Celts cemented these hilltops of strongholds by means
of coarse glass, a sort of red-hot mortar, using sea-sand
and seaweed as a flux. This is Professor Whewell’s
idea, and with him we had some interesting conversation
on that and other subjects.” Of this Scotch
tour, full of interest, thus very curtly. Turn
we now to Ireland in 1835. My record of just
fifty years ago is much what it might be now, starvation,
beggary, and human wretchedness of all sorts in the
midst of a rich land, through indolence relapsed into
a jungle of thorns and briars, quaking bogs, and sterile
mountains; whisky, and the idle uncertain potato,
combining with ignorance and priestcraft, to demoralise
the excitable unreasoning race of modern Celts.
Let us turn from the sad scenes of which my said diary
is full, to my day at the spar caverns of Kingston.
“At the bottom of a stone quarry, we clad ourselves
in sack garments that mud wouldn’t spoil, and
with lit candles descended into the abyss, hands,
knees, and elbows being of as much service as our
feet. Now, I am not going to map my way after
the manner of guide-books, nor to nickname the gorgeous
architecture of nature according to the caprice of
a rude peasant on the spot or the fancy of a passing
stranger. I might fill a page with accounts of
Turks’ tents, beehives, judges’ wigs,
harps, handkerchiefs, and flitches of bacon, but I
rather choose to speak of these subterranean palaces
with none of such vulgar similarities. No one
ever saw such magnificence in stalactites; from the
black fissured roofs of antres vast and low-browed
caves they are hanging, of all conceivable shapes
and sizes and descriptions. Now a tall-fluted
column, now a fringed canopy, now like a large white
sheet flung over a beetling rock in the elegant folds
and easy drapery of a curtain, everywhere are pure
white stalactites like icicles straining to meet the
sturdier mounds of stalagmite below; whilst in the
smaller caves slender tubes extend from top to bottom
like congealed rain. One cavern is quite curtained
round with dazzling and wavy tapestry; another has
gigantic masses of the white spar pouring from its
crannied roof like boiled Brobdingnag macaroni; others
like heaps of snowy linen lying about or hanging from
the ceiling. The extent of the caves is quite
unknown: eleven acres (I was told) have been surveyed
and mapped, while there are six avenues still unexplored,
and you may already wander for twenty-four hours through
the discovered provinces of the gnome king.”
This is not to be compared with Kentucky, perhaps not
quite with Derbyshire; but it seemed to me marvellous
at the time. Let this much suffice as hinted
reference to those early journals, which, if the world
were not already more full of books than of their readers,
would be as well worth printing in their integrity
as many others of their bound and lettered brethren.