HISTORY OF ENGLAND.

VOL. VI.

CHAPTER XVI.

William had been, during the whole spring, impatiently c.nAP.expected in Ulster. The Protestant settlements along the coast , 690 .of that province had, in the course of the month of May, been Williamrepeatedly agitated by false reports of his arrival. It was not, Carrick-

Tc reus

however, till the afternoon of the fourteenth of June that he and pro-landed at Carrickfergus. The inhabitants of the town crowded Belfast'. 0the main street and greeted him with loud acclamations: butthey caught only a glimpse of him. As soon as he was on dryground he mounted and set off for Belfast. On the road he wasmet by Schomberg. The meeting took place close to a whitehouse, the only human dwelling then visible, in the space ofmany miles, on the dreary strand of the estuary of the Laggan.

A village and a cotton mill now rise where the white house thenstood alone; and all the shore is adorned by a gay successionof country houses, shrubberies and flower beds. Belfast hasbecome one of the greatest and most flourishing seats ofindustry in the British isles. A busy population of eighty thou-sand souls is collected there. The duties annually paid at theCustom House exceed the duties annually paid at the CustomHouse of London in the most prosperous years of the reign ofCharles the Second. Other Irish towns may present morepicturesque forms to the eye. But Belfast is the only largeIrish town in which the traveller is not disgusted by the loath-Macaulay, History . VI. 1