ence relapsed into a jungle of thorns and
briars, quaking bogs, and sterile mountains; whisky, and the idle
uncertain potato, combining with ignorance and priestcraft, to
demoralise the excitable unreasoning race of modern Celts. Let us turn
from the sad scenes of which my said diary is full, to my day at the
spar caverns of Kingston. "At the bottom of a stone quarry, we clad
ourselves in sack garments that mud wouldn't spoil, and with lit candles
descended into the abyss, hands, knees, and elbows being of as much
service as our feet. Now, I am not going to map my way after the manner
of guide-books, nor to nickname the gorgeous architecture of nature
according to the caprice of a rude peasant on the spot or the fancy of a
passing stranger. I might fill a page with accounts of Turks' tents,
beehives, judges' wigs, harps, handkerchiefs, and flitches of bacon, but
I rather choose to speak of these subterranean palaces with none of such
vulgar similarities. No one ever saw such magnificence in stalactites;
from the black fissured roofs of antres vast and low-browed caves they
are hanging, of all conceivable shapes and sizes and descriptions. Now a
tall-fluted column, now a fringed canopy, now like a large white sheet
flung over a beetling rock in the elegant folds and easy drapery of a
curtain, everywhere are pure white stalactites like icicles straining to
meet the sturdier mounds of stalagmite below; whilst in the smaller
caves slender tubes extend from top to bottom like congealed rain. One
cavern is quite curtained round with dazzling and wavy tapestry; another
has gigantic masses of the white spar pouring from its crannied roof
like boiled Brobdingnag macaroni; others like heaps of snowy linen lying
about or hanging from the ceiling. The extent of the caves is quite
unknown: eleven acres (I was told) have been surveyed and mapped, while
there are six avenues still unexplored, and you may already wander for
twenty-four hours through the discovered provinces of the gnome king."
This is not to be compared with Kentucky, perhaps not quite with
Derbyshire; but it seemed to me marvellous at the time. Let this much
suffice as hinted reference to those early journals, which, if the world
were not already more full of books than of their readers, would be as
well worth printing in their integrity as many others of their bound and
lettered brethren.

In connection with these journals, I have been specially requested to
add to t