Ballynamona, Oro!

The food of the fair and the free.

Need I say, that this song was applauded, "even to the echo that applauds again," that echo was found in the loud acclaims of the people of the house, who were in the hall listening; nay, I have heard, I know not how true, that all the potatoes planted within hearing, progressed in their growth some inches towards the surface, and some even broke ground and protruded their auricular buds, the better to listen to the praises bestowed upon them by their lyric bard.

Any one who has experienced the influence of the convivial board, knows the ice once broken, how frigid modesty or bashfulness melts away before "the bottle, the sun of the table," and the force of example. Time was when

The land of potatoes for me."

I could sing," Tho' Bacchus may boast of his care-killing bowl"-" Let fame sound the trumpet"-" Spirit of my sainted sire," &c.; and I was told, as Micke and Joe Kelly, Tom Phillipps, or Bowden, who carried on his face the whole promontory of noses, and I did not discover the flattery until I had no more money to lend, or good dinners to give to the rascals. However, by the long Harry, I plucked up courage on the present occasion, and determined that the potatoe and its bard should not walk over the field and carry the day without competition; so, after the requisite number of "hems!" I poured forth this strain of my impromptu compositions, just as Theodore Hook would :

VOL. II.

2 x

My Dear Charles,

66

Here I am still, though grousing began yesterday. It is very desolate, very dusty, very hot, and all that sort of thing, in the Parks, and "nobody in town," as the saying is, except the ministers and the new-fangled parliament men, who feel themselves so very important that they can never get enough of it but I am here still, and even now there is matter enough worthy of note, if one will but attend to it. First and foremost," as they say in Ireland, the houses of parliament, or the people that be therein, continue nightly to perspire and persuade themselves they are doing very great things; but every one is tired of the parliament, and a great many disappointed, and not a few disgusted with it, though it is "reformed;" so I shall not trouble you with its tedious "jabber," as a polite newspaper called the Times, is pleased to designate it, but pass on to the next. It is amusing-very, to lie cool and quiet in the shadiest nook of one's lodgings, and see, or consider, which comes to the same thing, London going out of town. Of course it is only in a certain quarter of this huge metropolis that this appears-it is only Byron's "twice two thousand, for whom earth is made," and their ten times two thousand attendants that you perceive poising their wings, or packing up their trunks, for flight. The demand at Newman's and other fashionable purveyors-or usurers rather of horse flesh-for post horses, is inces

BYRON.

sant, and forth from their hiding places, where they have been lying in undisturbed repose since March or April, come the capacious travelling family coaches. In these, drawn by four horses, are commonly stowed away a large assortment of servants, children, and small boxes-the heavier and less valuable baggage being bestowed in the various external appendages of a travelling coach. My lord and my lady, or master and mistress, as the case may be, go first, in a lighter and more commodious travelling convenience, and content themselves with two horses. It is only your little great people that think it a matter of honour and glory to be drawn along the road by as many quadrupeds as if they were in a mail coach. They leave all the fuss to the housekeepers and the lady's maids, and truth to say, most appropriately, for with all the real pride belonging to the real aristocracy, the outward and visible signs thereof are in them far less striking and less offensive than in the menials of their train. I have seen it well and truly remarked very lately, by an acute and celebrated writer,* (of, I believe, republican principles in politics,) that with all their faults, the aristocracy are people of the most unaffected manners. Pride and vanity have the strongest holds in those who are uncertain of the recognition of their pretensions." I wish this were more generally known, for the instruction of the poor mistaken creatures who think they are imitating the great

by assuming pomp and parade in their own proper persons, and by talking in a consequential strain about fashion, and style, and so forth. Nothing is so sure a sign of vulgarity, and want of the genuine feeling of greatness, as personal attempts at display. Your true gentleman or lady never take that trouble; nor indeed have they any notion of people taking them for any other than they are-they know that a certain degree of pomp is looked for in their establishments, but that, they are aware, will be taken care of by their servants. To take every thing with an air of simplicity and quietness, as if nothing about them could be wrong, is the characteristic of the great.

Of course I now only speak of the routine things of life-love, hatred, ambition, jealousy, and all the host of passions, chafe the blood, and heat the brain of the highest as well as the lowest; but these are things not exhibited to the crowd-moreover these are real things, not affectations. Good manners, however agreeable, are not virtue; and I by no means feel disposed to idolize the aristocracy, while I contend for their exemption from the impertinence of those who ape greatness by imitating the behaviour of gentlemen's gentlemen, or the select company of the steward's room. You remember, I dare say, Byron's brief and bitter sketch of the great world—

