^ ^ CALIFORNIA y^ Z LIBRARY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY OF TH ^M ^ -A\ / CALIFORNIA LIBRARY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA r-A\ LIBRARY OF TH v OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY I ;^ OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY ( THE WORKS OF FATHER PROUT. THE WORKS OF FATHER PROUT (THE REV. FRANCIS MAHONY) EDITED WITH BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION AND NOTES BY CHARLES KENT BARRISTER- AT-LAW AUTHOR OF "ALETHEIA," "CORONA CATHOLICA," ETC. LONDON GEORGE ROUTLEDGE & SONS, Limited Broadway, Ludgate Hill MANCHESTER AND NEW YORK " A rare combination of the Teian lyre and the Irish bagpipe ; of the Ionian dialect blending harmoniously with the Cork brogue ; an Irish potato seasoned with Attic salt. Oliver Yorke. CONTENTS. PAGE BlOGR.\PHICAL IXTRODfCTION wii THE RELIQUES OF FATHER PROUT. Oliver Yorke's Preamble xxxv Father Prout's Apology for Lent i His Plea for Pilgrijlages i3 His Carousal ... 39 Dean Swift's Madness : A Tale of a Churn 64 The Rogueries of Tom !Moore 83 LlTER.\TURE and THE JeSUITS I04 The Songs of France — Wine and War , . 129 Women and Wooden Shoes 149 Philosophy 170 Frogs and Free Tr.\de , . . . 190 The Songs of Italy — Chapter the First 211 Chapter the Second 230 Barry in the Vatican 240 The Days of Erasmus 263 Victor Hugo's Lyrical Poetry . 2S3 A Series of Modern Poets — ViDA's " SlLK\VORM " 308 Sarbiewski, Sannazar, and Fracastor 325 Beza, Vaniere, and Buchanan 342 Father Prout's Dirge 361 Mahony on Prout 363 The Songs of Horace — First Decade 377 Second Decade 396 Third Decade 4^3 Fourth Decade 429 Fifth Decade , . . . . 44S MISCELLANEOUS PIECES. The Epiphany : A Fragment 460 The Bottle of St. Januarius 4-3 The Sabine Farmer's Serenade 4^9 lVi5e7317 VI Contents. The Hot Wells 05 Clifton The Original of "Not a Drum was hea The Ides of March The Signs of the Zodiac Blrns and Beranger Lover and Ovid A Baptismal Chant The Piper's Progress The Double Barrel Poetical Epistle to Boz The Mistletoe The Redbreast of Aquitania Inaugural Ode to the "Author of Vanity Fair 473 475 477 478 480 4S2 485 487 489 490 492 495 500 ^iogntpbical Introbuction BEING THE LIFE OF TEE REV. FRANCIS MAHONY, " FATHER PROUT." An assumed name has often acquired a celebrity in literature, as contrasted with which that of the author himself, down to the very last, dwindles to com- parative insignificance. Thomas Ingoldsby, for example, is far more widely known to the generality of readers than Richard Harris Barham ; while many upon whose ears the name of Bryan Waller Procter might sound but strangely would, nevertheless, be perfectly familiar with his pseudonym as a l)Tist, Barry Cornwall. .Similarly, it may be taken for granted, that while, as a rule, the Parisians of the days of the Citizen King enjoyed, with the greatest gusto, the fame of Timon, the majority of them either knew nothing whatever, or next to nothing, of the individuality of Louis de Cormenin. With anonymous writers it happens, perhaps, the most frequently, that the mask having been first allowed to slip awr}', is eventually thrown away altogether. Boz, after this fashion, was soon tossed aside like a superfluous domino, when Dickens, still a very young man, quietly stepped to the front, according to Thackeray's expression, and calmly took his place in perpetuity among the first of English humorists. Thackeray himself, as it fell out, required a little longer time before he was enabled, in his own person, to supersede his supposititious alter ego, Michael Angelo Titmarsh. Only very seldom, a iioni de phwie gets to be so far identified with an author, that it becomes, so to speak, a convertible term with his patronymic. In this way, the merest casual mention, at any time, of Elia, is about equivalent to the express naming of Charles Lamb. Again, it but exceptionally occurs that a writer of note indulges in the luxury of building up for hmiself two or three distinct pseudonymous reputations. Swift's reduplicated triumph in that way is about the one solitary instance that can be adduced — an instance notably comm.emorated by Pope's famous apostrophe in the "Dunciad" — O thou ! whatever title please thine ear. Dean, Drapier, Bickerstaff, or Gulliver ! Otherwise, it has been the general rule, in this particular, among authors — and for that matter, indeed, it may be said, among artists as well — to viii Biographical Introduction. select some imaginaiy title, and hold to it consistently. In the histoiy of Italian art it is in this manner noteworthy that more than one of the great painters acquired fame under the merest nickname or sohricpiet—^l^.'io di San Giovanni being better known to the world at large as Slovenly Tom, otherwise Masaccio, and Jacopo Robusti, by reason of his father's craft, as the Little Dyer, otherwise Tintoretto. In our own time, agam, there have been two skilled draughtsmen who have enjoyed a wide popularity, the one in France as a caricaturist, the other in England as a book-illustrator, each of whom in turn has had his real name virtually obliterated— or, at any rate, in a great measure eclipsed— by an eccentric pseudonym. One of these has long been universally known on the other side of the Channel under his fantastic signature of Cham in the Charivari, hardly any but his per- sonal intimates being acquainted with his actual designation, Amedee de Noe. While, with regard to his contemporaiy and compeer amongst ourselves, though for upwards of forty years he has been familiarly before the public under his grotesque nom de crayon as Phiz, comparatively few have, even as yet, accustomed themselves to identify him under his homely sur- name, Browne. Reverting, however, from the artistic to the pui^ly literary experts who have, at different times, indulged in this innocent kind of masquerading, it may be argued, with some show of reason, _ that the fashion, afterwards so much in vogue in this countr}', was first set in earnest when Sir Richard Steele began to discourse in the Spectator as ^Nlr. Short- face, and his associate Addison, through the same medium, from behind the classic mask of C.L.I.O. Improving, from the veiy outset, upon the design thus happily hit upon between them, those congenial intimates, besides, there and then, by simply harmonizing their fancies, called an entirely new personality into existence : one ever since familiarly known in the world of letters, and instantly recognizable by all to this day as Sir Roger de Coverley. \Vhat Steele's and Addison's Sir Roger de Coverley was to \}ciz Spectator^ that, a little more than a hundred years afterwards, was Professor Wilson's Christopher North to Blackwood, and that, a very little later yet, was the Rev. Francis Mahony's Father Prout to Fraser. Each in turn was a creation, each was a central and dominant figure in a group of originals. Each was not only witty and humorous in himself, but the cause of abounding wit or humour, as the case might be, in those with whom he was associated. If around Sir Roger de Coverley there were clustered, not infrequently, in hap]-»y commune, such sympathetic characters as Captain Sentry, and Sir Andrew Freeport, and Will Honeycomb, with Christopher North there were hilariously allied, in the carousals of the Blue Parlour, Tickler, and the Ettrick Shepherd, and the English Opium Eater ; while, at Father Prout's bidding, there were brought together — at least upon one memorable occasion— Jack Bcllew, Dan Corbet, and Dick Dowden, to chop logic and cap verses, to crack jokes and bottles far on into the small hours, at the hospitable l)oard of the good old parish priest of Watergrasshill. That Christopher North needed no crutch — being, in fact, that stalwart athlete, both physically and intellectually, John Wilson — evcr)'body knew who had the smallest acquaintance with that wonderful repertory of sarcasm, frolic, wit and wisdom, the "Nodes Ambrosian.c. " With the identity merged in the jnuely imaginary character of Father Prout, how- ever, it has been from first to last quite otherwise. The author, in this Biographical Introduction. ix instance, has not merely, in a great measure, disappeared from view behind the veil, as it were, of his own productions, but what few glimpses have been caught of him have been obtained through a medium so misted over by prejudice, that nothing has hitherto been secured in his regard but a few distorted outlines of his character. It seems only just and fair, therefore, eveiything considered, that some effort should at length be made to dissi- pate, so far as may be in any way possible, the haze until now enveloping the reputation of the scholarly Bohemian who was the author of these Reliques. Francis Sylvester Mahony, better kno\^-n among his intimates as Frank -Mahony, but best known of all to the outer world as " Father Prout," was born in 1804, at Cork, in Ireland. Although his parentage on both sides showed him to be distinctly a member of the middle classes, his father was reputed to have descended from a younger branch of one of the most ancient families in the county Kerry, the Zvlahonys, or, more strictly, the O'^Iahonys, of Dromore Castle. For a brief interval, indeed, towards the close of his life in Paris, the subject of this memoir not only had the aristocratic O pre- fixed to his surname upon his visiting card, but the family crest besides, engraved above it. These little coquetries with the airs of high life, how- ever, he at the very last, as in truth better became him, abandoned. Nevertheless, during the time when he was still indulging in such hannless luxuries as the O and the heraldic device just mentioned, he showed himself ready enough upon occasion stoutly to vindicate his right to the possession of both. Playfully asked by a lady friend, whose good opinion he greatly regarded, why he had not long before claimed his own by assuming the prefixed vowel, he not merely answered at once by word of mouth, but deliberately wrote to her on the morrow, that he valued her esteem altogether too highly to render himself ridiculous by assuming what he had no right to possess. At the same time, he referred her to an authority in these matters, from which she might recognize, at a glance, what claim he really had to employ an escutcheon that had been borne by his race for at least two centuries and a half This authority, he explained, was readily acces- sible among the records relating to the siege of Limerick preserved in the Bermingham Tower of Dublin Castle, from which it might be seen that among those who marched out of the beleaguered city, and who, on arriving at Cork, refused to cross over to France, was one who had stood to his guns like a trump, having served throughout the defence in the artiller}', — to wit, his ("Frank O'^NIahony's") great-great-grandfather. However chivalrous may have been the surroundings of his ancestors, there can at least be no doubt of this, that his immediate progenitors %yere persons of the homehest status. For a dozen years after his entrance into the world, Francis Sylvester Mahony (without the O) flourished at Cork, growing up there into a shrewd, bright-eyed, saucy-faced gossoon, while picking up with about equal readiness the brogue that never^ afterwards altogether forsook him, and the mdiments of an education which, a little later on, was to ripen, on the continent, into the soundest scholarship. In point of fact, he was just twelve years of age when he first quitted his native place for those foreign shores which for half a century afterwards had, for him, a supreme fascination. His student days began thus betimes in the Jesuit College of St. Acheul, at Amiens. Thence, a little while fur- ther on, he was transferred by the Fathers of the Society of Jesus to their B * Biographical In