第34章

Be it ever so shabby and dismal, nobody ever owns to keeping a shop.A fellow whose stock in trade is a penny roll or a tumbler of lollipops, calls his cabin the 'American Flour Stores,' or the 'Depository for Colonial Produce,' or some such name.

As for Inns, there are none in the country; Hotels abound as well furnished as Mulholliganville; but again there are no such people as landlords and land-ladies; the landlord is out with the hounds, and my lady in the parlour talking with the Captain or playing the piano.

If a gentleman has a hundred a year to leave to his family they all become gentlemen, all keep a nag, ride to hounds, and swagger about in the 'Phaynix,' and grow tufts to their chins like so many real aristocrats.

A friend of mine has taken to be a painter, and lives out of Ireland, where he is considered to have disgraced the family by choosing such a profession.His father is a wine-merchant; and his elder brother an apothecary.

The number of men one meets in London and on the Continent who have a pretty little property of five-and-twenty hundred a year in Ireland is prodigious: those who WILL have nine thousand a year in land when somebody dies are still more numerous.I myself have met as many descendants from Irish kings as would form a brigade.

And who has not met the Irishman who apes the Englishman, and who forgets his country and tries to forget his accent, or to smother the taste of it, as it were?

'Come, dine with me, my boy,' says O'Dowd, of O'Dowdstown: 'you'll FIND US ALL ENGLISH THERE;' which he tells you with a brogue as broad as from here to Kingstown Pier.And did you never hear Mrs.Captain Macmanus talk about 'I-ah-land,' and her account of her 'fawther's esteet?' Very few men have rubbed through the world without hearing and witnessing some of these Hibernian phenomena--these twopenny splendours.

And what say you to the summit of society--the Castle--with a sham king, and sham lords-in-waiting, and sham loyalty, and a sham Haroun Alraschid, to go about in a sham disguise, making believe to be affable and splendid?

That Castle is the pink and pride of Snobbishness.ACOURT CIRCULAR is bad enough, with two columns of print about a little baby that's christened--but think of people liking a sham COURT CIRCULAR!

I think the shams of Ireland are more outrageous than those of any country.A fellow shows you a hill and says, 'That's the highest mountain in all Ireland;'

a gentleman tells you he is descended from Brian Boroo and has his five-and-thirty hundred a year; or Mrs.

Macmanus describes her fawther's esteet; or ould Dan rises and says the Irish women are the loveliest, the Irish men the bravest, the Irish land the most fertile in the world: and nobody believes anybody--the latter does not believe his story nor the hearer:--but they make-believe to believe, and solemnly do honour to humbug.

O Ireland! O my country! (for I make little doubt I am descended from Brian Boroo too) when will you acknowledge that two and two make four, and call a pikestaff a pikestaff?--that is the very best use you can make of the latter.Irish snobs will dwindle away then and we shall never hear tell of Hereditary bondsmen.