was not a pastime, but a business; and a
business shared by the ladies. On rainy days it was customary to lay the
card-tables at ten o'clock in the morning, and on all days the work
began immediately after the four-o'clock dinner. Of all field-sports
hunting was the favorite; and, of course, horses and hounds helped to
run away with estates as well as cards and claret. Great pomp, however,
of a certain semi-barbaric kind was the crowning extravagance. Everybody
drove four horses,--the loftier grandees invariably six,--with due
accompaniment of outriders and running footmen. Dresses, jewels, and
lace were of course in keeping with the equipage, albeit the furniture
of the finest houses was what we should deem a strange mixture of
magnificence and bareness,--beautiful pictures on the walls, and no
curtains to the windows,--tapestry _fauteuils_, and a small square of
carpet in the midst of a Sahara of plain deal floor. But the kitchen was
the true scene of that Wilful Waste which assuredly brought Woful Want
often enough in its train. Every gentleman's house served as a sort of
free tavern for tenants, servants, laborers, and the relatives, friends,
and acquaintances of tenants, servants, and laborers without end. Up
stairs there was endless dinner-giving and claret-drinking; down stairs
there was breakfasting, dining, and supping,--only substituting beef for
venison and whiskey for claret. One famous countess, coming into an
estate of twenty thousand a year, with a reserve of one hundred thousand
pounds, spent the whole, and left a debt of another hundred thousand,
after Garter-King-at-Arms had been summoned from England to see her in
state to her mausoleum as a descendant of the Plantagenets. An earl in
the North, of no great wealth, was carried to his grave by a procession
of five thousand people, all of whom were entertained, and three
thousand clothed in mourning, for the occasion. But there is no need to
go further into such traditions.

Were _these_, then, the people who earned the hoarded hate of the
Fenian? Was it this coarse and stupid extravagance, contrasted with the
abject penury of the peasantry, (far greater then than now,) which has
left such indelible, bitter memories? Very far indeed is this from being
the case. That age of lavish waste is looked back upon universally in
Ireland as one of those "former times" which are to be forever
contrasted with the present,--an age of gold compared to an age of iron.