When first it dawns upon us through that thick darkness which hangs
about the birth of all countries--whatever their destiny--it was a
densely wooded and scantily peopled island "lying a-loose," as old
Campion, the Elizabethan historian, tells us, "upon the West Ocean,"
though his further assertion that "in shape it resembleth an egg, plain
on the sides, and not reaching forth to the sea in nooks and elbows of
Land as Brittaine doeth"--cannot be said to be quite geographically
accurate--the last part of the description referring evidently to the
east coast, the only one with which, like most of his countrymen, he was
at that time familiar.

Geographically, then, and topographically it was no doubt in much the
same state as the greater part of it remained up to the middle or end of
the sixteenth century, a wild, tangled, roadless land, that is to say,
shaggy with forests, abounding in streams, abounding, too, in lakes--far
more, doubtless, than at present, drainage and other causes having
greatly reduced their number--with rivers bearing the never-failing
tribute of the skies to the sea, yet not so thoroughly as to hinder
enormous districts from remaining in a swamped and saturated condition,
given up to the bogs, which even at the present time are said to cover
nearly one-sixth of its surface.

This superfluity of bogs seems always in earlier times to have been
expeditiously set down by all historians and agriculturists as part of
the general depravity of the Irish native, who had allowed his good
lands,--doubtless for his own mischievous pleasure--to run to waste;
bogs being then supposed to differ from other lands only so far as they
were made "waste and barren by superfluous moisture." About the middle
of last century it began to be perceived that this view of the matter