trodiiciion. Parisian seminary in the Rue de Sevres. Destined from an early period for the priesthood, Frank Mahony— or, as he was then called by preference, Sylvester — passed the customary two years of his novitiate under the care of the Jesuit Fathers, alternately at their establishment in the Rue de Sevres, and in their suburban retreat, or viaison de campagne, at ^Nlontrouge. An apter scholar than Mahony those great masters of erudition never had entrusted to their charge ; while, on the other hand, the advantages accming to himself, intellectually, from their system, it would be difficult in any way to exaggerate. During the time when he was enrolled under their instruc- tion, as he used himself afterwards exultantly to declare, he breathed a veiy atmosphere of latinity, — drank it in, so to speak, through all his senses, — got saturated with it to the very tips of his nails. Skilled and accomplished though he eventually became in Greek scholarship, his knowledge of Greek was never at any time comparable to his rare and intimate knowledge of Latin. Under his foreign Jesuit masters he learned, while yet a stripling, to write, not only with facility but with elegance, in Latin, according to the whim of the moment, elegiacs, alcaics, sapphics, and hexameters. He not only spoke the language glibly even in his college days, but then and thenceforward his latinity, both oral and written, was exceptionally remark- able as at once pure and idiomatic. During his student life abroad, more- over, he contrived so completely to conquer the difficulties of French and Italian, that from that date forward he could converse in either with the rapidity of a native, as though each in turn had been his mother tongue. His successes throughout, it should be said at once, were exclusively those achieved in Uteris huviajiioribiis. At Acheul, at Paris, and at ]\Iontrouge it was exactly the opposite with him, in his intellectual predilections and antipathies, to what it had been at Brienne with Napoleon, when the latter was familiarly referred to among his comrades as the Young Mutineer — " avec le cerveau de feu pour I'Algebre, et de glace pour le Latin. " Mahony, on the contrary, never once from the outset dreamt of winning honours in disciplinis mathejuaticis. His preference was given from the first, and with his whole heart, to the classic languages and to literature. Having completed his novitiate in the Rue de Sevres, Sylvester was in cue course despatched to Rome for the pursuance of his higher studies there in philosophy and theology, at the Jesuit College. His instructors had long before then come to recognize in him far more of the student than of the devotee. In temperament he was knoMm to be habitually disputatious, occasionally choleric, and, under anything like direct opposition, whether in trivial or important matters, persistently self-opinionated. If friends were won to him with ease from among his companions, they were not in- frequently repelled by the caustic irony of his remarks, which too often illustrated only too poignantly Sydney Smith's famous metaphor about the sword-stick, out of which seemingly innocent and harmless object there suddenly leaps forth something keen, glittering, and incisive. Having receiN-^d in due sequence the tonsure and the four minor orders, Mahony had by this time, at reasonable inters-als, been advanced to the sub-diaconate, and eventually to the diaconate. Precisely at the period of life, however, when he was eligible for ordination to the priesthood, his health failed him so completely that it was considered in every way advis- able that he should return for a while to Ireland. On this journey home- ward he had got as far as Genoa when, calling in there upon the Pro- Biographical Litrodiiction. xi \incial, it was communicated to him as gently, but as distinctly, as possible, that he was considered by his superiors to have no vocation whatever for the priesthood, and that in any case it had been decided by them that he was in no way qualified to enter the Society. Although, during the course of his studies in the Eternal City under the Jesuit Fathers, intimations of a like kind had been made to him whenever he had taken occasion to express his desire to become a novice, the weighty remonstrance addressed to him at Genoa by the Pro\-incial took him, in a great measure, by surprise, filling his mind for a while with doubt and bewilderment, but leaving him in the end wholly unconvinced. Pursuing his journey westwards, nevertheless, it may here be said at once, by anticipation, that on reaching his native land he obtained permission to renew his efforts, to the end, that is, of test- ing his vocation, with a result exactly the same as that already arrived at. Before relating, however, what occurred — on the occasion of that second and, as it might be considered, crucial test as to the validity of his vocation — at the great Jesuit College of Clongowes (which is to Ireland what Stonyhurst is to England), it is, to say the least of it, remark- able to note, from a book actually published in Paris when Mahony was in his twenty-second year, that is, in 1826, how strongly his (in the cruel English sense of the word) Jesuitical character had impressed itself upon one of his contemporaries. This contemporar}-, it should be explained at once, was the Abbe Martial Marest de la Roche-Amand, who, in his work " Les Jesuites Modemes," sketched in lurid colours a most extravagant caricature of the genius and temperament of — as he dubbed him — 0"Mahoni ! "Bom in Ireland," quoth this atrabilious and ultra-caustic penciller by the way, " I know not if O'Mahoni is descended from the Count of that name, but to the spirit, to the prejudices, to the system of the Count, he adds the fanaticism, the dissimulation, the intrigue, and the chicane of a thorough Jesuit ! God help us in the contingency of his Company ever triumphing in France I Were he only to become confessor to our good King, he would, for a dead certainty, give us magnificent auto-da-fes ! Irish and Scotch Catholics have about them a smack of the Spanish Catholics ; they love to sniff the reek wafted from the funeral pyres of the doomed wretches who have declined to hear mass. The Society designs to place O'Mahoni, later on, at the head either of colleges or of congregations. Having taught him to stifle all natural sentiment under the morality of a devout life, they hope that, docile to the teachings of his instructors, the young O'Mahoni will become still more insensible and still more cruel than the most pitiless inquisitors of Valence and of Saragossa I " For forty years together Mahony preserved a copy of the book containing this amazingly grotesque distortion of his own lineaments in his youth, and would often point out with a chuckle of delight the passage just translated. But at length, in 1S65, when, as it may be presumed, he had got it pretty well by heart, he handed the precious volume over as a gage d amitU to James Hannay, enhancing its interest to his friend by scrawling on the fly-leaf that it was a gift to him from Frank :Mahony (it should have been O'Mahoni) de Saragosse ! Leaving behind him on the Continent, in one mind at least, such par- ticularly strong-flavoured impressions as to his being inspired by a rehgious zeal amounting to nothing less than ferocity — impressions, it can alone be presumed, derived from no other source than the sketcher's own mner con- xii Biographical Introduction. sciousness, Francis Mahony, still a young cleric aspiiing to the priesthood arrived at Clongowes Wood College, to put yet again to the test what he, at any rate, for one, still believed in as his religious vocation. The position occupied by him at Clongowes immediately upon his arrival was that of one of the masters of the establishment. As Prefect of Studies and of the Higher Playground he had devolved upon him the duty, in the first place, of preserving silence and general decorum among the more advanced students, both in the school-hall and in the college chapel ; and in the next place, during the hours of recreation, of seeing to the good conduct of those who took part in whatever game happened at the moment to be uppermost, such as cricket, football, rounders, or hare- and-hounds. Reaching Clongowes at the end of August, 1S30, Tvlahony found there, among the pupils entrusted to his charge, one who, like himself, was but a very few years afterwards to become a contributor to Bciitle)''s Miscellany^ this being the future author of the Tipperary Papers in that periodical, otherwise John Sheehan, better known to the generality of readers by his comical title of the Irish Whisky Drinker. Another pupil, -who was already noted among the collegians as the most skilled Greek scholar of them all, writing already as he did brilliant Anacreontics, took part with Mahony also, but a brief while later on, in the literary jousts of Regina. This was Frank Stook Murphy, afterwards known far and wide in the courts of law as Serjeant Murphy, and who, like the young Prefect of Studies and of the Higher Playground, was, at so early a date, to be counted among the picked band of the Fraserians. A couple of months had hardly elapsed after Mahony's induction into the post of Prefect at Clongowes when he was promoted by Father Kenny, the then Rector of the College, to the yet more responsible ofhce of INIaster of Rhetoric. Rapid though his advance was, however, his career there, in any capacity, was destined to be of very brief duration. It closed not only abruptly but by a sort of catastrophe. A couple of months had barely run out after Mahony's arrival at Clongowes when, early in November, a holiday for the whole College was unexpectedly announced. Among the plans which were thereupon suddenly impro- vised for the day's enjoyment, it was arranged that, under the special charge of their young master, a score of Rhetoricians were to start in coursing line across country in pursuit of a hare about an hour or so after breakfast. This select band, it was further agreed, was to head well off through the Duke of Leinster's country in the direction of Carton, while the other divisions of the Higher School were to scurry away by entirely dif- ferent routes with their greyhounds. Mahony's party, each member of which was that genuine broth of a boy, a lightfooted Patlander, were, according to the day's programme, to sit down to a two o'clock dinner in the Hotel at Maynooth, and then, after a brief interval of rest, were to course home again before nightfall. Nearly midway, on their return, there was to be one slight additional interruption at Celbridge, where tea was to be partaken of at the house of young John Sheehan's father, three miles from Maynooth, and five from Clongowes. The Irish Whisky Drinker himself is not inappropriately the one who has put upon record the result of the day's proceedings. According to his veracious narrative of what occurred, all went prosperously enough Biographical Introduction. xiii until that fatal turning point, when the day was, with a vengeance, done to a tea — a thoroughly disastrous tea and turn out — at Celbridge. There, for one of the revellers at least, the paternal hospitalities, those, that is to say, of the elder Sheehan, were all but within an ace of illustrating, quite literally, what is meant by the phrase of killing mth kindness. Modera- tion, until then, had been the order of the festivities. A solitary tumbler of whisky punch, for example, had sufficed for each excursionist as the accompaniment to the homely banquet partaken of with a relish by "the boys '"' at the Hotel in ]\Ia)Tiooth. A hundred thousand welcomes {ccad mille failthe) aM^aited them, all too generously, as the sequel proved, at Celbridge. " If the fatted calf was not killed " — Mr. Sheehan "s ingenuous ipsissima verba are here given — "there was, as they said in Ireland of old, 'a fire lit under the pump,' or, speaking less poetically, the kitchen boiler was ready to overflowing for what promised to be an exceptionally wet evening." As for the beverage actually giving a name to the meal, it turned out to be nothing better than the merest preliminary. As a sequel to the tea, with its Brobdingnagian accom- paniment of hot tea-cake, hight Barnbrack, a luscious compound of flour and eggs, thickly sown with raisins, there came in, in relays, to be again and again replenished, huge decanters of mountain dew freshly distilled, capacious bowls of sugar and ample jugs of screeching water, renewed with proportionate frequency, ' ' I don't know how many songs we sang," confesses the younger Sheehan, in this reminiscence of his bibulous boyhood, "how many patriotic toasts and personal healths we proposed, how many speeches we made, how many decanters we emptied." At the head of the too hospitable board sat the evidently not unworthy sire of one who was so soon afterwards to win repute to himself as, by pre- eminence, The Irish Whisky Drinker I At the foot of the table was the universally popular Parish Priest of Celbridge, Father Dan Callinan, soul- searching as a pulpit orator, heart-stirring as the singer of a patriotic song, and true master of the revels on an occasion like this, if he happened to be called upon by circumstances, for the delivery of an impromptu harangue. The speech of the evening, the song of the evening, in this particular instance, were alike Father Dan's ; the song in rapturous tribute to Erin, the speech in impassioned praise of O'Connell. The Liberator was already even then, as he continued to be increasingly thenceforward to the very last, in an especial manner, Mahony "s bete iioir or pet aversion. Father Callinan's paneg}'ric on the victorious champion of Catholic Emancipa- tion, while it suddenly roused the ire, stirred up all the bile and virulence of his systematic depredator, the self-willed and hot-headed young ^Master of Rhetoric. When the ringing cheers which marked the close of Father Dan's encomium upon O'Connell had at length died away, the sarcastic voice of Mahony was heard raised, to every one's amazement, in caustic dissent. Some of the most scornful lines in Byron's Irish Avatar were quoted by him against the Liberator, with the added sting of the fine Cork brogue with which they v%ere articulated. Hot words elicited words still hotter, fierce taunts provoked taimts yet fiercer, the disputants at the table being all the rest against the one solitan,- dissentient, who was denounced in speech after speech as the degenerate son of Ireland. Hap- pily in the end, as Saul's wrath, when at its worst, was appeased by the j harp of David, the war of discord was drowned by the harmonious voic3 ' XIV Biographical Introduction. of Father Callinan, opportunely trolling out a ditty, the closing rhymes of which celebrated, thus, the intertwining of the national emblems — Then let thy native shamrock shine in rays of triple gleaming, And Scotland's thistle round entwine, the rose betwixt them beaming. A couple of hours later than was intended the little impromptu orgie broke up to many a hearty hand-grip and cordial clinking of the stirrup cup among the revellers. Excited by argument and heated with potations, the youngsters, immediately upon their emerging into the open air to return to Clongowes, found themselves completely vanquished by the very coolness and freshness of the evening atmosphere. Confusedly, in a straggling way, they had barely accomplished the first mile of their return journey when their discomfiture was completed by the sudden outburst of an autumnal tempest of thunder and lightning, with rain in such overwhelming torrents that they were drenched to the skin within a few minutes from its commencement. This climax of calamity appears to have had its sobering influence upon two or three of the least youthful members of the little party, foremost among them, of course, the young ]\Iaster of Rhetoric, now thoroughly awakened, at the eleventh hour and three-quarters, to a recognition of his responsibility. Mercifully, when affairs were at this supreme juncture, some Bog of Allen carmen opportunely came to the rescue, like so many dei ex machind, tramping by leading their cars, laden with black turf, on their way to Dublin. But for their providential interposition thus, in the very nick of time, the imminent probability is that the boys, ' ' much bemused with" potheen and half-drowned by thunder showers, must inevitably have scattered away in the darkness and before morning have succumbed. A costly bargain having been made, however, with the peat-gatherers, the drenched and stupefied urchins w^ere bound with the car ropes on to the top of the turf-loads by the bogmen, the cavalcade, in this miserable plight, wending their way slowly towards their destination. Not until midnight was the outer gate of the College at length reached. Watchers were there on the look-out with lanterns. The whole estab- lishment was in trepidation. One after another, the unconscious way- farers were unbound from their al fresco peat beds and carried into the entrance hall of Clongowes. To the momentary horror of the Rector, upon counting their number up, one, it turned out, was missing, who was, however, eventually discovered in a state of collapse half-buried away in one of the peat-cars. Extricated from the superincumbent turf, to all appearance dead, he was, by order of the house apothecary, plunged as quickly as possible into a hot bath, a bath so hot that upon his immersion, though he was restored to life, he was, as his brother collegian Sheehan has related, peeled, before the close of the next fortnight, from the nape of the neck to the tendon Achilles. The Rector of the College, Father Kenny, as could alone have been reasonably expected under the circum- stances, was profoundly indignant with every one concerned in what appeared to him so disgraceful a saturnalia, but most of all, of course, with the young master, who was especially in charge of the ill-fated cours- ing party. As the result of the incident, Mahony resigned his chair as Master of Rhetoric almost immediately after these occurrences, and before Christmas bade adieu to Clongowes on his return to the Continent. Biographical Introduction. xv Passing through Paris, Mahony went on for a M'hile to the College of the Jesuits at f^reiburg, whence, after a few months' hesitation as to the course he ought in prudence to pursue, he proceeded once more to Rome, there to settle down again among his old haunts, though not in his old quarters. During this, for him more or less anxious sojourn in the Eternal City, he continued, with exemplaiy regularity, to attend theological lectures for two years together, lodging the while out of college at his own expense. The opinion of the Jesuit Fathers was still resolutely opposed, not merely to the desire he persistently cherished of being enrolled in the Society, but to the ambition which, in spite of all obstacles, continued to possess him of being, at any rate as a secular, ordained to the priesthood. The declared ambition of his life was to become — Sacerdos. \Yhatever obstructions were placed in his path, and there were many, appeared only to strengthen his resolve that this one dominant desire of his nature, in spite of eveiything that could be said to the contrary, should be realized. Years afterwards he repented, when it was altogether too late, that, in this vital matter for him, he had set all reasoning at defiance. As he frankly acknowledged to Consignor Rogerson, who had the happiness at the last of reconciling him to the Church of God and of administering to him the last sacraments, he himself was " determined to enter the Church, in spite of Jesuit opinion." Not merely of his own perfect free will, therefore, but literally by reason of his rooted self-willed persistence he was, for once and for all, signed on the forehead and the hands with the sacred clirism, and enrolled a priest forever according to the order of Melchisedek. Diraissory letters to that end having been ob- tained from the Bishop of Cork, the Rev. Francis Mahony was ordained at Lucca, thenceforth standing before the world — Presbyter. It has been stated, in error, that not very long after his ordination to the Priesthood Father Mahony, in obedience to instructions from his bishop, the Right Rev. Dr. Murphy, not only joined the Cork ]Mission, but acted for a time as chaplain to one of the hospitals in his native city, in 1832, during the terrible cholera visitation. As a simple matter of fact he never in life returned to Cork after the date of his ordination. He frequently said mass both in France and in Italy, occasionally even officiating in London shortly after his first return in his priestly character to England. ]\Iore than once he preached from the pulpit of the Spanish Ambassador's chapel near Manchester Square, and at intervals assisted in his parochial labours the well kno\Ma Dr. iMagee, who was facetiously dubbed about that period by O'Connell the Abbot of Westminster. All too soon, however, for his o\\x\. happiness, because mihappily, of course, all too late for any possible rectification of his own grievous error of judgment in the matter, Mahony awakened to a recognition of the painful tinith that his Jesuit preceptors had been right from the first, and that in ranning counter to their earnest wishes and advice he had become a priest without any true vocation. Thenceforth, through nobody's fault but his o^^"n, he stood before the world, and before the Church until all but the ver}- end, in a distinctly false position. There was something essentially unclerical in the mocking spii-it 'U'ith which he regarded the men and things, not actually consecrated to religion, that fell under his immediate observation. A scoffer at Christianity or a depredator of Catholicism he constantly looked upon from first to last with abhorrence. xvl Biographical Introduction. Conscious at all times, in the midst of the incongruities of his after life, of the permanent eftect of the anointing from which there was no possibility of escape— the sacred chrism leaving, as he knew, a mark that was abso- lutely indelible — he was keenly alive to, and always instantly resented, any semblance even, under any conceivable circumstances, of a slight put upon him, whether directly or indirectly, in his priestly character. Having once realized to the full that by nature, instinct, temperament, nay, by his whole idiosyncrasy, he was far more of the man of letters than of the ecclesiastic, his very sense of reverence constrained him first of all into relaxing and eventually into foregoing altogether the ques- tionable luxury of continuing to exercise his sacerdotal functions. His office -he still loved to con. His breviaiy remained to the last his constant companion. //, and neither Horace nor Beranger, both of whom he knew pretty well by heart, he delighted to carry about with him in his pocket. Refraining, as has been said, out of his very sense of reverence, from venturing any longer within the sanctuary, there to offer up with his own hands at the altar the sacrifice of the mass, he drifted away little by little from the ordinary practices of religion. The Roman collar was doff"ed. The soutane Avas abandoned. A biretta never any longer pressed his broad temples : yet while these evidences of the priest were one after another stripped away, the presbyter-turned-man-of- letters still asserted himself in the semi-clerical costume he thenceforth adopted. A threadbare black it may be said was from that time forward his only wear, as indeed in some sort best became so