to the verge of famine.  As to actual life-peril,—­every due precaution being taken,—­the happy result of such a humanising experiment might fairly be left to the generous native loyalty of a kindly treated people, and to the gracious guardianship of God’s good providence.  I am sure that present Royalty would neither be boycotted nor burked.  We remember with what generous cordiality our Prince and Princess were received by all classes and creeds in their recent brave visit to Ireland.

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I cannot honestly pretend to have always taken quite so amiable a view of Celtic matters.  I plead guilty to having more than once assailed in print Daniel O’Connell and his kind, and to have written a pair of once famous poetical fly-leaves, “Erin go bragh” and “Hurrah for Repeal!” copies of which (beyond my archived ones) can now only be found in the Ballad Collection of the British Museum, which I used to supply with my Sibyllines, at a chief librarian’s request:  I forget the name, but he collected such placards.  I fear the two above were not very complimentary:  but what can one do for a perverse people, who complain of it as a wrong that they are excused the Queen’s taxes?  Also I wrote certain famous letters on Ireland, especially four long ones signed “T.,” in the Times of January 1847.

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In Ireland I have caught a salmon at Killarney and cooked it too on an arbutus stake; I have bruised my shins at the Giant’s Causeway; I have been an honoured guest at classical Florence Court; have picked up native gold at Avoca; have done the Round Towers, possibly Phoenician Baal-temples; have handled Brian Boroime’s harp; and have been shocked everywhere by the poverty and degradation of that musical barbarian’s miserable because idle people.  What can be done for those who will not help themselves?

CHAPTER XLIV.

SOME SPIRITUALISTIC REMINISCENCES.

Having often been asked to put on record my few and far-between experiences of spiritualism, as on several occasions I have verbally related them, I have hitherto neglected or declined to do so, on account of having really seen little, whereas many others have seen far more.  And on the whole it is to me rather an unwelcome task from several considerations; first, because I have never wished to add, by my apparent testimony, to the rising tide of unwholesome superstition in that or any other direction; secondly, because I had always a crowd of more important matters to look after, and, perhaps, was inclined to indolence in the “dolce far niente” respecting things of less consequence to myself; and thirdly, in chief, because, albeit I have seen and heard a few of the petty miracles (avouched for otherwise by thousands of better witnesses) inexplicable to my own reason, I yet entirely abjure and renounce this so-called