HERB AND THERE.—No. XI.

Otago Witness, Issue 1189, 12 September 1874, Page 20

HERB AND THERE.— No. XI.

( Written for the Otatjo Daily Times.)

1774 — Ireland's metropolis was at this time one of the pleasante3t in Europe. It had its own Parliament in College Green, and representative of Royalty in Dublin Castle ; it vied in a miniature manner with Paris for gaiety and prodigality ; it had all the gaming and political vices of London ; and it might have compared favourably with Naples in respect of the abject wretchedness and laziness of its poor. For the great bulk ©f the people, however, the times were as bad as they could well be. The conflict with the Colonieß had closed the American market against further export of the linen staple of the north ; deficiencies in the revenue called for the imposition of stamp duties, and the absentee landlords were driven by the state of the English market to be more exacting than ever. In England, the mass of the population suffered from the scarcity of wheat, to encourage the importation of which the City of London had just offered a bonus per bushel ; but the Irish peasant seldom saw that luxury in the shape of bread, and, so long aa the potato crop escaped blight, the grain crop was to him of little moment one way or the other. This was a miserable consolation at the best, but he found it. A little book, by one J. Bush, published somewhere about 1770, under the title of Hibernia Curiosa, being an account of a gentleman's travels in Ireland, gives a truly doleful account of the condition of the peasantry. A great number of the titled lords of the soil lived permanently in England; lands were leased and sub-leased shrough five or six hands before the holdings of a few acres each reached the workers of the soil, "la the south and west," continues the writer, "the roads are lined with beggars, who live in huts or cabins as ihey are called, of such shocking material and construction that through hundreds of them you may see the smoke from every inoh of the roof, not one in twenty having a chimney. g^The produce of the Kingdom is certainly not two-thirds of what it might be by good cultivation, but there is no encouragement for the poor cotter, and so the landlords get all that is made out of the land, while the tenant gets " poverty and potatoes." Between the exaction of the highest rent endurable — the tithes to the State priest— and the demands of the still more exacting priest of their own persuasion, it is little wonder that the condition of the poor should have been a dreadful one. Lord Harcourfc, the Lord Lieutenant in the previous year, had attempted to introduce an Act to tax absentee landlords, but, through their powerful opposition, was defeated. The Papist was then in the full bondage of disability. It was not legal that he should hold leases of lands for lives ; he could not marry a Protestant ; he was excluded from all public offices of trust or usefulness ; and even the equivocal honour of being an attorney was not conceded to him until 1793. If an unoffending people ever groaned with cause enough under barbaro\is oppressive legislation, it was the Roman Catholics of the last century. The high road to distinction was always open to them through the Apostate's gate, but to the enduring honour of the country be it said that it was rarely anyone passed it. Intellectually, the country held her own with the powerful Bister across the channel, Grattan, Busohe, Flood, Burke, Curran — men whose powers of thought and means of expression have not been exceeded— fought manfully to maintain her reputation, and yet at the same time there was more venality in high places, as much recklessness and profligacy, and more disregard for the condition of the mass of the people, than the records of any country under the Bun of Christianity are able to Bhow.

In journalism, by which we now-a-days estimate the mental condition of a people, Ireland was considerably in advance of England. Dublin had three established papers— two of them— the Freeman's Journal, and Saundor's News Letter, are flourishing to this day. Unlike the London papers, they gave original and independent essays, which we should now call leaders, and their information on foreign, social, and domestic affairs of the day were much more full and comprehensive. The Edict of Nantes Huguenots had established themselves pre-eminently as typographers and engravers, and much of the fine work in these branches issued from the Dublin Press. Cork, too, always famous for its mental calibre, was in the van, both in literature and art ; and Belfast, then a purely commercial town of small dimensions, but of great promise, was represented by its News Letter, which had been established in 1737, and still continues to be published. But it was in hospitality, in conviviality, and unbridled social pleasure, that the country had gained a reputation. A squire, whose house was barricaded against the sheriff, killed twenty sheep for a dish of kidneys, to please the palate of an English guest. A host would invite a stranger to dine with him, and lock up his horse and boots for a week so as to show him what cead mille failthe was like, and to prevent guests from putting their claret glasses on the table with anything in them it was the custom to knock off the stems ! The social songs were all about wine and women. It was an age of steady, persistent drinking, and a reputation for extra capacity without respect, was a sure passport to popular esteem.

Were I possessed of all the chink That was conquered by Cortes— Hernan,* I'd part with it all for one good drink With Johnny Adair, of Kitternan.

