Park, we listen to it in the parish church, and last week the Church Congress took up the old complaint as of burning moment, and discussed a paper on the subject from Canon Wat

son.

Though we have no sort of desire to deny that there is such a thing as culpable luxury, we cannot refrain from pointing out that there is a great liability to "canting" on the subject. Here, as in so many other cases, men are very apt to compound for the sins they are inclined to by damning those they have no mind to! People are very apt to define as useless and wicked luxuries the pleasures of sense for which they happen to have no sympathy. For example, the man who does not smoke looks with horror on the notion of spending £10 on a box of very choice cigars, but regards as almost virtuous the collection of rare books. Another condemns a taste for old china and Persian carpets, but thinks it perfectly legitimate to keep a large stable of horses. Jones has a taste for vintages and sees no objection to its indulgence in spite of the cost, but regards it as disgusting luxury to eat "a dinner-party dinner" every day of one's life. Brown, a teetotaller, on the other hand, holds that money is criminally wasted when spent on wine, but believes in the need for well-cooked food. In truth, one man's luxury is often another man's necessity as much as one man's meat is another man's poison. Again, as Canon Watson admitted, luxury is often a purely relative term, and to illustrate this he quoted Sir Walter Scott's striking story of the Highlanders sleeping out on the snow-clad moors. One of them made a pillow of a snowball. The others kicked it away with disgust as a piece of culpable luxury. Thus the poor man is very apt to talk of the rich wallowing in unholy luxury and living like swine in a golden sty, and to forget that the poor man of a former age would look with equal disgust on his own little comforts, or bare necessaries as he calls them.

If one of the old Covenanters could return and look into a modern manse tenanted by even the most self-sacrificing of ministers he would feel a sense of horror at the effeminacy and luxury around him. The stuffed chairs, the carpets, the coverlets, the kitchen range, the elaborate apparatus for making tea and coffee, the small cups and the big cups for various uses, and all the other little devices for producing even a very moderate degree of comfort, would seem to him to be calling down the vengeance of an outraged heaven. Imagine, too, his feelings at hearing that the minister had spent £20 on taking a holiday in visiting the cathedrals of northern

France. Twenty pounds spent on personal pleasure! Why, the sum might have been used for a hundred pious purposes. Instead, it was squandered on the most wanton of all luxuries-the luxury of gadding about and seeing the worship of idolators. Yet now the most old-fashioned of elders would not think it over-luxurious of the minister to take a holiday or to spend money on the pleasure of and travel sight-seeing. No one, again, at the present day thinks theatre-going a culpable luxury. It is looked on, no doubt, as an extravagance for a poor man, but the rich man may indulge his taste for the drama without reproach. Indeed, if he goes to see Shakespeare or to hear serious opera, he feels he is doing a good action and spends ten shillings on his seat without the slightest fear of reproach. Yet if he heard that a neighbor sat at home and smoked two five-shilling cigars, he probably would be extremely indignant and talk loudly about it being culpable luxury of this sort that turned the working men into Socialists.

But though there is great danger of condemning as culpable luxuries things on which money may be spent with perfect innocence, and though we hate the cant which allows £500 to be spent on a ball supper, but looks with horror on £100 worth of flowers for decorations-"blossoms which will

fade before the evening's over"-we admit that there is such a thing as culpable luxury. It is very difficult to define, but it does exist. In our opinion, however, the world is, as a rule, quite wrong when it confounds culpable luxury with great expenditure. That is a false issue. It is not the waste that makes the luxury culpable, nor, again, will the test of usefulness do. If the test is to be utilitarian, then all art and all music on a grand scale must go, for art and music do not increase the supply of food and clothing and warmth. A few prints and a musical-box may be retained as mental distractions, but the picture gallery and the opera are without defence. But if waste, or non-productiveness, is not to be the test, what is to be our touchstone? The amount expended will clearly not do, because this is purely relative, and will make culpable luxury an almost impossible crime for the great millionaires. No expenditure they are ever likely to undertake would be beyond their means, and therefore culpable luxury would have to be counted as the vice of the moderately well off and the poor. The real test of culpable luxury is, we believe, the personal one. Culpable luxury is luxury which enervates and demoralizes the man who indulges in it. If a man worships comfort like a god, cultivates the art of smoothing down the roughness on the road of life till he has made it like a butter-slide, and so arranges his existence that every conceivable physical want is instantly supplied to the full, then, no doubt, he is indulging in culpable luxury and is enervating himself body and soul.

