The unhappy inconveniences of sea travel prevent most folk from visiting County Cork under the best conditions. Access should be by boat: and surely the entrance into that wonderful Cove where the great liners halt to take off mails is noblest of all gateways into Ireland. All the encircling ring of hills is rich with vegetation, but above all on the east by Queenstown is the choicest and most varied wooding. Anything will grow there and nearly everything has been made to grow. The little town itself is picturesque, climbing the steep slope and dominated by Pugin's great cathedral, which stands on the disembarkation quay, making a centre for the last impressions and emotions of those—alas! how many thousands yearly—who leave Ireland.

It is not now as I saw it in the early 'eighties, when hopeless, broken, half-famished peasants were pouring out in a ghastly torrent, mere wreckage on the flood: emigration was then eighty thousand a year, to-day it is less than half that number. Those who go to-day, go reasonably equipped, go for the most part to friends in cities, of which they have heard so much, where they have so many kindred and acquaintances, that the journey seems hardly into exile—hardly to a strange land. Yet, even to-day, every train that brings the emigrants leaves behind it, through the West and South and Midlands, its wake of bitter weeping; at station after station it has gone out amid tearing away of locked hands, last embraces severed, faces of old men twitching, faces of women convulsed with sobs, and sped on its journey to the accompaniment of that dreadful heartrending "keene", the Irish wail, which is heard nowadays more often at the ship's side, or on the railway platform, than at the grave. "Och, the poor soft Irish," I heard a woman say this year, leaving some platform in Cork; on her way, evidently, to a home in the States, where she had lived, no doubt for many years, with the hard-faced, swaggering Yankee, who accompanied her, and who looked with ill-concealed contempt on the tears and emotions of the "poor soft Irish"; but she at least still kept the homely tongue and kind heart.

From Queenstown up to Cork is one of the loveliest waterways in the world, little towns on either bank under the steep wooded shores, and here and there some old castle. Cork itself may have no very great architectural beauties, but the whole lie of the city, spread between its hills, divided by the various streams of that delightful river, makes a beauty of its own: you see it best from the high ground over against the famous steeple where hang "the bells of Shandon that sound so grand on the pleasant waters of the river Lee".

"Pleasant" is the word for Cork, the county, and its soft-voiced, quick-speaking people, with the odd little turn upwards at the end of their sentence. It was called "the Athens of Ireland", though I would say rather, the Naples: in any case, Cork has always sent out far more than its share of brains. In the days of "Father Prout", who wrote the "Bells of Shandon" and other immortal ditties, Cork had a regular coterie of wits—among the best known being a Dowden, father or grandfather of the illustrious man of letters who is to-day one of the chief lights in Trinity College. The late Provost, Dr. Salmon, a still greater luminary, came also from the southern county—as did half a dozen more of the Fellows whose names are familiar enough to all in Ireland; though some, perhaps, enriched legend and chronicle rather than history, and survive as remembered oddities—after all, not the least loveable of survivals.

The south coast of Cork, from Youghal to the Kenmare River, is the pick of Ireland for yachtsmen. Endless is the succession, from Cork itself with all its lesser creeks and havens, Carrigalo, Carrigaline, and Ringabella, on past Kinsale harbour, Courtmacsherry and Clonakilty bays, Roscarbery, Glandore, and west to Baltimore and Roaring Water, off which lies Cape Clear. Then past Mizen Head, on the west shore, are greater bays, harbours not for yachts, but for navies—Dunmanus, Bantry, and the Kenmare River, whose northern shore belongs to Kerry, but which has a frontier certainly in paradise.

