only way possible to the belligerents who fought for home and
family. Mr. Trench always paints the people who sympathise with their
champions as naturally wild, lawless, and savage. If he happens to
be in good humour with them, he makes them ridiculous. His son, Mr.
Townsend Trench, who did the illustrations for the work, pictures the
peasantry as gorillas, always flourishing shillelaghs, and grinning
horribly. With rare exceptions, they appear as an inferior race, while
the ruling class, and the Trenches in particular, appear throughout
the book as demigods, 'lords of the creation,' formed by nature to be
the masters and guides and managers of such a silly, helpless people.
Nowhere is any censure pronounced upon a landlord, or an agent, with
one exception, and this was the immediate predecessor of Mr. Trench
at Kenmare. To his gross neglect in allowing God to send so many human
beings into the world, he ascribes the chaos of misery and pauperism,
which he--a heaven-born agent--had to reduce to order and beauty.
But there were other causes of the 'poetic turbulence' which he
so gloriously quelled, that he might have brought to light, had he
thought proper, for the information of English readers. He might have
shown--for the evidence was before him in the report of the Devon
Commission--with what hard toil and constant self-denial, amidst what
domestic privations and difficulties, Mr. Shirley's tenants struggled
to scrape up for him his 20,000 l. a year, and how bitterly they must
have felt when the landlord sent an order to add one-third to their
rack-rent. I will supply Mr. Trench's lack of service, and quote the
evidence of one of those honest and worthy men, given before the Devon
Commissioners.

Peter Mohun, farmer, a tenant on the Shirley estate, gave the
following evidence:--