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Updated: June 1, 2025
My reading has been lamentably desultory and immethodical. Odd, out of the way, old English plays, and treatises, have supplied me with most of my notions, and ways of feeling. In every thing that relates to science, I am a whole Encyclopædia behind the rest of the world. I should have scarcely cut a figure among the franklins, or country gentlemen, in king John's days. I know less geography than a school-boy of six weeks' standing. To me a map of old Ortelius is as authentic as Arrowsmith. I do not know whereabout Africa merges into Asia; whether Ethiopia lie in one or other of those great divisions; nor can form the remotest conjecture of the position of New South Wales, or Van Diemen's Land. Yet do I hold a correspondence with a very dear friend in the first-named of these two Terræ Incognitæ. I have no astronomy. I do not know where to look for the Bear, or Charles's Wain; the place of any star; or the name of any of them at sight. I guess at Venus only by her brightness and if the sun on some portentous morn were to make his first appearance in the West, I verily believe, that, while all the world were gasping in apprehension about me, I alone should stand unterrified, from sheer incuriosity and want of observation. Of history and chronology I possess some vague points, such as one cannot help picking up in the course of miscellaneous study; but I never deliberately sat down to a chronicle, even of my own country. I have most dim apprehensions of the four great monarchies; and sometimes the Assyrian, sometimes the Persian, floats as first in my fancy. I make the widest conjectures concerning Egypt, and her shepherd kings. My friend M., with great painstaking, got me to think I understood the first proposition in Euclid, but gave me over in despair at the second. I am entirely unacquainted with the modern languages; and, like a better man than myself, have "small Latin and less Greek." I am a stranger to the shapes and texture of the commonest trees, herbs, flowers not from the circumstance of my being town-born for I should have brought the same inobservant spirit into the world with me, had I first seen it in "on Devon's leafy shores," and am no less at a loss among purely town-objects, tools, engines, mechanic processes. Not that I affect ignorance but my head has not many mansions, nor spacious; and I have been obliged to fill it with such cabinet curiosities as it can hold without aching. I sometimes wonder, how I have passed my probation with so little discredit in the world, as I have done, upon so meagre a stock. But the fact is, a man may do very well with a very little knowledge, and scarce be found out, in mixed company; every body is so much more ready to produce his own, than to call for a display of your acquisitions. But in a tête-
The old red stage stopped at Enos Devon's door, and his niece crossed the threshold after a cool handshake with the master of the house, and a close embrace with the mistress, who stood pouring out last words with spectacles too dim for seeing. Fat Ben swung up the trunk, slammed the door, mounted his perch, and the ancient vehicle swayed with premonitory symptoms of departure.
Yesterday morning I rode from this town up the meandering Devon's banks, to pay my respects to some Ayrshire folks at Harvieston. After breakfast, we made a party to go and see the famous Caudron-linn, a remarkable cascade in the Devon, about five miles above Harvieston; and after spending one of the most pleasant days I ever had in my life, I returned to Stirling in the evening.
He goes on to prove the fact, alas! too easily proved; he goes to Lord Devon's Commission, and tells us from it, that it is no exaggeration to say, that the people of Ireland are the worst housed, the worst clothed, and the worst fed of any people in Europe.
That the Irish consider the constant use of "bread and meat" as an infliction, is proved by a rather ludicrous account given of their feelings on this head in his evidence before Lord Devon's Committee, by Mr Thomas Glennon, No. 418, part second.
Hence arises the difficulty of ascertaining the true state of things in Ireland hence the signal failures of the different commissions which have from time to time been appointed by the government of the day, when the truthfulness of their reports came to be tested by the working of the legislative measures founded upon them "hence it comes, that out of 2,800,000 Irish persons reported to be in a state of utter destitution by the Poor-law Commissioners, not more than 68,000 could in any one year, since the establishment of the Poor-law, be induced to accept the relief which Parliament provided for them;" and for this reason it is, that the condition of the most idle and indolent people in Europe is compassionated, as if it resulted from the misconduct of others rather than their own; and that "the patient endurance" of the most turbulent and bloodstained peasantry on earth is pronounced, in Lord Devon's report, "as deserving of the highest commendation, and as entitling them to the best attention of the government."
'Tis not price, nor outward fairness, Gives the victor's palm its rareness; Simplest tokens can impart Noble throb to noble heart: Graecia, prize thy parsley crown, Boast thy laurel, Caesar's town; Moorland myrtle still shall be Badge of Devon's Chivalry!"
His grimy little ears were ceaselessly open to the talk of the town, and for weeks past the town had talked of nothing but the Devons and Barbara Devon's approaching wedding. Even now the townspeople were still talking of the Devons, during the brief interval before the bridal party appeared. In the pew just in front of Jimmy, Mrs.
A farmer named William Quirke offered £590, which was accepted, and the money paid. After this, the two cousins came forward and said they would purchase the tenant-right, offering £40 more than Quirke had paid. This was on the 13th of the present month of April. On the 14th, Mr. James Cooke, Lord Devon's bailiff, was seen showing the purchaser Quirke over the newly-acquired holding.
Upon the shaggy fastnesses of Devon's central waste, within the bounds, metes, and precincts of Dartmoor Forest, there shone a whole constellation of little suns, and a wanderer in air might have counted a hundred without difficulty, whilst, for the beholders perched upon Yes Tor, High Wilhays, or the bosom of Cosdon during the fairness and clearness of that memorable night, fully threescore beacons flamed.
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