The Sun.
London, England, 1836-12-15 00:00:00

THE StTN, LONDON, THURSDAY, DECEMBER 15, 1836.

MEETING of the COUNTY of CLARE,

solution, although he was opposed to the principle of volun-
tary aid for such a purpose. lie hoped this would be the
last time they would be called together for such purpose ;
but a system of poor-laws would shortly be introduced by
the Legislature, which would entitle the poor to be fed by
assessment on the rich.—(Loud cheers.)
On the motion of W. R. MAHON, Esq., seconded by
CHARLES O'CONNELL, Esq., a Committee was appointed
to apply to persons connected with the county for con-
tributions.
Dean O'SHAUGHNESSY and HEWITT BRIDGMAN, Esq.,
M.P., having addressed the meeting,
Mr. STEELE was called for, and moved the next resolu-

IN FAVOUR OF POOR LAWS.

(From the Clare Journal.)
On Saturday, pursuant to requisition to the High Sheriff,
a meeting took place in the Court-house, the High Sheriff,
John O'Brien, Esq., in the chair.
The HIGH SHERIFF said they were assembled on an oc-
casion affecting the well-being, he might add the existence,
of a numerous portion of the community. The distress that
prevailed was of a most painful character, and prospects,
unless alleviated by timely aid. were still more alarming.
On the question of some Legislative provision for the poor
of Ireland, which now occupied the contemplation of the
Government, there existed much undue and indefinite ap-
prehension, and on examination they would find that the
arguments against poor-rates were derived more from the
incidental and available abuses which had attended their
administration in England, than from any inherent defect
in that great principle which declared that the protec-
tion of life, no matter how assailed, whether by violence
or by famine, was the great basis of human institu-
tions, and the first duty of a civilised community. Re-
specting that part of the poor-laws which provided for
the infirm and aged, he believed there now existed but
one sentiment, and public opinion was divided but on that
department which provided employment for the able-bodied
labourer. Yet, if they analyzed the principles which
sustained the one they would find them identified with
those which recommended the other. The protection of pro-
perty, next to that of life, was among the paramount du-
ties of society. Was it not our duty to give effect to this
principle not alone in favour of the more affluent classes,
but also to protect the value of that which constituted the
sole wealth of the poor, the power of productive industry ?
It was apprehended that they would be inundated by a list
of applicants for employment, but let the public, as it had
been briefly put to the lowest paymaster and the hardest
task-master, let its wages be under the average customary
rate in the respective districts, and they would have few if
any collusive or indolent applications. A great portion of
the land of the country was in the hands of an absentee
proprietary, who generally were forgetful of those interests
from which they were removed, and indifferent to the well-
being of a population with whose character or condition
they were entirely unacquainted. The absentee, by the
fact of his position, forgot the duties which attached to
property, and was reckless of misery which he had not
seen ; he was removed from the sympathies which should con-
trol him ; he was not identified with his tenantry, with their
feelings, or prejudices ; his pride was not involved in their
condition—it was not gratified by their prosperity—it was
not mortified by their impoverishments ; he was obnoxious
to public opinion. This condition was calculated to coun-
teract, in his relations with the country, the tendencies of
his nature, and it not unfrequently happened that the mu-
nificent English landlord, whose liberality was the theme of
merited panegyric, derived the very sources of his munifi-
cence from the sufferings and privations of an Irish tenantry.
" Gentlemen," continued he, " you will say whether this
picture is drawn from imagination or from fact. An absen-
tee tax has been suggested. I am not aware if such, in the
present intimate relations of the empire, be either prac-
ticable or advisable, but it is clear that a well-regulated
poor-rate would in a degree have the effect of an ab-
sentee tax, from which the resident landed proprietors
would derive important advantages. We should be re-
lieved from the painful sense of living in the midst of a fa-
mishing population. We should enjoy that security which
results from the habits of a people taught to respect
the laws as the fountain of their well-being ; the physi-
cal and moral condition of the country would progres-
sively improve, and the higher or more affluent ranks, whe-
ther resident or absentee, would be compelled, by the
urgent sense of self-interest, to superintend the wants and
ameliorate the condition of the humbler classes of the coun-

