Volume 26 — VOL. XXVI., No. 156.—MARCH, 1878.

IRELAND IN 1878.

I.

A history of Ireland still remains to be written; nor has there been even an attempt to collect some of the chief materials for such a work. Ten centuries of almost continuous conflict since the Danish incursions, or seven since the Anglo-Norman settlement and the destruction or dispersion of the national archives, are sufficient to account for the absence of any full, authentic, or valuable Irish history. From Giraldus Cambrensis in the twelfth century to Froude in our day, there have never been wanting subsidized, and even able, writers to defame and revile the native population and laud the English rule in Ireland. Nor, on the other hand, has there been any lack of enthusiasts whose patriotism, more ardent than their erudition is profound or exact, is ever ready to excuse or defend the natives and execrate the Anglo-Norman and Saxon tyrants and despoilers. Even in Ireland it is difficult to obtain reliable information regarding the country; while 1420outside of it such aim is impossible of attainment. The dispersion of the Irish race during the last thirty years has been greater in extent and over a larger area of the globe than any exodus of humanity known to history. These millions have carried the traditions of their country’s wrongs, and the dismal tales of the misgovernment of Ireland, to the uttermost ends of the earth, exaggerating, perhaps, the oppression of their persecutors, and depicting in touching sympathy the glowing virtues of the victims. The largest contingent of this Irish emigration has enriched the United States of America, where partiality has culminated in alternate praise and censure of the Irish race. The circumstances under which most of these people reached the American shores were truly tragic and appalling, and are well-nigh forgotten by the older portion of the generation now passing away.

The estimated population of Ireland in 1845 was 8,295,061, which made it then one of the most densely 1421peopled countries in Europe. In the autumn of that year the potato crop, one of the chief products of the country and the staple food of three-fifths of the people, failed, involving a loss estimated by Mr. Labouchere, the British minister, of eighty million dollars, or sixteen millions sterling. This failure in 1845 was followed by successive blights of the potato-crop in 1846 and subsequent years, causing what is called the Irish famine, and with it the great emigration, which brought an increase of millions of citizens to the United States. There had been an Irish immigration in America from the earliest days of the colony—to Maryland, for example, in the seventeenth century; but the Irish famine of 1845–49 marks the opening of the great influx of Irish into the United States and Canada.

We propose to consider the social and industrial condition and the political and religious prospects of Ireland in 1878, making the eve of the famine, in 1845, the basis of comparison. We write from Ireland, with the amplest knowledge of our subject, and, as we hope, having no object in view save a full and clear statement of the main facts necessary for its elucidation. We have travelled over every province, every county, every parish, every locality of its soil; are intimate with every phase of its history and every section of its population, and feel every throb of its national life. Yet we invite the fullest criticism of our attempt to discuss the present condition of Ireland from a scientific, a truthful, and an impartial stand-point. Nowhere out of Ireland is such discussion more desirable or more difficult than in the United States. The republic contains about the 1422same number of Irish, by birth or by descent, that remain in the old country. The emigrants of the famine period left under dire pressure, the origin of which is not fully understood abroad. In the forty-four years 1801–1845 the population of Ireland increased from 5,216,329 to 8,295,061, or by 3,078,732 persons—an increase of fifty-nine per cent. Emigration was throughout that period inconsiderable; in the decade 1831–41 it was only 403,459, or about 40,000 a year; in the next four years it fell to little over half that average; while in the year 1843, when O’Connell led the great agitation for repeal of the Union, only 13,026 persons left the country, being the lowest on record. Although the potato blight appeared in 1845, it was not until 1847 that the horrors of the famine and of emigration assumed their most awful aspect. In the single year 1847, that of O’Connell’s death, there was a loss of population of 262,574, or three per cent., by the conjoint action of emigration and the excess of deaths over births; while in the next four years the aggregate decrease reached 1,510,801 persons—little short of nineteen per cent. of the whole population. The following table exhibits the estimated population at the middle of the year relating to our inquiry:

DECREASE

YEAR POPULATION PERSONS PER CENT.

1845 8,295,061 —— ——

1846 8,287,848 7,213 0.09

1847 8,025,274 262,574 3.1

1848 7,639,800 385,474 4.3

1849 7,256,314 383,486 5.0

1850 6,877,549 378,765 5.1

1851 6,514,473 363,076 5.1

1861 5,778,415 736,058 11.3

1871 5,395,007 383,408 6.6

1875 5,309,494 65,513 1.0

1876 5,321,618 —— ——

1877 5,338,906 —— ——

1423Over the whole period from 1845 to 1875 population decreased, but the rate of decline diminished after 1851. In the thirty years there was a loss of 2,973,443—nearly 100,000 annually, or thirty-six per cent. of the inhabitants. The year 1876 is memorable as the starting-point of reactionary improvement. For the first time during a generation emigration has so diminished that the natural increase of births over deaths added 10,352 to the population in 1876, and 17,288 in 1877. Increase must henceforth be the normal law of population, but it is never again likely to reach the rate it attained in the thirty years 1801–31, when it expanded about fourteen per cent. each decade, or an increase of nearly one in seven every ten years.

We are now to inquire into the main causes of these terrible calamities, strange and conflicting explanations of which are advanced by public writers in the United States and other countries. One flippant, fertile, and accepted theory is the peculiar proneness of the Irish to contention and disunion—a theory generally credited as sound by those ignorant of history or those prejudiced against the Irish race. We shall adduce a few broad and suggestive facts in disproof of this theory. Can any nation exhibit a nobler proof of unity than the Brehon laws, or Seanchus Mor, which prevailed universally in Ireland for centuries before the Christian era, until revised by St. Patrick and the Christian kings, and which continued in force throughout the country, save the small patch called the Pale, until the seventeenth century, while the traditions and principles of that code yet influence 1424the people after a lapse of twenty to five-and-twenty centuries? And so as regards the tenacity with which, for ages, the people have adhered to the use of the Gaelic or native tongue, still spoken by little short of a million of the inhabitants, after the Greeks, the Romans, the French, the Spaniards, the Britons, and the Scotch have mainly abandoned the primitive tongues of their ancestors. All pagan Ireland was converted to Christianity by one man—an example of unity and docility without parallel in the history of the human race. Ireland, like France, England, and other countries, was ravaged by the Danish and Norse invaders, yet the Irish defeated and expelled them in 1014, long before the Gauls or the Saxons had banished or crushed them in Normandy or in England. Towards the close of the twelfth century the Anglo-Normans found partial footing in Ireland, yet for seven hundred years the native race have opposed their rule, and oppose it to-day—an example of unity and persistency unsurpassed in the world. The English, the Scotch, and most of the nations in the north and northwest of Europe abandoned their ancient faith and accepted the Protestant Reformation, at the bidding of their sovereigns, in the sixteenth century; while Catholic Ireland, in defiance of penal laws that plundered property, denied education, reduced the people almost to barbarism, and sent them to the scaffold for adherence to their church, has remained, through centuries of suffering, loyal to conscience, and by unity, fidelity, and perseverance has effected the overthrow of the Protestant Church Establishment 1425of the Tudors. Proud and great memories these for the Irish nation—memories sufficient to disprove the shallow and unfounded charge that to disunion, peculiar to their race, must be attributed the sad and chequered history of the country. While if we turn to all other kingdoms at corresponding periods, even to the present time, we find analogous internal strife and domestic political factions as numerous and as intense as any in Ireland. England, Scotland, the several British colonies, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Holland, and the United States were quite as much torn by internal dissension as Ireland, and are so at the present day; so that this hypothesis is wholly unfounded and quite inadequate to account for the disastrous decadence, or at least want of progress, of Ireland, compared in many respects with other countries.

The causes of Irish discontent and comparative social backwardness are remote, chronic, and cumulative. From the arrival of the Anglo-Normans in 1169 to the defeat of the Irish in the Williamite war, near the close of the seventeenth century, one clear purpose was kept in view by the aliens—the extirpation of the natives from ownership and even occupancy of the soil. Attainders, escheatments, plantations, transplantations, and settlements—all had the same purpose. Penal Laws, the Court of Wards, and dire persecution had driven the Catholic natives from proprietorship, and almost from occupancy, of the soil. Cupidity led many Cromwellian and planter landlords to baffle the Penal Laws and pocket the higher rents offered by popish recusants. Protestants of the humbler classes 1426complained that the protection promised and due to them as of right in the English interest was denied and defeated by the planter and palatine landlords in preferring popish tenants whose lower standard of living and degraded social caste enabled them to pay a higher rent than Protestant tenants, who claimed, by right of class, a better mode of living. Thus robbed and deprived of their estates, denied leases, and rackrented by middlemen and others, the mass of the Irish people before the famine were mere squatters on the soil, neither owners nor, in any true sense, occupiers.

Catholics were emancipated in 1829 and rendered admissible to almost all the offices in the state; they obtained an instalment of educational concession in 1831, and a modification of the grinding oppression of the tithe system and the Protestant Church Establishment a few years afterwards; a Poor Law, directed by a London board, was passed in 1838, and corporate reform was granted in 1840; but these and other remedial measures, in operation for a few years, could effect little towards the elevation of a people impoverished and degraded by centuries of foreign and crushing legislation.

From an economic and industrial stand-point the condition of Catholics, in relation to land, was the chief cause of the wretchedness of the country. The agricultural laborers were in the lowest social state in Europe, scarcely excepting the Russian serfs. Employment was precarious and rarely secured a higher average wages than sixpence to eightpence a day, or scarcely a dollar a week. From Connaught a large number went to 1427England for some weeks at the hay, corn, and potato harvests, where they earned what paid the rent of the cabin and the potato-plot; while many of the cotters and small farmers were little better in position. A few facts from the census of 1841 and 1851 will suffice to illustrate the large number and the terrible fate of these classes, as indicated by the grades of house accommodation before and after the famine:

1841. 1851.

HOUSE ACCOMMODATION. HOUSES PER CENT. HOUSES PER CENT.

First class 31,333 2.1 39,370 3.3

Second class 241,664 16.4 292,280 24.3

Third class 574,386 39.0 588,440 48.9

Fourth (cabin) class 625,356 42.5 284,229 23.5

Total 1,472,739 100.0 1,204,319 100.0

Here we see that, seemingly in ten but really in five years, no less than 341,127 fourth-class houses—mud, sod, or stone, thatched cabins with only a single apartment—were swept away, inhabited by that number of families, which included about 1,800,000 persons; while the table of population above given shows that in these years the estimated decrease was 1,780,588—a striking concurrence between both. Another proof as regards the class swept away is found in the following table of agricultural holdings, grouped by extent, in 1841 and 1851:

HOLDINGS. 1841. 1851.

