THEIR HEIGHT, FORM, AND STRENGTH. 79 



dread a glow of congratulation that we are the 

 countrymen of such spirits as these men could 

 furnish in a good cause, a thrill of anxiety that 

 these very men, at the moment they delight us by 

 their vivacity, and charm us by their urbanity, may 

 perhaps be engaged in secret designs the most for- 

 midable and atrocious." He seems to extend this 

 picture to the people of " the whole of the central 

 plain from Monaghan to Cork, from Kildare to 

 Galway." 



77. In October, 1837, the British and Foreign 

 Review says : " The Irishman is proverbially gen- 

 erous, improvident, and brave. It is the axe of the 

 Irish backwoodsman that has opened so many dis- 

 tricts of America to the ploughshare ; amid the 

 laborious inhabitants of busy England, the work 

 requiring the greatest exertion of human labour and 

 the largest amount of physical endurance falls to his 

 share ; wherever enterprise has penetrated, there he 

 is to be found foremost in the work of toil or in the 

 path of danger." 



78. In 1839, Gustave de Beaumont, a Frenchman, 

 wrote : " In the ancient chronicles of Ireland we 

 find that love of work was one of the distinctive 

 characteristics of the Irish people." And again he 

 tells us that an English engineer said to him : " I 

 have been intrusted by the English Government 



