s in Spain
and France, lying out in bivouacs, and feeding off commissariat beef and
biscuit, they would not understand what a life their ancestors led; and
so I shall leave further discourse upon the pleasures of the times when
even the Prince was a lad in leading-strings, when Charles Fox had not
subsided into a mere statesman, and Buonaparte was a beggarly brat in
his native island.

Whilst these improvements were going on in my estates,--my house, from
an antique Norman castle, being changed to an elegant Greek temple,
or palace--my gardens and woods losing their rustic appearance to be
adapted to the most genteel French style--my child growing up at his
mother's knees, and my influence in the country increasing,--it must
not be imagined that I stayed in Devonshire all this while, and that I
neglected to make visits to London, and my various estates in England
and Ireland.

I went to reside at the Trecothick estate and the Polwellan Wheal, where
I found, instead of profit, every kind of pettifogging chicanery; I
passed over in state to our territories in Ireland, where I entertained
the gentry in a style the Lord Lieutenant himself could not equal; gave
the fashion to Dublin (to be sure it was a beggarly savage city in those
days; and, since the time there has been a pother about the Union, and
the misfortunes attending it, I have been at a loss to account for the
mad praises of the old order of things, which the fond Irish patriots
have invented); I say I set the fashion to Dublin; and small praise to
me, for a poor place it was in those times, whatever the Irish party may
say.

In a former chapter I have given you a description of it. It was
the Warsaw of our part of the world: there was a splendid, ruined,
half-civilised nobility, ruling over a half-savage population. I say
half-savage advisedly. The commonalty in the streets were wild, unshorn,
and in rags. The most public places were not safe after nightfall.
The College, the public buildings, and the great gentry's houses were
splendid (the latter unfinished for the most part); but the people were
in a state more wretched than any vulgar I have ever known: the exercise
of their religion was only half allowed to them; their clergy were
forced to be educated out of the country; their aristocracy was quite
distinct from them; there was a Protestant nobility, and in the towns,
poor insolent Protestant corporations, with a bankrupt retinue of
mayors, aldermen, a