Not exceeding one acre Not known. 37,728

One to five acres 310,436 88,083

Five to fifteen acres 252,799 191,854

Fifteen to thirty acres 79,342 141,311

Above thirty acres 48,625 149,090

Total 691,202 608,066

1428Excluding the very large number of holdings under an acre not ascertained in 1841, we find the disappearance in that decade, or rather in half of it, of 222,353 tenements between one and five acres, which represents a diminished population of 1,200,000 persons. The decrease of 60,945, in the tenements from five to fifteen acres, representing about 320,000 people, is portion of this same subject. If we now turn to another head of evidence we find that the population was thinned from the least educated classes. The census of 1841 returned fifty-three per cent. of the whole population, aged five years and upwards, as illiterate, being unable to read or write, while the return for 1851 showed a decrease to forty-seven per cent.; and turning to the great decrease in the percentage of the Irish-speaking population between 1841 and 1851, we find similar results. Lastly, the creed census demands attention.

The first taken in Ireland was that by the Royal Commission of Public Instruction in 1834, when, of a population of 7,954,100, it was found there were 6,436,000, or 80.9 per cent., Catholics; while the followers of the intruded Anglican Church, established for three centuries, numbered only 853,160, or 10.7 per cent. The adherents of the Scotch Presbyterian Church, endowed by the state, though not established, 643,058, or 8.1 per cent.; and all other Protestant dissenters mustered only 21,822 or 0.3 per cent. Between 1834 and 1845, when the potato blight first appeared, the population had increased from 7,954,100 to 8,295,061, during which period of eleven years there are 1429ample evidences to prove that the Catholic element underwent a larger increase than the Protestant, so that we may fairly assume the whole population in 1845 to have been thus composed:

PER CENT.

Catholics 6,760,475 81.5

Protestants 1,534,586 18.5

———— ——

Total 8,295,061 100.

These millions of Catholics, emancipated only sixteen years, were the descendants of the natives who for over six centuries had battled against English domination; whose estates and lands had been wrested from them and given to soldiers and adventurers from England and Scotland—“the scum of both nations”; whose ancient church had been despoiled of her property; to whom education was denied and the profession of their faith made penal; whose manufacturing industries were suppressed by English laws; who were excluded from all offices, civil and military, and from all social rank and distinction, and denied not alone a seat in Parliament for 137 years, 1692 to 1829, but from 1727 to 1793, a period of 66 years, the right to vote.

Such is a broad outline of the main facts concerning the population of Ireland in 1845, as to quantity and quality. We must, however, supplement these by a few particulars.

From one-third to one-half the rental of the kingdom went to absentee and alien landlords, who spent it in England or on the Continent. The imperial taxes borne by Ireland were in excess of her capacity and in violation of the articles of the Act of Union. All the state departments had their headquarters in London, while Ireland 1430had slender share either in the appropriating or the enjoyment of those taxes. The local taxation, through grand jury and other cess, was enormous, but levied and appropriated by the country gentry, all predominantly Protestant. The county officers, the grand jury, the jail, the lunatic asylum, infirmary, and poor-law union boards were almost exclusively Protestant. The corporations, reformed by statute in 1840, were still Protestant. One or two Catholic judges had reached the bench, as O’Loghlen, and many Catholics were pressing to the front at the bar and in medicine, while in all the professions, in trade, and in commerce Catholic influence was beginning to be felt. Catholics had, it is true, only trifling share in the administration of the government and the laws. They had little representation in the magistracy or on the grand juries; while jury-packing was the normal condition of the administration of justice. The Orange system, stimulated by the triumph of Catholic emancipation, was rampant and aggressive at the prospect of social equality.

Yet, amidst such disadvantages, Ireland, in the two or three years before the famine, presented a moral and political spectacle such as the modern world had never witnessed. O’Connell, the greatest political leader of this century, led the millions of Irish people in their demand for justice to Ireland. He claimed the restoration of the legislative independence of Ireland as it existed from 1782 to 1801, or a repeal of the Act of Union. His efforts towards that object, the millions who rose to support him, and the moral, intellectual, and national 1431sympathy that his demand elicited, are perfectly well known. The famine appeared in 1845 and blasted the whole agitation, while O’Connell died at Genoa, May 15, 1847, when the country that he wildly, passionately loved was in the throes of the famine, the horrors of which O’Connell vainly endeavored to avert by appeals for substantial relief to the British government. The present prime minister of England, the Earl of Beaconsfield, declared in the House of Commons, in reference to Ireland, on the opening of the famine, that for a country with an absentee proprietary, an alien established church, and a population starving or fleeing the country, most Englishmen can see but one remedy, and that revolution.

The great Irish famine, contrary to popular opinion, was exceeded by many visitations of the kind in India and elsewhere, and perhaps equalled by some that had occurred even in Ireland, so far as extent of mortality is concerned; but, measured by the aggregate of its social and economic effects, no such disaster is recorded in history. The mortality was considerably less than was supposed—that is, of deaths caused directly by starvation, suffering, and sickness arising out of the famine. Dysentery, diarrhœa, fever, cholera—all supervened. Workhouse accommodation failed, notwithstanding the utilization, as auxiliary houses, of nearly all the idle and abandoned stores in cities and towns, and of large numbers of rural mansions deserted by the country gentry. All the habits, feelings, and traditions of the Irish nation were opposed to a poor-law. Passed in 1838, although a poor-law had 1432been in operation in England from 1601, it was only in 1847, the third year of the famine, that the last of the 131 Irish workhouses was opened, in Clifden, Connemara, and then by mandamus of the Queen’s Bench. In 1844, the year before the appearance of the potato blight, there were only 113 workhouses open, with an aggregate of 105,358 paupers relieved that year at an expense of $1,085,336. In 1847 the number relieved in the workhouses, auxiliaries included, was 417,139, or nearly fourfold, while the expenditure was $3,214,744, or threefold. The entire Poor-Law Act and the workhouse system utterly broke down under pressure of the mass of destitution. That act was administered from Somerset House, London, under an English commission, from 1838 to 1847. All the leading officers, assistant commissioners, and others were sent from England to carry out a law amongst a people of whose feelings and social circumstances they were thoroughly ignorant, and to their race and faith were totally opposed. That act expressly denied out-door relief, in any form or towards any destitution, how acute soever, in Ireland; while out-door relief was the general and normal form of poor relief in England for centuries, and continues so at present. The law was framed so as to throw the whole influence of its administration into the hands of the landlords and magistracy, or their agents, the vast majority of whom were planters and Cromwellians, hostile in faith and feeling to the destitute classes. A temporary Poor Relief Extension Act, passed June 8, 1847, was necessitated, or the destitute classes must have 1433seized in self-defence the cattle, corn, and other edibles abounding in the country to prevent starvation. Out-door relief was permitted, but should be administered solely in food; while the able-bodied recipients were subjected to severe tests of stone-breaking or other unproductive labor. The tenth section of this act was the infamous quarter-acre clause, which declared that,

“If any person so occupying more than the quarter of a statute acre (less than thirty-five yards square) shall apply for relief, or if any person on his behalf shall apply for relief, it shall not be lawful for any Board of Guardians to grant such relief, within or without the workhouse, to any such person.”

This horrible clause gave the alternative of death or the surrender of their cabins, cottages, and small farms to the tens, the hundreds of thousands who occupied the humbler allotments and homesteads in Ireland. If they refused to surrender possession to the landlord, they perished, relief being denied them; while if they yielded, the crowded workhouse, with a weekly mortality of twenty-five in every one thousand inmates, precipitated them from the trap-coffin, often unshrived and always unshrouded, into the common fosse without a semblance of Christian burial. As an adjunct to the quarter-acre clause, and further to effect the clearance of the mass of the laboring and industrious classes, urban as well as rural, occupiers rated at under twenty-five dollars who surrendered their holdings, whether held on lease or otherwise, to their landlords, were, with their families, assisted to emigrate, two-thirds of the expenses of the same to be borne on the rates of the electoral division, the other third by 1434the landlord. And to complete and give effect to these provisions for the death or the extermination of the population, the landlords were secured, by a radical change in the act of 1838, a monopoly in the whole administration of relief. Under that act each Board of Guardians consisted of three-fourths elected members and one-fourth ex-officio members, being magistrates resident in the union; whereas, by an amendment introduced into the act of 1847 the proportion of ex-officio members is doubled, being increased from one-fourth to one-half the whole strength of the board. With a full moiety of the members of the landlord class, the territorial influence through the multiple vote, which gives rated property from one to six votes, and also voting by proxy, the land magnates are always able to command, if not a majority, at least a large number, of seats amongst the elected guardians, and thus secure dominance in the administration of the whole poor-law.

Under the original act of 1838 the incidence of the poor’s rate was divided equally between the occupier and the owner, while occupiers whose tenements were below twenty-five dollars annual valuation were exempt, the rate being charged to the landlord; and, moreover, a clause declared that any contract made between owner and occupier which would release the former from liability to a moiety of the poor’s rate was null and void. The landlord added, of course, the rates to the rent, save in the case of the small number of tenants holding under lease, so that the whole cost of relief fell on the occupier; while a clause in the Poor-Law Amendment Act passed in 1849 repealed 1435the annulling provision of the act of 1838, and legalized the enabling power of the tenant to contract himself, under compulsion, out of the protection secured to him that property should bear a moiety of the cost of poor relief. We may mention that the savage quarter-acre clause continued in operation from 1847 until partially repealed in 1862, a period of fifteen years, during which it quenched many a hearth, dismantled thousands of roof-trees, and sent more than a million of the Irish race to the grave or as scattered exiles over the face of the globe. In 1862, its fell purpose fulfilled, it was partially repealed, to the extent that destitute persons, although occupiers of a quarter of an acre of land, may be relieved, but in the workhouse only; so that still a cotter with forty perches of a garden, or a small farmer, suffering under temporary distress from failure of crop, sickness, or accident, must either surrender his little holding and enter the workhouse, or starve under the scheme of legal charity devised to extirpate the Irish from the soil of which their ancestors had been robbed through ages.

