"This is the modern way of planting Colonies--Et ubi solitudinem faciunt, id Imperium vocant. When those who are so unfortunate to be born here, are excluded from the meanest preferments, and deemed incapable of being entertained even as common soldiers, whose poor stipend is but four pence a day. No trade, no emoluments, no encouragement for learning among the natives, who yet by a perverse consequence are divided into factions, with as much violence and rancour, as if they had the wealth of the Indies to contend for. It puts me in mind of a fable which I read in a monkish author. He quotes for it one of the Greek mythologists that once upon a time a colony of large dogs (called the Molossi) transplanted themselves from Epirus to AEtolia, where they seized those parts of the countries, most fertile in flesh of all kinds, obliging the native dogs to retire from their best kennels, to live under ditches and bushes, but to preserve good neighbourhood and peace; and finding likewise, that the AEtolian dogs might be of some use in the low offices of life, they passed a decree, that the natives should be entitled to the short ribs, tops of back, knuckle-bones, and guts of all the game, which they were obliged by their masters to run down. This condition was accepted, and what was a little singular, while the Molossian dogs kept a good understanding among themselves, living in peace and luxury, these AEtolian curs were perpetually snarling, growling, barking and tearing at each other's throats: Nay, sometimes those of the best quality among them, were seen to quarrel with as much rancour for a rotten gut, as if it had been a fat haunch of venison. But what need we wonder at this in dogs, when the same is every day practised among men? "Last year I travelled from Dublin to Dundalk, through a country esteemed the most fruitful part of the kingdom, and so nature intended it. But no ornaments or improvements of such a scene were visible. No habitation fit for gentlemen, no farmers' houses, few fields of corn, and almost a bare face of nature, without new plantations of any kind, only a few miserable cottages, at three or four miles' distance, and one Church in the centre between this city and Drogheda. When I arrived at this last town, the first mortifying sight was the ruins of several churches, battered down by that usurper, Cromwell, whose fanatic zeal made more desolation in a few days, than the piety of succeeding prelates or the wealth of the town have, in more than sixty years, attempted to repair.