tion, which was—" That this country can never enjoy peace,
nor progress in civilization, till every man is made to know
that he has a right to support from the soil on which he
stands a freeman." He said, when I state to you the subject
on which a resolution has been put into my hands, a subject
of such deep, and solemn, and awful importance to Ireland,
you may be very probably disposed to believe that I intend
making a very long speech, but I shall not. The subject of
the resolution is the recognition of the necessity of a poor-law
for Ireland.—( Hear.) No, I shall not make a very long
speech at this late hour of the evening ; but when you call
to memory the nature of the purpose for which we have
been convened on our requisition, and the deeply afflicting
circumstances of the peasantry of our country in conse-
quence of the incessant deluges of rain which have fallen
for the last two months, you will, I am quite sure, not re-
fuse me your attention for a few minutes.—(Hear.) Our
Chairman the High Sheriff has, with that depth of public
wisdom and private discretion and delicacy for which he is
so remarkable, expressed his hope that no topic would be
introduced by any of the speakers which could interrupt
the harmony which ought to characterise this meeting. I
am a man of innate power, of icy ethical calculation, and of
a stern and gloomy energy of nature in pursuing my pur-
poses, which fit me for the very fiercest turmoil and conflict
of the business of the world ; and I have a kind of rude
power, generated by habit, in addressing public assemblies ;
that rude power is not eloquence but even if it were elo-
quence, and " though I spake with the tongues of men and
of angels, and have not charity, I am only as a piece of
sounding brass or a tinkling cymbal," and I should be an
outcast traitor to the cause of charity and humanity if I
were this day to make any allusion, either political or pri-
vate, which could congeal those streams of balmy sympa-
thy which, I can perceive with delight, are in dulcet flow
from the fountains of your souls.—(Great cheering.) It
is not at all my intention to enter on this occasion into
any details on the subject of a poor-law for Ireland ; and
this for a twofold cause. In the first place, the resolu-
tion which has been put into my hand by my Reverend
Friend and Pastor, Mr. Adamson, only goes to the recog-
nition of the abstract principle of a poor law, without at all
committing this meeting to any opinion or theory on practi-
cal details ; a subject intervolving in it stupendous dcul-
ties to one so minutely acquainted as I am with the moral
organization of Ireland.—(Hear, hear.) And, secondly,
even if this were my duty, as the mover of the resolution, it
would be quite unnecessrry, after the luminous exposition
of the general subject which was given in the speech with
which John O'Brien, of Elmvale, has opened this meeting ;
and now I come directly to the performance of my duty—
and with respect to the abstract principle of a poor law for
Ireland, founded on the immutable instinct of human nature
that, under all ordinary cases, self-preservation is nature's
primal law ; I say that lam very much disposed to be-
lieve that I have given evidence, written with my own hand,
to the Commissioners of Inquiry into the state of the poor
of Ireland, more powerfnl than any other person whose tes-
timony was taken down, for I have had snore familiar in-
tercourse with the perpetrators of agrarian outrage in
Ireland than any other living man, for I was among the
Terry Alts of Clare, and the Whitefeet in Kilkenny, at
mid-day and at midnight during the times of both insurrec-
tions.—( Hear, hear, and cheers.) The Whitefeet leaders
were some of the most diabolical miscreants who ever
infected the world with their pestiferous existence ; but
I wrate with my own hand for Mr. Spencer and his col-
league—for Mr. Spencer, that most amiable English gentle-
man, whose every sentiment was, and is, a sentiment of bene-
volence towards Ireland, I wrote for them, I say, with my own
hand, that the " outbreak of the Terry Alt insurrection in the
county—an outbreak which originated in destitution and
despair—was the very poor-law of nature, and that the first
Terry Alts were not only justified and sanctified, but that
they would not be justified before earth or before heaven,
unless they had done it." I of course only speak of the out-
break which was the immediate, natural, inevitable, and
sanctified result of their utter destitution, without any shadow
of sympathy on the part of the landlords. I assuredly do
not speak of those frightful and revolting atrocities, the rob-
beries, and cold-blooded murders, and dancing reels in female
costume, and with painted faces, and their guns in their
hands around dying victims, which subsequently disgraced
our country, and froze the blood with horror at the recital.
I knew, and told at the time, that things would inevitably
go on from bad to worse, unless measures were taken for the
relief of the destitute, for the example of the violation of the
law of society by the destitute was followed by those who
were not in destitution ; and that which was justifiable and
sanctified in one case was deeply criminal in the other. By
rebelling against the law of society in Ireland, which afforded