We write fact and law, and repudiate all but sober statement in our attempt to illustrate the present position of the Irish people. In the most acute throes of the famine, July 22, 1847, an act was passed for the punishment of vagrants and persons offending against the laws in force for the relief of the poor in Ireland—an act worthy of the worst days of Nero or Diocletian. Let us inquire what was the condition of the country when this act was passed. At the end of February that year there were 116,321 inmates in receipt of relief in the 1436workhouses, and in July there were 10,000 cases of fever, apart from other terrible diseases, in those institutions, the mortality being enormous. Under the Temporary Relief Act there were issued, July 3, rations equal to the support of 3,020,712 persons. Yet the Vagrant Act inflicted imprisonment in a common jail and hard labor for a month upon any person “placing himself in any public place, street, highway, court, or passage to beg or gather alms,” with the same punishment for removing from one poor-law union, or even one electoral division, to another for the purpose of relief. More than half the population were then in receipt of relief, a vast portion of them being engaged upon relief works, which necessitated the migration to considerable distances of the male heads of families. Yet a clause in this act imposed imprisonment for three months, with hard labor, for desertion or wilful neglect of a family by its head—desertion that might have arisen from removal for some miles to another union or electoral division, in order to provide food for them.

Ireland was one uncovered lazar-house in 1847. We write from vivid and painful remembrance of personal travel of 5,000 to 10,000 miles yearly, in an official capacity, over the most afflicted of the famine-stricken districts, from Waterford round to Sligo, during that and subsequent years up to 1858. We visited every workhouse, every auxiliary, every fever hospital, every relief depot, every soup-kitchen, every centre of public works, by way of relief, every missionary station for proselytizing purposes, every ragged-school, every jail, and made a minute personal survey of the most distressed localities in 1437the south and west of Ireland in 1847 and throughout the famine. Holding an important commission from the government, we had access to and command of sources of reliable information open to few, while we had personal communication with the chief officers of several public departments that enabled us to understand thoroughly the precise condition of the suffering classes throughout the whole period of acute distress in Ireland. Charged, unsolicited, by the government with a special inquiry connected with the condition of the destitute and criminal classes which embraced the whole kingdom, owing to experience acquired during the famine period, we visited officially every county, every diocese, every poor-law union, every parish in Ireland, and willingly place the results of that experience before the readers of The Catholic World. The history of the famine is yet to be written, and, if not soon prepared, the records of personal experience will be lost, and a reliable account of it rendered impossible. When political factions in the United States traduce the Irish race, and when factions in the several British colonies do likewise, as regards Irish immigrants, they do so ignorant, it is to be hoped, of the precise circumstances under which these immigrants reached those countries during pressure of the famine. We have treated the amount of decline of population in Ireland, and the social quality of that decline, in this article. The decrease of population directly through the famine is, as we have said, exaggerated. The census commissioners of 1851 set down the deaths from extraordinary causes, between 1841 and 14381851, or rather from 1845, as follows:

Deaths from fever 222,029

Deaths from dissentery and diarrhœa 134,355

Deaths from cholera 35,989

Deaths from starvation 21,770

———

Total 414,143

These figures, sad and enormous as they are, we are prepared to show are an entire understatement of the true facts of the case. The whole condition of society below the middle classes was disorganized and demoralized. Panic and paralysis seized the entire population. The dependent perished at home or in the workhouses, while those with means to emigrate fled the country. Flying from famine, fever, and pestilence, these reluctant emigrants, numbers of whom perished before settlement, have helped to lay the foundation of the prosperity of the United States and of the British colonies. The author of the Record of the O’Connell Centenary, describing the character of the early Irish emigrants, says, with great truth and force:

“Snatched from rough rural labor, little skilled in handicraft, a very large number wholly illiterate, and many unable to speak any tongue save the native Gaelic; nearly half of them females, without that cultured training in domestic service required by other countries; a heavy, helpless juvenile element hanging on them; intensely clannish, yet removed from those tribal and religious standards of morality and social life which powerfully influence the Irish at home; memory saddened with the recollection of the roofless cabin and the loved little ancestral farm lost for ever, the dead who had been starved at home or fell in fever, the dear relatives who sought the shelter of the workhouse, but through whose trap-coffin they were precipitated into the famine fosse without shroud or requiem; and the uncertainty of despair as to the living remnant of the 1439family left behind—agonized by such feelings, the millions were hastily deported on the shores of America, Australia, and New Zealand, objects of sympathy and affection to the generous, of pity to the benevolent, of alarm and horror to the timid, of contempt to the misanthropic, and of scorn and hatred to the enemies of the race and faith of the Irish nation. Never before was spectacle so sad, so gigantic, so appalling submitted to the contemplation of humanity; the history of Ireland was dramatized throughout Christendom, and its tragic story personated on every hospitable shore on both hemispheres, when Moore’s prediction was literally and amply fulfilled:

“‘The stranger shall hear thy lament on his plain;

The sigh of thy harp shall be sent o’er the deep.’”

We have given an outline sketch of the condition of Ireland just before and in the early stages of the famine; in our next we shall endeavor to trace what progress she has made from that sad period to her present improved position in 1878.

Copyright: Rev. I. T. Hecker. 1878.

THE BLESSED VIRGIN.

Like chants which fade yet linger still to bless,

While float their formless notes of joy or dole,

So thought doth grieve for words beyond control,

That to itself it may thy charms confess,

And tell each grace with joyous eagerness,

As did the morning stars their anthems roll,

Or as the angels greet a ransom’d soul.

Such tongues alone could paint the loveliness

Which o’er thy face in sad, sweet beauty smiled;

As though in unseen wingings, ever near,

The Dove had coo’d a legend in thine ear

Of some rare tenderness to grief beguiled—

Perchance of love which bought redemption dear,

With all its cost of sorrow to thy Child.

1440

AMONG THE TRANSLATORS.

VIRGIL AND HORACE—III.

The work of translation seems in an odd way to enlist that mimetic impulse which is so strong an element of human nature, and which is really at the bottom of so much of human rivalry. To wish to do as much as others in any given line of effort is but an after-thought, a secondary motion of the mind; the initial instinct is to do the same as they. That men do not rest at this; that they are not content with merely duplicating what they see done about them, like the late lamented Mr. Pongo; that they are for ever seeking “to better their instruction,” is due to that further instinctive yearning for perfection which helps to differentiate them from Mr. Pongo, and interferes so sadly with many most ingenious and scientific schemes for recreating the universe without a Creator. All literatures, it may be said, all poets, begin with translation—that is, with imitation of some other literature or poet. Alcæus and Sophron, no doubt, are but Horace and Theocritus to the unknown who went before them; Homer is first, doubtless, only because we know not the greater than Homer—rapt from us by the irrevocable years—whom Homer may have copied, as Virgil copied Homer.

This, however, is a law of literature which was known as long ago as the days of Solomon, at least. What is not so obvious, and even more curious as well as more to the present point, is why translators under certain conditions should be so fond of repeating one another in regard to any particular bit of work.

1441For a generation or so some one of the poets who are the favorite objects of the translator’s zeal will be neglected and seemingly forgotten. Then some day appears a version which attracts attention and gets talked of, and, presto! a dozen pens are in eager chase to rival or surpass it. Now it is Homer which is thus brought into notice, and we have Professor Newman, Lord Derby, Mr. Wright, Mr. Worsley, Mr. Dart, Professor Blackie, Mr. Bryant—what muse shall catalogue the host?—giving us in quick succession and in every kind of metre their versions of the Iliad or Odyssey, or both? Again it is Virgil, and within a brief interval Professor Conington, Mr. Morris, and Mr. Cranch have done the Æneid into English. Or once more Horace sways the hour, and in a twinkling or thereabouts a dozen translations of the Odes are smoking hot from the press on the critic’s table, and bewildering him to choose among their various merits. Within the last half-century, nay, within the last twenty-five years, we have seen just this revolution. Is it because our own is so peculiarly one of those transitional periods in the history of a literature which are most favorable to translation—indeed, most provocative of it; one of those intervals when the national imagination is, as it were, lying fallow after the exhaustion of some great creative epoch, and intellectual effort takes chiefly the form of criticism, which in one sense translation is? Well, such generalizations are as perilous as they are fascinating 1442and we must not yield to them too rashly. In this case, if we did yield, we should be told, no doubt, that translation was no more a peculiarity of a transitional period than of a creative one; that the notion of such divisions in the history of a literature is preposterous and but another invention of the arch-enemy, like comparative philology and the Eastern question, to set the mildest and wisest of sages—even ourselves, beloved reader—thirsting for each other’s blood; or that, finally, an epoch which has produced Tennyson and Browning, De Vere and Arnold, Swinburne, Morris, and Rossetti, and—let nothing tempt us back to our own side of the Atlantic, where poets grow like pumpkins, big and little, in every garden patch; yet surely, if originality goes for anything, we may add—Tupper—that a time so prolific of poetic genius is not to be counted a transitional period at all.

This, or something like it, we should no doubt hear, if we ventured upon putting forth as our own the enticing proposition we have but modestly thrown out as a suggestion to the reader. And if we were not withheld by that providential want of time and opportunity which so often saves us from our rasher selves, we should no doubt go on to make the venture even now: to assert that, in spite of Tennyson and Browning, in spite even of Matthew Arnold—in one sense a truer voice of his time than either of them—in spite of the pagan and mediæval renaissance piloted by that wonderfully clever coterie of the Rossettis, the present can in no sense be called a creative epoch in our literature, as we call creative the two epochs of which Shakspeare and Wordsworth are, broadly speaking, the representative names—representative, 1443however, in different ways and in widely different degrees; that it is, on the contrary, a true transitional period, as the period of Pope and Dryden was transitional, and for analogous reasons; and that, because it is so, the art of translation flourishes now as then. Nor should we forget, in saying this, the numerous translations which marked the Elizabethan era. But it is to be noted that while all, or nearly all, the then extant classics were turned into English before the close of the Elizabethan era, translations of any one of them were not repeated, and precisely for this reason: that the age, being a creative epoch, made its main effort in the direction of knowledge, and not of criticism—sought to acquire ideas, and not to arrange them, as was the case with the translating periods which came after it. Then, too, it was the virtual beginning of our literature, when translation, as we have said, came natural to it. Chaucer two hundred years before was a creative poet, if the term may be used, in a time that was not creative, a time that was not his, a time whose sluggishness not even his pregnant genius could inform; Chaucer was the glad premature swallow of a lingering, long-delaying spring, whose settled sunshine came to us only with Spenser’s later bird-song,

“Preluding those melodious bursts that fill

The spacious times of great Elizabeth

With sounds that echo still.”

