But, in truth, kings and legislators had not much to regulate in the simple tastes and few pursuits of the old Irish. It is impossible to regard, without some twinge of envy, this hardy, simple-hearted, pious, imaginative people, shut out from the storms of the world, and dwelling in a green flowery land of their own, before her forests were, in Mr. Froude's language, 'pared to the stump,' and while her soil burst with power to feed their flocks and raise their corn. We can picture to ourselves readily the poorer sort of peasantry, picturesque, as they are to this day, in their rough woollens and freizes. Perhaps 'caubeens' were not quite in character; and the short black dudheen' was in the womb of futurity; nay, will it be believed that the native' itself was not born, and that bad beer was the national beverage? But, in all other respects, they might sit for portraits by Lever or Lover. They lolled in little villages around the doon, or stronghold, of their lord; tended his herds; sowed, reaped, and threshed his grain (never distressing in quantity); swelled his retinue at the popular assemblage; raided with him upon his neighbours; fought for him at need; roystered upon his beer; and fed to their hearts' content upon oatmeal and milk. Craftsmen of all sorts had free quarters wherever they went. Wayfarers had ford-lights and lawn-lights to guide them. They might turn in for refreshment to the nearest Brughfer, or baillie, of a village, whom the law bound to keep a vat of new milk and a vat of beer for the refection of travellers. The Bo-aires and Ceilés, the strong farmers' of those days, lived in snug little thatched cabins on their farms; they tilled and reared stock enough to pay the rent and to supply their own kitchens. Here ended their care, and, for the rest, they might hunt the wild-boar or the red-deer; feast upon sirloins and broths; sup upon cream cakes, or honey, and new milk. They had their prouder moments, too, when they exhibited in full fig at a kind of petty sessions, administering urrudhas, or customary law, among the natives; or when, like so many Warwicks, they strutted into the provincial Dhawl to elect their king. As for the kings themselves, the rosiest Home Rule' of the dreamers would hardly realise their condition, from the monarch who roystered in Tara down to the kingling who battened on his dozen ploughlands in Donegal. Whoever paid the reckoning, beeves and beer, a pipe of wine now and again, venison, pretty girls, gold ornaments, silken dresses, and shoals of the very choicest boon companions-philosophers, saints, lawyers, poets, and jugglersfor ever abounded in their little courts. Fancy this small inventory of guests around the table of one royal banquet-hall-four provincial kings; thirteen bishops; a suite of nobles, foreigners, and hostages numbering sixty; three royal jugglers; and quite a plague of poets, judges, harpers, pipe players, charioteers, equerries, jesters, guardsmen, cooks, and cupbearers. It was a happy arrangement that every reveller sat at the foot of his own feather-bed; though the aspect of the banqueting-hall the next morning, if there was no soda-water on the premises, must have been sometimes overpowering. The revelry, doubtless, ran high; for the women were excluded remorselessly from the feasts, and immured in a realm of their own, which Irish gallantry, however, named the Chamber of Sunshine.' Yet we have no reason to think those old Irish kings drank a drop deeper than many a royal tippler of more fastidious days, or spent less genuine hours enjoying the wild legendry of their bards or vowing penitence to their clerics, than many an august successor, who hires a box at the Opera or mumbles through a service in the Abbey. Peace to their ashes, anyhow; their hospitality was no cheat. We are told the doors of the royal palace were for ever wide open to strangers, though, an irreverent writer adds, for very good reason-that there were no doors to be closed. By the bye, it rather grates on one's nerves to find that the Tara's halls' in which the immortal harp shed the soul of music were after all only a cluster of wicker-work shanties, quite the image of great, scooped-out, conical bullets-not to talk of the pigsty attached to the palace, and mayhap the gintleman that pays the rint' himself ensconced in a snug corner of the Mead-circling Hall. Withal, if their majesties did wash their faces by dipping their heads into a tub of water, we see glittering through their history constantly the rough-and-ready royalty of the true king. When we hear King Hugh bid an impudent bard, in Gaelic idiom, go to the devil, who, in the arrogance of power, demanded the very collar off his neck, we know we stand before a MAN whom Cromwell would have hugged and Mr. Carlyle warmed to. The respect paid to age in their courts; the esteem of learning, piety, and arts; the chivalrous tone of their legends; the simplicity of their manners; the jealous restrictions with which their power was hedged around, -all are elements in a system which, however ill-adapted to modern wants, fulfils some of the grandest conditions of kingship. Even their wars were not appalling. If they were victors, it was only a big herd of cattle transferred from one district to another; and defeat could not have brought many broken bones, their rough swords and blunt hatchets being, in fact, much more innocent playthings than as many well-wielded blackthorns. The time has yet to come when we may plunge into the after centuries, when all this fair fabric was wrecked shred by shred, and draw forth the fruit of their lessons without their bitterness; but nothing will better suit us for the task than a kindly interest in antiquities, which, even in the indistinct glimpses we get of them by the light of a dawning science, reveal a society streaked with fine traits of nobility, simplicity, and freedom. LOST FOR LOVE BY THE AUTHOR OF LADY AUDLEY'S SECRET,' etc. CHAPTER XXXIX. 'Meantime Luke began To slacken in his duty; and, at length, There is a comfort in the strength of love; Ir was Mrs. Gurner's last day but one in Voysey-street. The furniture was ready for removal; the small stock of glass and crockery packed in a crate, with the ironmongery at bottom by way of ballast; Jarred's pictures-the Guido for which he had so long sought a purchaser, and various other canvases of problematical value-swathed in an old dressing-gown, and bound together with a clothes-line; a battered old portmanteau, standing on end in the passage; the fire-irons tied up in brown paper; the chest of drawers turned the wrong way; a general air of upside-downishness pervading the apartments, so soon to be abandoned by their present tenants. The day was waning, and Mrs. Gurner sat alone by her dismantled hearth. She had toiled patiently since morning at the packing, while Jarred was agreeably busy at Malvina Cottage, helping a jobbing carpenter to nail up shelves, and put up a bedstead or two, and directing the operations of a jobbing gardener, who was endeavouring to reduce the neglected garden to order and symmetry by means of a scythe and a pruning-knife. Having done her duty bravely-struggling heroically with feather beds, and nearly dislocating her spine in the delicate task of packing the crate-Mrs. Gurner seated herself in one of the two remaining chairs, and indulged in the luxury of a 'good cry.' Why she should weep at the prospect of abandoning a place which she had long yearned to leave is a question for psychologists to answer. She wept with a vague self-pity; remembering the dreary years she had lived in that house, and the small leaven of joy in her full measure of grief and care. She had struggled on, grubbed on, somehow, for twenty years, never utterly free from anxiety, rarely knowing an hour |