scholarly a Bohemian. Dropping gradually out of further association with his brother ecclesiastics, he found entirely new and in some respects more congenial companions among the contributors to the magazines and newspapers with which he soon afterwards came to be connected. In the calm retrospect which can be taken, now, of his long completed career, it seems to have been a circumstance curiously illustrative of its, so to speak, slipshod, and haphazard character that while in the earlier half of his literary life he was hand-and-glove with the ultra-Conservatives when writing for Eraser's Magazine and Bentley's Aliscellany, he was in its later moiety just as intimate with the ultra-Liberals when he was corre- sponding from Rome with the Daily A-eivs and from Paris with the Globe —addressing the latter under the guise of a sort of/«;/t7^;--bookworm, and the former under the nom de phime of the Benedictine Monk Don Jeremy Savonarola. Constitutionally arrogant and self-opinionated though he showed him- self to be throughout his whole life as a disputant, he nevertheless con- trived at all times to foregather, no less pleasurably for others than for him- self, with men of both the great political parties— his ready Avit, combined with his ripe scholarship, not infrequently securing to him the maintenance of these amicable relations with antagonists whom his ferocity of attack must otherwise have utterly estranged. A perfect master of fence in argu- ment, he disdained to wear the wire mask himself, or the button on his foil. Cut and thrust, carte and tierce were of no interest whatever to him unless, in those fierce bouts of disputation in which he delighted, he, and of course his opponent in like manner, had each full privilege allowed, so to speak, of drawing blood ad libiliitn whenever the opportunity for so doing might present itself to either. Sharper things were then said Biogi'apJiical Introduction. xvii and written than are now dreamt of in our social philosophy. Regitta and Maga flung vitriol and wielded bludgeons while dispensing their criticisms. Lord Alvanley, looking into the cadaverous face of Samuel Rogers, could c}Tiically raise the laugh in those days against his corpse-like friend, the poet-banker — not, we may be certain, as adding thereby another to his Pleasures of Memor}' — by observing interrogatively, " I say, Rogers, why don't you start your hearse ? you're rich enough 1 " The amenities of life were not only fewer then than they are now-a-days, but were of a wholly different character. Indiarubber tyres, C springs, and M'ooden pavements being comparatively unknown, the ways of the world were less smooth and the torturing jolts more frequent. It happened by good fortune for Mahony, at the very juncture when he v/as preparing to open up a new path for himself in literature, that a monthly periodical was just at that time springing into celebrity in London, with fair promise of rivalling in vigour and originality its already famous senior by thirteen years, Blackiuood of Edinburgh. This was Fras€7-'s Jllagazim', for Town and Countn,-, the initial number of which was pub- lished on the 1st of Februar}-, 1830. It had been but a little more than four years in existence when there was quietly enrolled one day upon its staff a new contributor, who immediately, upon his voice becoming audible, was recognized by all as indeed an acquisition. The originator of the Magazine it may here, however, be first remarked was Hugh Fraser, its publisher being his brother James Fraser, and its standpoint in London 215, Regent Street. There, at regularly recurrent intervals, the contributors were in the habit of assembling convivially in S}Tnposium. Less than a twelvemonth after the new recruit had accepted the colours of Regina and the coin of enlistment, there was shadowed forth upon a varnished copper-plate, by the rapid movements of an etching-needle held in the hand of one Alfred Croquis — a young Irishman afterwards renowned in the world of art as Daniel Maclise, the Royal Academician — the reflection, as like as life, of one of these famous gatherings. "The Fraserian?,''"to the number of seven-and- twenty, are there depicted, each of them with a marvellous verisimilitude. Two alone at this present writing are still survivors. The rest — a quarter of a hundred in all — have long since, one after another, gone over to the majority. The pair yet extant are the now veteran Carlyle and the then eminently handsome young novelist Harri- son Ains'Aorth. Glasses and decanters scattered about the finiit-laden board. Dr. Maginn, then Editor oi Frasej% has just risen to give the toast of the evening. Upon either side of him, in the background, are the two name- less attendants — one, a Sydney Smith-like butler in the act of decanting an especial magnum of port, the other an assistant flunkey extracting with an all but audible cloop the cork from a fresh bottle. Coleridge, Thackeray, Lockhart, Southey, D'Orsay are among those present who are the most readily distinguishable. Immediately to the left of ^Maginn, as he stands there delicately resting the tips of his fingers on the table, are seated three clerg}-men — Edward Irving of the Unknown Tongues, Gleig the Army Chaplain, and between the two. shrewdly peering at you from under his eyebrows and over his spectacles, Frank Mahony. One who knew several of the Fraserian set, and among them ]Mahony, — I am alluding here to the late Charles Lewis Gruneisen, the accomplished musical critic, — speaks of them in a communication addressed by him to the xviii Biographical Introduction. Pall Mall Gazette on the 25th May, 1S66, as having lived thirty-two years previously in a dangerous time, when club life was in its infancy. "The artistic and literar}' world," he there writes, "congregated chiefly in the small hours, in strange places. The painter, the sculptoi;, the actor, the reviewer, the critic, the journalist, the barrister, the author, nay, even the divine, fraternized in coteries, either at Eastey's Hotel, the Widow's in Saint Martin's Lane, afterwards in Dean Street, Soho, the Coalhole, Offley's, the Eccentrics in May Buildings, the Piazza, the Bedford, and other localities familiar to the few sur\-ivor5. The Irish and Scotch con- vivialists in their visits to London," he adds, "considered it to be a marked distinction to be admitted to thjse coteries, at a period when drinking habits were in the ascendant." Mahony's tutelary muse at _ this juncture might, hardly with extravagance, have been described as akin to the Fair}' Philomel in Planche's charming extravaganza of " The Sleeping Beauty," of whom the late James Bland, that true King of Burlesque, used to exclaim — with an august clearing of the throat beforehand — " (Ahem !) — we've known her long. She likes a jug and sings a tidy song." According to Mr. Gruneisen's recollection, Father Prout's vivacity found vent in the nocturnal revels just now referred to, "and," the narrator goes on to remark in so many words, "he never had sufficient resolu- tion to shake off the convivial habits then acquired." It was about that time that among other extravagant freaks of scholarship indulged in by Father Prout and his companions, he, in association among others with Dr. Maginn, Percival Bankes, and John (familiarly Jack) Churchill, trans- lated, or, as Mahony always loved, by preference, to express it, upset into various dead and living languages the then ridiculously popular street song of "All Round my Hat I wear a Green Willow." As a philologist, as a wit, as a lyrist, as a master of persiflage, Frank Mahony stepped at once conspicuously to the front with his earliest con- tribution to Frasers Magazine in the April of 1834. His communication there came to the readers of Regiiia as a distinct revelation. It introduced to their notice one who forthwith took his place permanently among the typical creations of our national literature. In setting forth what was entitled by him, with an air of delightful gravity, his " Apolog)-for Lent," it, in the very act of recording his Death, Obsequies, and Elegy, made the pulilic at large acquainted for the first time with Father Prout, whose Reliques thenceforth, month by month for a couple of years together, while they formed the chief attraction of Fraser, substantially built up for the writer himself an enduring reputation. According to a statement put forth on the 1 8th January, 1875, with all apparent seriousness, by Mr. Nicholas Mahony, Justice of the Peace of lilarney, in a letter addressed by him to the editor of the "Final Reliques," Father Prout was in some sense at least a real personage. He is there spoken of, at any rate, by the brother of the scholarly idealizer of his character who has thus given his name immortality, as an old clergyman who was intimate with the family of the Mahonyswhen they were children. This intimation it is especially worthy of note, however, is at once coupled with the acknow- ledgment that " the real Father Prout," as he is gravely called, " was only remarkable for his quiet simple manners!" Precisely. And upon an exactly Biographical Introduction. xix • similar showing it might just as reasonably be argued that Bob Fagin, the boy who helped to paste the labels on the pots of blacking down at Hungerford ^Market when Charles Dickens was for a \\hile there, in his childhood, as " a little labouring hind " at Warren's manufactor}^ was the veritable germ of the infamous Jew in " Oliver Twist " who goaded Sikes on to the murder of Nancy, and who is himself given over in the end to the hangman's hands at Newgate as an accomplice of the malefactor, A scene and a designation may not improbably in this matter have been adopted for the nonce as suggestive of a theme by Frank Mahony ; but he it was who, by his very mode of adopting it, made that theme his o^vn, and in the true Shaksperian sense as a creator imparted to it perennially in return a " local habitation and a name." The original Father Prout — original so far, that is, as the appellation and the venue are concerned — may, without doubt, have been, as indeed is stated on that veiy same page of the "Final Reliques," by another witness, Mr. James Murphy, from 1 800 to 1830, in which latter year he died, parish priest, at Watergrasshill. But, for all this, the true Father Prout — the still living and breathing Father Prout of whom we read in the Reliques, and who there talks to us all in a voice that has long since become perfectly familiar — is no other than Mahony's own innermost other self, not so much flesh of his flesh and bone of his bone, as, from his whole nature and genius, through brain and heart, his most intimate self-revelation. Guided to his right destiny when following in obedience to his first impulse the earliest conception formed by him of that delightful alter ego, one is tempted to say that Mahony by a happy instinct strolled from the Groves of Blarney to the Groves of Academe. Let who will turn the leaves, however cursorily, of those racy and indi- genous Reliques, he will for certain acquire a relish for them and a familiarity with them far more readily than he imagines. The potheen has not about it a tang more appetizing. The brogue is not more instantly suggestive of exhilaration. For, with a very literal truth, has he not himself hit off to a T his own highest faculty as a writer in those words of his already inscribed upon the fly-leaf of these collected *' Works of Father Prout " as their most fitting motto ? — words in which the Reliques are described in the aptest possible way as " a new combination of the Teian lyre and the Irish bagpipe, of the Ionian dialect blending harmoniously with the Cork brogue," or, yet more tersely even, as " an Irish potato seasoned with Attic salt." Discoursing thus, ostensibly