(I have seen it and know it) are only enabled
to cross from Dublin to Liverpool (even on
the deck with the pigs and geese) at the sacrifice
of a waistcoat, a shawl, or a coat sold for
anything they will fetch. In like manner, in
Liverpool, is the passage-money to New York
often completed, or the miserable stock of
provisions eked out by the sale of such old
clothes as can be spared. Thus a great system
of clothes barter and exchange, sale, purchase,
and re-sale, goes on in Ireland. Step into the
many old clothes depôts about Rag Fair, or
the Clothes Exchange in London, and ask the
dealer where the majority of his stock is to
be exported to. He will tell you to Ireland
—for the Irish market. I dare say many
gentlemen of the Irish press would
vehemently deny this, and asserting that the
Celt, their compatriot, never condescends to
wear anything but spick and span new broadcloth,
and denouncing my atrocious mendacity
and general Saxon brutality insinuate besides
that I murdered Eliza Grimwood, fomented
the Gunpowder Plot, and set the Thames
on fire; but the Coombe is my evidence
on the old clothes question, and I will stick
to it.

Diverging, temporarily, a little from the
Coombe I enter Patrick Street, which leads
to Patrick's Close, and to the great Protestant
Cathedral of St. Patrick. Patrick Street
is of the Coombe, Coombish. One side is
occupied by an imposing manifestation of the
old clothes interest, the other by a continuous
line of stalls for the sale of butcher's-meat
and provisions in general—the stalls being
overshadowed by projecting bulkheads
prodigiously productive of chiaro oscuro,
picturesqueness, rottenness, and dinginess. This and
the neighbourhood is the most ancient,
raggedest, dirtiest, wretchedest part of Dublin's
proud city. I become sensible of the presence
of incalculable swarms of tattered children
nearly all without shoes or stockings, and the
average number of whose articles of dress
varies from one and a half to two and three-eighths;
likewise of a multiplicity of grown-up
females, also barefooted—the elder ones
astoundingly hideous, the younger ones not
unfrequently exceedingly well-favoured, and
for all their bare feet, modest and demure.
The men seem to carry the allowance of shoes
for both sexes, exhibiting their lower
extremities cased in huge shoes, which in heavy
weather on heavy roads must make walking
anything but a labour of love. I opine the
men of all ages and the women of mature
years are nearly all smoking the national
short-pipe, its top protected by a small leaden
cupola, perforated, like a miniature dish-cover
with a hole in it. And I cannot fail to
observe a salient and a melancholy national
peculiarity in men and women and children.
They all crouch, or loll, or cower, or lean
on something somehow—on door-steps and
counters, over chairs and window-sills. The
climate is not sultry, it is not enervating;
yet here they crouch, and cower, and loll and
lean, with the same pervading, listless, wearied,
blasé expression. The first thing I saw on
landing at Kingstown was a railway porter,
lounging with both elbows outspread over a
truck, with a thoroughly "used up" and
languid air; and I see scores of counter-parts
of him as I walk along- Patrick Street.

You will say that a visit to any London or
Anglo-provincial district, colonised by Irish,
will show you what I have been describing;
but there are sights here, in addition, that
you will not see out of Patrick Street and the
Coombe. Groups of men and children carrying
neatly-cut sods of " turfs," peat sods for
fuel, about for sale; little dusky shops, full of
big white jugs and huge iron-hooped buckets
and churns full of buttermilk; more pork
and bacon and eggs within a few square yards
than you would see in some town-miles; open
shops like coal-sheds, but where, instead of
coals, there are piles on piles and sacks on sacks
of potatoes, which the dealers are shovelling
and carting about as though they really were
closed, and to show the quality of which for the
behoof of customers there is, on a little tripod,
a plate of brown-jacketed murphies ready
boiled and half-peeled; numerous stalls for
the sale of salt fish—cod and ling—for this is
Friday, and the Coombe, though hard by the
cathedral close, is Catholic; sweep and dustman's
carts jogging slowly by—the cart a long
low contrivance like a horse-trough on wheels,
and the vicinity of its owner being announced
by a bell attached to a wire on the horse's
collar. Lastly, all through Patrick Street and
the Coombe, and Francis Street and the
vicinity, one corner of every outlet, sometimes
both, are garnished with a grocer's shop,
and also a tobacconist's, and also a whisky
shop. The author of Lalla Rookh and the
Loves of the Angels was born in such a
shop.

At the first cursory view, Dublin seems
very deficient in houses of public entertainment.
No swinging doors invite the passer
by—no glistening bars dazzle the toper's
eyes. He sees plenty of hotels and plenty of
grocers, but few what may be called public-houses.
When, however, he has been a very
few days in Dublin, he discovers that in almost
every "hotel" (the Sackville Street and
aristocratic ones I exclude, of course) he may
be provided with refreshment as moderate as
a "dandy" of punch, or modicum of whisky
and hot water, which costeth twopence; or
that in almost every shop where tea and
coffee and sugar are sold, there also is sold
the enlivening beverage extolled by poets but
denounced by Father Mathew, the "rale
potheen," from a pennyworth up to a gallon,
which costeth eight shillings. There are, I
believe, some excise and municipal regulations,
limiting the drinking of whisky on the
premises, which prompt some grocers of tender
consciences to provide back yards, with back
outlets, into which customers accidentally