Milton may be said to have concluded, as Spenser preluded, that mighty time, without fairly belonging to it. They belonged rather to each other. “Milton has owned to me,” says Dryden, “that his original was Spenser.” They were the epilogue and the prologue of that mighty opening chorus of our literature, 1444in which the translators, too, had their parts, but only as prompters to the great singers, to help them to add to their native melody here and there some sweetness of a foreign note.

The time of critical translation, of translation for its own sake, as an art, came in only with Dryden—perhaps, on the whole, the greatest of the transition poets. Then, too, translators began first to repeat each other’s work. Before the year 1580 most of the classic poets had been translated into English verse. They were not duplicated, because, as we have said, the time wanted first of all the knowledge of them, and it was not fastidious as to the shape in which it came. For a hundred years after its appearance Phaer’s version of the Æneid had no rival. Then came Vicars’, only to disappear almost as quickly. Doubly lapped in lead, it sank at once in that Stygian pool where Dulness tries the weight of her favorites, and there it has since remained, like Prospero’s book and staff, drowned

“Deeper than did ever plummet sound.”

Undeterred by this untoward fate, John Ogilby brought out his translation soon after, first at Cambridge and again in London, “adorned with sculptures and illustrated with annotations”—“the fairest edition,” grave Anthony à Wood assures us, “that till then the English press ever produced.” This gorgeous work, pronounced by Pope to be below criticism, nevertheless went through four editions before descending to the congenial fellowship of Vicars under the forgetful wave—a proof how much a good English version of the Æneid was desired. Ogilby had been a dancing-master, and perhaps learned 1445in his profession to rival Lucilius, who

“In hora sæpe ducentos

Ut magnum versus dictabat stans pede in uno.”^[172]

At all events, although he took to literature late in life—he was past forty before he learned Latin or Greek—he was a prodigious author, as we learn from the Dunciad:

“Here groans the shelf with Ogilby the great.”

Besides translating remorselessly everything he could lay hands on, from Homer to Æsop, he found time to write various heroic poems, and had even completed an epic in twelve books on Charles I., when fate took pity on his fellows and sent the great fire of London to the rescue. Phillips, in the Theatrum Poetarum, styles Ogilby a prodigy, and avers that his “Paraphrase on Æsop’s Fables” “is generally confessed to have exceeded whatever hath been done before in that kind.”^[173] As Milton’s nephew can scarcely be suspected of a joke, we must conclude that this is not one of the critical judgments which Milton inspired. Nevertheless, Ogilby’s translations and paraphrases procured him a “genteel livelihood” which many better poems have failed to do for their authors.

Neither Vicars nor Ogilby, however, was of sufficient note, nor had their labors sufficient vitality, to set the current of translation fairly going. That was reserved for Dryden, whose famous work came out in 1697. Dryden had all the qualifications 1446necessary to ensure him a full harvest of imitation and rivalry at once. He was the most famous poet and critic of his day, and in either capacity had found means to excite abundance of jealousies and resentments. Moreover, his change of religion, and the vigor with which he had espoused the Catholic cause in his Hind and Panther, made him many additional enemies. So it is not to be wondered at that when, as Pope puts it,

“Pride, malice, folly, against Dryden rose

In various shapes of parsons, critics, beaux,”

the parsons led the onslaught. First came Parson Milbourn, “the fairest of critics,” who printed his own version side by side with the one he found fault with, and whom Dulness also promptly claimed for her own. Then Dr. Brady, giving over to his worthy coadjutor, Tate, for the nonce the herculean task of promoting Sternhold and Hopkins to be next to the worst poets in the world, devoted himself to the equally gigantic labor of proving that there was a work he could translate more abominably than the Psalms. His version in blank-verse, “when dragged into the light,” says Dr. Johnson, “did not live long enough to cry.” Then Dr. Trapp, the Oxford professor of poetry—majora viribus audens—rushed to the attack and did the Æneid into, if possible, still blanker verse than his predecessor’s. It was he who said of Dryden’s version “that where Dryden shines most we often see the least of Virgil.” This was true enough; and it was, no doubt, to avoid the like reproach that the good doctor forbore to shine at all. On him was made the well-known epigram apropos of a certain poem said to be better than Virgil:

1447“Better than Virgil? Yes, perhaps;

But then, by Jove, ’tis Dr. Trapp’s!”

This is only another form of Bentley’s famous judgment: “A very pretty poem, Mr. Pope, but you must not call it Homer.” The doctor has had no better luck than his fellows.

“Olli dura quies oculos et ferreus urguet

Somnus; in æternam clauduntur lumina noctem.”^[174]

These efforts of the parsons, however, were no doubt inspired at least as much by odium theologicum as by the genuine impulse of emulation. The first true exemplification of this came about 1729 with the version of Pitt,^[175] whose choice of Dryden’s couplet was a direct challenge. Johnson’s estimate of the success of this rivalry is not, on the whole, unfair—or, at least, as fair as such comparisons often are. “Dryden,” he says, “leads the reader forward by his general vigor and sprightliness, and Pitt often stops him to contemplate the excellence of a single couplet; Dryden’s faults are forgotten in the hurry of delight, and Pitt’s beauties neglected in the languor of a cold and listless perusal; Pitt pleases the critics and Dryden the people; Pitt is quoted and Dryden read.” Dryden, however, is probably oftener read nowadays than Pitt is quoted. It is something to be a poet after all, and in the exchange of translation we allow for the purity of his metal and the beauty of his coinage. Most of us would rather have the gold of Dryden, though it fall a 1448piece or two short in the reckoning, than the small change of Pitt, though every silver sixpence and copper farthing be accounted for.

Other translations of the Æneid there were during the eighteenth century, among them one by another Oxford professor of poetry, Hawkins, but none have survived. Pope’s translation of Homer, which was published soon after Pitt’s Æneid, diverted attention to the Greek poet, and gave him with translators a pre-eminence over his Latin rival which only within a few years he can be said to have lost. Pope had no imitators, however, till long after. Even more absolutely than Dryden he swayed the sceptre of poetry in his time; and the presumptuous wight who had ventured to challenge his sovereignty or to measure strength with “that poetical wonder, the translation of the Iliad, a performance which no age or nation can pretend to rival,” gods—critical gods—and men and booksellers would have laughed to scorn. It is true, Addison, that most uneasy “brother near the throne,” was shrewdly suspected of meditating such a design under the cloak of his friend and follower, Tickell, and even went so far as to publish—so ran the current gossip of the coffee-houses—a version of the first book of the Iliad in Tickell’s name. But the scheme stopped there; Pope’s triumph was too splendid and overwhelming, and his great work calmly defied competition, until the spell of his honeyed couplet was broken, and Cowper could find a hearing for his ponderous Miltonic periods, a full half-century after Pope’s death. The battle which soon thereafter came to be joined between the partisans of the Popian and Cowperian methods—both of them, as Mr. Arnold 1449assures us, really on a complete equality of error—had the effect of keeping Homer in the foreground and Virgil in the shade, despite the praiseworthy versions of the latter by Simmons in rhymed couplets about 1817, and Kennedy in blank-verse some thirty years later, until the critical furore created by the appearance of Prof. Conington’s Æneid about ten years since once more turned the tide and brought our Mantuan to the front.

Conington’s translation, by the novelty of its metre, the freshness of its treatment, the spirit of its movement, its union of fidelity and grace, took the public ear and at once won a popularity which, if we may judge from the fact that a new edition has been lately advertised, it has not yet lost nor is destined speedily to lose. Moreover, its peculiar metre gave rise to a discussion among the critics, which has no doubt had its share in bringing out the two additional versions by Mr. Cranch and Mr. Morris at brief intervals after Professor Conington’s, the former at Boston, the latter in England and reprinted here. Each of these three versions has that “proper reason for existing” in novelty of method and manner which Mr. Arnold demands, and without which, indeed, multiplied translations are but cumberers of the book-stall and a weariness to the flesh. Of Mr. Cranch this assertion may sound a trifle odd, since his work upon its face presents little that is new. In place of the galloping octosyllabics of Prof. Conington or the resurrected Alexandrines of Mr. Morris, he offers us only the familiar blank-verse which Kennedy and Trapp and Brady used, or misused, before him; he has no theories to illustrate, but translates 1450his author as faithfully as he knows how, and his rendering is neither so exceedingly good nor so excessively bad as to give it any claim to originality upon that score. But then it is the first American translation of Virgil, and that is surely novelty enough.

For as each age, so every country, looks at a classic author through spectacles of its own. “Each age,” as Conington well says in his preface, “will naturally think that it understands an author whom it studies better than the ages which have gone before it”; and it is for this reason, he adds, “that the great works of antiquity require to be translated afresh from time to time to preserve their interest as part of modern literary culture.” But it is not alone that each age will understand an author better than preceding ages; it will understand him differently; it will see him in another light, from far other points of view, modified and interpreted by its own spirit. What Heyne says of the poet is in a measure true of the translator—that he has the genius of his era, which must necessarily qualify his work. We have sometimes fancied even that this business of translation was a kind of metempsychosis through which the poet’s soul shall speak to many different times and lands through forms and in voices changing to suit the moods of each. This, of course, is only one of those fantastic notions which a writer must sometimes be indulged in, if he is to be kept in reasonable good-humor. But we think we may venture to say that two nations translating for themselves what antiquity has to say to them will insensibly find its utterances modified for each of them by their natural modes of thought. Nay, may we not go 1451further and say that no two human minds will find precisely the same message in Homer or Virgil or Horace—so infinite are the gradations of thought, so innumerable the shades of meaning and suggestion in a word. Of Virgil this is especially true; for he has, says Prof. Conington, “that peculiar habit, ... common to him and Sophocles, of hinting at two or three modes of expression while actually employing one.”