in the posthumous voice of the parish priest of Watergrasshill, but really in his own, he for twenty-four months together through Fraser's Magazine flung abroad in lavish handfuls the largess of his accumulated wit and learning, scattering them about pell- mell, according to the whim of the moment, with reference to whatever subject-matter chanced to come uppemiost. As a critic, there was but too often something scurrile in his acerbity. As a lyrist, his songs had for the most part a lilting swing that bore all before them. The personalities and nicknames with which he pelted the motley throng of those who in any way excited his antipathy, must have bred ill blood enough at the time of their first publication, and read even now most offensively when the passion of the hour has long subsided. For "real larky fun," as James Hannay admirably expressed it in the N'orth British Rez'ieTV, Father Front's lucubrations are scarcely to be surpassed. Six years before he thus laughingly eulogized the XX Biographical Introduction. Reliques, the same animated writer enlarged with gusto in the Universal RevLio upon their general excellence as " a piquant mixture of tor}'ism, classicism, sarcasm, and punch." Evidencing therein, as Mahony did, in a hundred whimsical ways, that he knew Latin quite as well as either Erasmus or Buchanan ; he showed his love for the classics, as Hannay dehciously put it, "as a father shows his love for his children — by play- ing with them. " While doing this, moreover, he may be said, through the medium of his gravefaced imputations of plagiarism, to have invented a system of intellectual torture until then undreamt of, the poignant operation of which he, besides, in a manner perfected through his cruelly ingenious method of applying it by preference to the geuiis irntahile. And if, according to Lord Brougham's scathing phrase. Lord Campbell could be said to have added a new pang to the agonies of death by threatening to become, his biographer — a threat eventually realized in the shape of a supplementary volume to the " Lives of the Lord Chancellors" — Father Prout might with equal truth have been said by Moore to have added a new pang to the agonies of living by the triumphant skill with which he affected to demonstrate that the "Irish Melodies," so far from being in any way original effusions, were many of them no better than sly borrowings by translation from the Greek, the Latin, or the French ! The Greek of an unnamed disciple of Anacreon, the Latin of Prout himself, ipsissivia verba, the French of the ill-starred ^Marquis Cinq-^klars ! Who that has ever dipped into the "Rogueries" can be blind to the verisimilitude of the Padre's shadowing forth there in classic verse, at one and the same time of the Xora Creina of Moore, and of the Julia of Prout's fellow-cleric of the Hesperides, Robert Herrick ? Who cannot see that Mahony bore equally in mind r^Ioore's rapturous ejaculation, " O my Nora's gown for me, That floats as wild as mountain breezes. Leaving every beauty free To sink or swell as Heaven pleases ;" and with it Herrick's ecstatic allusion to what he terms " the liquefaction of her [Julia's] clothes," where he exclaims, in regard to their " brave vibrations each v/ay free, O how their glittering taketh me 1 " when, in the good Father's blending of his recollection of the two in his harmonious numbers, he added a perfecting chanii to each in his — " Nora; tunicam prseferres. Flante zephyro volantem ; Oculis et raptis erres Contemplando ambulantem?" Mahony was just thirty years of age when he assumed his place — a fore- most one from the very first by right of his wit and learning — among the select band of the contributors to Fraser's Mai^azi)u\ His earliest paper there, the first of the four-and-lwenty making up the aggregate after the lapse of a little more than two years of the now famous Reliques, made its appearance, as already observed, in the number of AV^';/(7 for April, 1834. It introduced the reader at once to a new and delightful personality, thenceforth perennially existent in the familiar dreamland of English literature— that of the Reverend Father Andrew Prout, Parish Priest Biographical Introduction. xxi of Watergrasshill. Its sequel, a month later on, gave, parenthetically, as it might be said, vouchers to the more incredulous for his having actually existed in the flesh, by refemng to his executors. Father Magrath the elegiac poet, and Father Mat Horrogan, P.P. of the neighbouring village of Blarney. The initial paper, under the guise of "An Apology for Lent," not only revealed to all comers in an off- hand way the vu'nare of the good Father of Watergrasshill, but enabled them to realize with a relish his taste both for creature comforts and for classical scholarship. The May number, which in its turn was entitled "A Plea for Pilgrimages," rendered them besides for once and for all intimate with his immediate pastoral surroundings, while it familiarized them with much that was odd and with more that was attractive in his compan- ions, his visitors, and his conversation. Then, moreover, was made clear to the comprehension of all, the abounding vivacity with which Mahony revelled in his mastery over both the ancient and modem languages. The earliest testimony afforded by him of his holding thus completely under his command not only the resources of the two gi^eat classic tongues, but of Norman-French as well, was his turning, as by a very toui' de force, Millikin's roystering celebration of "The Groves of Blarney " into a triple polyglot — "' Blameum Xemus," 'H 'TAtj BKapviKt], and " Le Bois de Blarnaye. " Appended to these at the time was the fragment of a version of the same ditty in Celtic, which purported to have been copied from an antique manuscript preserved in the King's Library at Copen- hagen ; an Italian version, "I Boschicli Blamea, "being set forth by Mahony upwards of a quarter of a century afterwards as having been sung by Garibaldi on the 25th ^Nlay, 1859, among the woods near Lake Como — Italic, Celtic, Gallic, Doric, Vulgate, each serio-comically purporting to be the veritable prototype of the merely reputed original, the Corcagian ! "Father Prout's Carousal," as reported in the third instalment of the Reliques, which was published in the June number of Fraser, was taken rather gravely to heart, as it happened, among the population of Cork by reason of the liberal use made therein of the names of some of its leading inhabitants. George Knapp, Dick Dowden, Jack Bellew, Dan Corbet, Bob Olden, and Friar O'^NIeara, were but the chorus, however, attendant upon Sir Walter Scott, the illustrious guest of the incumbent of Water- grasshill. As to the bandying of grotesque fun and erudite sarcasms between Scott and Prout in this paper, it may be regarded as reaching its climax where Sir Walter, in answer to the Padre's bantering inquiry as to whether he is any relation of that ornament of the Franciscan order, the great irrefragable doctor. Duns Scotus, replies, ' ' No, I have not that honour ;" adding at once, however, slyly, "but I have read what Erasmus says of certain of your fraternity, in a dialogue between himself and the Echo : (Erasmus loqjiitur). 'Quid est sacerdotium ? ^ (KcHO respondit). Otium!' — Prout at once turning the gibe aside with the laughing rejoinder, "That reminds me of Lardner's idea of ' otium cum dignitate,' which he purposes to read thus — othwi cum digghi' 'faties ! " In the course of the ' ' Carousal " occurs the Padre's noble version in Latin of Campbell's " Hohenlinden," the ringing sapphics of his "Prselium apud Hohenlinden " not unworthily echo- xxii Biographical Introduction. ing the heroic orighial. There also he gave the first cruel foretaste of his more highly elaborated onslaught, two months later, upon Moore, when he adduced, with the matchless effrontery of his persiflage, what he coolly announced as the Latin original of "Let Erin remember the days of old," beginning " O ! ulinam sanos mea lerna recogitet annos ! " It was in the fourth of the Prout papers, which appeared in the July number of Kcgina, that Mahony, indulging in the same eccentric pastime, imputed to Byron the like delinquency of plagiarism, pretending to have discovered the source of the famous apostrophe to Kirke White, familiar to the readers of " English Bards and Scotch Reviewers," in the dainty verses of a purely imaginary young French poet, hight Chenedolle. A score of equally brilliant, bizarre, fantastic, and hilarious contributions from the hand of Frank ^Mahony followed these in rapid and almost un- broken succession through the double-columned pages of Regina, until, in 1836, the whole were collected together in two volumes for separate publi- cation as "Father Prout's Reliques. " Maclise — who had been all the while embellishing Frascr month after month with a series of wonderfully etched portraits of the literary celebrities of that generation — to three of which, by the way, those of Henry O'Brien, L. E. L., and Beranger, Mahony himself furnished the letterpress accompaniment — enhanced the interest and attraction of the reissued Reliques by interspersing them with a number of eminently characteristic illustrations. Eighteen in number, these em- bellishments were announced on the new title-page, under the artist's then pseudonym, as from the pencil of Alfred Croquis, while the Reliques themselves were said to be collected and arranged by Oliver Yorke, a noin dc plume generally usable among the Fraserians, as though, like Legion, it had been a noun of multitude signifying many. It can hardly be regarded indeed as having been applicable in any distinctive manner to the Editor of /;v7i't';- himself, Dr. William Maginn's assumed name being unmistakably Sir Morgan O'Dogherty, as Father Prout was that of Francis Mahony, Before continuing this record of the few and slight incidents which mark the career of the author of the Reliques, let it be said here at once that incomparably the finest of them all is, without doubt, the sixth, in which Mahony i)ays his tribute of respect and gi'atitude to his Jesuit instructors. " Literature and the Jesuits " is the title of it ; and it is from the celebration of the apiaiy in the "Georgics" that Mahony has aptly selected his motto — "Alii spem gentis adultos Educunt fiftus : alii piirissima raella Stipaiit, et liquido distendunt nectare cellas." Ilis theme was suggested to him by the then recent massacre of fourteen Jesuits in the College of St. Isidore at Madrid. Referring at the outset of his paper to that atrocity, lie is inclined to think, as he protests with cutting irony, that, with all due respect to Dr. Southey, the Poet Laureate, Roderick was not by any means the Last of the Goths in the Iberian peninsula. It is characteristic of him that, even against himself, in the midst of his emotional enthusiasm in the cause of his old masters in literature, he cannot help cynically hinting a suspicion BiograpJiical Introdtcction. xxiii that he has a sort of "drop serene" in his eye, seeing that he onlv, as he expresses it, winks at the rogueries of the Jesuits — never reddenino- for them the gridiron on which he gently roasts Moore and Lardner. Incidentally in a casual sentence he lays down a proposition which, looked back to now, seems like the foreshadowing of the noble master- piece produced years afterwards by the Count de Montalembert, " Les Moines de I'Occident : " " There is not, perhaps a more instructive and interesting subject of inquiry in the history of the human mind than the origin, progress, and workings of what are called monastic institutions." He enumerates with exultation, among a tlu'ong of other illustrious pupils of the great Society, Descartes, Torricelli, Tasso, Bossuet, Comeille, jMoliere, Fontenelle, Bellarmine, Cornelius