him no succour, the truly destitute human being proved his
allegiance to the paramount law of nature. Was he calmly to
see his wife and children perishing around him with hunger,
and to perish himself; in a country where there not only was
no scarcity, but where there was a profusion and supera-
bundance of food, as fine in quality as any in Europe ? I
recollect I wrote in my evidence, for my friend Mr. Spencer,
and often alluded to it afterwards when I passed evenings
with him at his house in Dublin, the question so powerfully
put, and with such pathetic power, by some of the first Tery
Alts in this county when they could not get as much ground
as even a quarter of an acre to sow potatoes—" Are we to
see our wives and children starving around us ? are we to
look on at this quietly, and to starve ourselves, in the neigh-
bourhood of great tracts of land and districts where bullocks
are splitting with fat, to be exported to England to pay the
rents of absentees, who are utterly regardless of what be-
comes of us, from whom their incomes and luxuries are
derived. Remember again and again, I only speak in
justcation of the outbreak ; for under the auspices of a great
and mighty leader, I have done in my time, by personal ex-
ertion to put down agrarian insubordination, when it became
outrage, and to get up arms, and keep Ireland quite, more
than any other man who was ever born in Ireland. In my
evidence before the Poor-Law Inquiry Commissioners I also
quoted a passage from Crabbe's Poem, " The Hall of Justice,"
which I am of opinion contains in it more of the pure essence
of the universal and eternal principle of a poor-law, than
anything I ever met in the course of my existence. A
gipsy is brought by a beadle before a magistrate in his
" Hall of Justice" (from which the poem takes its name),
with a sick child in her arms—she is charged with having
seized without sanction some food which she gave the child.
The magistrate presiding in his hall of justice, when this
unhappy woman is brought before him, is described by the
reverend poet as being a gentleman of most humane and
benignant spirit and feeling, a man like Mr. Malony, of
Kiltannon, who sits opposite to me, and who, although ve-
hemently opposed to me in political sentiment, I know to
be, as a man and a magistrate, most upright, honourable,
and practically benevolent.—( A burst of applause through
the court which lasted for some minutes.) Well, Mr. High
Sheriff, reverend gentlemen, and gentlemen, the gipsey tells
her story, a story of the humblest life, but of appalling
horror—accursed force and incest, the midnight murder of
I a father by his son in the forest of Blaekburne, a direful
imprecation, and many other circumstances of terror. But
I am not going to give you a poetical recitation of any part
of it beyond that which I wrote for the Poor-law Commis-
sioners, as in my opinion containing the sublimated and con-
centrated essence of the poor-law principle. I said she was
accused of the crime of seizing, without sanction of the
owner, the food which she had given to her child. In an-
guish and bitterness of soul, she ironically and scarcastically
rolls back the term—" crime."
"My crime 1 ! this sickening child to feed,
I seized the food your witness saw ;
I knew your laws forbade the deed,
But yielded to a stronger law.
" Know'st thou not to Nature's great command,
All human laws are frail and weak ?
Nay, frown not—stay his eager hand,
And hear me, or my heart will break ! "
es, Mr. High Sheriff, and other men of Clare, " Nature's
great command" for self preservation, and still more power-
fully for the preservation of those whose existence is de-
pendent on ours, is paramount to all the laws and institu-
tions of artificial society ; and if any human being in the
midst of a social system, whether in the metropolis of an em-
pire, . or a remote part of the country, unable by disease
or infirmity to labour, or being able and willing to work,
without being able to obtain employment to maintain his fa-
mily and himself, be left to starve, he is, I say, bound by no tie
to that
society ; as far forth as he is concerned, he is to that so-
ciety, in a state of nature, as it has given proof that it has no
sympathy with him, and will give him no succour in his
ghastly extremity. I affirm that in this case there arc no
reciprocal rights and duties between them, and that he is
warranted by " Nature's great command," in comparison
with which " all human laws are frail and weak,' in tak-
ing by violence from any one who refuses him succour
in that extremity, what may be necessary for immediate
self-preservation or immediate preservation of those beings
utterly dependent on him, just, this much, but no more.
—(Hear, hear.) Remember, Ido not speak of idlers who
are able and are unwilling to labour. If a man will not work,
being able to do it, why what is he fit for but to starve?
and let him starve and manure the ground with his carrion.
Why should he be supported by the sweat and labour of
others, without his giving to society any reciprocal benefit by
throwing something into the common stock of that society by
his exertions ?—( Hear, hear.) In discussing the subject on
which I have moved the resolution given me by the coin-

