LIFE IN IRELAND 



Kilkenny blinkers, in your bed-gowns gay, 



With pillar-legs and ancles wrapt in hay, 



Mount jockey-coats, ye fair from Garryow'n, 



Andknocking-jackets, though they be fly-blown ; 



O'er your dark brows potatoe-blossoms wave, 



Mix'd with the shamrock from a patriot's grave. 



Ye buck-shinned beauties haste from Enniskillen 



In time to meet your King, if God be willing. 



Half Scotch, half Irish, do not you be last, 



Ye linen bleachers that adorn Belfast. 



Lifting the Linen, ^ is an Irish toast. 



Come and let George more linen-lifters boast. 



And last, not least for standing six feet high, 



Thy beauties, Conamara, strike the eye ; 



Come forth, behold ! as you 're acknowledged strong 



Led by Dick Martin, lead the raptur'd throng ; 



Behold a scene which national love endears, 



A hundred paupers, younger sons of peers, 



Such as no Briton ever saw before, 



' All poor relations of Lord Donoughmore,' - 



Priests, curates, bishops, and a host of wise-men, 



From high commissioners down to low excisemen, 



Tax-gatherers, absentees, and middlemen, 



Advance their heads from vile Extortion's den, 



Militia puppets, yeomanry all follow. 



With Irish howl in English whoop and holla. 



All prim'd with whiskey, travel nothing loath 



O'er the poor property of poor Lord Howth, 



To meet your King, who comes to meet your vi'ishes, 



To share Pat's purse, and also Shelah's kisses ; 



1 There is a certain period of the season, when the bleach-greens 

 are cleared, and lifting thi linen is a Harvest Home, in the north of 

 Ireland. 



2 All poor relations of ?ny Lord Donoughmore. — This is a line taken 

 from a well-known song, which ridicules, with much truth and little 

 feeling, the thousands of poor Hutchinsons swarming over Ireland ; 

 it was an ancestor of this Lord's of whom Curran said, ' If the King 

 were to make him a present of all Ireland, he would beg the Isle 

 of Man for a potatoe garden.' 



