I T may safely be said that any boy or girl who takes a peep at Ireland will want another peep. Between London and Ireland, so far as atmosphere and the feeling of things is concerned, there is a world of distance. Of course, it is the difference between two races, for the Irish are mainly Celtic, and the Celtic way of thinking and speaking and feeling is as different as possible from the Saxon or the Teuton, and the Celt has influenced the Anglo-Irish till they are as far away from the English

D UBLIN is a city of magnificences and squalors. It has the widest street in Europe, they say, in Sackville Street, which, after the manner of the policeman and the muzzling order, half the population calls O’Connell Street. The public buildings are very magnificent. These are due, for the greater part, to the man who found Dublin brick and left it marble—that great city-builder, John Claudius Beresford, of the latter half of the eighteenth century, whose name is at once famous and infamous to t

D UBLIN possesses great natural advantages. The sea, the mountains, the green country, are at her gates. You take one of her many trams, and at the terminus you step into solitudes, into “dear secret greenness” of country; on to expanses of sea-sand, with the waves breaking in little crisped curls of foam at your feet. She is ringed about with mountains. She has a most beautiful coast-line. Turn which way you will on leaving her, you are safe to turn to beauty. Round about her are clustered vari

I MUST warn you, before proceeding to write about the Irish people, that I have tried to explain them, according to my capacity, a thousand times to my English friends and neighbours, and have been pulled up short as many times by the reflection that all I have been saying was contradicted by some other aspect of my country-people. For we are an eternally contradictory people, and none of us can prognosticate exactly what we shall feel, what do, under given circumstances; whereas the Englishman

I F you go down from Dublin by the wonderful coast-line or through the beautiful country inland which runs by the base of the mountains, you will come upon beautiful scenery, and find a population not at all characteristically Irish. The beauty of Wicklow, its wonderful woods, its deep glens, its placid waters, its glorious mountains, is only less than the beauty of Killarney, which is an earthly paradise. But in Wicklow, in Wexford, in Waterford, the people’s blood is mixed. Sometimes it is Cel

B ETWEEN Dublin and Newry there is not much to see or to remember except that Cromwell sacked Drogheda with a thoroughness, and that at Dundalk Edward Bruce, the brother of Robert, was crowned King of Ireland. The Mourne Mountains and Carlingford Lough bring us back to characteristic Ireland. Beyond them one enters the manufacturing districts—that north-east corner of Ireland which no Celt looks upon as Ireland at all. In speech, in character, in looks, the people become Scotch and not Irish. On

T HERE is something of rich and racy association about the very name of Cork—something that suggests joviality, wit, a warm southern temperament. Corkmen only out of all Ireland hold together. The rest of Ireland may be fissiparous, disunited. Corkmen cleave closer than Scotsmen to one another, and to be a Corkman is to another Corkman a cloak that covers a multitude of sins. A Corkman in Dublin will have friends in all sorts of unlikely places. What matter though a man be in a humble rank of li

G ALWAY is so synonymous with racy Irish life that a peep at Ireland must be incomplete unless it includes a peep at Galway. It is full of the strangest monuments of the past. It was once a town of the Irishry, in the O’Flaherty country. But with the Norman Conquest there came in that group of Anglo-Norman families known as the Tribes, who in course of time went the way of all their compeers, becoming more Irish than the Irish. “Lord!” said Edmund Spenser, “how quickly doth that country alter me

I T once fell to my lot to make a hasty scamper through Donegal from end to end; that is to say, as far as possible, I made the circuit of the county, beginning with Ballyshannon, following the coast-line, with divergences, from Donegal to Gweedore, going round by Bloody Foreland, by Falcarragh and Dunfanaghy, and ending up by way of Letterkenny at Ballyshannon again. I took ten or twelve days to do it—perhaps a fortnight—staying each night at an inn. To Gweedore I devoted the best portion of a

A N English person in Ireland may find himself astray because he will have no clue to the minds of the people. I once heard two English ladies returning from an Irish trip say to each other across a railway-carriage, otherwise full of Irish people, that the Irish all told lies. This was a rash judgment and a harsh one; I do not know what the occasion of it was. Sometimes the Irish, through their naturally gracious manners, will say the thing that will please you best to hear rather than the abso