try. It is apprehended that a poor-rate may encroach upon
rental ; but whatever part is so applied will produce an
abundant equivalent ; and I know no more appropriate
application of national rental than in protecting the great
body of the people from periodical starvation ; nor let it
be feared that such will supersede the exercise of pri-
vate charity, for let legislation do its best, enough of
human misery will survive to call into action the bene-
volent sympathies of our nature. Look to England, and
notwithstanding the oppressive expenditure of an abused
poor-rate, where has the tide of charity flowed in a nobler
course, where have charitable institutions been more muni-
ficently endowed, and when has human wretchedness in its
infinite varieties been more abundantly provided for ? It is a
mistake to suppose that the habitual contemplation of unre-
lieved misery is promotive of the humaner tendencies of our
nature ; the contrary is the fact ; we feel that the mass of suf-
ferings transcends all our exertions to remove, we are dis-
heartened by the incomparative inutility of our efforts, we
abandon ourselves to a criminal but natural indifference,
and those feelings which were at first harrassed becomes
ultimately the too familiar spectacle of human wretchedness.
The immediate object of the meeting is to provide for a
numerous portion of the distressed who are entirely de-
pendent upon public aid for support. The poor of our
county town are swollen by an influx from the country,
who from various causes, whether compulsory or other-
wise, seek relief within its more accessible charities, and
I am persuaded that the landed proprietary of the county
will feel that it becomes their duty equally with more im-
mediate residents of the town to contribute to the alle-
viation of the existing distress. In concluding, allow me
to express my earnest hope that no topic may be intro-
duced tending to alienate the feelings of any class of the
country, for whatever has the effect to disturb our unanimity
will essentially impair the efficacy of our proceedings."
CORNELIUS O'BRIEN, Esq., M.P., in moving the first
resolution, made some general observations as to the objects
of the late Act of Parliament, and stated as his conviction
that it was passed in contemplation of other Acts following,
such as district or baronial fever hospitals, and likely a gene-
ral system of poor-laws. He objected to any thing like a
censure being passed upon the Bill, as it might be supposed
to reflect blame upon the individual who brought it in, than
whom, he felt convinced, there was not a purer or higher-
minded man ever held office, the Hon. Baron O'Loghlen.
So far as the Hon. Baron was concerned, he knew that he
had been opposed in Committee almost upon every clause
of the Bill, and it was as much as he possibly could do to
have it passed. He concluded by moving, " That this
meeting finds with regret that the funds of the House of In-
dustry are exhausted, while poverty, from the inclemency of
the season, the dearness of provisions, and the scarcity of
fuel, is fearfully on the increase."
Mr. KNox observed, in reply to Mr. O'Brien, that there
had been no intention whatever of passing censure upon any
person, and least of all upon Baron O'Loghlen, for he was
not aware that it was the Baron who had brought in the Bill.
ANDREW FINUCANE, Esq., seconded the resolution.
J. MALONY, Esq., moved, " That while the rate of
expenditure for the current year, for the support of the
institution which shelters aged, infirm, and destitute per-
sons from all parts of the county, exceeds 1,5001. per an-
num, the ability of the Grand Jury, by the late Act of
Parliament to meet this expenditure, is limited to 1,0001.
per annum."
Lucius O'BRIEN, Esq., seconded the resolution.
Previous to moving the adoption of the petition, it was
read by Mr. KNOX. The following is a copy :
" To the Right Honourable the Commons of the United
Kingdom in Parliament assembled,
The Petition of the undersigned inhabitants of "the
County of Clare,
" Humbly showeth—That we, the undersigned inhabitants
of the county of Clare, humbly approach your Honourable
House, entreating your attention to the following statement
respecting the county houses of industry and mendicity for the
past year, and of their present situation.
" That for some years past there have been supported, in
both houses, numbers varying from fifty to two hundred per-
sons ; that from the increasing poverty of the people the num-
bers have been increased in the present year to three hundred
and ninety-two, being the utmost that could be accommodated
within its walls, and that this number could be still greatly in-
creased had the building afforded room, or the funds been suffi-
ciently large.
" That the sum necessary to support this number now in the
house, at the present rate of provisions, would amount to
about fifteen hundred pounds per annum, and which sum your
petitioners have no doubt would be cheerfully afforded by the
Grand Jury and rate-payers, had not the 88th section of a Bill
passed in your Honourable House during the last session of
Parliament, called the New Grand Jury Bill, prohibited any
larger sums being granted for the support of such institution
than the sum of one thousand pounds per annum.
" That at the time when public feeling is so unequivocally
expressed in favour of a provision not alone for the aged and
infirm, but for the unemployed, your petitioners deplore the
seeming want of sympathy for public distress which such a
clause evinces, and your petitioners feel called upon to pro-
test against such legislation as takes from the people at large
the power of taxing themselves for the support of their dis-
tressed poor.
" That your petitioners therefore pray your Honourable
House to alter, or altogether repeal, such clause, and give the
people the power of levying, by county cess, such sum as they
may think necessary for the maintenance of their poor. And
your petitioners will ever pray."
JOHN SINGLETON, Esq., proposed the adoption of the
petition. He thought every day showed the necessity more
and more for a system of poor-laws. He considered the
people had now a duty to perform—that of instructing their
Members as to what their opinions were, and it was a sub-
ject which ought to be fully discussed. He understood from
the best authority that the Act would be amended early
next session, particularly in relation to the medical chari-
ties, and that the Chancellor of the Exchequer was most
anxious it should be done.
PIERSE CARRICK, Esq., seconded the resolution, and
pledged himself to use his best exertions to alleviate the
public distress.
Upon the resolution to apply for subscriptions to the
landed and monied interest in favour of the poor,
JOHN MACNAMARA, Esq., said he readily moved the re-

