Activate Javascript or update your browser for the full Digital Library experience.
Previous Page
–
Next Page
OCR
1 G IRELAND.
est of food but the old birds would come with the first and with the
in’ and cherishin’ the young, and I used to tell
them their birds war better off"than they could make them; but EU“ t11ey’d
come they’d come and wail and murnatnd wail and mum,” repeated poor
1 J .
llfary mournfully. Her reason and affection were at variance; but I saw, as
is generally the case with her countrywomen, that, if she lived, the love of
parent towards child must triumph.
XVhen we returned from Killarney, she had been dead some days; and
er daughter resided, we had no means
With the b
last light-there they war feed
although we knew the house in which h
of ascertaining if she had seen her mother. -
Com: holds rank as the second city of Ireland-in extent, population, and
commercial importance. Its situation is low, having been originally built on
marshy islands; whence its name-“Corcagh,” signifying, in Irish, land
occasionally overflowed by the tide; but the northern and southern suburbs
stand upon high ground. Scarcely a century has passed since the river ran
through its principal streets, which are formed by arching over the stream.
The poet Spenser has happily dcscribcd-
“The spreading Lee, that like an island fair
Encloseth Cork with his divided dead.”
In a very rare tract, so rare indeed as to be said to be unique, entitled
“A relation of the most lamentable burning of the city of Cork by thunder
and lightning,” which was printed in London in 1622, the following graphic
account of old Cork occurs 2-“ The eittie of Corke hath his beginning upon the
side of an hill, which descendeth easily into one wide and long strcete; the
onely prineipall and chiefe streete of the eittic. At the first entrance there is
a castle called Shandon Castle, and almost over against it a church built of
stone, as the castle" is a kinde of marble, of which that country yeeldeth store.
The cittie hath many houses built of the same stone, and covered with slate.
But the greatest number of houses are built of tymber or mudde walls, and
covered with thatch.” About the year 1600, Camden described the city as
enclosed “within a circuit of walls in forme of an eggc, with the river flowing
round about it and running betweene, not passable through l)ut by bridges, lying
out in length as it were in one broad street, and the same having a bridge
over it.” The foundation of Cork is generally attributed to Danish adventurers
in the ninth or tenth century; it is contended, however, that its origin was
earlier, and that the founder was St. Finn Bar, (the fair-haired or white
headed, for the Irish name admits of both translatio11s,) whose ecclesiastical
establisliments contained, it is said, no fewer than seven hundred priests,