Thuß rings one of the catches of the festive board of the time, and it speaks the popular convivial sentiment. The once celebrated song, " One bottle more, was written by Archdeacon Day. There was a celebrated drinking club in Werburgh street, where topers met to swallow their way through paternal acres as quickly as possible. It was there that a member, one dark night, threw from an upper window a basin of filthy water, which was answered from below by aloud shriek. "If you're a Protestant," sang out the offender, "I beg your pardon respectfully ; but if you're a Papist, take it, and bad luck to you ! " A well-known character of the time one afternoon met a favourite boon companion, and was induced to go into a tavern, where he had sixteen tumblers of whisky punch. On rising to leave, his friend implored him to stay and "make up the twenty." To which he replied, " Faith I can't. Father Roe is to dine with me to-night, and I shouldn't like him to see the sign of liquor on me." Sir Jonah Barrington relates that Monckton, one of the Equity Baronß, was so early at his potations, that he invariably described the segment of a circle on making his way to the seat of Justice. Claret, the universal drink of the upper class, was about £18 a hogshead ; but as few of the convivial squires ever paid their wine bills until the amount was either levied by the Sheriff, or registered as a judgment against their acres, it has been ingeniously calculated that every hogshead cost at least £50.

There were not many of the old squire stock with unencumbered estates, and it is not too much to say that three-fourths of their houses gave no welcome to the sheriff. When it came to a writ of execution, that officer— being, as he almoat in* variably waß, friendly to the "right sort" — has been known, in his zeal, to return on the writ that the defendant had " neither body nor goods."

Dublin of the present day is a beautiful city, but a century ago it presented aspects which it happily lost with the Union. In winter, leading thoroughfares were blocked with snow for weeks together, and as papers of the day inform us, people of distinction broke their legs in attempting to get over frozen heaps. Although heavy rates were levied for police and lighting, the city was, in both respects, in a deplorable condition. Half-a-dozen oil lamps were all that were given for a leading thoroughfare, and it was well if they lasted till one or two in the morning ; and, between footpads prowling in search of the time of day and the king's likeness, anc 1 the young Mohawk on the warpath for fighting and adventure, the streets were dangerous after the closing of the theatres. The frolic-seeking night birds of the time carried bludgeons, affectionately known as " Who dare sneeze," and, as they sallied out of Reilly's Hazard Room in Smock Alley, or from Mrs Llewellyn's at the corner of Crane Lane, it was found prudent to give them a wide berth. Sackville street, now 120 feet wide, and one of the grandest of European highways, waß then a struggling passage of some 50 feet across. The noble Rotunda flanked it, as it does now, but the stately buildings on the line of the Post Office had not been dreamt of, and the other side of the street, now the Dublin "Shady side of Pall Mall," was not to be formed until better times.

Tn the previous centvry, the Earl of Meath's Liberty had been the abode of the grandees of the time, but they had long since forsaken the old city for the neighbourhood of the Green, Merrion Square, and the numerous streets north of the Liffey. Graf ton street was settling down to be a street of shops, and the north side of Stephen's Green was the "Beaux'sWalk." When city belles in Sunday's pomp are seen, And gilded ohariots roll through Stephen's Green. Writes one of the doggrel makers of the day.

The Green had been for fifty years a place of publio execution, and remained ao until 1766, when one Darby Kelly, the keeper of an infamous house in Copper Alley, was hanged and publicly burnt there. Soon after this, the place of execution was changed to Newgate, where in 1785, a father, mother, son, and daughter were hanged together for robbing a bleach ground at Kilmainham ! This barbarous case of wholesale punishment bears some similarity to the caae of Robert Arlett, who was hanged for murder at Tyburn, on the 20th May, 1773. His father and grandfather before him had both been hanged for similar crimes ; his mother was transported, his brother was under sentence of transportation, and he himself had been tried on four indictments two years before. Dame Btreet was an irregular street, permanently built only oa the north side, varying in width as it extended to the College from forty to fifteen feet. The Houses of Parliament stood in dignified isolation. In a quarter of a century, venality was to close that stately pile as a Senate House, and the Speaker would carry away the mace, which his descendants retain to this day, until— as the Speaker replied to the King's demand that it should be given up — " it is reclaimed by the authority that gave it" — so you see there was some unpurchaseable patriotism in College Green after all. In 1802 the building described as one oi the most convenient and extensive of the kind in Europe, was

