180 EUROPEAN AGRICULTURE. 



1838, and which has already, in a greater or less measure, quali 

 fied and sent out seven hundred teachers. To my mind it seems 

 destined to confer the most important benefits upon Ireland, and 

 I may add upon the world, for so it happens under the benig 

 nant arrangements of the Divine Providence, the benefits of 

 every good measure or effort for the improvement of mankind 

 proceed, by a sort of reduplication, to an unlimited extent ; these 

 teachers shall instruct their pupils, and these pupils become in 

 their turn the teachers of others ; and the good seed, thus sown 

 and widely scattered, go on yielding its constantly-increasing 

 products, to an extent which no human imagination can 

 measure. Three thousand schoolmasters are at this moment 

 demanded for Ireland, and the government are determined to 

 supply them. Happy is it for a country, and honorable to 

 human nature, when, instead of schemes of avarice, and dreams 

 of ambition, and visions of conquest, at the dreadful expense of 

 the comfort, and liberty, and lives, of the powerless and unpro 

 tected, the attention of those who hold the destinies of their 

 fellow-beings in their hands is turned to their improvement, their 

 elevation, their comfort, and their substantial welfare. 



The Model Farm and Agricultural School is at a place called 

 Glasnevin, about three miles from Dublin, on a good soil. The 

 situation is elevated and salubrious, embracing a wide extent of 

 prospect of sea and land, of plain and mountain, of city and 

 country, combining the busy haunts of men, and the highest im 

 provements of art and science, with what is most picturesque and 

 charming in rural scenery, presenting itself in its bold mountains 

 and deep glens, in its beautiful plantations, its cultivated fields, 

 and its wide and glittering expanse of ocean. The scenery in 

 the neighborhood of Dublin, with its fertile valleys, and the 

 mountains of Wicklow, of singularly grand and beautiful 

 formation, bounding the prospect for a considerable extent, is 

 among the richest which the eye can take in ; and at the going 

 down of the sun in a fine summer evening, when the long ridge 

 of the mountains seemed bordered with a fringe of golden fire, it 

 carried my imagination back, with an emotion which those only 

 who feel it can understand, to the most beautiful and pictu 

 resque parts of Vermont, in the neighborhood of Lake Champlain. 

 I have a strong conviction of the powerful and beneficial 

 influence of fine natural scenery, where there is a due measure 



