very cordially but, to my astonishment, when Mrs. Kemble entered she made me the most formal salutation conceivable and, after being seated, answered all my small politenesses in monosyllables and with obvious annoyance and disinclination to converse with me or with any of my friends whom I presented to her. Something was evidently frightfully amiss, and Harriet perceived it; but what could it be? What could be done? Happily the gong sounded for luncheon, and, my father being absent, my eldest brother offered his arm to Mrs. Kemble and led her, walking with more than her usual stateliness across the two halls to the dining-room, where he placed her, of course, beside himself. I was at the other end of the table but I heard afterwards all that occurred. We were a party of eighteen, and naturally the long table had a good many dishes on it in the old fashion. My brother looked over it and asked: “What will you take, Mrs. Kemble? Roast fowl? or galantine? or a little Mayonnaise, or what else?”

“Thank you,” replied Mrs. Kemble, “If there be a potato!”

Of course there was a potato—nay, several; but a terrible gêne hung over us all till Miss Taylor hurriedly called for her carriage, and the party drove off.

The moment they left the door after our formal farewells, Harriet St. Leger (as she afterwards told me) fell on her friend: “Well, Fanny, never, never will I bring you anywhere again. How could you behave so to Fanny Cobbe?”

“I cannot permit any one,” said Mrs. Kemble, “to invite a number of people to meet me without having asked my consent; I do not choose to be made a gazing-stock to the county. Miss Cobbe had got up a regular party of all those people, and you could see the room was decorated for it.”

“Good Heavens, what are you talking of?” said Harriet, “those ladies and gentlemen are all her relations, stopping in the house. She could not turn them out because you were coming, and her room is always full of flowers.”

“Is that really so?” said Mrs. Kemble, “Then you shall tell Fanny Cobbe that I ask her pardon for my bad behaviour, and if she will forgive me and come to see me in London, I will never behave badly to her again?”

In a letter of hers to Harriet St. Leger given to me after her death, I was touched to read the following reference to this droll incident:—