It is just for this reason that repeated translations of a great author are not only useful but desirable; that, to quote Conington again, “it is well that we should know how our ancestors of the Revolution period conceived of Virgil; it is well that we should be obliged consciously to realize how we conceive of him ourselves.” How true this is no one can fail to perceive who contrasts Dryden’s method in any given passage with Conington’s. The sense of Virgil may be given with equal exactness by each—we say may be, which is rather stretching a point, for, in respect of verbal fidelity, the two versions are not to be compared—the interpretation may be equally poetical, but there will remain a subtle something which stamps each, and which we can only say is the flavor of the time. Or, again, compare the Abbé Delille’s French version with Dryden’s English—perhaps a fairer comparison; for both are equally free, though by no means equally acquainted with their author, and both to a certain extent belonged to the same school of composition. Nor are they so very far apart as they seem in point of time; the century or so which divides them was a very much longer period in England than in France. Charles II. was nearer to Louis 1452XV. than to George III. in point of taste. Yet how different from Dryden’s Virgil, or from any Englishman’s, is Delille’s, even though he does not find in his text such enchanting gallicisms as Jean Regnault de Segrais could twist out of the lines,

“Ubi templum illi centumque Sabæo

Thure calent aræ, sertisque recentibus halant”:^[176]

“Dans le temple où toujours quelque Amant irrité

Accuse dans ses vœux quelque jeune Beauté.”

This is an extreme case, no doubt, and there are Frenchmen even who would not be beyond laughing at it. We are not to forget, as we laugh at it ourselves, that Segrais was not unknown in the Hôtel Rambouillet, and that although his own poetry was not all of this order, not even his Æneid—Saint-Evremond liked it—he also wrote novels which not even the Hôtel Rambouillet could read. But when that really able man and accomplished scholar, Cardinal Du Perron, turns Horace’s lines in the charming farewell to Virgil (Carm. i. 3):

“Ventorumque regat Pater

Obstrictis aliis præter Iapygia,”

into this sort of thing:

“Ainsi des vents l’humide Père

Ton cours heureusement tempere,

Tenant ses enfants emplumez

Si bien sous la clef enfermez

Excepté l’opportun Zephyr,”

we have a version which no doubt seems correct and poetical enough to a Frenchman, but to an English mind suggests nothing so much as a damp and aged poultry-fancier locking up his chickens in the hen-house out of the rain. And a countryman of the cardinal can make 1453nothing more of the “laughing eyes” of Dante’s Piccarda:

“Ond’ ella pronta e con occhi ridenti,”^[177]

than

“L’ombre me repondit d’un air satisfait!”

as though the celestial phantom had been a small girl bribed with a tart to answer. To the post-academic Gaul, shivering in the chaste but chilly shadow of that awful Pantheon of the verbal proprieties, the “Marguerite aux yeulx rians et verds” whom his forebears loved to sing would be but a green-eyed monster indeed. Ronsard’s parodies of Pindar were no worse than Ambrose Philips’ travesties of the deep-mouthed Theban—the sparrow-hawk aping the eagle—and not much worse, indeed, than West’s or even Wheelwright’s, or any other imitation of the inimitable that we have seen. But the badness of the one is thoroughly French and of his time, even to his bragging that it was his noble birth which enabled him to reproduce Pindar, wherein Horace, for lack of that virtue, had failed; the badness of the other as thoroughly English and of his age. And what more salient instance could be given of this natural difference in mental constitution, in “the way of looking at things,” than Voltaire’s treatment of the scene in Hamlet where the sentinel answers the question, “Have you had quiet guard?” by the familiar household idiom, “Not a mouse stirring”? “Pas un souris qui trotte” the author of Zaire makes it, and proceeds to inform his countrymen that this Shakspeare was a drunken savage.

1454Now, while there is no such radical difference between English and American ways of thought as between English and French ways, there is still difference enough to justify us in giving place to Mr. Cranch’s blank-verse Æneid, as being à priori another thing from the English blank-verse Æneids of forty or one hundred and forty years ago. So, without more ado, let us repeat that these three versions of the last decade are sufficiently unlike one another or any that have gone before to warrant attentive notice.

In choosing for the vehicle of his attempt the octosyllabic line—the well-known metre of Scott’s Marmion—Prof. Conington turned his back intrepidly on all the traditions. Scarcely any rhythm we have would seem at first blush worse fitted to give the unlearned reader an adequate idea of the sonorous march of the Latin hexameter or of the stately melody of Virgil’s verse, of the dignity of his sentiments, or the noble gravity of his style. For him who uses such a metre to render the Æneid one half anticipates the need of some such frank confession as that Ronsard, in a fit of remorse, or perhaps a verbal indigestion over his own inconceivable pedantry, puts at the end—at the end, mark you—of one of his never-ending series of odes:

“Les François qui mes vers liront,

S’ils ne sont et Grecs et Romains,

En lieu de ce livre, ils n’auront

Qu’un pesant faix entre les mains”—

which for our present purpose we may paraphrase: My excellent reader, if you don’t know Virgil as well as I do, you will find very little of him here, and if you do you will find still less. But Professor Conington soon puts away from us all 1455such forebodings. He gives us, in spite of his metre, for the most part, in rare instances, by the help of it, a great deal of Virgil—more, on the whole, than almost any other of the poet’s translators. He has put the story of the Æneid into bright and animated English verse which may be read with pleasure as a poem for itself, and is yet strictly faithful to the sense and spirit of its original, as close as need be—wonderfully close in many parts—to its language, often skilfully suggestive of some of the most salient peculiarities of its form, and only failing conspicuously, where all translations most conspicuously fail, in rendering the poet’s manner, because the manner of any poet—and we mean by manner that union of thought and form of the poet’s way of seeing with his way of saying things which is the full manifestation of his genius—only failing here because this part of any poet it is next to impossible to reproduce in a foreign tongue, and because the vehicle chosen by Prof. Conington, so opposite in every way to Virgil’s vehicle, increased that difficulty tenfold. But a translation of a long narrative poem is not like the translation of a brief lyric. Is the former to be written for those who understand the original and care for no translation, or for those who, not understanding the original, ask first of the translator that he shall not put them to sleep, and, second, that he shall give them all that his author gives as nearly as possible in the same manner? Two of these demands Prof. Conington’s version fully meets, and it comes as near to the third as was consistent with a metre which gave him the best chance of combining the other two. If any translation of Virgil can hope to be popular it is his; and we hold to the belief 1456that it will share with Dryden’s, which, if only for its author’s sake, will live, the affections of the unlatined English reader for long to come.

As might be expected, it is in battle-pieces and in scenes of swift and animated action, to which Scott’s metre naturally lends itself, and with which it is as naturally associated, that this version chiefly excels. Take, for example, the onset in the eleventh book:

“Meantime the Trojans near the wall,

The Tuscans and the horsemen all,

In separate troops arrayed;

Their mettled steeds the champaign spurn,

And, chafing, this and that way turn;

Spears bristle o’er the fields, that burn

With arms on high displayed.

Messapus and the Latian force,

And Coras and Camilla’s horse,

An adverse front array;

With hands drawn back they couch the spear,

And aim the dart in full career;

The tramp of heroes strikes the ear,

Mixed with the charger’s neigh.

Arrived within a javelin’s throw,

The armies halt a space; when, lo!

Sudden they let their good steeds go

And meet with deafening cry;

Their volleyed darts fly thick as snow,

Dark-shadowing all the sky.”

The Latin could scarcely be given with more spirit or closeness; though in neither respect does Morris fall short of his predecessor, from whom in manner, however, he differs toto cœlo:

“But in meanwhile the Trojan folk the city draw anigh,

The Tuscan dukes and all their horse in many a company

Well ordered; over all the plain, neighing, the steed doth fare,

Prancing and champing on the bit that turns him here and here.

And far and wide the lea is rough with iron harvest now,

And with the weapons tost aloft the level meadows glow.

Messapus and the Latins swift, lo! on the other hand,

And Coras with his brother-lord, and maid Camilla’s band,

Against them in the field; and, lo! far back their arms they fling

In couching of the level spears, and shot-spears brandishing.

All is afire with neigh of steeds and onfall of the men.

And now, within a spear-shot come, short up they rein, and then

1457They break out with a mighty cry and spur the maddened steeds;

And all at once from every side the storm of spear-shot speeds,

As thick as very snowing is, and darkens down the sun.”

It would be hard to say which version is closer to the original. Conington leaves out the epithet celeres which Virgil bestows on the Latins, and also—a graver omission—that brother whom Virgil makes attend him like his shadow (et cum fratre Coras) in every battle-field of the Æneid. This fraternal warrior Morris gives us, indeed, but not very intelligibly, as Coras’ “brother-lord.” On the other hand, although Morris renders the Latin line for line, he is not so concise as Conington, who puts Virgil’s fifteen hexameters into twenty of his short lines as opposed to fifteen of Morris’ long ones. Virgil has nothing of Morris’ “iron harvest”; here—

“Tum late ferreus hastis

Horret ager, campique armis sublimibus ardent”—

we should give Conington the preference, while Morris excels in rendering the verse:

“Adventusque virum fremitusque ardescit equorum.”

In Morris’ version four words are to be specially noted: folk, dukes, maid, and very. They contain the key to his method, and we shall recur to them again.

Our American’s blank-verse here helps him to no greater degree of fidelity than either of his rivals, while even patriotism must own his version, as compared with theirs, a trifle tame:

“Meanwhile, the Trojan troops, the Etruscan chiefs,

And all the cavalry approach the walls,

In order ranged. The coursers leap and neigh

Along the fields, and fight against the curb,

And wheel about. An iron field of spears

Bristles afar, and lifted weapons blaze.

1458Upon the other side the Latins swift,

Messapus, Coras, and his brother come,

Also Camilla’s wing; in hostile ranks

They threaten with their lances backward drawn,

And shake their javelins. On the warriors press,

And fierce and fiercer neigh the battle steeds.

Advancing now within a javelin’s throw,

Each army halted; then, with sudden shouts,

They cheer and spur their fiery horses on.

From all sides now the spears fly thick and fast

As showers of sleet, and darken all the sky.”

The word “cavalry” here is too modern in its associations to suit us entirely, nor strikes us as highly poetical.