mittee, it is, in my opinion, of paramount necessity that the
term property should be most distinctly defined ; and in
my opinion that which is the private " property" of any in-
dividual in society, is only the residue which remains after
all those outgoings are paid from it which place it under
the general protection of the society in which that indivi-
dual has his existence, and it cannot by possibility be, in
my opinion, under the general protection of the society if
there be a numerous body of individuals existing in it, but
virtually not members of it ; viz., being unbound by any
social compact, as being left to perish for want without
sympathy of those who are its members. Those mem-
bers, therefore, by refusing sympathy to those individuals
in their extremity, place their society in the, state of na-
ture to those individuals, and consequentlirry, inevitable
reciprocation, those individuals in a state:of nature to them,
and the next step, resulting by inevitable moral neces-
sity, will be that the state of nature will change itself
into a state of warfare, of justifiable, sanctified war-
fare. I give utterance to these sentiments after years
of deliberation. There are persons who think, in con-
sequence of the fervour of my delivery in public
speaking when I speak on heart-stirring subjects, that I
speak under the influence of sudden impulses. I never act
or speak under sudden impulses when I find that the sub-
ject is one which requires calm deliberation. A pretty fool
I should be, with my desperate knowledge of human life
and human nature, in so many varieties, if I could be that
contemptible, intellectual whirligig, eulogised by the maudlin
writers of bad novels as " a creature of impulse."—
(Cheers.) And now, Mr. High Sheriff, my Reverend
Friends of both creeds, and my lay friends and brethren,
Protestant and Catholic, I am quite sure that you will ac-
knowledge that the subject of poor laws for Ireland cannot
by possibility be alluded to as a matter of practical cha-
rity, by any practical person such as I am, without making
allusion to the opinions of a certain great and mighty man,
whom, however, I forbear to name, but who exercises a
stupendous influence in the affairs of the empire, and par-
ticularly of Ireland, and whose opinions on this momentous
subject must be allowed by his political foes, as well as his
political friends, to carry with them a stupendous weight of
importance.—[The High Sheriff here called " Order !" and
Mr. Steele proceeded as follows :]—Mr. High Sheriff, I bea-
of you to call most distinctly to your recollection that at the
very commencement of the observations with which I have
been endeavouring to support the resolution I have moved,
I highly eulogised your most wise admonition, that no
subject should be introduced or alluded to, either poli-
tical or personal, which could tend to the production
of discord or disorder of any kind in this meeting for cha-
rity. My very first coming forward in public life, as will be
remembered by many who hear me now, was on an occa-
sion like the present, at a time of public distress in this my
native county, and I would sooner fling myself upon that
witness' table, and allow my limbs to be hewn one by one
from my body with a hatchet, than be guilty of a moral
crime so portentous, so heinous, and so accursed, as on the
present occasion to introduce allusion to that mighty man
in any manner whatever, except as connected with the
cause of holy charity. And, Sir, there are two kinds of
charity recognised and inculcated in the sanctified code of
Christianity ; first, the charity which consists in acts'of bene-
ficence by sharing one's property, or one's labour, if he have
not property, with the desolate and forlorn—the charity
which consists in allaying the agonies and drying up the
bloody' sweat of a breaking heart—the charity which con-
sists in giving benign counsel to our fellow.being to prevent
him from going wrong, and a thousand other modifications
which I could enumerate of its divine nature and essence.
• But, Sir, there is another kind of charity inculcated, not
• only by the law of nature, but by the code of our religion,
whether we be Protestants, Catholics, or other Dissenters
from the Church of England ; and it is that ethereal
meaning of the term charity, that sentiment of our moral
• nature,

