Pre-Famine Athenry.

This bathing-place, Athenrye, is also one of the curiosities of Ireland. From what I have already said, you will conclude that no Polish village can have a more wretched aspect. The cluster of cabins is on a bare hill rising out of the bog, without tree or bush, without an inn, without any convenience, inhabited only by ragged beggars, and by the few invalids who bring with them everything they want, and must send for even the most trifling article of food to Galway, a distance of twelve miles. Once it was otherwise; and it saddens one to see at the further extremity of this wretched village the proud ruins of better times. Here stood a rich abbey, now overgrown with ivy: the arches which once protected the sanctuary lie in fragments amid the unsheltered altars and tombstones. Further on is a castle, with walls ten feet thick, in which King John held his court of justice when he came over to Ireland.

I visited these ruins with a most numerous company: I do not exaggerate when I say that at least two hundred half-naked beings, two-thirds of whom were children, had collected round my carriage at a very early hour in the morning, doing nothing: they now thronged round me, all begging, and shouting, ‘Long life to your honour!’ Every individual among them stuck faithfully by me, leaping over stones and brambles. The strangest compliment now and then resounded from the midst of the crowd: at last some called out, ‘Long life to the King!’ On my return I threw two or three handfuls of copper among them; and in a minute half of them, old and young, lay prostrate in the sand, while the others ran with all speed into a whiskey-shop, fighting furiously all the way.

Such is Ireland! Neglected or oppressed by the government, debased by the stupid intolerance of the English priesthood, and marked by poverty and the poison of whiskey, for the abode of naked beggars!—I have already mentioned that even among the educated classes of this province, the ignorance appears, with our notions of education, perfectly unequalled: I will only give you one or two examples.

To-day something was said about magnetism, and no one present had ever heard the slightest mention of it. Nay, in B——m, in a company of twenty persons, nobody knew that such places as Carlsbad and Prague existed. The information that they were situated in Bohemia did not mend the matter:—Bohemia was not less unknown; and in short, everything out of Great Britain and Paris was a country in the moon. ‘And where do you come from?’ asked one. ‘From Brobdignag,’ said I in jest. ‘O! is that on the sea? Have they whiskey there?’ asked another. The son of my host, whom I have repeatedly mentioned, asked me one day very seriously as we met some asses, whether there were any such animals in my country? ‘Ah! but too many,’ replied I.