as children, and to which they give the name of
tutelary deities. The Ostyaks of the Eastern
Archipelago set up a rude wooden image to
the memory, or in representation of a man
who dies; which image the widow embraces
and caresses, and to which offerings are carried
and honours are paid. This then is the
beginning of idol worship, and the minor form
of the same instinct, the reverence paid to holy
images.

Strangest of all strange customs is that of the
couvade—the custom which puts the husband
carefully to bed when a child is born, sets the
women to nurse him, the doctor to dose him,
and the friends to visit him. Whether arising
from the principle of vicarious punishment
general among humanity, or from the natural
inclination of the women to hustle, ill treat,
snub, and despise husbands on such occasions,
must be left to Mr. Tylor and his reviewers to
decide; our business is only with the custom
itself. Fasting, blood-letting with agouti teeth,
the extreme of self-restraint in the matter of
eating, as with the Caribs; fasting with the
South American Indians; abstinence from all
pleasure, occupation, or amusement, as with the
Arawaks of Surinam; lying in bed huddled up
in skins, not suffering a breath of fresh air to
blow upon him; fasting and absolute privacy, as
with the Abipones; and, nearer home, among
the Biscayans, where "the women rise
immediately after child-birth, and attend to the
duties of the household, while the husband goes
to bed, taking the baby with him, and thus
receives the neighbours' compliments;" these are
a few of the instances and practices mentioned
by Mr. Tylor, to set us wondering at the folly or
laughing at the credulity of mankind.

A DUBLIN MAY MORNING.

FROM a land that surely seems about as
remote as—say—Spain, have been floating to us
the strange cries of Tenant Right, Evictions,
Distress, Established Church, Fenianism, and
all the other "isms" which belong to an Orange
and to a Ribbon. But, a day's easy jaunting—
eleven hours by train and "new and splendid
packets"—will set us down in the very country
with all these popular cries echoing about us;
where we shall see indistinctly, as from the top
of a mountain, the whole theatrical portion of
the Irish play, the frieze coats, and the whirling
shillelagh, and the Norahs and Larrys dancing
under the shadow of a round tower, with Father
Tom looking on; and the outside car skimming
by, with Larry standing up as he drives, or
the same Larry "coshering," or emigrating, or
firing at a landlord round a street corner, or
drawing an opera-singer home by torchlight,
like an Italian Larry. It is surprising to think
that all this is not merely on the boards of a
theatre or in the pages of a novel, but that four
hours' acquaintance with a "new and powerful
steam-ship," will set us down among real shillelaghs,
and the true and original Irishman. When
it is thought, too, that, only eleven hours away
from London, a sort of king rules, who has first
ministers, and a chamberlain, and comptrollers,
and masters of the horse, and gentlemen at
large, and who reigns in a castle, where he
receives his male subjects at levees, and his
lady subjects—whom he has the feudal
privilege of saluting—at drawing-rooms; who gives
monster balls and "banquets," and shows
himself on all occasions of state; when we think that
this little play is going on at a little theatre
only next door, the mildest shape of human
curiosity might prompt us to avail ourselves of
the "new and powerful steam-ship," and take a
stall for the Irish drama.

And now, of all seasons in the world—when
I look down on this gay May morning from a
window into Great Sackville-street, where there
is a huge column to Admiral Nelson, and a
golden shop-front board dedicated to O'Connell,
on the site for his statue, and which is by-and-by
to be made into a French boulevard and planted
with trees—I say, on this May morning it is easy
to see that one of the many Great Days for
Ireland has come round once more. For, the crowds
in the great thoroughfares, and the "Boys"
sitting on the bridges, and the flags and streamers,
and the rolling carriages, and the general air of
busy idleness, tell me that a great festival is
toward; and placards in fiercely carbuncled
letters proclaim in an angry fit of St. Antony's
fire, that H.R.H. the Prince of Wales is to
"OPEN" something: which something a still
greater scorbutic operation of type tells us is
THE DUBLIN EXHIBITION OF 1865.

Not without charms, and marked and special
features of its own, is this Dublin city—to say
nothing of the fresh and fair Irish faces and
violet eyes which pass by in streams, or of the
cheerful voices and the gay laughs heard at
every turn; or of the giant policemen who wear
moustaches and beards, and thus compete on
more favourable terms with military rivals; or
of the rollicking drivers, who stand up as they
drive, very like the cocchieri of Rome, and who
look out for "fares" in a debonnaire indifferent
fashion. There is a gay, busy, foreign,
parti-coloured look about the place, which reminds
one of a foreign town. The background is
composed of wide spacious streets, Grecian
buildings wonderfully classic in tone and shape,
fitted into corners with porticos that belong to
the street, and under which the people walk—
pretty breaks where the bridges come, and the
masts of shipping seen in the sun half way
down a long long thoroughfare. There are no
warehouses or ugly business associations; but
all is shops and shopping, and colour and
liveliness, and carriages and walkers.

I think, as I look out on this May morning,
that it is curious that a people
popularly supposed to want "self-reliance" and
"independence," and who are utterly ignorant of
the "self-help" principle, should, after all, have
done some few self-reliant things in this very
matter of exhibitions. Some one tells me that
many decades of years before glass palaces were