er
that price it was called lawn. In that neighbourhood cambric had been
made which sold for 1 l. 2 s. 9 d. a yard unbleached. The principal
manufacturing establishments in addition to Messrs. Coulsons' are
those of the Messrs. Richardson and Co. and the Messrs. Barbour.

Lord Dufferin has written the ablest defence of the Irish landlords
that has ever appeared. In that masterly work he says: 'But though
a dealer in land and a payer of wages, I am above all things an
Irishman, and as an Irishman I rejoice in any circumstance which tends
to strengthen the independence of the tenant farmer, or to add to
the comfort of the labourer's existence.' If titles and possessions
implied the inheritance of religion and blood, Lord Dufferin ought
indeed to be 'Irish of the Irish' as the men of Ulster in the olden
times proudly called themselves. On the railroad from Belfast to
Bangor there is a station constructed with singular beauty, like
the castellated entrance to a baronial hall, and on the elaborately
chiselled stone we read 'Clandeboye.' Under the railway from Graypoint
on Belfast Lough runs a carriage-drive two miles long, to the famous
seat of the O'Neills, where his lordship's mansion is situated,
enclosed among aged trees, remembrancers of the past. Perhaps, there
is no combination of names in the kingdom more suggestive of the
barbaric power of the middle ages and the most refined culture of
modern civilisation. The avenue, kept like a garden walk, with a
flourishing plantation on each side, was cut through some of the
best farms on the estate, and must have been a work of great expense.
Taking this in connection with other costly improvements, among which
are several picturesque buildings for the residence of workmen--model
lodging-houses resembling fancy villas at the seaside--we can
understand how his lordship, within the last fifteen years, has paid
away in wages of labour the immense sum of 60,000 l., at the rate of
4,000 l. a year.

The Abbot of Bangor never gave employment like that. William O'Donnon,
the last of the line, was found in the thirty-second year of Henry
VIII. to be possessed of thirty-one townlands in Ards and Upper
Clandeboye, the grange of Earbeg in the county Antrim, the two
Copeland Islands, the tithes of the island of Raghery, three rectories
in Antrim, three in Down, and a townland in the Isle of Man. The
abbey, some of the walls of which still remain, adjoining the parish
church, was built