The learned and kind-hearted Dr. Berkeley, Protestant Bishop of Cloyne, under date 21st May, 1741, writes to a a friend in Dublin:—­“The distresses of the sick and poor are endless.  The havoc of mankind in the counties of Cork, Limerick, and some adjacent places, hath been incredible.  The nation probably will not recover this loss in a century.  The other day I heard one from the county of Limerick say, that whole villages were entirely dispeopled.  About two months since I heard Sir Richard Cox say, that five hundred were dead in the parish, though in a county I believe not very populous.  It were to be wished people of condition were at their seats in the country during these calamitous times, which might provide relief and employment for the poor.  Certainly if these perish the rich must be sufferers in the end.”  The author of a letter entitled “The Groans of Ireland,” addressed to an Irish.  Member of Parliament, thus opens his subject:—­“I have been absent from this country for some years, and on my return to it, last summer, found it the most miserable scene of universal distress that I have ever read of in history:  want and misery in every face; the rich unable almost as they were willing to relieve the poor; the roads spread with dead and dying bodies; mankind of the colour of the docks and nettles they fed on; two or three, sometimes more, going on a car to the grave for want of bearers to carry them, and many buried only in the fields and ditches where they perished.  This universal scarcity was ensued by fluxes and malignant fevers, which swept off multitudes of all sorts:  whole villages were left waste by want, and sickness, and death in various shapes; and scarcely a house in the whole island escaped from tears and mourning.  The loss must be upwards of 400,000, but supposing it 200,000, (it was certainly more) it was too great for this ill-peopled country, and the more grievous as they were mostly of the grown-up part of the working people.”  “Whence can this proceed?” he asks; and he answers, “From the want of proper tillage laws to guide and to protect the husbandman in the pursuit of his business.” [29]

This writer further says, the terrible visitation of 1740 and ’41 was the third famine within twenty years; so that in view of these and other famines, since and before, Ireland might be not inaptly described as the land of Famines.  Almost the first object one sees on sailing into Dublin Bay is a monument to Famine.  This beautiful bay, as far-famed as the Bay of Naples itself, has often been put in comparison with it.  More than once has it been my lot to witness the tourist on board the Holyhead packet, coming to Ireland for the first time, straining his eyes towards the coast, when the rising sun gave a faint blue outline of the Wicklow mountains, and assured him that he had actually and really before him, “The Holy Hills of Ireland.”  Nearer and nearer he comes, and Howth at one side and Wicklow Head at the other define what he, not unjustly, regards as