I write of what I have seen, in the Kenmare River: all these southern harbourages are to me only names on the map, save for the quaint little bay of Roscarbery and the long winding creek of Baltimore—both of which I know only as winter shows them, and shows them from the land. Yet of the people of Roscarbery I form at least some picture from the sketches drawn by the two ladies who relate the varied Experiences of an Irish R.M.—though West Cork needs to be supplemented by knowledge of Connemara, to realize the scenes that they have in mind. And from Baltimore, or rather from a mile outside it, I carry away a picture of a congregation dividing after mass into two rival political assemblies, and the one that I addressed consisted largely of women wearing the great black cloak, with black hood giving an odd framework to the wearer's face, which is one of the few and cherished relics of traditional costume. I was told on good authority (when I lamented myself) that if I had the women I had the votes, for West Cork was in all matters under female governance. But of that I cannot testify.

Baltimore is one of the great fishing stations of Ireland, and to it the population of Cape Clear comes for most necessaries of life. Along that coast many craft are familiar, but an odd name hangs about one set: the fishermen from near Dungarvan are always known as "the Turks". In 1631 Algerine pirates made a descent on the town of Baltimore, sacked it and carried a hundred of its folk into slavery: and it was a fisherman from Dungarvan who (under threat of death) piloted the corsairs.

All this shore had fine natural advantages for smuggling which in old days were not neglected: and still, I am told, certain places could be named where cigars and wines of excellent quality can be had at surprisingly moderate price.

Kinsale is a greater haven, fit in old days to be the rival of Cork; and the town there speaks of prosperous merchant folk, with its quaint weather-slated houses, each having the little bow-window which eighteenth-century mariners would seem to have specially affected, and its very old-world bowling green.

Here was the theatre on which Ireland saw a great game played out—the last and losing throw in the war of O'Neill and O'Donnell against the forces of Elizabeth. At the long last, the promised help from the Continent had come; a Spanish fleet under Don Juan d'Aquila entered the harbour, seized and held the town, which was beleaguered by the English (and Irish allies) under Mountjoy and Carew. O'Neill and O'Donnell, marching down from the north, drew an outer line about the besiegers, and on December 21st battle was joined. Tyrone would have waited, wisely, till the siege could be raised by cutting the English communications, and the force attacked on the march. But Red Hugh was always bad at waiting, and forced the attack. The combination failed, the Spaniards gave no help, and Mountjoy drove back the Ulstermen. D'Aquila surrendered on good terms, and O'Donnell in hot fury went to Spain to complain of his incompetence and to press for a new expedition. But Elizabeth had her agents in Spain also, and one of them did her such service as was freely rendered in those days. O'Donnell drank a poisoned cup at Simancas, and died of it, and the State Papers contain the poisoner's account of his own exploit and demand for fitting payment. It was only after this that Carew was able to write of Pacata Hibernia, an Ireland, where, in truth, he and his had made a wilderness and called it peace. They themselves tell how from the Rock of Cashel to Dingle Bay the voice of man or the lowing of cattle could not be heard.

Loveliest of all regions in Ireland, this country of Desmond has suffered worst of all. Elizabeth's soldiers attempted here, and nearly carried out, a complete extermination of the native race by the sword and by starvation. And when after centuries the folk had multiplied again and were, by universal testimony, gay even in their rags, the famine of 1847 fell upon them, and in the blackest horrors of that time Skibbereen and West Cork attained an awful notoriety. Nowhere else did such heaps of famished and plague-stricken dead defy all efforts even to bury them.

The shadow of those days has not yet entirely passed: but the stranger will see little of it, following the famous route which leads up the Lee valley to Macroom (where the rail ends), and so past Inchigeela and Ballingarry, past Gouganebarra by Keimaneigh, through the mountains to Bantry and Glengariff. And here confession must be made. I have never seen these famous beauties. I have followed the Lee only to Inchigeela where it breaks into a score of channels between little islands covered with scrub oak and birch and hazel, a piece of river scenery whose like I never saw. And I have driven along the road from Macroom to Killarney, along the Sullane River to Ballyvourney, which tens of thousands know as "the metropolis of Irish-speaking Ireland". For, as it chances, Cork alone, of the more prosperous counties, has kept the Irish speech, and kept it in a form the least modified by modern simplifications. Irish is still to-day the language of well-to-do and well-educated men and women. My host at Ballyvourney had received his education in Paris, more than that, had been through all the Franco-Prussian war, and had seen more of the world than is given to most men; but for many years he has been back, a kind of king among his own people, and a real repository of the ancient scholarship and traditions of the Gael. At Ballingeary, a few miles from him, was founded the first of those "summer schools" where men and women, boys and girls, of all sorts and conditions, and from many corners of the world, unite for common study of the noble language which careless generations had nearly suffered to die out. That settlement is now one of the objects of interest on the coach road, and travellers, if not tourists, may well find it the most interesting of all.

