in 1690, each moiety was valued at 1313 l. 14 s. 4-1/2 d.  Gradually as the lands were reclaimed by the tenants, the rental rose.  In 1769 the Bath estate produced 3,000 l., and the Shirley estate 5,000 l.  The total of 8,000 l. per annum, from this once wild and barren tract, was paid by middlemen.  The natives had not been rooted out, and during the eighteenth century these sub-tenants multiplied rapidly.  According to the census in 1841 the population of the barony exceeded 44,000 souls, and they contributed by their industry, to the two absentee proprietors, the enormous annual revenue of 40,000 l., towards the production of which it does not appear that either of them, or any person for them, ever invested a shilling.

Mr. S. Trench was amazed to find ’more than one human being for every Irish acre of land in the barony, and nearly one human being for every 1 l. valuation per annum of the land.’  The two estates join in the town of Carrickmacross.  When Mr. Trench arrived there, March 30, 1843, to commence his duties as Mr. Shirley’s agent, he learned that the sudden death of the late agent in the court-house of Monaghan had been celebrated that night by fires on almost every hill on the estate, ’and over a district of upwards of 20,000 acres there was scarcely a mile without a bonfire blazing in manifestation of joy at his decease.’  Mr. Trench says, the tenants considered themselves ground down to the last point by the late agent.  As he relates the circumstances, the people would seem to be a very savage race; and he gives other more startling illustrations to the same effect as he proceeds.  But here, as elsewhere, he does not state all the facts, while those he does state are most artistically dressed up for sensational effect, Mr. Trench himself being always the hero, always acting magnificently, appearing at the right place and at the right moment to prevent some tremendous calamity, otherwise inevitable, and by some mysterious personal influence subduing lawless masses, so that by a sudden impulse, their murderous rage is converted into admiration, if not adoration.  Like the hearers of Herod or of St. Paul, when he flung the viper off his hand, they are ready to cry out, ‘He is a god, and not a man.’  Of course he, as a Christian gentleman, was always ‘greatly shocked,’ when these poor wretches offered him petitions on their knees.  Still he relates every case of the kind with extraordinary unction, and with a picturesqueness of situation and detail so stagey that it should make Mr. Boucicault’s mouth water, and excite the envy of Miss Braddon.  Not even she can exceed the author of ‘Realities of Irish Life,’ in prolonging painful suspense, in piling up the agony, in accumulating horrors, in throwing strong lights on one side of the picture and casting deep shade on the other.