has too
much merit to be forgotten. Pleased to enjoyment with a joke, or witty
repartee, they will repeat it with such expression, that the laugh will
be universal. Warm friends and revengeful enemies; they are inviolable
in their secrecy, and inevitable in their resentment; with such a notion
of honour, that neither threat nor reward would induce them to betray the
secret or person of a man, though an oppressor, whose property they would
plunder without ceremony. Hard drinkers and quarrelsome; great liars,
but civil, submissive, and obedient. Dancing is so universal among them,
that there are everywhere itinerant dancing-masters, to whom the cottars
pay sixpence a quarter for teaching their families. Besides the Irish
jig, which they can dance with a most luxuriant expression, minuets and
country-dances are taught; and I even heard some talk of cotillions
coming in.

Some degree of education is also general, hedge schools, as they are
called, (they might as well be termed ditch ones, for I have seen many a
ditch full of scholars,) are everywhere to be met with where reading and
writing are taught; schools are also common for men; I have seen a dozen
great fellows at school, and was told they were educating with an
intention of being priests. Many strokes in their character are
evidently to be ascribed to the extreme oppression under which they live.
If they are as great thieves and liars as they are reported, it is
certainly owing to this cause.

If from the lowest class we rise to the highest, all there is gaiety,
pleasure, luxury, and extravagance; the town life at Dublin is formed on
the model of that of London. Every night in the winter there is a ball
or a party, where the polite circle meet, not to enjoy but to sweat each
other; a great crowd crammed into twenty feet square gives a zest to the
_agrements_ of small talk and whist. There are four or five houses large
enough to receive a company commodiously, but the rest are so small as to
make parties detestable. There is however an agreeable society in
Dublin, in which a man of large fortune will not find his time heavy.
The style of living may be guessed from the fortunes of the resident
nobility and great commoners; there are about thirty that possess incomes
from seven to twenty thousand pounds a year. The court has nothing
remarkable or splendid in it, but varies very much, according to the
private fortune or liberality of disposition in the lord l