of time, when youngsters are employed cutting the Frenchmen’s throats in Spain and France, lying out in bivouacs, and feeding off commissariat beef and biscuit, they would not understand what a life their ancestors led; and so I shall leave further discourse upon the pleasures of the times when even the Prince was a lad in leading-strings, when Charles Fox had not subsided into a mere statesman, and Buonaparte was a beggarly brat in his native island.

Whilst these improvements were going on in my estates,—­my house, from an antique Norman castle, being changed to an elegant Greek temple, or palace—­my gardens and woods losing their rustic appearance to be adapted to the most genteel French style—­my child growing up at his mother’s knees, and my influence in the country increasing,—­it must not be imagined that I stayed in Devonshire all this while, and that I neglected to make visits to London, and my various estates in England and Ireland.

I went to reside at the Trecothick estate and the Polwellan Wheal, where I found, instead of profit, every kind of pettifogging chicanery; I passed over in state to our territories in Ireland, where I entertained the gentry in a style the Lord Lieutenant himself could not equal; gave the fashion to Dublin (to be sure it was a beggarly savage city in those days; and, since the time there has been a pother about the Union, and the misfortunes attending it, I have been at a loss to account for the mad praises of the old order of things, which the fond Irish patriots have invented); I say I set the fashion to Dublin; and small praise to me, for a poor place it was in those times, whatever the Irish party may say.

In a former chapter I have given you a description of it.  It was the Warsaw of our part of the world:  there was a splendid, ruined, half-civilised nobility, ruling over a half-savage population.  I say half-savage advisedly.  The commonalty in the streets were wild, unshorn, and in rags.  The most public places were not safe after nightfall.  The College, the public buildings, and the great gentry’s houses were splendid (the latter unfinished for the most part); but the people were in a state more wretched than any vulgar I have ever known:  the exercise of their religion was only half allowed to them; their clergy were forced to be educated out of the country; their aristocracy was quite distinct from them; there was a Protestant nobility, and in the towns, poor insolent Protestant corporations, with a bankrupt retinue of mayors, aldermen, and municipal officers —­all of whom figured in addresses and had the public voice in the country; but there was no sympathy and connection between the upper and the lower people of the Irish.  To one who had been bred so much abroad as myself, this difference between Catholic and Protestant was doubly striking; and though as firm as a rock in my own faith, yet I could not help remembering my grandfather held a different one, and wondering that there should be such a political