BARON’S COURT, Thursday, Feb. 9.—­Among a batch of letters received this morning I find one from a most estimable and accomplished priest in the West of Ireland, to whom I wrote from Dublin announcing my intention of visiting the counties of Clare and Kerry.  “I shall be very glad,” he says, “to learn that no evil hath befallen you during your visit to that solitary plague-spot, where dwell the disgraceful and degraded ‘Moonlighters.’  Would not ‘martial law,’ if applied to that particular spot, suffice to stamp out, these-insensate pests of society?” This language, strong, but not too strong in view of the hideous murder last week near Lixnaw of a farmer in the presence of his daughter for the atrocious crime of taking a farm “boycotted” by the National League, shows that the open alliance between this organisation and the criminal classes in certain parts of Ireland is beginning (not a day too soon) to arouse the better order of priests in Ireland to the peril of playing with edged tools.  For my correspondent is not only a priest, but a Nationalist.  I have sent him in reply a letter received by me, also to-day, touching the conduct in connection with the Lixnaw murder of a priest, a curate, I think, comparatively new to the place, who, standing by the corpse of the murdered man, endeavoured, so my informant states, to make his unfortunate daughter give up the names of the murderers, the effect of which would have been to put them on their guard, and “under the protection of that public conspiracy of silence, which is the shield of all such criminals in these parts!” Baron’s Court is a very large, stately mansion, lacking elevation perhaps like Blenheim, but imposing by its mass and the area it covers.  It was rebuilt almost entirely by the late Duke of Abercorn, who also made immense plantations here which cover the country for miles around.  His grandfather, the handsome Marquis of the days of the Prince Regent, came here a great deal towards the end of his life, but did little towards making the mansion worthy of its site.  Two very good portraits of him here show that he deserved his reputation as the finest-looking man of his day, a reputation attested by a diamond ring, the history of which is still preserved in the family.  A fine though irregular pearl given by Philip of Spain to his hapless spouse, Mary Tudor, is another of the heirlooms of Baron’s Court; but the ring and the note left by Mary Stuart to Claud Hamilton, Lord Paisley, mysteriously disappeared during the long minority of the late Duke under the trusteeship of the fourth Earl of Aberdeen, and have since, it is said, come into the possession of the Duke of Hamilton.

Of the three castles given to Lord Claud Hamilton by James I., to enable him to hold this country, one which stood at Strabaue has disappeared, the memory of it surviving only in the name of Castle Street in that town.  The ivy-clad ruins of another adorn a height in this beautiful park.  They are “bosomed high in tufted trees,” and overlook one of three most lovely lakes, stretching in a shining chain through the length of the demesne.