Irish commoners, either hurried in high hopes to London, or retired
disgusted and in despair to their houses in the country. Immediately,
in Dublin, commerce rose into the vacated seats of rank; wealth rose
into the place of birth. New faces and new equipages appeared: people,
who had never been heard of before, started into notice, pushed
themselves forward, not scrupling to elbow their way even at the
castle; and they were presented to my lord-lieutenant and to my
lady-lieutenant; for their excellencies might have played their
vice-regal parts to empty benches, had they not admitted such
persons for the moment to fill their court. Those of former times,
of hereditary pretensions and high-bred minds and manners, were
scandalized at all this; and they complained with justice, that the
whole _tone_ of society was altered; that the decorum, elegance,
polish, and charm of society was gone. And I, among the rest," said
Sir James, "felt and deplored their change. But, now it's all over, we
may acknowledge, that, perhaps, even those things which we felt most
disagreeable at the time were productive of eventual benefit.

"Formerly, a few families had set the fashion. From time immemorial
every thing had, in Dublin, been submitted to their hereditary
authority; and conversation, though it had been rendered polite by
their example, was, at the same time, limited within narrow bounds.
Young people, educated upon a more enlarged plan, in time grew up;
and, no authority or fashion forbidding it, necessarily rose to their
just place, and enjoyed their due influence in society. The want of
manners, joined to the want of knowledge, in the _nouveaux riches_,
created universal disgust: they were compelled, some by ridicule, some
by bankruptcies, to fall back into their former places, from which
they could never more emerge. In the mean time, some of the Irish
nobility and gentry, who had been living at an unusual expense in