and show me a specimen of an Irish tenant, on his property.

We rode on, Mr. Waller having the butt-end of a large horse-pistol sticking out of his breast pocket; and, keeping a good look-out when any people were in sight, we proceeded up a villainous road to the farm-house, which presented an appearance of filth and misery such as I had never witnessed. The thatch was a small field of bad grass in itself; the door was broken, and an old hat supplied the place of glass in the window; a pool of stagnant water, which flooded the house in wet weather, was close by the door; and the dunghill was under the window. The owner of this paradise was worthy of it as far as appearances went. He was a short, thickset man, with an unpleasant down-look, and a shock-head of red hair, which he was disagreeably fond of scratching.

"Well, Sheedy," said Mr. Waller, "I thought you were to have this place, cleaned up. I told you, three months ago, that I had a table to give you when everything should be clean and nice."

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Why, then, yer hanner," said Mr. Sheedy, looking intently at a pool of dirty water in which he was standing, "I towlt the boys to do it, but they're gone to the races; but if I might be bowld eneough to ask yer hanner for the table ye promised me. -for the pig, bad cess to her, knocked the legs off the old wan, and broke all the chany."

"More fool you for letting the pig into the house; you know I often spoke to you about that. What do you think I built you a pigsty for?"

“Ye, than, God knows yer hanner's the good, kind landlord that did so; but she's accustomed to play with the childer, and we put turnips into the pigsty.'

"That is no reason. I allowed you for building a barn and offices."

"Ah then, that yer hanner did; but the boy wid the flurin' never came; and we have the cows below, and there's no room for the praties either, but in the cabin; but if er hanner would give us the table

"

"No, no; not until this place is clean, and the house whitewashed, and the dunghill removed. But I am losing time. I hope that gate is up at last.”

"Why, then, yer hanner" (I never heard so many honours as Mr. Sheedy made use of in his discourse), "I was going yesterday to put it up."

Here Mr. Waller, sick of excuses, rode on, and I followed him. When we came to the farm, which was as badly kept as the house, I saw the gate in question. It was a stout iron one, very rusty; and, instead of being hung in the usual manner on the posts, was laid leaning on its side against them, with much ingenuity, so as to let a drove of cows into the young corn.

"Oh! glory be to God and the Virgin! I'm ruined intirely; all the corn trod down! Oh, wisha! wisha!" exclaimed Mr. Sheedy, who had followed us, and who stood wringing his hands, but never making the slightest effort to drive out the cows.

"Why don't you drive them out before they do more mischief?" said Mr. Waller, angrily.

"Oh! don't be sphakeing to medon't be sphakeing to me. I'm ruined intirely. Oh, wisha! wisha!"

At length, he was induced to turn them out, stopping every now and then to wring his hands, and give vent to a particularly heart-rending "Oh, wisha wisha!"

"And do you mean to tell me that you have many of that class here?" said I, as we rode off.

"He is one of a numerous body," said Mr. Waller, sadly. "That fellow bored me to death for that gate, which you saw falling to pieces from rust, and which he has never even swung. If I swung it for him, he would not take the trouble to close it after him. Kindness cannot improve him, nor starvation teach him; and yet if I turn him out, I am held up as an exterminator. That fellow will declare, with tears in his eyes, that he has not a shilling in the world, and the next Sunday he will give ten at chapel to the O'Connell tribute. You have seen him in dirt and wretchedness, which a few hours would remove, and which the bribe of a table cannot induce him to do; and if you could listen unperceived, you would hear him carping at the disparity of the lot which has placed him in wretchedness, and me in a grand house. There are many bad landlords in Ireland; as many, or, perhaps, more than in England. There are absentees. There are men who live in towns, and who, if put on their own property, would not know it by sight, as they do not the tenants by name. many who let at high or rack rents; but they have all been classed together, and

none have tried to find out what they had to struggle against-religious bigotry, prejudice, and intolerance where trying to innovate or improve is looked upon with suspicion and dislike, and doing a kindness as a snare for some future time. It is a thankless and up-hill office, that of a resident Irish landlord. The English newspapers, judging truly of a part, have classed the whole together, and their name has become a by-word. Excuse my warmth. I have been annoyed at the state of things here. If ever you come to this part of the country again, pay me a visit."

I never saw him again. He was fired at, and desperately wounded, about a year after I left. The trial was, I understand, very interesting; and Mr. Sheedy played a principal character in the proceedings.

I now lost sight of my friends at Loughlinstown, and can only describe the remainder as I heard it.

The potato disease, and consequent poverty, were every day ruining hundreds of the Irish gentry. The Ormsbys suffered among the rest. Most of the tenants ran off to America with the rents. The all-devouring poor-rate swallowed up his remaining capital. He was unable to stock his domain and farm. The estate was bankrupt, and the Ormsbys were beggars.

