INTRODUCTION 



BY 



THE RIGHT HON. THE EARL OF DUNRAVEN 



To properly appreciate the following pages the reader 

 should first adjust his critical faculties to the date in 

 which the letters were written — unless, indeed, he 

 has actually cultivated a taste for the artificial periods, 

 the practical joking, the elaborate puns, the sentimen- 

 talities and the somewhat pompous humour of the 

 period. The art of description was not one in which 

 the amateur writers of the early nineteenth century 

 excelled. And it is not for its style that this book 

 is valuable to us now. It is for the picture it presents 

 of Hfe and social conditions painted, presumably, by 

 an Anglicised Irishman during a sporting visit to a 

 remote part of Connaught in the first quarter of the 

 nineteenth century. 



Everything was new to the supposed writer ; most 

 of what he had to tell, I imagine, was new also to the 

 average reader of the time. For this book was almost 

 a pioneer in its day. It was the first of a series begin- 

 ning with Charles Lever and continuing to our own time 

 in which the lives and manners of the Irish people, 

 the sport and scenery of the country, are set forth in 

 detail for the information and entertainment of British 

 and Anglo-Irish readers. I will not go so far as to say 



