urn. All this
was seven good weeks ago: I hoped somewhere in my Irish
wayfarings to fling you off a Letter; but alas, I reckoned there
quite without my host (strict "host," called _Time_), finding
nowhere half a minute left to me; and so now, having got home to
my Mother, not to see my Wife yet for some days, it is my
_earliest_ leisure, after all, that I employ in this purpose. I
have been terribly knocked about too,--jolted in Irish cars,
bothered almost to madness with Irish balderdash, above all kept
on dreadfully short allowance of sleep;--so that now first, when
fairly down to rest, all aches and bruises begin to be fairly
sensible; and my clearest feeling at this present is the
uncomfortable one, "that I am not Caliban, but a Cramp":
terribly cramped indeed, if I could tell you everything!

What the other results of this Irish Tour are to be for me I
cannot in the least specify. For one thing, I seem to be farther
from _speech_ on any subject than ever: such masses of chaotic
ruin everywhere fronted me, the general fruit of long-continued
universal falsity and folly; and such mountains of delusion yet
possessing all hearts and tongues I could do little that was not
even _noxious,_ except _admire_ in silence the general
"Bankruptcy of Imposture" as one there finds and sees it come to
pass, and think with infinite sorrow of the tribulations, futile
wrestlings, tumults, and disasters which yet await that
unfortunate section of Adam's Posterity before any real
improvement can take place among them. Alas, alas! The Gospels
of Political Economy, of _Laissez-faire,_ No-Government, Paradise
to all comers, and so many fatal Gospels,--generally, one may
say, all the Gospels of this blessed "New Era,"--will first have
to be tried, and found wanting. With a quantity of written and
uttered nonsense, and of suffered and inflicted misery, which one
sinks fairly dumb to estimate! A kind of comfort it is, however,
to see that "Imposture" _has_ fallen openly "bankrupt," here as
everywhere else in our old world; that no dexterity of human
tinkering, with all the Parliamentary Eloquence and Elective
Franchises in nature, will ever set it on its feet again, to go
many yards more; but that _its_ goings and currencies in this
Earth have as good as ceased for ever and ever! God is great;
all Lies do now, as from the first, travel incessantly towards
Chaos, and there at length lodge! In some parts of Ireland (the
Wes