One of the few whose acquaintance I had made there, who was not ruined or severely pinched, was Mr. Cuppage. He, on the contrary, rather benefited by it, as a doctor, by a steady mortality; and when it was determined that the cut-up and unfinished roads should be left as they were, and he was thrown out of employment, he found himself appointed county-cess collector.

Every state of life has its peculiar trials, and county-cess collectors are not free from them more than other men. The bar-the stumbling-block in Mr. Cuppage's life-was the poor-law collector. It was no use to think that he was of higher birth than him. What was birth to a man who could scent, at a mile's distance, a pig belonging to a poor-rate defaulter, and who snapped it up, and had it up to auction before Mr. Cuppage was out of bed in the morning? A gentle melancholy preyed on his mind; but the cup was not yet full, and one more trial remained, to convert him into a confirmed misanthrope.

Mr. Timothy Quinlan- the poorrate collector-was a man sprung from the people. He was one of those whom the troubles of the present day had brought into life. In him the law of Nature was fully carried out. He was one of the maggots which the corruption of everything good had brought into existence. He was destined to flourish and grow fat on it; and, perhaps, after fulfilling his destiny in that shape, to start into a new life, as a plethoric blue-bottle, and sport in the sunshine of future prosperity. His public life had not been, on the whole, fortunate. He was discovered to have watered the poorhouse milk, when he had the contract; and was not perfectly cleared from a suspicion of having adulterated the Indian meal. But he knew human nature too well, to suppose that to a genuine radical and repealer such trifles would make any difference. No. He came forward at public meetings, and abused the landlords with a virtuous dignity that won him the plaudits of the multitude. Never was the saying, "set a thief to catch a thief," more truly justified than in Mr. Quinlan; no one who had not spent his life in flattering the mob, and abusing the gentry, could pounce with half the quickness on a poor man's cow or sheep, seize and sell for five pounds corn that was worth twenty, and let the owner go to the poorhouse. Such was the man who was born to be the bane of Mr. Cuppage's existence.

Mr. Cuppage was taking a late breakfast, and thinking moodily over a calf which the poor-rate collector had seized and sold under his very nose; the county-cess was not collected, and the day for settling accounts was fast approaching. He took a large bite out of a round of toast, and gnashed his teeth, when he thought of the poorrate collector and the large poundage he would have compared to him. Just as he was raising his cup to his lips his servant, Pat Delany, rushed into the room with anxiety and delight on his countenance.

"Glory be to the Lord, Misther John, but there's a cow of Paddy Dwyer's strayed away on the domain of Loughlinstown; I've been following and watching her this hour, and she's now safe in the clover-field near the house. The cob is ready saddled; good luck to ye, and seize her before that bloody villain Quinlan hears of it."

Mr. Cuppage put down his tea. Even his buttered toast could afford him no gratification compared with that of doing the poor-law collector. He seized his hat, and sallied out like a knight of old, prepared to conquer or to die.

There was a short way across the country, and, although a timid horseman, he prefers to take this to going by the road. He clears the fences gallantly; and, on gaining arising ground, he sees the object of his hopes and fears grazing unconsciously in the field, about half-a-mile off. He pulls up to gloat his eyes upon it, and chuckling, thinks that he has done the poor-rate collector.

Hark! what does he hear in the distance? it is a horse;-a horse; and on its back Quinlan.

With a cry of horror Cuppage lashes his horse, and dashes down the steep in the direction of the cow on, on, over hedges, and ditches, and stone walls. Some fate seems to guard the riders, for neither gets a fall. On, on; if the race were a hundred yards longer, Quinlan would win; but Cuppage keeps the lead.

In the next field unconsciously cropping the clover is the cow: a large fence, impracticable to horses, separates her from her pursuers. Cuppage leaps off, and dashing at an open place, gets through in spite of the thorns.

There are two ways to seize a cow, by the horn or by the tail. He looks at the cow's head, but the cow looks viciously at him; and he prefers the safer, but more ignominious method, and grasping the cow by the tail, he exclaims in a solemn voice

"I hereby declare that I seize this cow, which is found on the land of John Ormsby, Esq., for county-cess due by him to me, and I call you, Peter Quinlan, to be witness to the seizure."

"With all my heart, Mr. Cuppage," said Mr. Quinlan, from the other side of the hedge. "And I," here he seized Mr. Cuppage's pony-" declare that I seize this pony which I find on Mr. Ormsby's land, for poor-rate due to me, and I call you, Mr. Cuppage, to be witness to the seizure. I wish you good morning, Mr. Cuppage.'

"

And he rode off, leading Mr. Cuppage's pony by the bridle, and leaving Mr. Cuppage gazing in a bewildered

manner at the cow, and the cow gazing at his tail in Mr. Cuppage's hand.

