Horses sufficient to carry a few travellers were with some difficulty procured; and, on the fourteenth of March, James proceeded to Cork, [172] We should greatly err if we imagined that the road by which he entered that city bore any resemblance to the stately approach which strikes the traveller of the nineteenth century with admiration.

At present Cork, though deformed by many miserable relics of a former age, holds no mean place among the ports of the empire.

The shipping is more than half what the shipping of London was at the time of the Revolution.

The customs exceed the whole revenue which the whole kingdom of Ireland, in the most peaceful and prosperous times, yielded to the Stuarts.

The town is adorned by broad and well built streets, by fair gardens, by a Corinthian portico which would do honour to Palladio, and by a Gothic college worthy to stand in the High Street of Oxford.