612 IRELAND AND HER COMMENTATORS. 



persuasion. Our author's stay in the metropolis was short ; as he 

 justly remarks, Dublin is not Ireland, and it was Ireland he came to 

 see. But we must record his opinion of Hibernian beauty, which 

 certainly does not substantiate Mr. Alexander Walker's assertion, 

 who, in his " Physiognomy/' reviewed in the Monthly lately, says 

 that the Irish " have a taste for ugliness-" A difference, observes 

 Mr. Inglis, between his own countrywomen and the Irish ladies, 

 " will be remarked by a stranger, even on a very cursory glance, and 

 certainly not to the disadvantage of the Irish females, whose ge- 

 nerally high foreheads, and intellectual expression, were not thrown 

 away upon me." 



With upwards of 130 letters of introduction to persons of all ranks, 

 and of all shades of religious and political opinion, Mr. Inglis pro- 

 ceeded to the south of the country, by way of Wicklow and Wexford. 

 In the former county the state of the peasantry is deplorable, and the 

 small farmers are but slightly removed from the same condition. 

 The cabins are unfit for the residence of swine, who indeed are their 

 chief occupiers. Our author's English sensibilities were at first out- 

 raged by witnessing pigs sharing the habitations of human beings, 

 but a slight experience sufficed to convince him that, where there 

 were not these quadrupeds, the condition of the reasoning animals 

 was any thing but improved. Wages in Wicklow were sixpence 

 a day, and potatoes fourpence a stone ; so how life is sustained under 

 such circumstances may well puzzle conjecture. The miserable 

 sheds of the labourers are generally paid for in labour eighty days' 

 work, or 2/., being the rent usually extorted for a hovel without 

 chimnies, windows, or a particle of furniture. Wicklow is a county 

 which, from its vicinity to the capital, and its picturesque beauties 

 rendering it a resort for the nobility and landholders, one would 

 suppose should be well off. But, on the contrary, Mr. Inglis found 

 that any thing like constant employment at fivepence a day could 

 not be procured by men with large families. Wives in rags, and 

 children in absolute nakedness, are the consequence, while the un- 

 fortunate labourers themselves are not distantly removed from primi- 

 tive nudity. In the county of Wexford things improved ; the cabins 

 of Wicklow did not so frequently appear, but dwellings less remotely 

 allied to cottages, and kept in a state of comparative neatness, owing 

 to the assistance afforded to the peasantry by loan societies, of the 

 good resulting from whose labours Mr. Inglis bears ample testimony. 

 He complains, however, that the great cause of the misery of the 

 Irish agriculturalists the exorbitant price demanded for land 

 prevails in this otherwise fine county. Land is invariably let at 

 more than its value, and such is the competition, that it is taken at 

 any price, because from the scarcity of employment, the occupation 

 of a morsel of land is a question involving the very existence of the 

 bidders. Pauperism is less prevalent in Wexford than most other 

 counties, and in the town of the same name Mr. Inglis was not 

 asked once for alms a very different account, by the way, from that 

 given by Mrs. Hall of her sojourn there. The Barony of Forth, a 

 large district of the south of this county, calls forth the encomiums of 

 the traveller, because of the neatness of the people, their superior de- 