Many very rich men know this in stinctively, and guard themselves most carefully against the demoralization which comes from the too great easiness and softness of life. Plenty of millionaires have no better dinners than their neighbors, not because they are afraid of gout, but because they dread the effects of physical comfort carried to the extreme point. They may have great houses and a sumptuVOL. XII. 610

LIVING AGE.

ous style of life in all externals, but inside their apparent life they often most carefully organize for themselves and their children a simpler habit of existence. In the best of the rich English families there is a strong and sound tradition against personal luxury which is very noticeable. It is thought disgraceful, either for the men or the women, if they are not invalids, to be over-zealous about their comforts. So strong, indeed, is this instinctive desire for protection against the effects of personal luxury that it is counted bad form to be always bothering about making life into a feather bed. Great ladies are often far harder upon their sons and daughters in the matter of the small luxuries of life than the ordinary middle-class parent. In fact it is, as we have said, considered to be extremely bad form for a man to be over-luxurious in dress or in any of the personal appointments of life.

From Blackwood's Magazine. IN DARK DONEGAL.

THE TOURIST ON THE CELTIC FRINGE.

"Fwhat's thim?" said a Sligo bouchal the other day as the Royal Society of Irish Antiquaries rolled along on a dozen wagonettes through the rambling village of Grange on their way to the Cross of Drumcliff.

"Thim's the Antiquarians," said the stranger at his door.

...

"Is it by occupation or religion?" said Pat, perplexed, and with strong expression of distrust. "I suppose they'll be takin' it all down and printin' it. . . . Shee that island out there? William O'Brien lived on it wanst when he was writin' a book- -" and then he fell away into some splendid irrelevances upon Parnellism and the big "clift," and his ideas on Irish touristry were lost to the world forever; for just as all roads lead to Rome, so all the channels an Irishman's conversation ulti

of

mately find their way into the great sea of politics, and there is no return.

The Sligo gossoon's labels will serve the present purpose. Tourists "by occupation" would do well to keep clear of the Celtic fringe. The traveller whose ears are always pricked up for "the locsin of the soul," who thinks more of what he shall eat and what he shall drink than of the scenes among which he is moving and the people he encounters, has really no business, and little pleasure, in Donegal or in Connemara. Truth to tell, the care of the body, the purely physical aspect of life, is of little moment there; the followers of Alcinous are sadly out of place amid bogs and boulders. Yet even in this connection it is well to correct wrong impressions. There has been much wild writing of late on a wild subject. Since the meeting of the Irish Tourist Association at the Imperial Institute, some startling assertions have crept into the papers; and with the lofty condescension of a foreigner, the scribe in Fleet Street, who has never reached Holyhead, and garbles his "copy" from the pages of some out-of-date guide-book, assures a credulous public that on the main tourist routes in Ireland there are not half-adozen hotels where a man may dine and sleep in tolerable comfort. "Every one knows it; it is a patent fact."

The innocent scribe had better throw Baedeker and Baddeley and Black, and all his minor prophets, into the fire, and come and see. Then, if he is a fair man, he will go home and withdraw the cruel calumny in the next issue of his paper. The present writer has more than once made the grand tour of the Celtic fringe, and is now writing from one of its remotest points. He would extenuate nothing, but he makes bold to say that in the Donegal Highlands alone-which are at the back of the world-there are at least eight or nine first-class hotels, if first-class means all that a reasonable man expects. One cannot hope to walk into a Hotel Cecil on the slopes of Errigal. Would the dubious tourist question their existence? Let the places be set down in black and white:

Buncrana, Portsalon, Rosapenna, Dunfanaghy, Gweedore, Glenties, Dungloe, Ardara, Carrick, and Bundoran. Such comfortable hostelries as may be found at Donegal, Killybegs, Falcarragh, Milford, and Letterkenny will more than make up the dozen. No; if one has nothing to complain of in Donegal but the hotels, his grievances are purely imaginary. But there are other elements in the case. To do justice to dark Donegal, one must be a tourist "by religion," possessed of the enthusiasm which carries a man through league after league of waste places, over bleak mountain passes grey with a solitude that may be felt, of the stoic calm which can equably regard a succession of rainy days, of the callosity demanded by Irish jaunting-cars in the winter of their springs, rattling over roads that are surely the riddlings of creation. Yet if such a one endures to the end of his journey, he is blessed, and reaps a fair guerdon beyond the dreams of his luxurious brother, the tourist "by occupation."

