those human beings are confined and punished who on earth had been guilty of destroying or tormenting birds. Among others, the souls of a Bird-catcher, a Cook, and a fine Lady, present themselves, and pour forth both their sins against birds done in the body, and the penance they now suffer for those delinquencies. The fine Lady desires to be informed by the poet as to the present fashions, and then laments the empire that she had wielded in that domain, where she and her sisterdirectresses "Dispensed, in latitudes below, The laws of flounce and furbelow, Now the feathers and eider-down which had once been her favourite ornaments are converted to instruments of torture. She informs the visitors, however, of the way which they should go, and that passing The philosopher then proceeds, in a wild and jumbling metre, to expound how many things arose out of few or none, and how different things came from similar ones:"Ho! ye obsolete wings in the outset of things, which the clergy Creation miscall, There was nought to perplex by shape, spe- But a motion most comic of dust-motes hurled, and Love was the first to attune it, Yet not by prevision, but simple collision— and this was the cause of the Unit. through the Limbo of the Obsolete, So jarred the old world, in blind particles they would come to the Paradise of which they were in search, and of which the gate is guarded by a Roc's egg. The embryo in that egg they must endeavour to conciliate so as to gain admittance. This announcement stimulates the two pilgrims, and especially the Man of Science, who exclaims : Of the worlds thus begun the first was the Sun, who, wishing to round off his girth, Began to perspire with great circles of fire and this was the cause of the Earth. Soon desiring to pair, Fire, Water, Earth, Air, to monogamous custom unused, All joined by collusion in fortunate fusion, and so the Sponge-puzzle produced. Now the Sponge had of yore many attributes more than the power to imbibe or expunge, And his leisure beguiled with the hope of a child. CHORUS. O philoprogenitive Sponge ! MARESNEST. Then Him let us call the first Parent of all, though the clergy desire to hoodwink us; For He gave to the Earth the first animal birth, and conceived the Ornithorhynchus." The Ornithorhynchus being thus produced, and being an ambidexter animal, with a duck's bill and a quadruped's extremities, proceeds to devise means for diversifying its progeny. Its efforts come to this, that of four young ones from two pairs of eggs, one pair incline in one direction, and another the opposite way : "From the bill, in brief words, were developed the Birds, Unless our tame pigeons and ducks lie; From the tail and hind legs, in the second laid eggs, The Apes and-Professor Huxley." These views, and some deductions from them, incense Roc's Egg to such a degree that he seems resolved to keep the gate of Paradise shut against the strangers. Windbag, however, appeases him with an appropriate song in praise of the Obsolete, and they are allowed to pass in. But in this "enchanted region of twilight and gentle temperature, abounding in trees, grass hollows, and fresh water," and every luxury and appliance that can soothe and satisfy its winged inhabitants, our two pilgrims have new difficulties and dangers to encounter. All the birds turn out to reconnoitre them, including the Bird of Paradise, the sovereign of the place; and it is soon remembered that there is a law by which any soul of any mammal, and specially of man, which there intrudes, shall die. The travellers are thereupon put upon their trial, and a jury is empanelled. Various of the birds come forward to give evidence as to the injuries inflicted on their race by mankind; and Windbag, then, in defence, adduces, on the other side, examples of those who have been what we may call Philornithists-Anacreon, Catullus, Aristophanes, Chaucer, and last, not least, Selborne's Sage "He, bright historian of your loves and feuds, Dated your building, chronicled your broods, Described your times of flight, your change of feathers, Your light moods shifted with the shifting weathers, And by long commerce with his gable guests, Learned all the secrets of your souls and nests." To each or most of these examples the birds sing forth their approval; and as to the last named, the Swallow twitters some pleasant stanzas: "If Transmigration e'er compel A bird to live with human heart, "Books he shall read in hill and tree; And everything his friend. "Such man in England I have seen; He moved my heart with fresh delight; And had I not the Swallow been, I had been Gilbert White." The Bird of Paradise admits the force of these "extenuating circumstances," but reluctantly declares that "Law is law:" "the Law must take its course." Windbag, however, has still another arrow in his quiver. If strict law is to rule, the defendants must be acquitted; for the law under which they are being tried cannot reach them. Its enactment is that the soul of any man which trespasses is to die; but there is nothing said about his body; and if the body must live it will be difficult to kill the soul. This solution of the question is welcomed by all parties, and the King exclaims: "Then they must be discharged. A legal flaw Is (blest be Justice!) stronger than the Law." "Save by your free will, Or shoot you in his garden. When your nesting is begun, Then, again, in spring-time— "If a girl For your own well-wisher.'" These terms being considered satisfactory, the Convention is concluded, and the Birds come trooping in with nests full of eggs in their beaks to enable the pilgrims to repeople earth with the lost tribes; and the Philosopher and Poet put to sea with their beardrawn iceberg, among the farewell carols and good wishes of the Birds, who are thus trusting them with their embryo offspring. There is something pleasant and touching in the valedictory chorus with which the Birds in Paradise address their unborn young in anticipation of their entering on possession of the earthly seats where their ancestors had once been happy; and we shall wind up this article with some of the verses thus chanted :: "Go from the home of your birth, Children, unhatched in the shell: Go afar off upon earth, In the woods of your fathers to dwell! To pair in your leafy possessions, To mingle, in sunlight or shade, Your labours, your loves, and your sessions, And over calm fisheries float, From the Longships far eastward to Thanet, The Lizard to lone John o' Groat! "You, too, swallows, that hatch Broods by the dwellings of men, Colonise chimney and thatch, Fresh from migration again! Shoot swift over market and haven, Or gnat-haunted river, that hems Lovers of infinite room, Shall whistle at night by the main ; 1 "Rivers and streams shall resound; The water-rat down in the reeds Shall hear the sedge-warbler around, And the crake on the low-lying meads: And the bittern shall boom o'er