inhabitableness of the houses and the neglect of the
streets, surpass all description. Some idea of the manner in which the
poor are here crowded together may be formed from the fact that, in 1817,
according to the report of the Inspector of Workhouses, {33} 1,318
persons lived in 52 houses with 390 rooms in Barral Street, and 1,997
persons in 71 houses with 393 rooms in and near Church Street; that:

"In this and the adjoining district there exists a multitude of foul
courts and alleys; many cellars receive all their light through the
door, while in not a few the inhabitants sleep upon the bare floor,
though most of them possess bedsteads at least; Nicholson's Court, for
example, contains twenty-eight wretched little rooms with 151 human
beings in the greatest want, there being but two bedsteads and two
blankets to be found in the whole court."

The poverty is so great in Dublin, that a single benevolent institution,
the Mendicity Association, gives relief to 2,500 persons or one per cent.
of the population daily, receiving and feeding them for the day and
dismissing them at night.

Dr. Alison describes a similar state of things in Edinburgh, whose superb
situation, which has won it the title of the Modern Athens, and whose
brilliant aristocratic quarter in the New Town, contrast strongly with
the foul wretchedness of the poor in the Old Town. Alison asserts that
this extensive quarter is as filthy and horrible as the worst district of
Dublin, while the Mendicity Association would have as great a proportion
of needy persons to assist in Edinburgh as in the Irish capital. He
asserts, indeed, that the poor in Scotland, especially in Edinburgh and
Glasgow, are worse off than in any other region of the three kingdoms,
and that the poorest are not Irish, but Scotch. The preacher of the Old
Church of Edinburgh, Dr. Lee, testified in 1836, before the Commission of
Religious Instruction, that:

"He had never before seen such misery as in his parish, where the
people were without furniture, without everything, two married couples
often sharing one room. In a single day he had visited seven houses
in which there was not a bed, in some of them not even a heap of
straw. Old people of eighty years sleep on the board floor, nearly
all slept in their day-clothes. In one cellar room he found two
families from a Scotch country district; soon after their removal to
the city two of t