Who that has ever stood upon the "One Man's Path" at Slieve Liag and watched the sun sink in his ocean bed, and the Atlantic thundering upon the cliffs two thousand feet below him, can forget the sight? From the top of Muckish, looking over Sheep Haven, Tory, and the northern headlands, there is a panorama for the equal of which one might search in vain from China to Peru. On the crags at Horn Head, on the corrugated cliffs at Bundoran, one breathes a pellucid air which exhilarates like good wine. Glenveagh Lough in a storm, Errigal at twilight as viewed from the Gweedore Hotel, the vale of Glen Gesh on a day when the sky is weeping Donegal Irish, when the water comes tumbling over the glensides in a hundred cascades-these are characteristic bits of Donegal scenery which write themselves in indelible ink on the memory. The country affords · other pictures less inspiring, deplorable examples of the sordid conditions under which body and soul may sometimes keep together; and for dirt-dirt that is unrelieved by any speck of cleanliness,

dirt that is naked and unashamed-it is a bad place to beat. Of a truth Dirtiness is next to Donegaliness.

The men of the mud cabins are a strange conglomeration, and ethnology is of more than usual interest in these remote corners. The fishermen of the Rosses, the kelp-burners of the Bloody Foreland, the stark stalwarts of Fanad peninsula, the village communities of Keel and Dooagh and Dooega in Achill, furnish types which have stood still while the great world has been spinning down the grooves of change. Firbolgs and Fomorians and Tuatha de Danaans are hopelessly and helplessly woven together, with many a foreign thread tangling the skein. What a jumble of names, what a medley of languages! Stewarts and Harkinses, M'Faddens and Sweeneys. Gallaghers and Pattersons, dwell together in unity in the same town-any two or more houses on a hillside constitute a "town" in Donegal-Protestant M'Kinley delves in the same prairie patch with Roman Catholic M'Kinley, and for his corrupt Irish returns him a corrupter Scotch. The bee-hive houses of Achill are inhabited by-can one believe it?-Lavelles and Toolises and Mangans.

If poor in this world's goods, these dwellers on the fringe are rich in nature's endowments, which cannot be estimated in silver or gold. The two mighty voices of the sea and the mountain are ever in their ears, and whether in storm or in sunshine they speak to them with majestic eloquence. It may be that the native ear is dulled by long association, but to the stranger eager with first impressions the voices are resonant. Rocking gently on the violet waters of one of the tortuous creeks of Sheep Haven, he dreams of Homer's ioeldea TóνTOV. On the slopes of Errigal or Muckish on an autumn evening he catches glints of that sapphire blue which he has been wont to associate with Italy and Italy alone.

The weather is the great problem in Donegal. To uncertainties of race and of language the tourist must add the painful uncertainty of climate. The American who said that in Ireland we

had no climate, only "samples," must have landed on the Donegal seaboard. It is true that the tears and the smiles chase each other with astonishing rapidity over this corner of Erin's fair face. Even the weather is a compromise, and a continuous wet day is as rare as the great auk. Often fair is foul, and foul is fair, and the sou'wester of the morning gives place to the blazer of the early afternoon. On the worst of days one's asperity of temper is miti gated on observing the demeanor of the natives under adversity. A Donegal man is really in his element in a downpour. It is impossible to feel depressed in face of his friendly greeting, "Tha sha bug thranona sho!" "It's fine and soft this evenin'!" And all the while he shakes the water off what he terms his "polite scantlins" with duck-like glee.

Let us pay a vow, then, to Jupiter Pluvius, and set out on our journey. As it is essential above all things that we be Irish, we start at Derry, half of which lies in another county, and the big half of whose inhabitants are by no means Irish, but fairly broad Scots. Londonderry was originally named Derry Columbkille, after that saint to whom, while in Donegal, the stranger must pay due reverence. Columbkille was as quick of foot as he was reputed to be quick of temper, or else he had the wings of a dove, for there is hardly a mile of the country from Teelin Head to Inishowen without some memorial of him. The history of Derry practically dates from the famous siege of 1688. Prior to that time it was happy in that its annals were almost vacant. For the last two hundred years it has been the scene of many heart-burnings and fifetootlings. If a 'prentice boy knows any. thing, he knows how to play his big drum and whistle "Derry Walls." The Maiden City is compactly built, and commandingly situated at the head of the broad estuary of the Foyle. "Its walls," to use Macaulay's words, "are to the Protestants of Ulster what the trophy of Marathon was to the Athenians." Happily sectarian feuds are now of rare occurrence in the City on