a Lapide, Bourdaloue. In the vindication of them as undoubted benefactors to their fellow-creatures, physically no less than intellectually, he recalls to mind the celebrity achieved by their beneficent medicaments, asking, for himself, who has not heard of Jesuits' bark, Jesuits' drops, Jesuits' powders ? and, with Virgil — " Quae regio in terns nostri non plena laboris?" Grandly he sings, there, too, in his owTi voice, though nominally in that of an old schoolfellow of Prout's, who died in 1754, as a Jesuit Missionaiy in Cochin China, the noble Latin ode in which he commemorates the Vigil and Triumphs of the gi-eat founder of the Order, Ignatius Loyola — " Tellus gigantis sentit itur ; simul Idola nutant, fana ruunt, micat Christi triumphantis trophceum, Cruxque novos numeral clientes." Persecuted from generation to generation ; ruthlessly expelled from Venice ; twice (it maybe said now, thrice) driven ignominiously from France, where, thrust out of the door, they returned through the window ; executed by the dozen, here, in England ; encountering stripes, perils, and incarcerations as numerous as those of St. Paul, in Poland, Germany, Portugal and Hungary — the Society's march through Europe for two centuries together, Mahony finely declares to be alone comparable in heroic endurance with the retreat of the ten thousand Greeks under Xenophon. As for himself, he protests that he owes everything to their guidance, finding only in the words of Tully any adequate expression for his gratitude — " Si quid est in me ingenii, judices (et sentio quam sit exiguum), si quae exercitatio ab optimarum artium dis- ciplinis profecta, earum rerum fructum, sibi, suo jure, debent repetere. " It is after this sustained and strenuous avowal of his sense of obligation to the Society of Jesus that, as if yielding himself up at once to the irre- pressible resilience of his nature as a satiric humorist, he evidently enough for the sheer relief of unbending after so much imwonted serious- ness, upsets into English verse the extravagant drollery of the Jesuit Cresset's comic poem " Vert-Vert," the Parrot who, although he can sing of him cne while in the days of his original innocence, " Green were his feathers, green his pinions, And greener still were his opinions," alternates, to the delight and terror of the Ursuline community of whom he was the boast, between the saintly and the satanic. xxiv Biographical Introduction. Having unburdened his mind thus in F?-ase7- between 1834 and 1836 of a good deal of the miscel!an::ous load of familiar humour and out-of-the- way learning that nevertheless, even when most thickly accumulated there, always sat so lightly upon it, Mahony, at the very dawn of 1837, began poking his fun anew at the public through an entirely fresh channel — that, namely, which was opened up to him by Dickens, then at the very outset of his career, when, having just completed " Pickwick," and dropped the mask of " Boz," he inaugurated under his editorship a new monthly venture for the million, under the title of BentleVs JMisccllany. The very first page of the new periodical was Front's, dated Watergrasshill, Kal. Januarii, entitled No. I of " Our Songs of the Month, " It was an effervescent lyrical draught from, or anent, the Bottle of St. Januarius. Exactly a year afterwards, in the January number of Bentley for 1838, another and somewhat longer lyrical effusion from the same pen appeared in the fomi of "A Poetical Epistle from Father Prout to Boz," under date Genoa, the 14th of Decem- ber, 1837. Intermediately between these two contributions, Mahony had been pouring out his rhymed drolleries abundantly enough, though for the most part in a very fragmentaiy way, in the Miscellany, to the number of seventeen or eighteen. Four of these were scattered, like the sugar-plums from an exploded bonbon -cracker, in different parts of the initial number of Bentley, Teddy 0'Dr}'Scull, the Schoolmaster of ^Vatergrasshill being ostensibly, in the instance of three of them, the intermediary for their trans- mission. Again, in the J//^a7/a;n', the charge of plagiarism was demurely cast in the teeth of dead and living celebrities by this most incorrigible of larking scholiasts — Lover's Molly Carew, "Och hone! Oh! what will I do?''' reappearing as " Heu ! lieu ! me tedet, me piget o ! " while Tom Hudson's Barney Brallaghan came forth anew, robed in the classic toga, under the title of "The Sabine Farmer's Serenade," with its irresistible refrain thus whimsically imitated — " Semel tantum die eris nostra Lalage ; Ne recuses sic, dulcis Julia Callage." Before the close of his connection as a regular contributor with BeJitley^s Mis- cellany, Mahony had at length forsaken the haunts to which he had latterly become accustomed in London, particularly towards the small hours of the morning, and had wandered back through Paris into Italy. Thence, being in no way tethered, either by home lies or clerical responsibilities, he went for two or three years together further afield than he had hitherto ever dreamt of venturing. His movements, which were discursive, carried him gradually and in a wholly unpremeditated way through Hungar}-, through Asia Minor, through Greece and Egypt, until in 1 841 the observant nomad re- turning to the South of France, paused a while there, to all apjx'arance solely for rest and reflection. Before setting out on these peregrinations he had, in 1837, passed through the press in London, with notes and illus- trations, a little duodecimo, entitled " La Boullaye le Gouz in Ireland." By the time his w.anderings eastward were completed he settled down into what came to be thenceforth his confirmed character — that of a bookish, schol a rIyyW ;/«■;/;•, loitering through life by preference in continental cities; with quij:)s and cranks galore for every one he encountered ; gladdened by the chance, whenever he was lucky enough to stumble across one, of fore- gathering with an old friend from whom he had long drifted apart, and B iograpJi ical In trodiiction . XXV from this time fon^'ard until the very end giving up his pen exclusively to the rough and ready labours of the journalist. Twice in this capacity he discharged for a lengthened period, first for two years at Rome, and afterwards for eight years together at Paris — these being in fact the last years of his life — the responsible duties of a Special Correspondent. As the Roman Correspondent of the I)ai7\' Alius in 1846 and 1847, he bad the privilege of describing the end of the Pontificate of Gregor}- the Sixteenth and the commencement of the wonderful reign of Pope Pius the Ninth. He it was who, shortly after the accession of Giovanni Mastai Ferretti to the chair of the Fishennan, said so finely in his regard, in the words of the Gospel — J^m'i homo inissiis a Deo ad iiomen erat JoaJines. In carry- ing on this Roman correspondence from day to day Mahony wrote no longer like the Prout of Fraser in a conservative sense but, on the contrar}', as an advanced Liberal. Immediately his communications were brought to a conclusion they were collected together as a separate and substantive publication — his title-page running thus : — "Facts and Figiires from Italy, by Don Jeremy Savonarola, Benedictine Monk. Addressed during the last two . Winters to Charles Dickens, Esq., being an Appendix to his 'Pictures.' " His introduction to the work, Avhich affected to give an autobiographical account of himself as this supposititious monk of St. Benedict, and of his supposed birthplace, Sardinia, amounted in reality to a bitter and caustic satire, the veil thrown over which was only too transparent. John Taureau, Tomaso il Moro, Mac(chiav) Hello, Archbishop of Vestrum, Dandelione, Constematum Hall, and the like, so flagrantly indicated their application, that they were almost tantamount to printing the real names they signified in italics. Mahony"s antipathy to O'Connell, it must be said in honest truth, bore about it no more distinct characteristic than that of malignity. Nothing less than malignity, it will be evident, dictated eveiy syllable of Don Jeremy's revolting lyric entitled "The Lay of Lazarus," or hinted with such gusto at the notion of the rats clearing off with the heart of the Liberator, after the depositing of that relic overnight in the ponderous catafalque. Consistent at least to the very last, in his ungrateful deprecia- tion of the archchampion and victor of Catholic Emancipation, was the sometime usher of Clongowes, later on Father Prout, later on yet, Don Jeremy Savonarola. A wanderer by choice for years upon the European continent, a cosmo- politan ingrained, Mahony, it has been A\ell said by one of his younger friends, Mr. Blanchard Jerrold, while he v>-as at home in many places — on the banks of the Tiber, the Seine, the Amo, and the Thames — was most at home in London. Yet for all that he settled down at length en pcrnia- muce in dear, delightful Paris — " Paris pleine d'or et de misere." Occa- sionally, even then, but only at very rare inter\-als indeed, he wrote for the magazines. In i860, for example, he contributed to the Cornhill his ' ' Inaugural Ode to the Author of ' Vanity Fair ' " — that dear friend of the old Fj-ascr days whom he could never praise too highly. Otherwise Mahony's writing during the last eight years of his life wa^ given up exclusively to the Globe in his capacity as its regular Paris Correspondent. His letters there were often brief, and always both desultor}- and intermittent. ^ His reader, however, sat down to them invariably as a gounnand might sit down to a dish of ripe walnuts, with a favourite bottle of madeira at his elbov.-, to crack, and peel, and munch them with a relish — et cum grano XXVI Biographical Introduction. sails. His residence down to the very last during these years was in the entresol of one of those huge Parisian hotels in which he so much dehghted. It was situated in the Rue des MouHns, a thoroughfare running out of the Rue Neuve des Petits Champs, or, as Thackeray facetiously preferred to call it in plain English, the New vStreet of the Little Fields. There the old scholiast, striking at last, so to speak, his nomadic tent, settled down permanently in bohemian seclusion. There, at odd intervals, according to the spur of the moment, he jotted down those alternately whimsical and recondite commentaries on passing events which went to the making up of his daily newsletter. During the tirst half-dozen of the " 'sixties," his was a familiar figure enough to some, at least, of the habitues of the streets of Paris. Wherever encountered — whether dropping in fitfully at Galignani's newsroom, or sipping his brandy-and-water in solitary state at some favourite cafe, or mooning, half dreamily, half observantly, along either a gaslit or a sunlit boulevard — he was scarcely to be passed unnoticed even by a stranger. As characteristic a glimpse of Father Prout in his Parisian days as any 1 know of is that afforded through ths loophole of the third chapter of the " Final Reliques," where he is described as one of those voluntary exiles to the banks of the Seine, who were as much integral parts of its fair Lutetia as Murger, Musset, Privat d'Anglemont, ^Nlery, the great Theo, Lespes, Monselet, Dr. Veron, and a host of other strollers. At that time, quoth Mr. Blanchard Jerrold, " it was difficult to meet Father Prout. He w'as an odd, uncomfortable, uncertain man. His moods changed like April skies. Light little thoughts were busy in his brain, lively and frisk- ing as ' troutlets in a pool.' He was impatient of interruption, and shambled forward talking in an undertone to himself, with now and then a bubble or two of laughter, or one short sharp laugh almost a bark, like that of the marksman when the arrow quivers in the bull's-eye. He would pass