I never heard whether he recovered his pony, but certainly he took the thing very much to heart, and had thoughts at one time of emigrating to America, but gave it up, hearing of the buffalo hunts there. His first and only hunt is ever before his mind; he is a cynic in disposition, and talks mysteriously of the hand of fate, and of being done by a poor-rate collector.

A few days after I had heard of Mr. Cuppage's adventure, I was paying a visit at Lady -'s; as I was an old acquaintance, the servant did not bring up my name, and as I reached the drawing-room door I heard her ladyship (who has a deuce's own temper), blowing up her governess, or maidservant, as I thought. As it is unpleasant catching a lady in an excited state, I hesitated, undetermined whether to advance or retreat, and necessarily heard some of the conversation. I could hear her ladyship, in a loud, imperious voice, and another person in a subdued one, seemingly deprecating her wrath.

"What business had you to dare to think so?"

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I entreat your ladyship's pardon; I did not know you wished me to appear when there was company."

"I might have expected such ingratitude," said her ladyship, sweeping out of the room, "when I took Irish beggars into my house.

Thinking that the governess, for so I could perceive the other party to be, had also departed, and not wishing to be caught eavesdropping, I quietly entered the room. As I did so, I saw a young girl seated near the window, with her head buried in her hands. At the noise she started up, throwing back her dark-brown ringlets from her forehead.

"Gracious heaven! Emily Ormsby." It was, indeed; but how changed! The wild Irish girl was then no more; it was a pale, broken-hearted creature, too true an emblem of Ireland herself. She might pass for the genius of Erin, with her harp unstrung, weeping over the wreck of former hopes, and wistfully lingering on the thoughts of those days she should see no more.

AMONG the many "Popular Fallacies' which Jeremy Bentham has left untouched in his celebrated essay, there is none more generally diffused than this very great fallacy, that there are no French poets, properly so called, and no such thing as French poetry. It is true that the French, having chosen to put trammels on their language, and to make their poetry dance, as it were, in fetters, by encumbering it with rigid and superfluous rules, their natural genius has been cramped, and its productions disfigured, by a coldness and stiffness hardly reconcilable with the effusion of genuine poesy. Still the poetic spirit inherent in the Celtic race (the same which had already, in ruder times, produced in France the "lais" of the menestrals and troubadours, and the more recent ballads and rondeaus of Clement Marot) could not be wholly kept under. The genius of a Racine, bursting its bonds, showed itself in many a lofty passage of the "Andromaque," the "Esther," and the "Athalie ;" while a Malesherbes, a Moncrif, and others scarcely known to us by name in these islands, produced, despite all obstacles, some exquisite stanzas, and some ballads as simple and pathetic as are to be found in any language. The revolutions, the many revolutions in politics to which France has been subjected, have been accompanied, too, by a revolution scarcely less important in literature. The rules of the Academy have not only been relaxed, and words and subjects, long TABOO'D, been allowed to the French poet, but "Free Trade" in verse-making has been proclaimed to him in all respects, and he is now quite as much of a "" chartered libertine" as any of his European or American co-minstrels. The barriers of prohibition once removed, the natural consequences have followed-a torrent of verse, fresh, natural, and impetuous, has been poured forth; and if haply some of it has been turbid and unclean, yet by far the greater part has either dashed along over rock and stone, bright, bounding, and sparkling, or glided on in a gentle and pellucid current, murmuring soft music to the listening

ear.

To drop metaphor, the France of our day deserves any reproach rather than that of being unpoetical; for without speaking of the world-famous Chateaubriand, whose verses are all too few, of HUGO, and LAMARTINE, and BERANGER-the greatest of the three, there are numbers of original and pleasing poets among the French writers of the present day, who are quite unknown in these countries, and who have not yet attained any considerable degree of fame in their own. Among these, Henri Blaze and Ernest Legouvé are favourites of our own; and as we should wish to give an idea of their powers and their manner to such of our readers as do not understand French, we venture to offer to their notice the two following translations, one of which is from each poet, premising that the first, " Claire," by Henri Blaze, is rendered nearly word for word, the metre of the original being as much as possible preserved; while the second, the "Two Mothers," by Legouvé, is altered only by being "done into " blank verse, instead of rhyming couplets:

"Hear'st thou? The wind is rising in the wood;

It moaneth wildly through the rustling grass,

O'er which the beech-tree leaves are thickly strewed:

Even the oak bendeth as the storm-gusts

Lowly the willow doth its branches trail, And through the chestnuts sound the music of the gale.

"The nightingale sits silent in the shade,

The fresh acacia bends each vigorous bough, The streamlet gurgles o'er its pebbly bed,

The reeds wave sad and silently; while now The clouds, driven wildly o'er the sky's blue plains,

Pass like a rapid flight of snow-white

"Along the path by which wild strawberries grow,

And lilies of the vale, 'neath sheltering bowers

Of balmy hawthorn, lilac, blossomed sloe, Claire, with light footstep trampling the wild flowers,