Excerpt from The Last Earl of Desmond, Vol. 2 of 2: A Historical Romance of 1599-1603 Writers of Romance are much addicted to the institution of comparisons between the course of dark waters and the flow of dark thoughts. Their ideas on this subject are calculated to make melancholy people run and drown themselves. Dickens is the deuce at this kind of writing, and Sir Bulwer Lytton is almost as bad. But, notwithstanding these bad examples, if the figure of a flowing river were not as common as ditch-water, I should have attempted a comparison between this dark river and.the darker thoughts which were passing through John Nugent's mind, as he looked down upon it. What! Institute a comparison between the most beautiful river in Ireland, and the most-blood thirsty man in Munster? Preposterous! I am astonished at you. You are worse than Dickens, and his Thames. The most beautiful reaches of his Blackwater, are between Mallow and Youghal, where it termi nates. Here it flows. Silently, slowly, and darkly, between over-hanging trees, as if meditating suicide, by casting itself into the sea. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.