you with a nod that meant, ' Hold off — not to-day I ' You had been with him in his entresol of the Rue des Moulins over night, and had been dismissed in the small hours when he had had gossiping enough. You had been charmed' with the range of his scholarship, the ease and raciness of his wit, by the masterly skill with which he handled his literary tools, and the shades of the best of all good company whom he could summon before you in anecdotes which almost brought their breath again upon the cheek. To-day he is gathered up closely within himself, and is holding company in solitude. Fie was very impatient if any injudicious friend or a passing acquaintance (who took him to be usually as accessible as any flaneur on the macadam) thrust himself forward and would have his hand and agree with him that it was a fine day, but would possibly rain shortly. A sharp answer, and an unceremonious plunge forward without bow or good-day, would put an end to the interruption. Of course the Father wa- called a bear l)y ceremonious shallow-pates, who could not see there wa - something extra in the little man talking to himself and shuflling, with his hanfls behind him, through the fines fleitrs and p-andes dames of the Italian Boulevard. There were boobies of his cloth, moreover, who called him a bore. He was forgetful at times of the bienseances, it seems, which regulate the use of scissors and paste. He made ill-timed visits. He was unmindful of the approach of ' the hour of going to press.' He lingered over the paper v.hcn a neighbour was waiting for it, while he travelled far Biographical Litrodnction. xxvii off amid the vast stores of his. memon', seeking to clothe some fact or truth of to-day in the splendour of a classic phrase or in some quaint old Jesuit dress. When his brain was full-flowing to his tongue, he would keep you under a tropical sun by the Luxor obelisk, and tell you M"hen he first knew Paris, and how he saw the scaffoldings of the Rue Royale, and what historic pageants he had watched progressing inwards and outwards by tl*e Tuileries. Apposite anecdote, queer figure, sounding phrase cover-- ing wretched littleness, lace coats over muddy pett}^ hearts : Monsieur de Talleyrand, Beranger's de, everj'body's de, Louis Philippe and his mess, the poet-president and then the nephew of somebody who lives to rule the roast — better roast, too, than Monsieur Chose got by contract for his guests — ha! ha ! the Father. laughed, unmindful of the heat — and he gossiped on. Louis Philippe as Ulysses ! as Leech could draw him, with bottle- nose, a cotton umbrella under his aiTQ, and a market basket in his hand, going out for the Sunday dinner. The store of recollection would gape wide, and it would end with this, 'You've nothing to do for an hour, have a cigar.'" Lightly touched in though this silhouette is, it is surely a speaking likeness of the man whom, as Mgr. Rogerson reminds me. Vis- count Palmerston, Lord John Russell, and others of the Whig party used to look up as something to be seen in Paris and encouraged in politics. Stooping his short and spare but thick-set figure as he walked, wearing his ill-brushed hat upon the extreme back of his head, clothed in the slovenliest way in a semi-clerical dress of the shabbiest character, he saun- tered b)', with his right arm habitually clasped behind him in his left hand — altogether presenting to view so distinctly the appearance of a member of one of the mendicant orders, that upon one occasion, in the Rue de Rivoli, an intimate friend of his found it impossible to resist the impulse of slipping a sou into the open palm of his right hand, with the apologetic remark, "You do look so like a beggar I " Apart, however, from his threadbare garb and shambling gait, there were personal traits of character about him which caught the attention almost at a glance, and piqued the curiosity of even the least observant wayfarer. The " roguish Hibernian mouth," noted in his regard by Mr. Gruneisen, and the grey piercing eyes, that looked up at you so keenly over his spectacles, won your interest in him even •upon a first introduction. From the mocking lip soon afterwards, if you fell into conversation with him, came the "loud snappish laugh," with which, as Mr. Blanchard Jerrold remarks, the Father so frequently evi- denced his appreciation of a casual witticism — uproarious fits of merri- ment signalizing at other moments one of his own ironical successes, outbursts of fun, followed during his later years by the racking cough witli which he was too often then tormented. His " pipes," as he called the bronchial tubes, he mistakenly regarded as the only weak point in his con- stitution, his physical strength having been mainly worn down at last by diabetes. That disease, in the midst of a complication of maladies and infiiTnities, first indicated its undermining influence by the excessive depression it superinduced in his naturally hilarious temperament. Leading in his domestic character the life of a recluse, he had only too obviously ample opportunity for solitar}' reflection. Ordained to the priesthood, consecrated to the service of God by the sacred chrism, not only, as has been seen, had he ceased for years to exercise his sacerdotal faculties, but he had even drifted away altogether, as already remarked, from the ordinar}- prac- xxviii Biographical Introduction. tices of religion. It must be understood at once, however, and ought, in justice to his memory, to be here stated as emphatically as words can in any way express it, that — contrary to a belief in his regard still unhappily very prevalent — he never was suspended 1 More than this, no shadov\- of a charge was ever directed against him of having, at any time, either directly or indirectly, denied his Faith. He was never, it should be added, besides, in any way seriously taken to task, either by the Hol> See, or by his immediate ecclesiastical superiors. More than this, the fact is upon record, that the Tablet, having once incidentally referred to him as "a suspended priest," was summarily challenged by him to prove its assertion in a court of justice, Mahony laying his damages at ;i^2,ooo, and the result being that an apolog}' was instantly offered and the charge unconditionally withdraT\-n. About six weeks before Mahony's demise, the illness from which he had for a considerable interA-al been more or less constantly suffering assumed an unmistakably menacing character. He did then what he had done three years previously when attacked by severe indisposition — he sent round to St. Roch, his parish church, for the Abbe Rogerson. Thence- forth, day after day, the latter was sedulously in attendance upon him in his apartment. The spiritual adviser of the lonely wit became his friend, his guide, his consoler. It is from the testimony of this venerated priest, better kno\\"n now as Monsignor Rogerson, that the facts are derived which are here, for the first time in print, about to be enumerated. Desirous as I naturally was, immediately upon my having vmdertaken to become Mahony's biographer, to state only in his regard what was abso- lutely authentic, but more particularly with reference to the incidents attendant upon his deathbed, I turned instinctively, as a matter of course, for the desired information to Mgr. Rogerson, my application to whom, it is but the simplest justice to say, was responded to with the most instant and gracious cofdiality. \\Tiatever materials Mgr. Rogerson had at his command that were in any way likely to be serviceable to me, he placed entirely at my discretion. The characteristic portrait, for example, which forms the frontispiece to the present volume he has enabled me to have engraved from the latest photograph of Mahony — that executed by Weyler, of 45 in the Rue Lafitte : the very copy having been generously confided to me for that purpose which was the sitter's last souvenir to his deathbed confessor. Thanks to a similar kindness again, the ver}^ auto- graph which will be found inscribed underneath that likeness has been fac- similed from one of the very last and one of the most confidential letters addressed to Mgr. Rogerson by the author of the Reliques. During the closing six weeks of Mahony's existence, within which inter\-a], as has been said, he was brought day after day into intimate acquaintance with Mgr. Rogerson, their usual hour of meeting was late in the afternoon. Ordinarily the former's diurnal letter to the Globe had l)y that time been com- pleted, Father Prout's special correspondence with that journal, by the way, being continued up to within a fortnight of the actual date of his decease. Upon one of these occasions, however, he had not quite finished his com- munication. Hence, upon the Abbe showing himself at the door, which generally stood open, ^lahony called out with soilie asperity, " I'm busy." •' All right," was the reply "and not very civil to-day." That same evening a line written with a black-lead pencil on his card was sent round to hi-s Biographical IntrodiLction. xxix confessor — zoologically apologetic — thus : "If you iviU poke up a bear in his hours of digestion, you must expect him to growl. " Hereupon, Mf^r. Rogerson remarks, that, although Mahony was undoubtedly by nature testy and\brupt, he evidently, in his regard, restrained his impetuosity,_ as a rule receiving him as a priest who had a duty to perfoi-m= The exception just instanced he conceives to have betokened unmistakably the self-con- quest which had already commenced. Another slight ebullition of temper is also mentioned as having occurred at one of their earlier conferences. Upon the occasion refeiTcd to, the Abbe had thrown out, it appears, the suggestion that :Mahony should resort for purposes of especial devotion to Notre Dame des Victoires, urging as its peculiar privilege, that that sanctuary was the seat of the great archconfratemity for the conversion of sinners, as •well as a place of holy pilgrimage sought by people of all_ classes when weighed down by any particular anguish or solicitude, adding that at such times it was visited, among others, by the Empress Eugenie. Upon this Mahony, who had listened sullenly to these remarks, kindling into a poetic flame, exclaimed abruptly, " Don't talk to me oi localizing devotion. God is to be met wnth in all places. The canopy of heaven is the roof of his temple : its walls are not oui horizon," and so on. Seeing clearly that he was in for a strenuous remonstrance, and realizing at once the importance of asserting his own position in his regard, Mgr. Rogerson, interrupting him, mildly observed, "Excuse me, I am speaking to you under the impression that you are a Catholic wishful to resume his duty. Byron has given us his rhapsodies in some such fashion as this. Pray let me speak as a priest and as a believer. If you find me limited and illiberal seek some one else." Having from the very outset been under the appre- hension that he would in his intercourse with ]\Iahony have to encounter impatience of control and pride of intellect, Mgr. Rogerson deemed it advisable, he says, at once to claim his position unhesitatingly, as here described. In so doing it may be remarked at once that he succeeded effectually. Mahony never repealed his assault, but on the contraiy remained to the last docile and tractable. Here, for example, is one of the little epistolary' indications he gave at this period of his havingbecome thoroughly amenable. Dating his note simply "6 o'clock — evening," he writes as follows with reference to his intended general confession : — " Dear and Reverend Friend, , . . " I am utterly unfit to accomplish the desired object this evening, having felt a giddiness of head all the afternoon, and am now compelled to seek sleep. It is my dearest wish to make a beginning of