“Wave, Munich, all thy banners wave,

And charge with all thy chivalry,”

is the way Campbell put it. Again, the rendering of the line Adventusque virum fremitusque ardescit equorum is less exact than Morris’, if not than Conington’s, and much less poetical than either; and were it not for the printer’s aid, we should be unable to tell such blank-verse as “Messapus, Coras, and his brother come, also Camilla’s wing,” from the very prosiest of prose. Mr. Cranch, like Prof. Conington, omits Camilla’s attribute of virginis—though that is, perhaps, better than to call her, as Dryden does, a “virago”—and turns Virgil’s 1459snow into sleet, no doubt having in mind Gray’s

“Iron sleet of arrowy shower

Hurtles in the darkened air,”

or the “sharp sleet of arrowy shower” in Paradise Regained.

It may be of interest to set side by side with these English translations the French version of Delille. It will show us, at least, where Mr. Morris went, perhaps, for his “iron harvest”:

“Mais déjà les Troyens, déjà les fiers Toscans

Pour attaquer vers Lausente ont déployé leurs rangs;

Ils marchent; le coursier de sa tête hautaine

Bat l’air, ronge le frein, et bondit dans la plaine;

Les champs sont hérissés d’une moisson de fer,

Et chaque javelot fait partir un éclair.

Et Messape, et Coras et son valeureux frère,

Et la chaste Camille et sa troupe légère,

Se présentent ensemble. On voit de toutes parts

Et s’alonger la lance et s’agiter les dards.

Sous les pas des guerriers les champs poudreux gémissent;

Et soldats et coursiers de colère frémissent.

Enfin, à la distance où le trait peut porter,

Les partis ennemis viennent de s’arrêter:

On s’écrie, on s’élance, et d’un essor rapide.

Chacun pousse en avant son coursier intrépide.

Plus pressés que la neige au retour des hivers

Des nuages de traits en obscurci les airs.”

In a future number we purpose concluding our present examination and taking a final leave of the translators.

1460

THE HOME-RULE CANDIDATE.

A STORY OF “NEW IRELAND.”

BY THE AUTHOR OF “THE LITTLE CHAPEL AT MONAMULLIN,” “THE ROMANCE OF A PORTMANTEAU,” ETC., ETC.

CHAPTER II.

NEW IRELAND AND YOUNG ENGLAND.

How glad I felt when morning came, as it brought me nearer to seeing our fair guest! I gathered a bouquet for her, wet with the kisses of the lingering night-dew. I flatter myself that my bouquets are constructed with a tender regard for tone. I have sat for hours in Paris, upon an upturned empty basket in the Marché aux Fleurs, watching the fleuristes deftly composing those exquisite poems in color which serve to render flowers a charming necessity. Upon this occasion I selected blood-red geraniums as the outer edge, with narrowing circlets of stefanotis and mignonette, the whole enshrined in a bower of maiden-hair fern. How lovely she looked when I presented them to her at breakfast; how enchanting her transparent complexion, that flushed as she spoke, and crimsoned when she was spoken to! Alphonse Karr speaks of a similar indefinable charm in his own delightful way: “Elle avait ce charme poétiquement virginal, qui est la plus grande beauté de la femme.” Alas! my bouquet had been forestalled by the gift of a veritable last rose of summer which Harry Welstone had culled while I was engaged in imparting some finishing touches to my rather bristly hair. The words “too late” to meet me on the very threshold of my new career! It was truly disheartening.

She was attired in a tightly-fitting 1461dress of pure white, adorned by a series of coquettish blue ribbons, the edgings being of the same color. Her cavalier collar and gauntlet cuffs finished a toilette which almost recalled my Virgil, as I could hardly refrain from exclaiming “O Dea certe!”

“Might I ask, if it is not an unparliamentary question, Mr. Ormonde, at what hour you allowed poor papa to retire to his bed? Was it late last night or early this morning?” she asked with a droll archness.

“Well, it was rather late, Miss Hawthorne; but as your father was good enough to favor me with some exceedingly interesting passages in his senatorial career, the time galloped by at a break-neck pace and we took no note of it.”

I had already learned to play the hypocrite. O Master Cupid! and this was thy first lesson.

“Is my memory mocking me, or did I hear awful mention of Irish whisky?” she laughed.

This enabled me to explain the blunder of my retainer in his desire to uphold the honor of the family, and to exonerate myself from the soupçon of having neglected her society for that of the bottle. Peter’s ideas upon the family status seemed to afford her the liveliest merriment, and she laughed the silvery laugh with which, old playgoers tell me, Mme. Vestris used to bring down the house.

1462“Peter is a character, then?”

“You will find that out before very long, Miss Hawthorne.”

“I do so love characters!”

I ran over my characteristics like a flash, and found them of the baldest and mildest nature. Not a single strong point came to the rescue, not a liking or a disliking. Pah! what a dull, drowsy weed; what a prosy, colorless nobody.

“Peter is a great admirer of the fair sex,” said my mother. “You must see him on Sunday standing at the chapel gate ‘discoorsin’’ the pretty girls as they pass in to last Mass.”

“Is he a bachelor?”

“Oh! yes. I have often asked him why he doesn’t marry, and his invariable reply is, ‘I’d rayther keep looking at them.’”

“Perhaps I might have a chance,” said Miss Hawthorne, with a delicious coquetry in her manner.

“Not a bit of it, my dear; he would not ally himself to a Saxon for a crock of gold.”

“He is a hard-hearted wretch, then,” laughed our guest, “and I shall not endeavor to make a conquest.”

Little did she imagine that she might have uttered Veni, vidi, vici at that particular moment. A poor triumph, though—a paltry victory. I did not feel myself worthy of powder and shot.

Harry Welstone kept gazing at Miss Hawthorne from out his supremely handsome eyes. How I envied him those deep, dark, corsair-like organs of vision, inwardly railing against my own heavy blues! He chatted with her upon every conceivable topic, planning excursions, arranging her boating, riding, walking, and even the songs she was to sing, disposing of her time to his own especial advantage, 1463and leaving me helplessly out in the cold with the prosy member for Doodleshire. I could not find a solitary topic to speak upon; at least, just as I had summoned up courage to “cut in,” as they say at whist, the wind had shifted and the current of the conversation had taken another turn, leaving my disabled argosy high and dry. I had spent my most recent years in the secluded valley of Kilkenley with my mother, my horses, and my dogs. I had seen little or nothing of the whirl of the world, and was so purely, so essentially local as to be almost ignorant of what was going on in the outer circle of life. Of course I read the Freeman’s Journal—generally two days old when it reached us—and then I merely glanced at the hunting fixtures or the sales of thoroughbreds at Farrell’s or Sewell’s. Of course I had done some reading; and of a lighter kind the Waverley Novels and Dickens, the Titanic Thackeray and a few unwholesome French effusions; but of late I had read nothing, and, as a consequence, was local to a contemptuous degree. In what did Peter, my own servant, differ from me? Merely in the perusal of a few books. He was a better judge of a horse and—but why proceed? My reflections were all of this melancholy cast as I listened to dissertations upon Chopin, Schubert, and Wagner, upon the novelists and poets of the period, upon Gainsborough hats and Pompadour flounces, upon the relative merits of Rève d’Amour and Ess’ bouquet. Harry and our fair young guest kept the shuttlecock going between them, and I was forced to bear the burden of my own ignorance in a stolid, stupid silence. One chance was offered me which 1464I took as I would a six-foot wall—flying. The question of horses came upon the tapis, and I vaulted into the saddle. I rode down Harry and scarcely spared Miss Hawthorne; nor did I draw rein until I had described the run of last season, from meet to death, winding a “View-halloo!” that actually caused the teacups to ring upon their saucers. This blew off my compressed excitement, and, although very much ashamed, I felt all the better for it. My foot was on my native heath, and I showed her that my name was McGregor.

“What are you going to do with Mr. Hawthorne to-day?” asked my mother.

“What are you going to do with Miss Hawthorne, mother?” I retorted.

“Oh! Harry Welstone and I have arranged all that. You are not in the baby-house.”

This was gratifying intelligence with a vengeance. I was told off as bear-leader to the prosy Parliament man, while Harry was to revel in the radiance of Miss Hawthorne’s presence. This was grilling. And yet what could I do or say? My hands were tied behind my back. I was host, and should pay deference to the respected rites of bread and salt, the sacred laws of hospitality. A sacrifice was demanded, and in me was found the victim.

“Could we not manage to unite our forces?” I suggested, in the faint, flickering hope that a compromise might be effected.

“Impossible!” said Harry.

I could have flung my teacup at his head.

“And why not, pray?” I asked in a short, testy way.

“Because you are to take Mr. Hawthorne over to Clonacooney, 1465and to talk tenant-right and landlord-wrong with old Mr. Cassidy; then, when exhausted there, you are bound for the model farm at Rouserstown, and any amount of steam-ploughing and top-dressing; then you can pay a flying visit to Phil Dempsey’s hundred-acre field, and show the Saxon the richness of the land he has invaded; then you are to call for Father O’Dowd, where you can coal and do Home Rule; and then you may come home to dinner, where we shall be very happy to receive you.” And Harry laughed loudly and long at my utter discomfiture—a discomfiture written in my rueful countenance in lines as heavy as those laid on the grim visage of Don Quixote by Gustave Doré.

“You are very kind, Welstone—a most considerate fellow. Why not have arranged for Knobber, or the other side of the Shannon—say Ballybawn, or Curlagh Island?”

The iron had entered my soul.

“Is not this arrangement a very heavy tax upon Mr. Ormonde’s good-nature?” exclaimed our fair guest, graciously coming to the rescue, addressing my mother, who, par parenthèse, expressed herself perfectly charmed with Miss Hawthorne.

“Tax! my dear child? On the contrary, it is just the sort of day my son will thoroughly enjoy: going about the country, talking second crops, turnips, and the price of hay and oats. He is devoted to all that sort of thing, and I doubt if even his duties of gallantry to you, Mabel, would get the better of his devotion to Mme. Ceres.”

I was about to blurt out something that might possibly have compromised me on all sides, when, as luck would have it, the M.P. entered.

1466He stalked into the room as if the division-bell were ringing, and took his seat as though below the gangway, bowing gravely to the assembled House. He lifted his cup as he would a blue-book, and handled his knife as an act of Parliament.

“You will—ahem!—I’m sure excuse my being a little late”—with a preparatory cough—“but the late sittings of last session have totally unfitted me for bed until the wee sma’ hours.”

“Surely, papa, you are not going to carry the House of Commons hours into the romantic glens of Kilkenly?”