" Bright effluence of bright essence increate,"
emanating directly from the Holy of Holies, the Spirit of
God, the Holy Ghost, which whispers in the voice of sera•
phim to our souls to take care that the character of a fel•
low-being shall not unjustly suffer.—(Cheering.)

The HIGH SHERIFF, in terms of the most refined con!,
esy, here assured Mr. Steele, that so far was he from al•
aiding to him, or anything he had said, when he called or•

der, that he called order for the express purpose of getting
him heard more distinctly.
Mr. STEELE expressed his obligation to Mr. O'Brien, and
proceeded—That great and mighty personage to whom I
have alluded has views on the subject different from mine.
He has been thoughtlessly assailed by the thoughtless ; ig-
norantly by those who wallow in the enjoyment of their ig-
norance, and will not learn ; basely by the base ; and noi-
somely by noisomely renegades from his own party, as one
who, for sinister and selfish purposes, was opposed to a

.•
poor-law for Ireland. Now, Sir, although I do, and always
did, acknowledge the stupendous power of his arguments

against the possibility of a poor-law working practically in
Ireland, according to the intention of those who are eager

For its introduction, those arguments have not brought con.

viction to my mind. But the matter of conviction is one
thing, the matter of moral charity is another ; and I here
lift up my voice, and give testimony before earth and before
heaven, that nothing in nature can be more benign, or, in
my opinion, more in unison with the spirit of a man who
aspires to be the father of his country, than the sympathy of
that mighty personage for the afflicted poor of Ireland, to
whom, without talking of politics, but only talking of
charity, I have obtained your permission to allude. Men of
Clare ! political foe-men as well as political friends, I know
you will agree with me that, above all other living human
beings, I am bound by sanctified duty to do moral justice to
him to whom I have alluded, on a subject connected with

charity, on which his character has been unjustly assailed,
and for this reason, because although there was a miscon-

ception between us, that misconception was voluntarily re-
moved by him in London, and as if to make his mode of
doing it the more nobly gratifying to my feelings, made
through my friend and benefactor Cornelius O'Brien.
What the cause of the misconception between us was is a
matter of no public interest, and one in which no created
being except myself has, or ever had, the shadow of any
interest ; but be it what it may, I tell you, men of Clare,
that when he is unjustly assailed, I, above all other living
men, am bound to stand up to give the testimony of justice ;
for he removed the misunderstanding which had arisen be-
tween us in a manner worthy even of the cause of it, for he
did it in the gorgeous spirit of the Newton of political
science, of the man transcendently in moral power and in-
fluence the foremost man of the world.—(Applause.) As I
want to evolve and stabilitate a principle of practical charity
from a comparison between two incidents which I am about to
allude to, I rejoice to observe that there are so many of my
friends of the medical profession from many parts of our
country present on this occasion, as they, above all others,
are the most capable of confirming it ; if I am right in the
position with regard to human woe which I am about to