the rushes Love-signals, deep-throated and harsh, Where solitude mournfully hushes The stagnated pools of the marsh. "Yet, wheresoe'er ye shall roam, Seek not in life for your goal; Death shall restore you your home, Death the imparadised Pole." CORNELIUS O'DOWD. IRELAND REVISITED. I was told I should find great changes in Ireland since I had last seen it. I was prepared to find Dublin itself much altered; and in some respects, I believe, considerable change has occurred. One trait has, however, sustained no modification of any kind. The genial, generous hospitality is just the same as ever; and for the courtesy of a graceful welcome, and the warm cordiality of a generous reception, I am ready to back my countrymen against Europe. I have lived, I am sorry to own it, so much away from home, that I have at last attained to that sort of observation which a stranger is apt to bestow on a foreign country; and in this way I find myself questioning modes and ways and habits amidst which I was brought up, but have lived so long away from that they come before me as new and strange, and even peculiar. The most strongly marked change in the tone of society which struck me was, that Dublin had ceased to be as provincial, and become far more national, than I remembered it of old. Nor is there any paradox in what I say. The old provincialism of Dublin displayed itself in an almost slavish imitation of London, as though it revelled in the sense of its secondary position. It adopted the hours, the dress, it even tried to counterfeit the accent, of the greater capital. It mimicked, I rejoice to say most unsuccessfully, the languid air of semi-exhaustion so conspicuously distinctive in English manners; and it tried its very utmost to be as dreary and tiresome as its better. It has apparently outgrown all VOL. CX.-NO. DCLXX. those affectations; and now, in one sense, there has grown up an Ireland for the Irish. A gradual distrust of English parties, a growing feeling that the great rivals for political power cared more for the Irish vote than for any real interest of the land, has estranged many from the ranks of either Whig or Tory, and prepared them, in a measure, to listen to the discussion of a separate legislative system with far more patience than they would have vouchsafed a few years ago. So that, while the present Cabinet are flattering themselves on their success, and chanting the praises of their "healing measures," they are little aware to what cause is due the seeming quietude of the land, and the actually wider toleration that is found in society. They fancy the patient to be cured, because he makes less complaint than of old; while the real reason is, he has discharged his doctor, and thrown his physic to the dogs! That old party - worship which made itself felt in every social gathering, and marked a dinner-table as distinctly as the benches in the House, has totally disappeared, with what gain to the spirit of pleasant intercourse I need not say. Whatever a portion of the press may say, England cannot afford to despise the Nationalists. The green flag that these men would now hoist is not the banner of rebellion. There are at least a very considerable number who do not desire separation from England, who would wish to see Ireland intrusted with the care of her own interests, and able to attend to the development of her own resources, without hav M ing, as a necessary preliminary, to swell the lists of a party majority in England, or take the mot d'ordre from the staff at Downing Street. An Irish member now knows that before he can blast a rock in a Galway harbour, he must earn the right by exploding a Tory combination; and that a successful sneer at Mr Disraeli in the House is the essential preliminary towards a bounty for the coast fishery; and feels how ignoble a position he occupies in the House at Westminster. I know it is not a gracious office to question the boons which a strong Administration have taxed all their strength to bestow upon Ireland, but I also know that many of these remedies have been advised in utter ignorance of the real wants and the true sentiments of Irishmen. The great physician Abernethy used to say, that no inconsiderable part of the treatment of disease was the endeavour of the doctor to obviate at one time the effect of the remedies he had employed; at another and in this way the bark and the strong nutriment administered were simply the compensation to the sick man for all the bloodletting and depletion before. Now there is something like this in the legislation adopted towards Ireland. To certain things that we have done for her, a great deal of late legislation has been framed as the corrective, and the Downing Street doctors have less been curing their patient than trying how to counteract their own remedies. The chief intention of the Encumbered Estates Act was unquestionably to substitute for the old and ruined proprietors a class of small farmers tied to the soil by their especial interests, and responsible, by their properties, for the quietness of the country. The project was certainly wise. No order of men could be better adapted to replace the old gentry of the land, nor with any other could so many guarantees be found for peace and security. It was not possible to imagine a transfer of land which should occasion less inconvenience or less local disturbance than this. The very farmlabourers would, in all likelihood, remain to till the soil they had lived on from childhood, and not a tradition of home or neighbourhood be invaded. In the working of the system, however, this happy issue was sadly disappointed. The purchasers "under the Court" were not, as was expected, the tenant-farmers of the estate, but a set of people totally new to landowning and its obligations— the small shopkeepers of small towns -men who had amassed considerable wealth, and in many respects worthy and excellent people, but quite unused to the position of territorial owners, and totally deficient in the sort of knowledge that befits a man for country life and its habits. These men staked their money on land with a very small return for their capital, accepting in lieu of larger interest the greater security they obtained. They invested, however, on the distinct understanding that their two and a half or three per cent-and they rarely got even so much-should be as punctually paid as their bank dividends. They knew nothing of good or bad seasons, of smut in the wheat or rot in the potato; they took little account of drought in spring or floods in autumn. Of the thousand and one contingencies of a farmer's life, of which every country gentleman knows the bearing and the pressure, they were utterly ignorant. They were alike unable to discuss with their tenants the themes interesting to each, and by that very show of knowledge evidence the sort of sympathy that should bind the owner to the tiller |