were very few. Manufactured articles were hardly to be found, and if found could be procured only at immense prices.[1] The truth was that most of the English inhabitants had fled, and that art, industry, and capital had fled with them.
James received on his progress numerous marks of the goodwill of the peasantry; but marks such as, to men bred in the courts of France and England, had an uncouth and ominous appearance. Though very few labourers were seen at work in the fields, the road was lined by Rapparees armed with skeans, stakes, and half pikes, who crowded to look upon the deliverer of their race. The highway along which he travelled presented the aspect of a street in which a fair is held. Pipers came forth to play before him in a style which was not exactly that of the French opera; and the villagers danced wildly to the music. Long frieze mantles, resembling those which Spenser had, a century before, described as meet beds for rebels, and apt cloaks for thieves, were spread along the path which the cavalcade was to tread; and garlands, in which cabbage stalks supplied the place of laurels, were offered to the royal hand. The women insisted on kissing his Majesty; but it should seem that they bore little resemblance to their posterity; for this compliment was so distasteful to him that he ordered his retinue to keep them at a distance.[2]
On the twenty-fourth of March he entered Dublin. That city was then, in extent and population, the second in the British isles. It contained between six and seven thousand houses, and probably above thirty thousand inhabitants.[3] In wealth and beauty, however, Dublin was inferior to many English towns. Of the graceful and stately public buildings which now adorn both sides of the Liffey scarcely one had been even projected. The College, a very different edifice from that which
- ↑ Ibid. March 25/April 4, 1689
- ↑ A full and true Account of the Landing and Reception of the late King James; Ireland's Lamentation; Light to the Blind.
- ↑ See the calculations of Petty, King, and Davenant. If the average number of inhabitants to a house was the same in Dublin as in London, the population of Dublin would have been about thirty-four thousand.
