detail the sufferings, which their privileges and pretensions produce in the gross ; and when they have bestowed a small per centage of their overgrown fortunes upon the wretches whom their monopoly of power has impoverished and wronged, they flatter themselves that they have done all which human sympathy or divine injunction requires at their hands.

This description of charity has been well described by a popular writer, as "other-worldlymindedness;" and no where is it more sensitive or alive than among the aristocracy of Ireland,-a country where mendicity is national, and where religious Quixotism is carried to the fever point of exultation and excess. Unfortunately, this fiery and rampant zeal is utterly deficient in knowledge; and there is more waste of money in the city of Dublin, more direct provocation of misery by ill-contrived attempts to relieve distress, more misdirected energy, than would, if properly applied, remove, ten times over, all the pauperism of a wholesomely constituted society of the same bulk.

In a country so teeming with an unemployed population as Ireland, it certainly is not an easy matter to give a proper direction to public feeling, and to avoid falling into dangerous errors; and though it is necessary to signalize the more flagrant and mischievous abuses, and to ridicule an all pervading folly, by which society suffers so deeply, yet it must be confessed, that the individuals who come under the lash are not without some excuse. If their presumption and self-conceit are absurd and baneful, their intentions at least are often the purest and the best.

The sphere of charity, its productive power of good, being closely confined to the relief of those

fortuitous evils to which the lower classes must ever be exposed, even in the best-regulated societies, the moment it is applied to large categories of persons, as a remedy for permanent abuses, it becomes an unmanageable and equivocal agent of happiness, interfering with independent labour, disturbing its market, and rendering occupation precarious, and its reward fluctuating. The means which a nation possesses of employing its population are definite; and charity, in giving them a new direction, does not increase the sum: on the contrary, in as far as the process is forced and unnatural, it tends to diminish that sum by waste and mismanagement. Most of the charitable efforts which daily succeed each other for the employing of the poor of Ireland, are but the pouring money out of one pocket, to place it in another; and if certain individuals are put to work in a new direction by the process, an equal number are inevitably thrown out of employment in some unobserved department.

This evil attaches with particular severity and mischievous effect to those associations of good and pious ladies, who either work themselves for the benefit of the poor, or find employment for them in charitable asylums, where they are enabled to undersell and drive out of the market all competitors who are thrown upon their own resources. The money which is collected by the sale of needle and fancy work thus performed, is a direct robbery of the sempstresses, who, in garrets and in cellars, strive to exist by unwearied labour. The cheap repositories that vend articles of taste, fabricated in Magdalen asylums and receptacles for the destitute, not only severely injure the shopkeeper, who pays rent and taxes for the service of the public, but, through him, strikes despair into the bosom of a large class of

helpless females, who avail themselves of accomplishments, acquired in happier circumstances, to support themselves in independence, by the only means which the perverse exclusion of women from their natural employments has left open to them. It is no justification of such establishments, that they sell only inutilities, calculated to catch a certain portion of loose cash, which otherwise would be lost to benevolence. The manufacture of inutilities, no less than that of articles of prime necessity, is the property of the working poor,—a property with which the public cannot tamper, without producing a certain evil, that is never compensated by the uncertain and delusive good expected from the process.

Among the many idle, delusive, and extravagant amusements, invented by that model of Grand Caliphs, Louis the XIVth, not the least remarkable were the shops opened in the saloons of Versailles, and kept by the king's mistresses, or the princesses of the blood, attended by cavaliers, who, though officiating as shop-boys, were chosen according to their rank and office. In these magazines, toys, trinkets, and jewels of immense value, were distributed at counters, attended by the greatest beauties and most distinguished personages at the court; and if the cupidity of the courtiers found its account in this prodigality, coquetry lost nothing by the assumption of a character which added the naïveté of the bonne bourgeoisie to the graces of dignity and refinement. Madame de Maintenon dwells with emphasis on the fascinations of these illustrious shopkeepers, and the elegance which presided over their counters.

The bazaars, called charitable, which, for some successive seasons have been opened in Dublin, B2

have in their details been modelled somewhat after the manner of these comptoirs of Versailles. The market is generally held in some very public place; either at the Rotunda, (a room consecrated to all public purposes,) or in an hotel or tavern. The stalls are raised on either side; the shops are kept by ladies of the highest rank in the Irish world of fashion and charity. The work disposed of is their own; their customers are the public at large, who are admitted on paying a shilling. The profits of the sale, of course, go to charity, sometimes at home

too often foreign,-the conversion of Jews, or the gathering of the stray sheep of Otaheite or Hindostan. The articles produced to extort the benevolence of the customer, address themselves rather to his charity than to his taste. They are multifarious; and if variety could compensate for want of ingenuity and of skill, there would be nothing to wish for in the bazaars of the charitable ladies of Dublin: -worsted stockings, to fit Irish giants,-bead purses, threaded by fairy fingers, frizettes for the head, woven of horsehair,-and slippers of hemp for the feet, as fatiguing as the tread-mill,-hearthrugs as rugged" as a Russian bear,"-and pillows of lavender, not much smoother,-old jelly and stale cakes, which have figured at more than one tea and tract soirée, and ornaments in every form, that can be produced by paste and paper, and daubed by paint, from a pagoda to a pincushion,-of just that description which a woman of taste consigns to her housekeeper's room, and the housekeeper, in turn, bestows on the still room, as fit for nothing but to preserve dust, and afford lurking places for spiders.

Meantime, if criticism looks on with her "eye malign askance," in its lounge up the long line opened between the repositories of trash, there

are many whose susceptibility supplies the place at once of taste and of charity, and the bazaar is the great resort of all the desœuvrés of one sex, and of all the saints of the other. Among the most distinguished of the first, are the military elegants of the garrison; among the latter, are some of the highest and prettiest of the aristocracy. Placed behind piles of pincushions, each having a moral in minikins stuck on its silken surface, or behind an outwork of paper screens, consecrated by the Lord's prayer and the commandments, stands the fair trader, with a look, "sober, steadfast, and demure," and an air of gentle solicitation, like that of the venders of royal effigies at the gate of the Tuileries, who cry, from morning till night, "Voyez, Messieurs, voyez la famille royale de France, et la Princesse Caroline, tous pour deux sous. 99*

I was one day much amused by observing a little scene of this sort. The finest eyes I ever saw, were doing the honours of a charitable counter, to the very best of their ability. “A bonnes enseignes, bon vin.” A young and gallant hussar, whose attention had wandered from stall to stall, with undefined charity, was at last attracted by the " voyez, messieurs," of the eyes alluded to. The petit commerce once begun, it was difficult to say which party threw most enterprise and speculation into the transaction. Flytraps were shut and opened, with suitable comments on flies and traps; tablets were displayed, whose inscriptions were only to be breathed upon, to become, like good impressions, ineffaceable; Adam and Eve, with the tempter in the tree, worked on a footstool in tent stitch, were not without allusion and edifica

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Here, gentlemen, here is the whole royal family of France, and the Princess Caroline, all for a penny."