that impelled it had ceased to act. In contrast to the general poverty and dreariness of the scene, the aristocratic part of the city glittered in all the clinquant of exterior splendour with which bad institutions ever seek to hide their inherent defects.-Viceroys, in more than royal state, went to and fro, not only to open and to close parliaments, but to feasts of public ceremony or private conviviality, with all the ensigns of office, and all the protection of an armed force. Peers and commoners in the full dress of the times perpetually drove from the senate-house to the Castle,-(those markets of political corruption, where an English viceroy had always the means of purchasing, and an Irish aristocrat always something to sell;) and city processions were zealously paraded through the streets to show the statute loyalty of the assistants while incorporated ignorance, pranked out in all the fantastic drapery of "companies" and "bodies," perpetuated many an old papistical ceremony, unconscious of their meaning; and proudly rode the fringes (or franchises,) which represented the freedom of the city, when the liberties of the nation lay prostrate in the dust. The showy and cumbrous equipages of the always ostentatious Irish nobility, then vied, and frequently surpassed the more elegant "setouts" of the English officials; and multitudes of noddies (the Irish cabriolets) and countless sedan-chairs,* (for none of either sex then walked, save those who had no means to pay for being carried,) contributed to give factitious elegance to a state of society and a capital, from which all the true sources of national happiness and national prosperity were withheld. In a word, the metropolis of Ireland at this period resembled in its diminished scale the capital of France of the same æra :-the squalid misery of the lower classes, and the taste and splendour of the higher, were opposed in strong and fearful relief. While palaces now began to rise on every side, with the power of that overweening oligarchy, for whom they were erected, and by whom at no distant day they were destined to be abandoned; there still remained, in the more ancient part of Dublin, some curious relics of the cagework architecture of the old times, which were so well put together, that they long survived the more stately edifices which had been built round them. They still encumbered the neighbourhood of the Swifts and the Stellas; they were to be found in those remote old up and down hill streets, now abandoned to the indigent and the lowly, but once distinguished as the avenues to the "Abbey of the White Friars," and to the hostel called par excellence, the "Wine-tavern," and led antiquarian steps to "Big-butter-lane," or "Gillemoholmock's alley," in search of the authenticated residence of the gallant Sir Francis *There is a most curious picture of the importunate insolence of Irish chairmen in the last century to be found in Swift's Correspondence. Like the Trasteverini of Rome, their physical force rendered them formidable to all classes; even in the finest weather they were wont to force the dandies of the day into their sedan, and frequently offered "to convey them and their dolls for nothing," to prevent the habit of walking becoming fashionable. † Several of these kind of houses were to be seen in Castle-street, High-street, Wood Quay, and Thomas-street, between the years 1760 and 1780. The Wine tavern street, so called in Camden, being the street where the taverns were kept in 1316, is still in high preservation. + Swift was born in Haly's Court, and "the deified Vanessa" lodged in "Turn Style Alley, near College Green." Willoughby, of Charles the First's time, or to the site of the domicile of old Dermott Fitz Gillemoholmock, a burgher of Dublin, and a stout ally of King John's. Dick's coffee-house in Skinner's-row, the resort of the legal and the mercantile, was still kept in an old cage-work house called the Carberie, once the residence of the Geraldines, where the most powerful of the Kildares "suffered the Lord Skiffington to dance attendance among other suitors;" and Lucas's, occupying a part of Cork-house, within the purlieus of the Castle, was the daily resort of the wits, politicians, and dramatic critics of the day, who sipped their chocolate or their coffee in rooms where the Burlingtons and the Orrerys had held their statesmen circles and scientific coteries. It was, however, from the memorable epochs of 1779 and 1782 (when some acquisitions were made by the long-oppressed Irish, by a partial amelioration of the terrific penal code) that the ancient capital of the country first acquired some of the features of the metropolis of a free people; for it is one of the fatal results of a bad government, that the comforts, accommodations, and health of the community at large are ever sacrificed to the enjoyments, pleasures, and boundless indulgences of the privileged classes,-and that the cities of despots are composed of palaces and dens, of spacious courts and luxurious gardens. for the great, and noisome alleys and pestilential passages for the lowly! The filthy courts and noxious lanes of Dublin now gave way to spacious streets and healthful avenues, where the air of heaven was permitted to circulate, and its light to shine and cheer. Infection now lost some of its strongest holds, and the plague and pestilence began to retreat before the commissioners of wide streets, as toads and serpents fled before the thrice blessed crosier of St. Patrick. Commerce, too, recovering from the palsying effects of jealous and impolitic restrictions, called upon the industry of the land; and wealth and confidence gave rise to vigorous speculation, reflecting upon the material as upon the moral aspect of the country. Edifices in the best taste, at once noble and simple, were erected for public utility by public spirit. As the gloomy pile of penal disabilities fell in part, (and, alas! but in part) the capital of Ireland, which it had so long overshadowed with