CHAPTER LIII.

“Land of the harp! the soul of music dwells With thee! thine every word, thy wildest thought Is poetry; thy fields, thy groves, thy streams Are melody! Henceforward thou shalt bloom In the bright summer of prosperity. Thy sovereign shall behold thee face to face, The eloquence of truth on thy fair brow Beaming.—Oh, he never can forget its ray! On thy green shores, the heart’s own welcome dwells! There, an hundred thousand greetings wait him! There, an hundred thousand blessings greet him!”

After the visit we have already mentioned to the Craigs, a season in Town, and a quiet month or two at dear Lodore, Fitz-Ullin prevailed on Julia to accompany him to that gem of the ocean, the Emerald Isle, the land of his birth, for the purpose of visiting his extensive paternal estates in the beautiful county of ⸺.

Here, nature indeed had been bountiful; but her benign intentions had, hitherto, been defeated by an ill judged organization of the social system.

For six and twenty years, agents and middlemen had oppressed the hardy tenant of the soil; till, what had been courage, became fierceness; what had been humour, bitterness; and even native beauty of feature was veiled by the utterly hopeless expression, which hung on almost every countenance; while not the muscles of the face only, but the very limbs of naturally athletic men appeared relaxed. For the rewards of labour being insufficient to inspire industry, bodily fatigue was unsustained by mental energy, and the mere animal instinct of hunger remained the sole stimulus to exertion.

It had never entered the minds of this simple, almost wild people, to look to the government for justice or redress. The executive power, in all its branches, was, and long had been, concentrated and personified in their imaginations under the loathed figure of a hangman; and him whom they considered as their natural protector, their landlord, leader, and hereditary chief, was out of the reach of hearing their complaints. It is not surprising, therefore, that the arrival of the happy couple, surrounded by all the splendour to which their rank and fortune entitled them, lending a ready ear to every tale of woe, and with the hand of benevolence open for the relief of every want, was viewed by all as the rising of the morning of hope, on a land long desolated by a dreary succession of stormy nights that knew no day between.

Fitz-Ullin was so forcibly struck by the marks which all around him bore, of private duties sacrificed to public ones, during the long and brilliant life of the late Earl, that his reflections and resolutions on the subject very shortly became such as we may trace in a conversation which took place, a few evenings after his arrival at Ullin Castle. He was seated with his lovely Countess on the balcony of a high tower, from whence might be seen on every side, a large portion of the wide domains of his forefathers.

He had been indulging in the fond hope, justified by the then situation of Julia, that the future possessor of all he now beheld, would, ere long, enter life amid prospects delightful to the heart of a parent, and sheltered too, he trusted, under providence, from the rough blasts, which he had in infancy encountered; for Julia had promised him that she herself would nurture her own child, and never commit it to the hands of a stranger, to run the risk of enduring what its father had endured.

While these gentle thoughts dwelt in his mind, his eye accidentally rested on the smoke that stole from the lowly chimneys of some cottages, which, scattered at various intervals, lay concealed among the distant trees.

As busy fancy painted the rustic group around each fire-side, a something like self-reproach smote upon the heart of Fitz-Ullin.

“How often,” he exclaimed, giving audible utterance to his thoughts, “how often have I felt enthusiasm, amounting almost to a wild species of joy, when engaged in the work of war, and, of course, of destruction; and behold around me here, the labours of peace, the power of diffusing happiness to multitudes, lying neglected and forgotten.”

“Do not say the work of destruction!” interrupted Julia, eagerly: “it never was in your nature, Edmund, to take pleasure in destroying the very worst of enemies! Say rather the work, the glorious, the indispensable work of protection; for of what avail would it be to spread prosperity over the face of the land if we suffer the foe to come in and lay our labours waste?”

“True, Julia! most true!” replied Fitz-Ullin, delighted to have his favourite and habitual views of the subject thus revived. And as he spoke, he arose unconsciously, and, assuming a loftiness of carriage of which his figure was peculiarly susceptible, looked once more the hero—a character lately almost forgotten in that of the lover.

“Seen in this light,” he said, “our duty to our country is also one of the most sacred of those which we owe to our kindred and dependants, taken too on its greatest, its noblest scale! The reflections, however, which the scene before us has awakened, have had their use; they have reminded me that, in the pride of performing a selected task, gratifying to our ambition or our vanity, we must not neglect the manifold and unpretending duties which surround our homes. You will allow,” he added, changing his manner from the grave to the sportive, “heroine as you are, Julia, that in the intervals of peace, at least, we ought to thatch the peasant’s hut, and see that he has grain to sow his fields—aye,” he continued, his voice and manner again becoming serious, “and a cheerful countenance when he reaps them, emanating from the consciousness that a liberal portion of all which the labour of his hands has caused the ground to bring forth shall be his own and his children’s. Nor is this more than just: large estates were small, indeed, in value to their luxurious possessor, did not the sweat of the brow of his fellow-creature render them productive.”

The impressions received by the mind of Fitz-Ullin on this evening were never effaced. In the course of promotion he became, as his father had been, Admiral Lord Fitz-Ullin, and, under that title, continued to reap, when called upon by the emergencies of the state, laurels as distinguished as any gained by his great predecessor; but his people at home were never forgotten. His sons and his daughters were born amongst them, and all the many silent blessings which fall from the hand of the resident landlord introduced into their dwellings. While as much of a long, blissful, and prosperous life as he could spare from his more active duties to his country, and his closer ties to his immediate family and dependants was devoted to the noble task of pleading the cause of the oppressed of his native land in the great assembly of his peers.

THE END.

_Gunnell and Shearman, 13, Salisbury Square._

Transcriber’s Notes

Obvious typographical errors have been corrected. Inconsistent spelling and hyphenation in the original document have been preserved. Volume II (PG e-text #56566) lists the errata for all three volumes; those corrections have been applied here.

There is no Chapter XXX: the chapter numbering goes straight from XXIX to XXXI.

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