This state of things was seen, perhaps, at its worst
in the generation when Berkeley and Swift flourished,
but I have no space to describe it at length. It was
mitigated by degrees by time and usage, and by the
influences of the eighteenth century ; yet, as we see
it in the days of Arthur Young and Grattan, it still
presented features of evil aspect which, changed as
they have been in some respects, have never been
even nearly effaced. In five-sixths of the country the
owners of the soil were still Englishry, of the Protes-
tant faith ; the occupiers were Celtic Irishry, and, to a



332 MEMOEIES AND THOUGHTS OF A LIFE

man, Catholic, and these relations were different in a
part of the North only. Absenteeism, too, prevailed
over vast districts, and many estates were let to the
worst kind of landlords, the rack-renting and hard-
fisted middlemen, the squireens of Miss Edgeworth's
novels. In this condition of affairs there was much
exaction and wrong. We read of evictions on a great
scale, and occasionally of exorbitant rents, and there
were frequent outbreaks of agrarian crime, remorse-
lessly suppressed by the Irish Parliament, which had
no scruples whatever to abuse " coercion." Yet, if
there was much in the land system to regret, the
principal Irish landed gentry indisputably, as a general
rule, were kindly superiors to the class dependent on
them. They had many vices and grave faults, but
generally they were not oppressive landlords. Divided
as they were ftom the peasantry they ruled, they felt
secure in the ascendency they enjoyed ; and if they
were a dominant caste, they were good-hearted mas-
ters, and were looked up to with much reverence and
respect. The wounds of the past had, in a word,
been healed to a considerable extent in landed rela-
tions, and the land system of Ireland might have
become less disliked' and unpopular than it has since
been but for a train of events that followed.
