industry. But, from Kilkenny to the
gates of Dublin, the path of the travellers lay over gently undulating
ground rich with natural verdure. That fertile district should have been
covered with flocks and herds, orchards and cornfields: but it was an
unfilled and unpeopled desert. Even in the towns the artisans were very
few. Manufactured articles were hardly to be found, and if found could
be procured only at immense prices, [174] The truth was that most of the
English inhabitants had fled, and that art, industry, and capital had
fled with them.

James received on his progress numerous marks of the goodwill of the
peasantry; but marks such as, to men bred in the courts of France
and England, had an uncouth and ominous appearance. Though very few
labourers were seen at work in the fields, the road was lined by
Rapparees armed with skeans, stakes, and half pikes, who crowded to look
upon the deliverer of their race. The highway along which he travelled
presented the aspect of a street in which a fair is held. Pipers came
forth to play before him in a style which was not exactly that of the
French opera; and the villagers danced wildly to the music. Long frieze
mantles, resembling those which Spenser had, a century before, described
as meet beds for rebels, and apt cloaks for thieves, were spread along
the path which the cavalcade was to tread; and garlands, in which
cabbage stalks supplied the place of laurels, were offered to the royal
hand. The women insisted on kissing his Majesty; but it should seem that
they bore little resemblance to their posterity; for this compliment
was so distasteful to him that he ordered his retinue to keep them at a
distance, [175]

On the twenty-fourth of March he entered Dublin. That city was then,
in extent and population, the second in the British isles. It contained
between six and seven thousand houses, and probably above thirty
thousand inhabitants, [176] In wealth and beauty, however, Dublin was
inferior to many English towns. Of the graceful and stately public
buildings which now adorn both sides of the Liffey scarcely one had been
even projected. The College, a very different edifice from that which
now stands on the same site, lay quite out of the city, [177] The ground
which is at present occupied by Leinster House and Charlemont House,
by Sackville Street and Merrion Square, was open meadow. Most of the
dwellings were built of timber, and have long given place to more
substant