This is excellent; the last line hath as much in it as might be squeezed out of a treatise two volumes long, and brings the truth before you like light condensed into lightening. Yet was Byron himself one of the great, in birth and station, as well as in intellect, and had he not been, he could not have written as he has written. We may forgive the inconveniency of a century of aristocracy, for having cast out such a noble flame of genius from its mass of smouldering dignity. But I must not forget what I was describing; it was-let me see-O yes! the giving forth of the metropolitans to the country. Well, they are gathered into their coaches or chariots, or britskas, or whatever other four-wheeled luxuries are known in the vocabularies of the coach-makers, they and their menservants and their maid-servants, their baggage, and all their etcæteras, and

they are gone-the last sound of the wheels rolling over the Macadamised street has died away, and there is no more to be said about them, unless we follow them into the country. We'll talk of that anon;-m the mean time let us take a glance at the desolation they have left us. The squares are empty and would be almost silent, but for the sound of closing shutters up; that is done, and it is all night-like except for the intolerable glare of the sun-light reflected hot and dazzling from the broad white flags. One meets no one but a house-keeper going out to take a walk, no longer on household cares intent. The knockers have got a sinecure, the servants' bell alone is put in requisition, the tradespeople think of steam-boat excursions, and the west-end is vast, and bright, and solitary.

There is nothing for which I so much blame our great ones of the earth, as their manner of living in the country. They carry the evils of the town system into

the country with them, instead of leaving them behind as they ought to do, with their houses of parliament, and clubs, and boxes at the opera. In a

place where nearly a million and a half of people, of whom the majority are not over honest, are congregated within a few miles' space, it is well that the great should be exclusive in their habits it is, indeed necessary for caution sake, and to enable them to escape the crowds of parasites and plunderers of all descriptions, that are ready to press upon them; but all this, at it seems to me, should cease when they go down to their own people in the country, and they ought to remember their common humanity, and seek something else than merely their own entertainment, and that of their visitors. For my part, I think a landlord should be as proud of having every rustic on his estate, and having a personal and kindly influence over him, as a good officer is of having that kind of knowledge and influence with regard to each individual soldier of his regiment. But our nobles and gentles seem to have no notion of that sort of thing. In the country they get up a little earlier than in town; they dress and go down to breakfast, which is rather a long, irregular, undecided sort of a business in a great sense, mixed up with reading of letters from town, and newspapers, which are looked for with as much eagerness, as if God had not sent a sky, or hill and dale, and trees, and grass, and flowers worth contemplating. Breakfast and the balderdash of news being discussed, some of the gentlemen go to shoot, and others to ride out with their ladies; some get in a boat on the pond or river, or bit of sea, according to the locality, and some haply have recourse to their fishing rod; then there is a huge library for literary loungers, and there is a bench, and love making, and other little matters, all among themselves; and at last dressing for dinner, and then dinner itself, and all its mighty parade, and then wine, coffee, cigars, a little music, flirtations, assignations in the shrubberies, and so forth, make up the day. A couple of days, to be sure, are given to the grand jury, and the judges and principal barristers of the circuit are entertained at dinner, and half a dozen days are set apart for enduring a certain number of the lesser gentry of the neighbourhood in stated rotation, in order to keep up the purple, or the pink, or the blue, or the yellow interest, to which the great family is attached; and sometimes on a Sunday,

when the parson is invited, two or three of the elder tenantry, on the recommendation of the steward, are admitted to the dining-table, and their families asked after, with the most marked condescension, by my lady; but in all this there is no heartiness-no cordiality. The humbler man feels at my lady's dinner, as he would at my lord's funeral; it is to him a grand solemnity -an honour and a fear, and he is conscious that he neither understands, nor sympathises with my lord, and knows that my lord only suffers him, and would rather that it were not the custom ever to have such people at his table. All this is wrong, and estrangement and dislike grows out of it, and sudden and expected defeats at elections, and then my lord grows wroth, and does some foolish thing in his anger, forgetting that the fault lay, and lies in his own want of cordial fellowship and union with the people about him, and their little households.

I do not know exactly how it is, but so far as my experience goes, and I believe it agrees with the experience of others, the great family of any particular district generally looks with considerable disgust upon the families of the smaller esquires round about them.

Whether it be the fear of an approach to familiarity, or dislike to their pompously vulgar manner, and their parade, which is awkward, because not habitual, whether dread of encroachment, or love of solitary supremacy, be at the root of the evil, I shall not pretend to determine; but of the fact I have no doubt, that the Lord Lieutenant of a county, or his lady, would as soon see any other pestilence that walketh at noon day advancing towards their lordly towers, as the old fashioned chariot of some country neighbour, whose chariot lasts from the time of his marriage till his eldest son comes of age. There is one consequence of this dislike or jealousy, or whatever it is, which I think has very bad consequences both political and social, and that is the extreme anxiety of great proprieters to buy up the smaller estates around them, and to leave the mansion houses upon them waste, or turn them into mere farm-houses. is marvellous and melancholy to observe to what an extent this system has been carried in England within the last thirty years. In France we know,

It