table observation, even this rudimentary stage, secmed 18%.
to embrace all smaller matters as well as great. Though Zr. 21.
he was little more than one and twenty, he had already a
sense for those great facts of society which are so much more
important than landscape and the picturesque, whether in
books or travels, yet for which the eye and thought of
adolescence are usually trained to be so dull. On his first
journey in Ireland (September, 1825), he notices how immediately
 after the traveller leaves Dublin “yon are reminded
by the miserable tenements in the roadside that you are in
the land of poverty, ignorance, and misrule. Although my
route afforded a favourable specimen of the Irish peasantry,
it was a sight truly heartrending. There appears to be no
middle class in Ireland : there are the rich, and those who
are objects of wretchedness and almost starvation. We
passed through some collections of huts called towns, where
I observed the pig taking his food in the same room with
the family, and where I am told he is always allowed to
sleep. Shoes and stockings are luxuries that neither men
nor women often aspire to. Their cabins are made of mud
or sometimes stone. I observed many without any glass,
and they rarely contain more than one room, which answers
the purpose of sitting-room and sleeping-room for themselves
and their pig.”
Even in Dublin itself he saw what made an impression
upon him, which ten years later he tried to convey to the
readers of his first pamphlet. * The river Liffey intersects
the city, and ships of 200 tons may anchor nearly in the
heart of Dublin; but it is here the stranger is alone disappointed
 ; the small number of shipping betrays their limited
commerce. It is melancholy to see their spacious streets
(into some of which the whole tide of Cheapside might
with ease move to and fro), with scarcely a vehicle through
their whole extent. Whilst there is so little circulation ip