O’Sullivan, lineally descended from the King of the Lakes, not many years since vegetated on a retired spot of his hereditary dominions at Killarney; and, though overwhelmed by poverty and deprivation, kept up in his mind a visionary dignity. Surveying from his wretched cottage that enchanting territory over which his ancestors had reigned for centuries, I have been told he never ceased to recollect his royal descent. He was a man of gigantic stature and strength; of uncouth, yet authoritative mien—not shaming his pretensions by his presence. He was frequently visited by those who went to view the celebrated lakes, and I have conversed with many who have seen him: but at a period when familiar intercourse has been introduced between actual princes and their subjects, tending undoubtedly to diminish in the latter the sense of individual respect and distance, so wholesome to royalty, the poor descendant of the renowned O’Sullivan had no reason to expect much commiseration from modern sensibility.
The frequent and strange revolutions of the world within the last forty years, the radical alterations in all the material habits of society,—announced the commencement of a new era: and the ascendancy of commerce over rank, and of avarice over every thing, completed the _regeneration_. But, above all, the loosening of those ties which bound kindred and families, in one common interest, to uphold their race and name;—the extinction of that spirit of chivalry which sustained those ties;—and the common prostitution of the heraldic honours of antiquity;—have steeled the human mind against the lofty and noble pretensions of birth and rank; and while we superficially decry the principles of _equality_, we are travelling toward them, by the shortest and most dangerous road degeneracy and meanness can point out.
I confess myself to be a determined enemy to the Utopian vision of political and social equality: in the exercise of justice alone should the principle of equality be paramount; in any other sense, it never did, and never can, for any length of time, exist in Europe.
Miss Edgeworth’s “Castle Rackrent” and “Fashionable Tales” are incomparable in truly depicting several traits of the rather modern Irish character: they are perhaps on one point a little overcharged; but, in some parts, may be said to exceed the generality of Lady Morgan’s Irish novels. Fiction is less perceptible in them: they have a greater air of reality—of what I have myself often and often observed and noted in full progress and actual execution throughout my native country. Nothing is exaggerated: the stories and names are coined, but the characters and incidents are “from _life_.” The landlord, the agent, and the attorney of “Castle Rackrent” (in fact every person it describes) were neither fictitious nor even uncommon characters: and the changes of landed property in the county where I was born (where perhaps they have prevailed to the full as widely as in any other of the united empire) owed, in nine cases out of ten, their origin, progress, and catastrophe to circumstances in no wise differing from those so accurately painted in Miss Edgeworth’s narrative.