. III. c. 22, passed in 1696, actually
prohibited any goods whatever from being imported to Ireland direct from
the English colonies. These are the reasons for Swift's remark that
Ireland's ports were of no more use to Ireland's people "than a
beautiful prospect to a man shut up in a dungeon." [T. S.]

[51] See note on page 137 of vol. vi of this edition. "The Drapier's
Letters." [T. S.]

[52] Lecky quotes from the MSS. in the British Museum, from a series of
letters written by Bishop Nicholson, on his journey to Derry, to the
Archbishop of Canterbury. The quotation illustrates the truth of Swift's
remark. "Never did I behold," writes Nicholson, "even in Picardy,
Westphalia, or Scotland, such dismal marks of hunger and want as
appeared in the countenances of the poor creatures I met with on the
road." In the "Intelligencer" (No. VI, 1728) Sheridan wrote: "The poor
are sunk to the lowest degrees of misery and poverty--their houses
dunghills, their victuals the blood of their cattle, or the herbs of the
field." Of the condition of the country thirty years later, the most
terrible of pictures is given by Burdy in his "Life of Skelton": "In
1757 a remarkable dearth prevailed in Ireland.... Mr. Skelton went out
into the country to discover the real state of his poor, and travelled
from cottage to cottage, over mountains, rocks, and heath.... In one
cabin he found the people eating boiled prushia [a weed with a yellow
flower that grows in cornfields] by itself for their breakfast, and
tasted this sorry food, which seemed nauseous to him. Next morning he
gave orders to have prushia gathered and boiled for his own breakfast,
that he might live on the same sort of food with the poor. He ate this
for one or two days; but at last his stomach turning against it, he set
off immediately for Ballyshannon to buy oatmeal for them.... One day,
when he was travelling in this manner through the country, he came to a
lonely cottage in the mountains, where he found a poor woman lying in
child-bed with a number of children about her. All she had, in her weak,
helpless condition to keep herself and her children alive, was blood and
sorrel boiled up together. The blood, her husband, who was a herdsman,
took from the cattle of others under his care, for he had none of his
own. This was a usual sort of food in that country in times of scarcity,
for they bled the cows for that purpose, and thus the same cow often
afforded both milk and blood....