The present Marquis has almost never visited Ireland, I believe, and he is not much known even in London.
People who dislike him for one reason or another readily believe anything that is said to his disadvantage as a landlord.

Most people who don't like the cut of Dr.Fell's whiskers, or the way in which he takes soup, are quite disposed to listen to you if you tell them he beats his wife or plays cards too well.

The campaigners are shrewd fellows, and they know this, so they start the 'Plan of Campaign' on the Portumna properties, and get a lot of English windbags to come there and hobnob with some of the most mischievous and pestilent parish priests in all Ireland--and then you have the dreadful story of the 'evictions,' and all the rest of it.

Lord Clanricarde, or his agent, or both of them, getting out of temper, will sit down and do some hasty or crabbed or injudicious thing, or write a provoking letter, and forthwith it is enough to say 'Clanricarde,' and all common sense goes out of the question, to the great damage, not so much of Lord Clanricarde--for he lives in London, and is a rich man, and, I suppose, don't mind the row--but of landlords all over Ireland, and therefore, in the long-run, of the tenants of Ireland as well." At Luggacurren, this gentleman thinks, the League is beaten.

There are eighty-two tenants there, evicted and living dismally in what is called the Land League village, a set of huts erected near the roadside, while their farms are carried on for the owner by the Land Corporation.