its baneful influence, cheered into beauty and spread into capaciousness, and the city of mud and wicker of the days of domestic and foreign despotism, in times of increasing liberality and illumination became comparatively a "city of marble." It did not however become so by the ostentation of some imperial Augustus, but by the partial abolition of bad laws, and the operation of good,-for the progress of Irish prosperity has ever kept pace with the decline of intolerance; and those who know her interests best, and love her most, are well aware that nothing but the total abolition of her dark, fearful, and atrocious code can restore her to peace, to confidence, and to the full benefit of those advantages with which Nature has bounteously endowed her. *The Carberie was also inhabited by the Ormonde family, during the vicissitudes of the Geraldines. It became again the property of the Earl of Kildare, and the habitation of that illustrious chief, who continued to reside in it till the dispersion of the family in the reign of Henry the Eighth, when five of them were publicly executed, and the rest died in misery or fled into exile. THE BARD'S PROPHECY.* Ne'er err'd the prophet heart that Grief inspired, MATURIN A SOUND of music o'er the deep green hills, And the wind's whisper in the mountain-ash Whose clusters droop'd above. His head was bow'd, Th' unchaining of his soul, the gush of song: By his own rushing stream?--Once more he gazed From the deep chords his wandering hand brought out *.Founded on a story related of the Irish bard Carolan. See the Percy Anee dotes of Imagination. Long have I striven With my deep foreboding soul, But the full tide now its bounds hath riven, -There's a young brow smiling near, Fair art thou, Morna! The sadness of thine eye Is beautiful as silvery clouds On the dark-blue summer sky! And thy voice comes like the sound Of a sweet and hidden rill, That makes the dim woods tuneful round- Silence and dust On thy sunny lips must lie! Make not the strength of love thy trust, A stronger yet is nigh! No strain of festal flow That my hand for thee hath tried, But into dirge-notes, wild and low, Like heavy dew on the lily's leaves, And the glance is thine which sees But bright things go with the summer's breeze, And thou, too, must depart! Yet shall I weep? I know that in thy breast There swells a fount of song too deep, Too powerful for thy rest! And the bitterness I know, And the chill of this world's breath -Go, all undimm'd in thy glory, go! Take hence to Heaven Thy holy thoughts, and bright, And soaring hopes, that were not given Might we follow in thy track, -But the spring shall give us violets back, -There was a burst of tears around the bard: And spring return'd CRITICISM ON FEMALE BEAUTY. CRITICISM, for the most part, is so partial, splenetic, and pedantic, and has such little right to speak of what it undertakes to censure, that the words "criticism on beauty" sound almost as ill, as if a man were to announce something unpleasant upon something pleasant. And certainly, as criticism, according to its general practice, consists in an endeavour to set the art above its betters, and to render genius amenable to want of genius, (particularly in those matters which, by constituting the very essence of it, are the least felt by the men of line and rule,) so critics are bound by their trade to object to the very pleasantest things. Delight, not being their business, puts them out of conceit. The first reviewer was Momus, who found fault with the Goddess of Beauty. I have sometimes fancied a review set up by this anti-divinity, in Heaven. It would appear, by late discoveries in the history of the globe, that as one species of production has become extinct, so new ones may have come into being. Now imagine the gods occasionally putting forth some new work, which is criticised in the Olympian Review. Chloris, the goddess of flowers, for instance, makes a sweetbriar : "The Sweet-Briar, a new bush, by Chloris, Goddess of Flowers. Rain and Sun, 4104. us. This is another hasty production of a lady, whom we are anxious to meet with a more satisfied face. Really, we must say, that she tires The other day we had the pink. It is not more than a year ago, that she flained upon us with the heart's-ease (pretty names these); then we were all to be sunk into a bed of luxury and red leaves by the rose ; and now, ecce iterum Rosina, comes a new edition of the same effeminate production, altered but not amended, and made careless, confused, and full of harsh points; which the fair author, we suppose, takes for a dashing variety! Why does not she consult her friends? Why must we be forced to think that she mistakes her talents, and that she had better confine herself to the production of daisies and dandelions? Even the rose, which has been so much cried up in certain quarters, was not original. It was clearly suggested by that useful production of an orthodox friend of ours,-the cabbage; which has occasioned it to be pretty generally called the cabbage-rose. The sweet-briar, therefore, is imitation upon imitation, crambe (literally) bis cocta; a thing not to be endured. To say the truth, which we wish to do with great tenderness, considering the author's sex, this sweetbriar bush is but a paltry rifacimento of the rose-bush. The only difference is, that every thing is done on a pettier scale, the flowers hastily turned out, and a superabundance of those startling points added, which so annoyed us in the rose yclept the moss; for there is no end to these pretty creatures the roses. Let us see. There is the cabbagerose, the moss-rose, the musk-rose, the damask-rose, the hundred-leaved rose, the yellow-rose, and earth only knows how many more. Surely these were enough, in all conscience. Most of them rank little above extempore effusions, and were hardly worth the gathering: but after so much trifling, to go and alter the style of a common-place in a spirit of mere undoing and embrouiliement, and then palm it upon us for |