habits of the most powerful of the animal creation—the lion and the leopard, when not excited, taking their ease like the Irishman.”

Men of Belfast, what think you of that? But hear him out—

“I had thought, among a people so imaginative as the Irish, to have seen some touch of fancy in dress, if ever so poor—a bit of ribbon on the women’s caps, or a jaunty cock of the ‘boy’s’ tile, or his jacket or coat worn shapely and with an air. But dirty cloaks, ribbonless caps, uncombed hair, and not even a little straw taken from the cart and put under them when they sat on the dirty side-walk, were universal symptoms that left no room for belief in the existence of any vanity whatsoever in the women; many of them of an age, too, when such fancies are supposed to be universal to the sex. The men could scarce be less ornamental in their exteriors; but the dirty sugar-loaf hat, with a shapeless rim, and a twine around it to hold a pipe; the coat thrown over the shoulders, with the sleeves hanging behind; the shoes mended by a wisp of straw stuffed into the holes, and their faces and bare breasts nearly as dirty as their feet, were alike the uniform of old and young. Still those who were not bargaining were laughing, and even in our flourishing canter through the market I had time to make up my mind, that if they had taken a farewell of vanity, they had not of fun.”

Again we say, men of Belfast, what think you of that? Did you ever see yourselves in this manner? If so, we must say that it is more than we ever did, though we have spent many a gay week in your noble, thriving, and most industrious town. “Neither a bit of ribbon on the women’s caps, nor a jaunty cock of the boy’s tile;” no, “but the dirty sugar-loaf hat, with a shapeless rim, and a twine round it to hold a pipe; and the shoes mended by a wisp of straw stuffed into the holes,” &c. This certainly flogs; and we must look more attentively to the Belfastians in future.

Mr Willis proceeds to the hotel called the Donegal Arms, which he allows is a handsome house, in a broad and handsome street; and then he adds, “But I could not help pointing out to my companion the line of soiled polish at the height of a man’s shoulder on every wall and doorpost within sight, showing, with the plainness of a high-water mark, the average height as well as the prevailing habit of the people. We certainly have not yet found time to acquire that polish in America [most civilized people!]; and if we must wait till the working classes find time to lean, it will be a century or two at least before we can show as polished an hotel as the Donegal Arms at Belfast, or (at that particular line above the side walk) as polished a city altogether.” Such is Mr Willis’s description of the Gresham’s Hotel of Belfast, a house which we had foolishly thought was remarkable for its cleanliness, order, and good accommodation. Of course he got a miserable dinner of “unornamented chops and potatoes,” after which he proceeded to visit the lions of Belfast. But we cannot follow him in all his wanderings, though he tells us many things that are not a little amusing, as, for instance, that the houses have a noseless and flattened aspect; that he saw Dubufe’s pictures of Adam and Eve, and sagaciously remarks how curious it is to observe how particularly clean they are (that is, Adam and Eve) before they sinned, and how very dingy after—being dirtied by their fall; and, what was very agreeable to him, the exhibitor of the pictures actually called him by name, having remembered seeing the great penciller in America! After having read the advertisements stuck on every wall, of “vessels bound to New York,” and having “done that end of the town,” he returned towards the inn. He then sallied out again to do the other end, and tells us with great satisfaction of a successful petty larceny of a very sentimental kind which he achieved in the Botanical Gardens—namely, plucking a heart’s-ease, as an expressive remembrance of his visit—“in spite of a cautionary placard, and the keeper standing under the porch and looking on.” After this feat he returned to the inn, and very wisely went to bed. “A bare-footed damsel, with very pink heels”—recollect, reader, that this was in the Donegal Arms—“was

and in some fear of oversleeping the hour for the coach in the morning, I reiterated, and ‘sealed with a silver token,’ my request to be waked at six. Fortunately for a person who possesses Sancho’s ‘alacrity at sleep,’ the noise of a coach rattling over the pavement woke me just in time to save my coffee and my place. I returned to my chamber the moment before mounting the coach for something I had forgotten, and as the clock was striking eight, the faithful damsel knocked at my door and informed me that it was past six.”

Mr Willis is a fortunate traveller. Often as we have stopped at the Donegal Arms, we never had the good fortune to see the pink heels or bare legs of a chambermaid; and the moral economy of the house must be greatly changed also, when they allow the gentlemen to be called by the said bare-legged damsels; a duty which, in our visits at it and all other respectable hotels, always devolved on that useful personage called Boots. We do not think, however, that this change of the system—leaving the calling of the gentlemen to the chambermaids—would work well, except in the case of American travellers. Still, however, as he says, he was in time, and started off—no longer in St Patrick’s track, but on King William’s route to the battle of the Boyne—and arrives in Drogheda to dinner. He tells us that the country is very bare of wood, and then proceeds in the following words to describe the habitations.

“But what shall I say of the human habitations in this (so called) most thriving and best-conditioned quarter of Ireland? If I had not seen every second face at a hovel-door with a smile on it, and heard laughing and begging in the same breath everywhere, I should think here were human beings abandoned by their Maker. Many of the dwellings I saw upon the roadside looked to me like the abodes of extinguished hope—forgotten instincts—grovelling, despairing, nay, almost idiotic wretchedness. I did not know there were such sights in the world. I did not know that men and women, upright, and made in God’s image, could live in styes, like swine, with swine—sitting, lying down, cooking and eating in such filth as all brute animals, save the one ‘unclean,’ revolt from and avoid. The extraordinary part of it, too, is, that it seems almost altogether the result of choice. I scarce saw one hovel, the mud-floor of which was not excavated several inches below the ground-level without; and as there is no sill, or raised threshold, there is no bar, I will not say to the water, but to the liquid filth that oozes to its lower reservoir within. A few miles from Drogheda, I pointed out to my companions a woman sitting in a hovel at work, with the muddy water up to her ancles, and an enormous hog scratching himself against her knee. These disgusting animals were everywhere walking in and out of the hovels at pleasure, jostling aside the half-naked children, or wallowing in the wash, outside or in—the best-conditioned and most privileged inmates, indeed, of every habitation. All this, of course, is matter of choice, and so is the offal-heap, situated, in almost every instance, directly before the door, and draining its putrid mass into the hollow, under the peasant’s table. Yet mirth does live in these places—people do smile on you from these squalid abodes of wretchedness—the rose of health does show itself upon the cheeks of children, whose cradle is a dung-heap, and whose play-fellows are hogs! And of the beings who live