After having witnessed the splendours of civilised life abroad, the sight of Dublin in the year 1771, when I returned thither, struck me with anything but respect.  It was as savage as Warsaw almost, without the regal grandeur of the latter city.  The people looked more ragged than any race I have ever seen, except the gipsy hordes along the banks of the Danube.  There was, as I have said, not an inn in the town fit for a gentleman of condition to dwell in.  Those luckless fellows who could not keep a carriage, and walked the streets at night, ran imminent risks of the knives of the women and ruffians who lay in wait there,—­of a set of ragged savage villains, who neither knew the use of shoe nor razor; and as a gentleman entered his chair or his chariot, to be carried to his evening rout, or the play, the flambeaux of the footmen would light up such a set of wild gibbering Milesian faces as would frighten a genteel person of average nerves.  I was luckily endowed with strong ones; besides, had seen my amiable countrymen before.

I know this description of them will excite anger among some Irish patriots, who don’t like to have the nakedness of our land abused, and are angry if the whole truth be told concerning it.  But bah! it was a poor provincial place, Dublin, in the old days of which I speak; and many a tenth-rate German residency is more genteel.  There were, it is true, near three hundred resident Peers at the period; and a House of Commons; and my Lord Mayor and his corporation; and a roystering noisy University, whereof the students made no small disturbances nightly, patronised the roundhouse, ducked obnoxious printers and tradesmen, and gave the law at the Crow Street Theatre.  But I had seen too much of the first society of Europe to be much tempted by the society of these noisy gentry, and was a little too much of a gentleman to mingle with the disputes and politics of my Lord Mayor and his Aldermen.  In the House of Commons there were some dozen of right pleasant fellows.  I never heard in the English Parliament better speeches than from Flood, and Daly, of Galway.  Dick Sheridan, though not a well-bred person, was as amusing and ingenious a table-companion as ever I met; and though during Mr. Edmund Burke’s interminable speeches in the English House I used always to go to sleep, I yet have heard from well-informed parties that Mr. Burke was a person of considerable abilities, and even reputed to be eloquent in his more favourable moments.

I soon began to enjoy to the full extent the pleasures that the wretched place affords, and which were within a gentleman’s reach:  Ranelagh and the Ridotto; Mr. Mossop, at Crow Street; my Lord Lieutenant’s parties, where there was a great deal too much boozing, and too little play, to suit a person of my elegant and refined habits.  ‘Daly’s Coffee-house,’ and the houses of the nobility, were soon open to me; and I remarked with astonishment in the higher circles, what I had experienced in the lower on my