which is still preserved, exhibits a very respectable level of culture and intelligence. School and university education among the Irish Protestants in the first half of the eighteenth century appears to have been fully equal to what then existed in England; and the great prevalence of social habits did something to soften the tone both of manners and of feeling. But on the whole, and in the most important respects, the country gentry in Ireland were greatly inferior to the corresponding class in England. They inherited traditions of violence, extravagance, and bigotry. Their relations to their tenants were peculiarly demoralising. Their circumstances were eminently fitted to foster among them the vices of tyranny; and an oligarchy, disposing almost absolutely of county revenues and of political power in a country where nearly all political and professional promotion was given by favour, and where all government was tainted by monopoly, soon learnt to sacrifice habitually public to private interest. Spendthrift and drunken country gentlemen, corrupt politicians, and jobbing officials were, indeed, abundantly common in England in the first half of the eighteenth century, but in Ireland the tone of dissipation was more exaggerated, and the level of public spirit was more depressed. There was little genuine patriotism, and political profligacy was sometimes strangely audacious. The shameful jest of the politician who thanked God that he had a country to sell is said to be of Irish origin, and it reflected only too faithfully the prevailing spirit of a large section of the gentry.

These vices were more or less diffused through the whole class, but they attained their extreme development in the small landlords, and especially in the middlemen. At a time when in England economical causes were steadily weeding out the poorer and less cultivated members of the squirearchy, and replacing

them by large landlords, the tendency in Ireland was precisely opposite. Absenteeism drew away a great part of the richer landlords, while the middlemen rapidly multiplied. A hybrid and ambiguous class, 'without any of the solid qualities of the English yeomen, they combined the education and manners of farmers with the pretensions of gentlemen, and they endeavoured to support those pretensions by idleness, extravagance, and ostentatious arrogance. Men who in England would have been modest and laborious farmers, in Ireland sublet their land at rack-rents, kept miserable packs of half-starved hounds, wandered about from fair to fair and from race to race in laced coats, gambling, fighting, drinking, swearing, ravishing, and sporting, parading everywhere their contempt for honest labour, giving a tone of recklessness to every society in which they moved.1 An industrial middle class, which is the most

1 The following very graphic description of the middlemen is given in an Irish periodical which appeared in 1729: This motley generation of half landlords, half tenants, fills the country with a sort of idle half gentry, half commonalty, who abound at all races, cock-fights, and country fairs, and are the very pest and bane of the nation. They are in constant emulation with our gentry to keep up a rank and character to which they are in no way entitled, and for that purpose are perpetually running to the most expensive and extravagant methods of living. . . . These vicelandlords are the great inlet and support, both by their practice and example, to our luxury and idleness, and the cause of many if not most of the grievances under which the kingdom labours.'—

The Tribune, p. 140. 'I must now come to another class,' wrote Arthur Young, nearly half a century later, 'to whose conduct it is almost entirely owing that the character of the nation has not that lustre abroad which I dare assert it will soon very generally merit. This is the class of little country gentlemen, tenants who drink their claret by means of profit rents, jobbers in farms, bucks, your fellows with round hats edged with gold, who hunt in the day, get drunk in the evening, and fight the next morning... these are the men among whom drinking, wrangling, quarrelling, fighting, ravishing, &c., are found as in their native soil, once to a degree that made them the pest of society.' He adds, however, that from the intelligence I have received even this class are

essential of all the elements of English life, was almost wholly wanting; and the class of middlemen and squireens, who most nearly corresponded to it, were utterly destitute of industrial virtues, and concentrated in themselves most of the distinctive vices of the Irish character. They were the chief agents in agrarian tyranny, and their pernicious influence on manners, in a country where the prohibition of manufactures had expatriated the most industrious classes and artificially checked the formation of industrial habits, can hardly be overrated. They probably did more than any other class to sustain that race of extravagance which ran through all ranks above the level of the cottier,1 and that illiberal and semi-barbarous contempt for industrial pursuits, which was one of the greatest obstacles to national progress. False ideals, false standards of excellence, grew up among the people, and they came to look upon idleness and extravagance as noble things, upon parsimony, order, and industry as degrading to a gentleman.

