This spirit of exclusion makes itself even more disagreeably felt where a gentleman’s paling chances to include any natural curiosity. One of the wildest, as well as most exquisitely beautiful spots on earth is the Dargle, in the county Wicklow, in Ireland. It is interesting, besides, as belonging to the estate of the orator and patriot Grattan. To get to it, we were let through a gate by an old man, who received a douceur: we crossed a newly reaped field, and came to another gate; another person opened this, and we paid another shilling. We walked on toward the glen, and in the middle of the path, without any object apparently but the toll, there was another locked gate, and another porter to pay; and when we made our exit from the opposite extremity of the grounds, after seeing the Dargle, there was a fourth gate and a fourth porter. The first field and fee belonged, if I remember rightly, to a Captain Somebody, but the other three gates belong to the present Mr. Grattan, who is very welcome to my three shillings, either as a tribute to his father’s memory, or to the beauty of Tinnehinch and the Dargle. But on whichever ground he pockets it, the _mode_ of assessment is, to say the least, ungracious. Without subjecting myself to the charge of a mercenary feeling, I think I may say that the enthusiasm for natural scenery is very much clipped and belittled by seeing it at a shilling the perch—paying the money and taking the look. I should think no sum lost which was expended in bringing me to so romantic a glen as the Dargle; but it should be levied somewhere else than within sound of its wild waterfall—somewhere else than between the waterfall and the fine mansion of Tinnehinch.
The fish most “out of water” in the world is certainly a Frenchman in England without acquaintances. The illness of a friend has lately occasioned me one or two hasty visits to Brighton; and being abandoned on the first evening to the solitary mercies of the coffee-room of the hotel, I amused myself not a little with watching the _ennui_ of one of these unfortunate foreigners who was evidently there simply to qualify himself to say that he had been at Brighton in the season. I arrived late, and was dining by myself at one of the small tables, when I became aware that some one at the other end of the room was watching me very steadily. The place was as silent as coffee-rooms usually are after the dinner hour, the rustling of newspapers the only sound that disturbed the digestion of eight or ten persons present, when the unmistakeable call of “Vaitare!” informed me that if I looked up I should encounter the eyes of a Frenchman. The waiter entered at the call, and after a considerable parley with my opposite neighbor, came over to me and said in rather an apologetic tone, “Beg pardon, sir, but the _shevaleer_ wishes to know if your name is _Coopair_.” Not very much inclined, fatigued as I was, for a conversation in French, which I saw would be the result of a polite answer to his question, I merely shook my head, and took up the newspaper. The Frenchman drew a long sigh, poured out his last glass of claret, and crossing his thumbs on the edge of the table, fell into a profound study of the grain of the mahogany.