“I admit that I ought not to do so, my dear, but, as a great statesman once observed—I, ahem! quite forget his name at this particular moment—habit is second nature; and were I to retire early, it would—ha! ha!—be only for the purpose of quarrelling with one of my best friends, my best friend—Morpheus.”

“You must find the fatigues of Parliament very great,” said my mother.

“Herculean, madam. My correspondence, before I go down to the House at all, is a herculean task, and one in which I am very considerably aided by my daughter.”

“Oh! yes,” she laughed; “I can write such diplomatic letters as ‘I beg to acknowledge receipt of your communication of the blank instant, which shall have my very best attention.’ Papa’s constituents invariably hear from me in that exact phraseology by return of post. I have a whole lot of such letters, as the Americans say, ‘on hand.’”

“If it were not for the off-nights, madam,” continued the member for Doodleshire, “Wednesdays and Saturdays, I should seriously think 1467of accepting the Chiltern Hundreds, which is a gentlemanlike way of resigning a seat in the House.”

“And on the off-nights poor papa devotes himself to me,” exclaimed Mabel; “and I always accept invitations for those nights, so the only chance he has for sleep is during the recess.”

I wondered who her friends might be, what they were like, where they resided, and if the men were all in love with her. She had upon three distinct occasions referred to a Mr. Melton, and somehow the mention of this man filled me with a grim foreboding.

“We take too much sleep. We should do with as little as possible, and divide that by three. Sleep is waste of time. Sleep is a sad nuisance, a bore. It is born in a yawn and dies in imbecility,” cried Harry, suddenly bursting into vitality.

“Is it thus you would designate Nature’s soft nurse, sir?” demanded Mr. Hawthorne in a severe tone.

“This comes very badly from Mr. Welstone,” said my mother, “who requires to be called about ten times before he will deign to leave off sleeping.”

“You should see the panels of his door—actually worn away with knuckle-knocking,” I added.

“In the country I sleep because there’s nothing else to do. I get up early! What for? To see the same mist on the same mountains, and the same cows in the same field, and the same birds in the same trees; though, mot d’honneur, I was up and out this morning at eight o’clock, and played Romeo to Miss Hawthorne’s Juliet—at least, so far as a garden and a balcony could do it.”

“Who ever heard of a Romeo by daylight?” I exclaimed sarcastically.

1468“Let’s see what that love-stricken wretch does ‘neath the sun’s rays. We all know what he says and does in the pale moonlight.”

“He kills Tybalt,” I interposed, not utterly displeased in being able to show Mabel that I was on intimate terms with the Bard of Avon.

“And buys a penn’orth of strychnine,” added Harry with a grin.

“We know a gentleman who plays Romeo to perfection,” observed Mabel. “Such a handsome fellow! And the dress suits him charmingly.”

How I hated this Romeo!

“A Mr. Wynwood Melton.”

I knew it before she had uttered the words.

“An actor?” I drawled in a careless sort of way.

“Oh! dear, no; he’s in the Foreign Office, and a swell. He is nephew or cousin—I don’t know which—to Mr. Gladstone or some other great chief.” This with an animation that sent a thrill of despairing jealousy to my very soul.

“He is—ahem!—a very promising young man, a great favorite of ours, and will make his mark. He is destined for the House. You’ll meet him, Mr. Ormonde, when you come over. He is—ha! ha! ha!—rather a constant visitor,” with a significant glance in the direction of his daughter.

She flushed crimson. The deep scarlet glowed all over her like a rosy veil. That blush tolled the death-knell of my hopes. Our eyes met; she withdrew her glance, as I haughtily outstared her.

“He is a great favorite of papa’s,” she murmured, almost apologetically.

“And how about papa’s only daughter?” laughed my mother.

“Papa’s only daughter admires 1469him very much—thinks him very handsome, very nice, very cultivated, very clever, et voilà tout.”

“What more would papa’s only daughter have?”

A quaint little shrug, and a dainty laugh.

“A thousand things,” she said. From that moment I marked down Melton as my foe—as the man who had dared to cross my path. Not that I hoped for success, or could ever hope for it; yet to him she had evidently surrendered her heart, and he must reckon with me. Meet him! Rather! I would now accept the invitation to London for the sole purpose of falling foul of Melton. It would be such exquisite torture to see them together; such racking bliss to behold them pressing hands and looking into each other’s eyes. What pleasurable agony to look calmly on while those nameless frivolities and gentle dalliances by which lovers bridge the conventionalities were being performed beneath my very nose! Ha! ha! I would close with Mr. Hawthorne’s offer and make arrangements for proceeding to ‘town,’ as he would persist in calling the English metropolis, at the earliest possible opportunity consistent with his, and Melton’s, convenience.

“Miss Hawthorne,” suddenly exclaimed Harry, “do tell us something more about this Romeo. You have only given us enough to make us wish for more. What is he like?”

“Will you have his portrait in oil or a twopenny photo?” she laughed.

“Let us strike ‘ile’ by all means.”

“Imprimis—that’s a good word to begin with—he is tall.”

“Good!”

“Graceful.”

“Good again!”

1470“Dignified-looking.”

“Bravissimo!”

“Parts his hair in the centre.”

“I don’t care for that,” said Harry.

“It becomes him.”

“Possibly. Pray proceed. His eyes?”

“Gray.”

“Nose?”

“Aquiline.”

“Beard?—men parting their hair in the centre wear beards.”

“Henri Quatre.”

“Hands?”

“Small and white.”

I threw a hasty glance at mine; they were of the same hue as the leg of the mahogany breakfast-table at which we were seated. Sun and saddle had done their work effectually.

“Does he smile?”

“Why, of course he does.”

“Now,” said Harry, “upon your description of his smile a good deal may depend.”

“I object to this line of cross-examination,” said my mother.

“I consider the subject has been sufficiently thrashed already,” I added. Truly, I was sick of it.

“I shall throw up my brief, if I do not get an answer to my question.”

“I shall tell you by and by, Mr. Welstone.”

“By and by will not do.”

“Well, then, Mr. Melton’s smile is like a sunbeam. Are you satisfied now?”

“Mr. Hawthorne,” said Harry, turning to the M.P., “this is a very bad case.”

“I’m afraid—ha! ha! ha!—that it looks somewhat suspicious,” was the significant reply.

“If you mean—” Mabel began.

“I don’t mean what you mean,” laughed Harry.

1471“What do you mean?” she asked.

“What do you mean?” he playfully retorted.

At this juncture Peter O’Brien’s shock head appeared at the open window, through which he unceremoniously thrust it, announcing, in no very delicate accents:

“The yokes is convaynient.”

“That’s a fine morning, Peter,” exclaimed Miss Hawthorne, rising and approaching the window.

“Troth, it’s that same, miss, glory be to God! It’s iligant weather intirely for the craps.”

“We’ve cut all our corn in England, Peter.”

“See that, now,” gloomily; but, brightening up, he added: “Sorra a haporth to hindher us from cuttin’ it long ago, av it was only ripe enough.”

“An Irish peasant will never admit Saxon superiority in anything,” said my mother, placing her arm about Mabel’s waist. “What ‘yokes’ have you out to-day, Peter?”

“The shay for you, ma’am, and the young leddy there; though I’m afeared it’s not as nate as it ought for to be, be raisin av a rogue av a hin—a red wan, full av consait an’ impidence—makin’ her nest right—”

“Here, Peter,” I cried, to put a stop to these hideous revelations, “get my car round at once.” I could have strangled him.

As all English visitors to Ireland are possessed of a frantic desire to experience the jolting of an Irish jaunting-car, I ordered my own special conveyance round, also from the workshop of Bates—a low, rakish-looking craft, with a very deep well for the dogs when going out shooting, and bright yellow corduroy cushions; an idea of my own, and upon which I rather piqued 1472myself. Harry Welstone and the ladies came to the doorsteps to see us off, and while he explained the beauties of the chariot to Miss Hawthorne I endeavored to initiate her father into the mysteries of clinging on, advising him not to clutch the front and back rail so convulsively, but rather to allow his body to swing with every motion of the vehicle, and above all things to trust to luck.

“Lave yourself as if ye wor a sack o’ male, sir,” suggested Peter, who was charioteer, “or as if ye had a sup in. Sorra a man that was full ever dhropped off av a car, barrin’ Murty Flinn; an’ shure that was not his fault aither, for it was intirely be raisin av a bargain he med wud a lump av a mare he was dhrivin’ at that time.”

“Who was Murty Flinn, Peter?” asked Miss Hawthorne.

“A dacent boy, miss, that lives beyant at the crass-roads—a rale hayro for sperits,” was the prompt response, accompanied by a semi-military salute.

“And how did he fall off the car?”

“Troth, thin, mavourneen, it wasn’t Murty that fell aff av the car, so much as that the car fell aff av Murty; an’ this is how it happened: Murty was comin’ from the fair av Bohernacopple, where he wint for to sell a little slip av a calf, an’ afore he left the fair he tuk several gollioges av sperits, an’ had a cupple uv haits wud Phil Clancy, the red-hedded wan—not Phil av Tubbermory—an’ he was bet up intirely betune the whiskey an’ the rounds wud red Clancy, so that whin he cum for to make for home he was hard set for to yoke the mare, an’ harder set agin for to mount to his sate on the car. But Murty is the persevarionist man ye 1473ever laid yer two purty eyes on, miss, an’ he ruz himself into the sate afther a tremendjus battle; and th’ ould mare, whin she seen that he was comfortable, tuk the road like a Christian mare. Well, Murty rowled backwards an’ forwards, an’ every joult av the car ye’d think wud sind him on the crown av his caubeen; but, be me song, he was as secure as a prisner in Botany Bay, an’ it’s a sailor he thought he was, up in a hammock no less. Well, miss, the night was a little dark an’ the road was shaded wud threes, an’ whin they cum to th’ ould graveyard at Killencanick never a fut the mare ‘ud go farther.

“‘What’s the matther wud ye?’ axed Murty; but sorra an answer she med him.

“‘Are ye bet,’ sez he, ‘an’ you so far from home?’ She riz a cupple av kicks, as much as to say, ‘Ye hit it off that time, anyhow, Misther Flinn!’

“‘Did ye get a dhrink at the fair beyant, Moria?’—the little mare’s name, miss. She shuk her hed in a way that tould him that she was as dhry as a cuckoo.