sold to the Bank of Ireland for £40,000— a price which a lucky stockbroker will give ungrudgingly now-a-days for a villa. Adjoining the Houses stood Daly's Club, in which it is said that half the land in Ireland changed hands at the gamingtable. King William's statue, familiar to everyone who has been in the city, stood where it stands now, but it had a cobbler's stall stuck on the steps on one side, and a watch-house on the other. In 1735 the college boys abstracted the truncheon from the hand of the smileless King, for which they did much penance ; and somewhere about this time, on the eve of a great public event, the statue was unholily anointed with, soft tar, and subjected to other indignities too numerous to mention. In 1830, as every Dublin citizen will remember, the figure was blown from the horse— to be speedily restored, however : and in 1842, during Mr O'Connell'a mayoralty, to receive a bronze coat, in which it has shone peaoefully ever since. Can any student of T.C.D. forget a college election? — the Bally through the denße crowd, the noble struggle to get round the statue, the pellmell charge of the police, and the woeful list of lost and wounded "when, once within the gates, his leader called the roll." As well can he forget Jude's and the anti-collegian Keating fighting brigade, or Anderson's pineapple rum, or Jemmy Delaney's stewed kidneys in Harry street, or any other of the reminiscences which made his college servitude a time to be delightfully remembered for ever and ever.

Tiie old four Courts stood in the neighbourhood of Christchurch, and were not removed to Inn's Quay until 1796. Here one might have heard Bully Egan in nisi prius, and seen Toler, afterwards Lord Norbury, in the King's silk. There are many racy anecdotes abont this man. He was a pitiless criminal Judge — a witty Jeffreys, but without his ferocious depravity. On one occasion a wretched culprit, sentenced to be hanged for murder, craved a long day. "Your wish ia granted," said his Lordship, " this is the 20th of June, you shall have to-morrow, the longest day in the year." On being asked to subscribe to a shilling subscription list to bury a poor attorney, " Here's a guinea," said Toler, "bury one-and-twenty of them." He is Baid to have passed sentence of death at one occasion on 198 persons, 197 of whom pasßed through the hands of Galvin, the hangman. His Lordship lived to the year 1836, but not beyond his evil reputation, for, when his coffin was being lowered by ropes into a deep grave, a voice in the crowd was heard to cry out "Give him rope galore, boys, he never was sparing of it to others ! It waa in the latter part of this year that the Fifth Regiment of Foot — the " Fighting Fifth " — the "Shiners" — after ten years' inglorious Whiteboy and still-hunting, might have been seen marching gaily through Dame street to the tune of " Over the hills and far away," to ship at Dnnleary for America, where they were destined to fire the first shot at the disastrous battle of Lexington. Nothing is left of the "Bold Fifth" of that day but its time-worn ensigns, with the philosophio device " Quo Fata VocanV*

The noddy, a one-horse contrivance, was the hack vehicle in common use, but the sedan was the fashionable means of transit, and the ladies often vied with eaoh other in the splendid liveries of their chair-men. Twenty years ago, the writer saw three of these old bygone luxuries in a ghostly old street of stately houses off Stephen's Green ; but ob there were no chair-men attached, he concluded they were there for the accommodation of the courtly old shadows who perhaps, when the clock strikes one, visit the scenes ©f their former social glorieß. Smock Alley, now Essex street west, was the locality of the main theatre, on the boards of which Spranger Barry was gaining laurels as a tragedian ; and there were two other houses of like entertainment — one in Crow street, the other in Anngier street. They are all, long ago, converted to other uses. Smock Alley, perhaps in penitence, gave its site to a Roman Catholic Church and burial grounds ; Crow Btreet became a practical dissecting room ; and Anrgier street passed into the oblivion of private life.

On Bachelors' Walk, the citizen could indulge in a Turkish bath, which a pseudo-Turk, one Dr Achmet, had just established there ; and if after his cup of coffee, or more likely his glass of punch at Lucas's in Essex street or in the Exchange in Crampton-street Court, he was prepared for exercise, there waa^ the racket court in Thomas street, or billiards in Cole alley. If in a charitable mood and inclined to melting pity, he might pass the Four Courts, Marshalsea, where the poor prisoners looked through the grating and implored everything, from a tenpenny to a guinea, for the love of God !

Reader, can you fancy yourself alive in that age of bag-wiga, velvet coats, steelhilted swords, saw-handled pistols, moral contrariety ? Step into the gallery of the House of Commons, and you may hear the discussion on Sir Boyle Roche's measure, that every quart bottle shall hold a quart ; or, if you are in luck, you may be present at that animated debate in which a representative, availing himself of the extraordinary latitude in Bpeech allowed by the House, addressed the Speaker thus : — " Sir, they are all rotten, from the honourable member who has just Bat down, to the toothless old hag that is now grinning at us from the gallery ;" the lady referred to being the "honourable member's" mother !— Aurwoir.