Bantry is one of the great naval stations, one of the great recruiting grounds for the navy. I saw it, as it should be seen, from the sea. It, too, is associated with the memory of one of those failures which stud the course of Irish history like sinister beacons: for here Hoche with a fleet aimed to land in 1796, and here half of his fleet actually arrived, with no one to oppose them. Hoche was then at the pinnacle of his power and fame, an idealist of the early Republican movement, consumed with that real passion for spreading freedom which Napoleon was destined to replace by a very different conception. But Hoche and half of the ships were tempest-driven far out of their course, and it was Grouchy, the slow mover, the man of hesitations, who reached the goal, and, having reached it, failed to act. History hinges on odd chances. Humbert's achievements, two years later, with a mere handful of men, when England had an army in Ireland, put it beyond dispute that Grouchy, even with what he had, could have set on foot a movement that would have driven English power out of Ireland at least for a time: and Wellington himself has told how great a part in breaking down the power of France, from those conflicts in the Peninsula on to the climax of Waterloo, was borne by the unemancipated Catholic Irish peasants, who formed the very bone and sinew of the British line.

It may well be that all was for the best in the best possible of worlds: that it was best that Ireland, instead of freeing herself with the help of Republican France, should help greatly to deliver Europe from the menace of Imperial France—and hand it over to the tender mercies of the Holy Alliance. Yet it needs the faith of Voltaire's philosopher to believe that anything could have been worse for Ireland than the historic evolution which she was actually fated to undergo.

Beyond Bantry is Glengarriff, of which Thackeray wrote that "such a bay, were it lying upon English shores, would be a world's wonder". I have only seen it off the deck of a steamer, away in a smother of cloud; but everyone confirms Thackeray. Castletown Beare, farther west on the north shore of Bantry Bay, I have seen, and the Castle of Dunboy, where was the seat of the O'Sullivan Beare, lord of this region, from which after the rout at Kinsale he and his people fled in a body, marching north amid dreadful privations till they crossed the Shannon and ultimately reached some protection in Ulster. But O'Sullivan's fighting men were left in the Castle under their captain MacGeoghegan, who prolonged resistance to the point of desperation against Carew's artillery. Mortally wounded at last, he succumbed in an attempt to reach the magazine to blow all, assailants and defenders, sky high. It would have been better for the garrison had he succeeded, since Carew hanged every man of them. There is the ruin to-day, breached and battered, standing in a grove of ilex on a very beautiful promontory.

That Castle of Dunboy gave its name to Froude's famous romance The Two Chiefs of Dunboy—a romance founded on historic fact—perhaps not more coloured in the telling than in the same author's volumes on the history of Ireland. For here in this peninsula between Bantry Bay and the Kenmare River, which was the special hold of the O'Sullivans, clan loyalty and the clan name did not die out. Here as elsewhere, English settlers were brought in as lords of the land, with enormous power over the native Irish, whose loyalty still held to the representative of their old chiefs. The O'Sullivans were chiefs now principally in the extensive smuggling operations—and let it be remembered that under the laws made by England to crush out Irish trade, contraband was almost the one outlet for Irish commerce. If Irishmen wanted to export the wool of their sheep, the hides of their cattle, the meat that they salted, all this traffic was by law forbidden. Such laws make smuggling necessary and beneficent, and the O'Sullivans on the south of the Kenmare River, like the O'Connells on its northern shore, brought in their cargoes of wine, tobacco, silks, and laces, and sent back ships laden with wool. With those cargoes went out too that other contraband, the supply of officers and men for the Irish brigade. The English landlord-settler was the representative of English law, and between him and the O'Sullivans conflict was certain. In 1754, Murtagh Oge O'Sullivan shot the Puxley of that day. Law was moved to great efforts, and two months later the O'Sullivan was surrounded in his house at the village of Eyeries, and, after a desperate resistance, driven out of it by fire: he tried to cut his way out but was shot down in escaping. That was a great day for the law, and they towed O'Sullivan's body by a rope at the stern of a king's ship to Cork, where they cut his head off and spiked it over the city gate.