“‘Musha, musha, but that was cruel thratemint,’ sez he. ‘What’s to be done at all, at all?’

“Well, miss, he thought for a minit, an’ he sez: ‘Moria, we’re only two mile from the Cock an’ Blackberry, an’ I’ll tell ye what I’ll do wud ye: you carry me wan mile, sez he, ‘an’ I’ll carry you th’ other.’”

This proposition on the part of Murty Flinn was received with a peal of ringing laughter from Miss Hawthorne, who, with flashing eyes and an eager expression of delighted curiosity, begged of Peter to proceed.

“Av coorse, miss,” replied the gratified Jehu. “Well, ye see the words was hardly acrass his mouth 1474whin, cockin’ her ears an’ her tail, th’ ould mare darted aff as if she was runnin’ for the Cunningham Coop at Punchestown, an’ Murty swingin’ like a log round a dog’s neck all the voyage; an’ the minnit she come to the milestone undher Headford demesne she stopped like a dead rabbit.

“‘Where are we now?’ axed Murty.

“She sed nothin’, but rouled the car up to the milestone an’ grazed it wud the step.

“‘Well, yer the cutest little crayture,’ sez Murty, ‘that ever wore shoes,’ sez he; ‘an’, be the powers, as ye kept yer word wud me, I’ll keep me word wud you.’ And he rouled aff av the car into the middle o’ the road, while th’ ould mare unyoked herself as aisy as if it was aitin’ hay she was insted av undoin’ buckles that riz many a blisther on Murty’s fingers; for the harness was contrairy, and more betoken as rusty as a Hessian’s baggonet. When Murty seen the mare stannin’ naked in the road, he med an offer for to get up, but he was bet intirely be raisin av the sup he tuk, an’ he cudn’t stir more nor his arms; but the ould mare wasn’t goin’ for to be done out av her jaunt in that way, so she cum over, an’ sazin’ him—savin’ yer presence, miss—be the sate av his small-clothes, riz him to his feet, an’, wud a cupple av twists, dhruv him betune the shafts av the car, an’ in a brace av shakes had him harnessed like a racer.

“‘I’m reddy now, ma’am,’ sez Murty, mighty polite, for he seen the whip in one av her forepaws—‘I’m reddy now, ma’am; so up wud ye, an’ I’ll go bail we’ll not be long coverin’ the road betune this an’ the Cock an’ Blackberry.’

“Well, miss, th’ ould mare mounted 1475the car, an’ Murty started aff as well as he cud; but he was bet up afther runnin’ a few yards, an’ he dhropped into a walk, but no sooner he done it than he got a welt av the whip that med him hop.

“‘What are ye doin?’ sez he, an’ down cums the lash agin be way av an answer.

“‘How dare ye raise yer hand to a Christian?’ sez he. A cupple av welts follied this.

“‘I’ll not stan’ it!’ he bawled; but the more he roared an’ bawled the heavier th’ ould mare welted, an’ he might as well be spakin’ to the Rock o’ Cashel.

“‘Hould yer hand!’ he roared, thryin to soothe her—‘hould yer hand, an’ ye’ll have a bellyful av the finest oats in the barony—ould Tim Collins’ best crap. Dhrop the whip, an’ sorra a taste av work ye’ll do till next Michaelmas. I can’t thravel faster, Moria, be raisin av a corn,’ and the like; but the mare had him, an’ she ped off ould scores, an’ be the time they kem to the Cock an’ Blackberry poor Murty was bet like an ould carpet, an’ he wasn’t fit for to frighten the crows out av an oat-field. An’ that’s how it all happened, miss.”

“And did he give Moria the drink?” asked Miss Hawthorne.

“He sez he did,” replied Peter, with a peculiar grin; “but the people that owns the public-house sez that he niver darkened their doore, an’ that he was found lying undher the yoke near the crass-roads, wud th’ ould mare grazin’ about a half a mile down the road. But it’s a thrue story,” he added with somewhat of solemn emphasis.

“Si non e vero e ben trovato,” laughed our guest, as she waved us a graceful adieu.

It was one of those lovely mornings nowhere to be found but in 1476Ireland: the dim, half-gray light, the heavily-perfumed air, the stillness that imparted a sort of sad solemnity to the scene, the glorious tints of green on hill and hollow that mellowed themselves with the sombre sky, a something that inspires a silence that is at once a resource and a regret. I became wrapped up in my own thoughts—so much so that, although I held the “ribbons” I was scarcely aware of the fact, and it was only the exclamation from Peter: “Blur an’ ages! Masther Fred, luk out for the brudge”—a narrow structure, across which it was possible to pass without grazing the parapet walls, and nothing more—that brought me to my senses. My guest, in spite of the earnest instructions of Peter, was clinging frantically to the rails at either end of the seat, and, instead of allowing his body to swing with the motion of the vehicle, was endeavoring to sit bolt upright, as though he were in the House of Commons and in anxious expectation of catching the Speaker’s eye. Upon arriving at the foot of Ballymacrow hill Peter sprang to the ground—an example followed by myself; but Mr. Hawthorne retained his seat, as there was plenty of walking in store for him, and my horse could well endure the weight of one, when the weight of three would make a very essential difference in so steep a climb.

Peter, reins in hand, walked beside the “mimber,” and in a few minutes was engaged in “discoorsin’” him.

“Home Rule? Sorra a wan o’ me cares a thraneen for it, thin.”

“What is a thraneen?” asked Mr. Hawthorne, eager for information all along the line.

“A thraneen is what the boys 1477reddies their dhudeens wud,” was the response to the query.

“I am still in ignorance.”

“Wisha, wisha! an’ this is a mimber av Parliamint,” muttered Peter, “an’ he doesn’t know what a thraneen manes, an’ the littlest gossoon out av Father Finnerty’s school beyant cud tell him”; adding aloud: “A thraneen is a blade av grass that sheeps nor cows won’t ait, an’ it sticks up in a field; there’s wan,” suiting the action to the word, plucking it from a bank on the side of the road, and presenting it to the member for Doodleshire.

“And so you are not a Home-Ruler, my man?”

“Sorra a bit, sir.”

“Then what are you?”

“I am a repayler. I’m for teetotal separation; that’s what Dan O’Connell sed to Drizzlyeye.”

“What did Mr. O’Connell say to Mr. Disraeli?” asked my guest in very Parliamentary phraseology.

“I’ll tell ye. ‘What is it yez want at all, at all, over beyant in Hibernium?’ sez Drizzlyeye. ‘Yez are always wantin’ somethin,’ sez he, ‘an’ what the dickens do yez want now?’

“‘I’ll tell ye what we want,’ says Dan, as bould as a ram.

“‘What is it, Dan?’ sez Drizzlyeye.

“‘We want teetotal separation,’ sez Dan.

“‘Arrah, ge lang ou’ a that,’ sez Drizzlyeye. ‘Yez cudn’t get along wudout us,’ sez he.

“‘Cudn’t we?’ sez Dan. ‘Thry us, Drizzlyeye,’ sez he. ‘How did we get on afore?’

“‘Bad enuff,’ sez Drizzlyeye—‘bad enuff, Dan. Yez were always batin’ aich other and divartin’ yerselves, and, barrin’ the weltin’ Brian Boru gev the Danes at Clontarf, 1478bad cess to the haporth yez ever done, Dan. England is yer best frind. We always play fair,’ sez he.

“‘How dar ye say that to me?’ sez Dan, takin’ the Traity av Limerick out av his pocketbuke. ‘Luk at that documint,’ sez he, firin’ up; ‘there’s some av yer dirty work; an’ I ax ye square an’ fair,’ sez Dan, in a hait, for he was riz, ‘if the brakin’ av that wasn’t as bad as anything yer notorious ancesthor ever done?’ alludin’ to Drizzlyeye’s ancesthor, the impenitint thief.

“‘That’s none of my doin’, Dan,’ sez Drizzlyeye, turnin’ white as a banshee.

“‘I know it’s not,’ sez Dan; ‘but ye’d do it to-morrow mornin’,’ sez he, ‘an’ that’s why I demand the repale an’ a teetotal separation.’

“‘Begorra, but I think yer right, Dan,’ sez Drizzlyeye.”

“Such an interview could not possibly have occurred,” observed the practical Englishman.

“Cudn’t it?” with an indignant toss of the head. “I had it from Lanty Finnegan, who heerd it from the bishop’s own body-man.” And Peter, giving the horse a lash of the whip, dashed into the laurestine-bordered avenue leading up to the cosey cottage wherein resided the “darlintest priest outside av Room,” Father Myles O’Dowd.

Father O’Dowd’s residence was a long, single-storied house, whitewashed to a dazzling whiteness, and thatched with straw the color of the amber wept by the sorrowing seabird. A border of blood-red geraniums ran along the entire façade, and the gable ends were embowered in honeysuckle and clematis. A rustic porch entwined with Virginia creeper jealously guarded the entrance, boldly backed up by the “iligantest ratter in the barony” 1479in the shape of a bandy-legged terrier, who winked a sort of facetious welcome at Peter and bestowed a cough-like bark of recognition upon me. The parlor was a genuine snuggery, “papered with books,” all of which, from St. Thomas of Aquinas to Father Perrone, were of the rarest and choicest theological reading. Nor were the secular authors left out in the cold, to which the well-thumbed volumes of the Waverley Novels and the immortal facetiæ of Dickens bore ample testimony. A charming copy of Raphael’s masterpiece stood opposite the door, the glorious eyes of the Virgin Mother lighting the apartment with a soft and holy radiance, while the fresh and rosy flesh-tints of the divine Infant bespoke the workmanship as being that of a maestro. A portrait of Henry Grattan hung over the chimney-piece, and facing it, between the windows, a print of the review of the volunteers in College Green, while some dozen valuable engravings, all of a sacred character, adorned the walls in graceful profusion. A statuette of the Holy Father occupied a niche specially prepared for it, and an old brass-bound rosewood bureau, black as ebony from age, sternly asserted itself in defiance of a hustling crowd of horse-hair-seated chairs; a shining sofa a little the worse for the wear, and presenting a series of comfortless ridges to the unwary sitter, and a genuine Domingo mahogany table bearing an honest corned beef and cabbage and “boiled leg with” completed a picture that was at once refreshing and invigorating to behold.