136

HISTOEY OF ENGEAIO).

CHAP.

XII.

1683.

richer purple: the varnish of the holly and ivy is more glossy;• and berries of a brighter red peep through foliage of a brightergreen. But during the greater part of the seventeenth cen-tury, this paradise was as little known to the civilised worldas Spitsbergen or Greenland. If ever it was mentioned, itwas mentioned as a horrible desert, a chaos of bogs, thickets,and precipices, where the she wolf still littered, and wheresome half naked savages, who could not speak a word ofEnglish, made themselves burrows in the mud, and lived onroots and sour milk.*

At length, in the year 1670, the benevolent and enlightenedSir William Petty determined to form an English settlement inthis wild district. He possessed a large domain there, whichhas descended to a posterity worthy of such an ancestor. Onthe improvement of that domain he expended, it was said, notless than ten thousand pounds. The little town which hefounded, named from the bay of Kenmare, stood at the headof that hay, under a mountain ridge, on the summit of whichtravellers now stop to gaze upon the loveliest of the three lakesof Killarney. Scarcely any village, built by an enterprisingband of New Englanders, far from the dwellings of their coun-trymen, in the midst of the hunting grounds of the Red Indians,

* In a very full account of the British isles published at Nurembergin 1G90, Kerry is described as “an vielen Orten unwegsam und vollerWalder und Gebiirge.” Wolves still infested Ireland. “Kcin schiidlichThicr ist da, ausserhalb Wolff und Fiichse.’’ So late as the year 1710money was levied on presentments of the Grand Jury of Kerry for thedestruction of wolves in that county. See Smith’s Ancient and ModernState of the County of Kerry, 3756. I do not know that I have ever metwith a better book of the kind and of the size. In a poem published a3late as 1719, and entitled Macdermot, or the Irish Fortune Hunter, in sixcantos, wolfhunting and wolfspearing are represented as common sports inMunster. In William’s reign. Ireland was sometimes called by the nick-name of Wolfland. Thus in a poem on the battle of La Ilogue, calledAdvice to a Painter, the terror of the Irish army is thus described:

“A chilling damp

And Wolfland howl runs thro’ the rising camp.’*