lay down, and with respect to the general sympathies and
feelings of human nature. The first fact which I state with
respect to the position which I will presently explain is the
following :—When cholera revelled in Limerick in its most
appalling character, the hospital of St. Mary's parish in the
school-room of the Nuns of St. Clare, among the ruins and
gardens of an antique gothic abbey, presented a scene of
ghastly horror and agony. On a particular day of which
I speak, there might have been in the lone school-room of
the nuns about sixty patients suffering under the disease
in all the complication of its awful forms—incipient collapse,
consecutive fever, some in progress of recovery, some dying ;
some were blue, and were, with eyes encircled with black
and distorted by tortures, writhing in direful cramps, spasms,
and convulsions, and groaning and shrieking, the protracted
Ah ! oh ! the baleful cry of the riving agony of cholera.
Others were blue living corpses, not actually without vi-
tality, but virtually dead, utterly beyond the possibility,
except by miracle, of recovery. Daughters, exhausted by
fatigue and watching, were sleeping on the beds of their
mothers ; mothers, exhausted in the same manner, were
sleeping on the beds of their children. A Catholic clergy-
man with a candle lighted near him was administering the
rites of religion to a patient to prepare him for eternity—
a young woman was in another part of the room hang-
ing over a patient, most probably her father, with a
prayer-book in her hands, which she read to him while he
held a crucifix before his deep-sunken eyes. A poor inno-
cent little being, almost an infant, blue with cholera, and
who astounded us all by the tenacity with which, for many
days, it clung to life, was convulsed in spasms, at the end
of the room on a little bed on the floor. The gloomy room
under this was also filled up as an hospital ; and there
were many dead in the dead-house, and one of the
bodies had been just given to the friends. As they bore it
from under the porch of the convent, recollecting nothing
but their own feelings, the wild and. piercing wail of the
Irish funeral cry, bursting suddenly from their souls under
the windows of the hospital which I have attempted to de-
scribe. For one moment the cries and groans of agony
were stilled—stilled by the effect of the well-known
death cry ; and then, on the other hand, just as if the trum-
pet of the Archangel were sounding in the day of the
wrath of God, and of his judgment, the blue living corses
made a feeble and shuddering movement. All this was of
course but an evanishing incident ; it endured but for a mo-
ment and pessed away for ever. But it was a moment never
to be forgotten for deep and appalling solemnity ; often have
I spoken of it to a deeply-lamented fris, a native of
this country, a young physician of r*t amiable feel-
ings, and high promise in his profession, who was in at-
tendance in the hospital at the appalling moment, doing
everything that a benignant nature could devise for the al-
leviation of the disease to which he soon after, alas ! him-
self became a victim in his attendance at the hospital of
this, his native town. Is the scene I have described an
affecting one ? Show nie the man who could look unmoved
upon such a scene, and I would as soon bold communion
with Burke or Hare, if they were to arise from the dead,
or with a fiend out of hell, as with the horrific villain,—