did not lessen by
taking three hundred into the house, and all of them recommended under
the minister's and churchwardens' hands of the several parishes": and
this complaint must still continue, although the poor-house should be
enlarged to contain three thousand, or even double that number.

The revenues of the poor-house, as it is now established, amount to
about two thousand pounds a-year; whereof two hundred allowed for
officers, and one hundred for repairs, the remaining seventeen hundred,
at four pounds a-head, will support four hundred and twenty-five
persons. This is a favourable allowance, considering that I subtract
nothing for the diet of those officers, and for wear and tear of
furniture; and if every one of these collegiates should be set to work,
it is agreed they will not be able to gain by their labour above
one-fourth part of their maintenance.

At the same time, the oratorial part of these gentlemen seldom vouchsafe
to mention fewer than fifteen hundred or two thousand people, to be
maintained in this hospital, without troubling their heads about the
fund. * * * *

ON BARBAROUS DENOMINATIONS

IN IRELAND.

SIR,

I have been lately looking over the advertisements in some of your
Dublin newspapers, which are sent me to the country, and was much
entertained with a large list of denominations of lands, to be sold or
let. I am confident they must be genuine; for it is impossible that
either chance or modern invention could sort the alphabet in such a
manner as to make those abominable sounds; whether first invented to
invoke or fright away the devil, I must leave among the curious.

If I could wonder at anything barbarous, ridiculous, or absurd, among
us, this should be one of the first. I have often lamented that
Agricola, the father-in-law of Tacitus, was not prevailed on by that
petty king from Ireland, who followed his camp, to come over and
civilize us with a conquest, as his countrymen did Britain, where
several Roman appellations remain to this day, and so would the rest
have done, if that inundation of Angles, Saxons, and other northern
people, had not changed them so much for the worse, although in no
comparison with ours. In one of the advertisements just mentioned, I
encountered near a hundred words together, which I defy any creature in
human shape, except an Irishman of the savage kind, to pronounce;
neither would I undertake such a task, to be owner of the lands, unless
I had