These are all the attractive characteristics of a nice old village public house in England. Clean, quiet, sweet, and breathing of the olden time. They are characteristics professedly gathered by the poet in his rural rambles in England, where he had lived at least twenty years when he wrote the poem. In his preface he talks of these "country excursions for four or five years past," in which he had "taken all possible pains" to be correct in his details. Where, indeed, did any one see in an Irish country ale-house "the parlor splendors of a festive place;" "the whitewashed wall, the nicely sanded floor;" "the varnished clock that clicked behind the door;" "the hearth, except when winter chilled the day, with aspen boughs, and flowers, and fennel gay?" Where does he find the nut-brown ale? They all belong to the healthy, wholesome, well-to-do village ale-house of rural and prosperous England. An Irish village ale-house! What is it? A poor and filthy cabin; the walls of rough stones, the roof often with nothing between it and the floor. The floor! nicely sanded?--a bed of mud, full of holes, in which geese, and ducks, and pigs, are dabbling and wallowing! If floored at all, paved with pebbles, which stand up in heaps by places, and by places are gone, leaving the aforesaid duck-pools and pig-troughs. A parcel of ragged people sprawling on the hearth around the peat fire, the coy maid, a bare-legged, shock-headed body, hard at work in tending the potato kettle, or contending with the ass, the cow, the pigs, that make part of the family. The parlor splendors? Half the house separated by a counter, behind which the landlord stands, amid a stock of candles and bread for sale, and dealing out, not the generous nut-brown ale, but the deadly liquid fire called whisky. Such are the almost universal attributes of a village ale-house in Ireland. Goldsmith knew better than to draw on his memory for them; he turned to the more poetical scene of the English village ale-house, which, clean as hands could make it, sweet, and all that he describes, had charmed him in his numerous rural excursions in this country. The Three Jolly Pigeons is just a regular Irish ale-house, or, rather, whisky-shop. On going in, you look in vain for the picture Goldsmith has so beautifully drawn. The varnished clock clicking behind the door, the pictures placed for ornament and use, the twelve good rules, the royal game of goose, where are they? Not there; but in many an old-fashioned hamlet of England. The mud floor, the dirty walls, the smell of whisky, these are what meet you. You look for "the parlor splendors," and on your left hand there is, for a wonder, a separate room, but it is, as usual, filled with the candles, the herrings, the bread, of the Irish ale-house, and the whisky is doled out over the suspicious counter, instead of the nut-brown ale being brought in the generous foaming cup, to the bright, clean fireside, by the neat and blooming maid.