2

These are signs of a society that was profoundly

very different from what they were twenty years ago, and improve so fast that the time will soon come when the national character will not be degraded by any set.'-Tour in Ireland, ii. 241, 242.

All ranks amongst us seem to be of a kind of emulation which of them shall soonest run out of their wits and their fortunes by pressing close upon their superiors in all high and expensive methods of living. One would be tempted to think that Hamlet prophesied of us when he observed that the toe of the peasant comes so near to the heel of the courtier that he galls

his kibe. If we look all the country over, we shall find every station of life driven forward at least two degrees beyond its natural position. Our country gentlemen appear in the equipage of the first quality. Our farmers and graziers are turned gentlemen, and come to fairs in their coaches to buy and sell cattle; and our tradesmen live in as much splendour and drink as large quantities of claret as formerly fell to the share of our richest merchants.'-The Tribune, p. 100.

2 See, on this contempt for trade, Arthur Young, ii. 343.

diseased, and it is not difficult to trace the causes of the malady. It must, however, be added that there was another and a very different side of Irish life. Its contrasts have always been stronger than those of England, and though the elements of corruption extended very far, it would be a grave error to suppose that in the first half of the eighteenth century everything in Ireland was frivolous and corrupt, that there was no genuine intellectual life, no real public spirit moving in the country. Considering how unfavourable were the circumstances of the nation, the number of its eminent men, in the period of which I am writing, was very respectable. During a considerable portion of that period Swift was illuminating Dublin by the rays of his transcendent genius, while Berkeley, who was scarcely inferior to Swift in ability, and incomparably his superior in moral qualities, who was, indeed, one of the finest and most versatile intellects, and one of the purest characters of the eighteenth century, filled the See of Cloyne. Archbishop King is still faintly remembered as a writer by his treatise On the Origin of Evil,' and Browne, who was Provost of Trinity College and afterwards Bishop of Cork, published among other works an elaborate treatise 'On the Limits of Human Understanding,' which had once a considerable reputation and which is remarkable as anticipating the doctrine of a modern school about the generic difference of Divine and human morality and the impossibility of human faculties conceiving either the nature or the attributes of God. Among the other clergy of the Irish Church were Parnell the poet, who was Archdeacon of Clogher, and Skelton, who, though now nearly forgotten,2 took a prominent part in the Deistical

1 See Leslie Stephen's English Thought in the Eighteenth Century, i. 113-117. A similar doctrine appeared in King's Origin

of Evil, and it was powerfully assailed by Berkeley.

2 Wesley was a great admirer of Skelton. He said of him:

controversy, and has also left several valuable tracts on Irish and on miscellaneous subjects. The greatest name among the Irish Nonconformists was Francis Hutcheson. He was of Scotch extraction, and was educated at Glasgow, but he was born in Ireland in 1694, lived there the greater part of his early life, and published there his 'Letters of Hibernicus,' directed against the philosophy of Mandeville, his 'Inquiry into the Original of our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue,' and his Essay on the Conduct of the Passions and Affections.' He kept a school in Dublin, and was warmly befriended by Archbishop King; but in 1729 he was summoned, as Professor of Moral Philosophy, to the University of Glasgow, where he won for himself a place in the history of the human mind that can hardly perish, for he was the founder of that school of Scotch philosophy which was adorned by the great names of Reid, Adam Smith, and Dugald Stewart. Leland, who was one of the most popular writers on the side of orthodoxy in the Deistical controversy, though born in England, lived all his life in Ireland, and was for many years pastor of a Presbyterian Church in Dublin. The View of the Principal Deistical Writers,' by which he is now chiefly remembered, appeared in 1754. and Sir Hans Sloane, though Irish by birth, lived all their lives in England, and neither Sterne, Goldsmith, nor Burke had risen to notoriety by the middle of the century; but Henry Brooke, the author of 'Gustavus Vasa,' and of 'The Fool of Quality,' and the first editor of the Freeman's Journal,' lived and wrote in Dublin. The great wave of the experimental philosophy had passed the Channel. The Dublin Philosophical Society' was founded in 1684 by the illustrious Molyneux, and under the presidency of Sir William Petty, after the model of the Royal Society, with which it placed itself in connec'When there is occasion he shows with ten times his judgment.'— all the wit of Dr. Swift, joined Wesley's Journal, June 1771.

Toland