Irish memory keeps vividly the detail of such events, and you can find men in that district to tell you the whole as if it had happened yesterday. I heard it all, though at secondhand, on a sail from the Kenmare River to Bantry, one night when the sea was all fire, and the mackerel shoals dashing this way and that, made flashes like a Catherine wheel, and porpoises or dolphins following them left long trails of light on the surface with sudden sparkles wherever the great fish came up to roll. Out to sea was the recurring flash of the Bull Light, for which ships steer on their way from America; and though there was no moon I could still distinguish this huge island rock, and its neighbour the Cow. The Calf, where the light used to be, is lower, and lies close in by Dursey Island—in that year much talked of, for a party of police who had crossed to collect rents from the few islanders, were effectively marooned, as the boat they had chartered left them, and every other craft was suddenly spirited away.

I think, perhaps, that night was lovelier on the Kenmare River—under a sky ablaze with stars—than even the days of sun had been; but nothing else in Ireland is so perfect, to my fancy, as this long, narrow sea lough between the two mountainous peninsulas, and having inland of it the full vista of those higher mountains which encircle Killarney's lakes.

On the Kenmare shore of the southern peninsula is Lord Lansdowne's famous seat, Derreen, set among rivers and lakes, and backed with mountains. Derreen means the little oak grove, and as Mr. Cooke well observes in his Murray, the native wooding here escaped "the general destruction" of the forest trees to feed the iron furnaces of Sir William Petty, ancestor of the Lansdowne family. Most of the woods of Ireland—and Munster was covered with timber in Elizabeth's reign—were ruthlessly squandered in this way, during the first century of English occupation, by grantees or purchasers of confiscated land, whose one idea was a savage exploitation of what could immediately be cashed. However, let it be said that Petty's successors, coming into great part of the Desmond inheritance, and adopting the Desmond name, Fitzmaurice, took high place among that Irish nobility of the latter type. They were not absentees but landowners with some sense of what was owing to their estates, and with a sentiment to the country from which they drew their revenues, which is best evidenced by their close friendship with Maria Edgeworth and Thomas Moore. Yet it was always at Bowood, in Wiltshire, that Miss Edgeworth and Moore knew the great Whig statesman and his belongings: neither the poet nor the novelist ever penetrated to Derreen.

Had they done so, they might have learnt more than ever either of them came to realize about the greatest Irishman of their day—the greatest power that has ever come out of purely Celtic Ireland in modern times: for Iveragh, the peninsula over against Derreen, was the birthplace and the home of Daniel O'Connell; it gave the climate and the environment which determined him to what he was.

I am not going to write much—because no writing can do it justice—of Iveragh, which is bounded on the south by the Kenmare River, on the north by Dingle Bay, on the west by the Atlantic Ocean (with the Skelligs lying off in it), and on the east by Magillicuddy's Reeks and the lakes of Killarney; which is set therefore in beauty and majesty and splendour and has interest and charm at every turn of every road. But I am going to write a little of Daniel O'Connell and his people, for it is stupid to go to Kerry, and know nothing of the greatest Kerryman that ever lived, only—first, a little practical geography.