lliganville' painted over the gate of her villa; and receives you
at a door that won't shut or gazes at you out of a window that is glazed
with an old petticoat.

Be it ever so shabby and dismal, nobody ever owns to keeping a shop. A
fellow whose stock in trade is a penny roll or a tumbler of lollipops,
calls his cabin the 'American Flour Stores,' or the 'Depository for
Colonial Produce,' or some such name.

As for Inns, there are none in the country; Hotels abound as well
furnished as Mulholliganville; but again there are no such people as
landlords and land-ladies; the landlord is out with the hounds, and my
lady in the parlour talking with the Captain or playing the piano.

If a gentleman has a hundred a year to leave to his family they all
become gentlemen, all keep a nag, ride to hounds, and swagger about
in the 'Phaynix,' and grow tufts to their chins like so many real
aristocrats.

A friend of mine has taken to be a painter, and lives out of Ireland,
where he is considered to have disgraced the family by choosing such
a profession. His father is a wine-merchant; and his elder brother an
apothecary.

The number of men one meets in London and on the Continent who have a
pretty little property of five-and-twenty hundred a year in Ireland
is prodigious: those who WILL have nine thousand a year in land when
somebody dies are still more numerous. I myself have met as many
descendants from Irish kings as would form a brigade.

And who has not met the Irishman who apes the Englishman, and who
forgets his country and tries to forget his accent, or to smother the
taste of it, as it were? 'Come, dine with me, my boy,' says O'Dowd, of
O'Dowdstown: 'you'll FIND US ALL ENGLISH THERE;' which he tells you with
a brogue as broad as from here to Kingstown Pier. And did you never hear
Mrs. Captain Macmanus talk about 'I-ah-land,' and her account of her
'fawther's esteet?' Very few men have rubbed through the world without
hearing and witnessing some of these Hibernian phenomena--these twopenny
splendours.

And what say you to the summit of society--the Castle--with a sham
king, and sham lords-in-waiting, and sham loyalty, and a sham Haroun
Alraschid, to go about in a sham disguise, making believe to be affable
and splendid? That Castle is the pink and pride of Snobbishness. A COURT
CIRCULAR is bad enough, with two columns of print about a little baby
that's christened--but think of people liking a sham COURT CIRCULAR!

I