this merciful work, but complete prostration of mind renders it unattainable just now. I will call in the morning and arrange for seeing vou. "Do pray for your " penitent, F. Mahony." Mgr. Rogerson remembers also perfectly well, as he tells me, having been influenced in his determination to take this resolute stand with INIahony, by reason of his having been some time previously struck by the remark of an Irish dignitar}', who, when conversing with another bishop on the subject of Father Prout, said in the Abbe's hearing, "I should fear him even dying ! " the reply of the prelate thus addressed being, "^I should covet no greater grace than to see poor Frank prepared to die well. " ^^ hen listen- XXX BiograpJiical Introduction. ing to tliose words the Abbe Rogerson little expected, as he says, that his was to be the privilege and his the responsibility. The event actually came to pass, however, on the evening of Friday, the 1 8th of May, 1866, at Mahony's apartment in the entresol of No. 19 in the Rue des Moulins, and it did so, as will be seen at once, under circumstances of great conso- lation both to penitent and confessor. Their conversations for half a dozen weeks together, though generally brief and business-like, had been often prolonged, extending at those times into details of Father Prout's past history and reminiscences. Repeatedly during the course of them, ejaculations like the following would start in anguish from his lips : — "But I ought never to have been a priest ! " "I had no vocation ! " or exclamations of a similar character. As already explained, the Jesuit Fathers, before it was yet too late, had striven in vain to impress upon him, betimes, the same conviction. Their proverbial powers of penetration had, as ^Igr. Rogerson conjectures, enabled them even then to detect what was invisible to Mahony himself, namely, a prepon- derating excess of will and unusual intellectual endowments, together with a ready armoury of dangerous wit and satire. Notwithstanding his general recklessness whentreating of Churchmen and Church matters, it is especially noticeable in his regard that he never once allowed either his tongue or his pentogive expression, with reference to his old masters, to any of those denun- ciations of the great Order, so much in accord with the popular prejudices. Mahony's remorseful sense of having obtruded himself into the Church was, it may here be remarked, embodied by him in a document which the Abbe Rogerson presented on his behalf to Rome when first he sought his aid towards reconciling him to the Church of God. This was in 1863, when, through the archbishop's office in Paris, permission was obtained for him "to retire for ever," as he expressed it, -'from the sanctuary," and to resort thenceforth to lay communion. Simultaneously he received a dis- pensation enabling him, in consideration of his failing eyesight and his advancing age, to substitute the rosary or the penitential psalms for his daily office in the Iheviary. Mahony, it is worthy of note, drew up this petition himself at the Aljbe Rogerson's suggestion, both its completeness and its lalinity being so remarkable that the Roman ecclesiastical lawyer who charged himself with it volunteered to the Abbe an expression at once of his surj^rise and his admiration. Commenting upon this same document Mgr. Rogerson himself remarks, that whilst INIahony's published specimens of clas.^ical and canine Latin are no doubt the wonder and amuse- ment of scholars, his taking up his pen, as he did in this instance, after years of disuse, and in a couple of hours throwing off an ecclesiastical paper full of technical details and phraseology, was, to say the least of it, very remarkable. Already, at the period here immediately referred to, that is three years prior to the end, the Abbe had the happiness of restor- ing his penitent to practical life in the Church, though, greatly to the inter- mediary's regret, only in the degree of lay communion. To two aloneof P'ather I'rout's friends was this fact communicated — one of these two being bound to him by tics of affection from their early youth, when they were fellow-novices at Acheul, meaning the good Pere Lefevre, while the other was the late saintly liishop Cjrant of Southwark, who had never, at any time evidenced towards Mahony anything like estrangement. It was the last-mentioned, by the way, who, in 1848, during Don Jeremy Savona- BiograpJdcal Introdtictioii, xxxi rola's residence in Rome as the Daily News' Con-espondent, "drew him, in his own sweet winning way," as Mgr. Rogerson expresses it, once more within the sanctuaiy, Father ]Mahony tlien for the last time venturing to offer up the Holy sacrifice. Many years afterwards the two met by accident one day in Paris, at the comer where the Rue de Rivoli turns into the Rue Castiglione. The Bishop, stopping abruptly in front of Father Prout, claimed him upon the instant as an old friend, calling him delight- edly by his real name, and at once walked off with him arm-in-ann with every evidence of affectionate cordiality. Refemng with manifest pleasure at the time to this incident, Mahony in 1 863 requested the Abbe Rogerson to communicate to Bishop Grant and to the Pere Lefe\Te, and to those two intimates alone, the fact of his reconciliation. When, towards the close of April, and yet more plainly at the beginning of May, 1 866, Mahony's last malady gave unmistakable evidence of its alanning character, the Abbe Rogerson, finding that his penitent took to his bed at length without reluctance (he who had always hitherto striven hard to receive his friends in his accustomed comer), directed his utmost efforts to the completion of his work by the administration of the last sacraments. Immediately prior to Father Prout's actually taking to his deathbed, upon the last occasion, that is, of the Abbe's finding him yet "up," he was huddled in his arm-chair, scantily clad, and eagerly expectant ! Mgi". Rogerson's own words shall be here given : — "Thanking me for my patient and persevering attention to him during his sickness, he asked pardon of me and of the whole world for offences committed against God and to the prejudice of his neighbour, and then sinking down in front of me, with his face buried in his two hands and resting them on my knees, he received from me with convulsive sobs the words of absolution. His genial Irish heart was full to overflowing with gratitude to God as a fountain released at this moment, and the sunshine of his early goodness had dispelled the darkness of his after life, and he was as « child wearied and worn out after a day's wanderings, when it had been lost and was found, when it had hungered and was fed again. I raised him up, took him in my arms and laid him on his bed as I would have treated such a little wanderer of a child, and left him without leavetaking on his part, for his heart was too full for words." After this he never attempted to quit his bed, or desired to see any one. At the Abbe Rogerson's suggestion, however, he consented to see his fellow-novice of the old days, the Pere Lefevre, his parting with whom is described as wonderfully touching. The old college intimate, addressing him by his once familiar name as a novice, ' ' Sylvestre, " embraced him with an effusion of tenderness, and gave him rendezvous in eternity ! Two days afterwards he received extreme unction at the hands of the Abbe Rogerson. The latter had been desirous, it is true, of giving this sacrament to him earlier, Mahony himself, however, entreating at the time to be allowed to give the signal himself when he should feel prepared for its administration. Immediately upon his confessor's appearance at his bedside, on the very next morning, he uttered significantly the two words "Holy Oils," upon hearing which the Abbe Rogerson lost no time in summoning his assistants, and with the aid of the Abbe Chartrain gave the solemn anointing. The last sacred rites having been completed, the end was seen to be rapidly approaching. No articulate syllable from that moment passed his lips, and at about half-past nine o'clock on the evening ^ xxxii Biographical hitrodicctioii. of Friday, the i8th ^lay, 1866, he tranquilly expired in the presence of his sister, Mrs. Woodlock, and of his friend and confessor, the Abbe Rogerson. " We could detect," says the latter, "the approach of the final moment, and continued through the beautiful prayers for the agonizing, to appeal to God, earnestly for him up to the very instant when his breathing ceased. He could not, in fact," continues this s}'mpathetic eyewitness, "have sur- rounded himself with more accessories of grace had he been permitted to sketch out his mode of quitting life ; and I feel that our ever-merciful Saviour, His compassionate ^lother, and the whole Court of Heaven must have welcomed this one other 'lost and found,' wounded it may be and ha\'ing many sores, and requiring the process of renewal in Purgatorial deteniion, but — saved. No other thought or feeling comes back to me to interrupt as a cloud the clear remembrance that I hold of this event," observes Mgr. Rogerson in conclusion, "and it troubles me to hear un- catholic reflections pronounced by those whose faith and the experiences of life, and much more the 'charity that hopeth all things,' ought to check, admonish, and deter, 'And thinkest thou, O man, that judgest them that do such things, that thou shalt escape the judgment of God? or despisest thou the riches of his goodness, and patience, and long-suffer- ing?' Rom, ii. 3, 4." With reason did the then British consul at Barce- lona, James Hannay, write of his old friend, on the morrow of Mahony's death, in the Pall Mall Gazette : — " Probably nc man with whom he was brought into contact, friendly or otherwise, but will hear with satisfaction that a sister of his blood and a priest of his faith cheered the deathbed of the lonely old wit and scholar, and helped to make his last hours pass tranquilly away. " More tranquilly, as will be evident now upon unques- tionable authority, he could not well have passed the awful boundary line that divides time from eternity. It is characteristic of the magnanimity of the venerable Archbishop McHale, who still survives, at the patriarchal age of a nonogenarian, that years ago he checked one whom he overheard reprehending Mahony by observing that, after all, the Irishman who wrote Father Prout's papers was an honour to his country'. Dying abroad though he did, his remains had fitting sepulture at once in his native land, at his birthplace, Cork, on the banks of the river Lee, uncfer the shadow of the spire and within sound of those Bells of Shandon he had sung of so lovingly and harmoniously in his lyrical masterpiece. Immediately upon its arrival at Cork, upon the evening of Sunday, the 27th May, 1866, the coffin containing his remains was disembarked from the London steamer and conveyed to St. Patrick's Church, King Street, where it was laid in front of the sanctuary until the following morning. Shortly after daybreak, masses were said there for the repose of the soul of the deceased, at each mass large numbers attending. At eight o'clock, Bishop Delaney, preceded by a long procession of priests, entered from the sacristy and sang the Miserere. Another pro- cession being formed upon the completion of the solemn requiem and the aspergings, the remains were borne to the bier which stood in readiness at the gates, and conducted, with twenty priests in attendance, to the vaults at Shandon, in which, among the dust of many generations of Frank Mahony's kith and kin, they have ever since reposed. By a curious irony of fate — remembering how Mahony during his last illness had remarkeation was assigned during which it was ascertained that his notions of temperance were too liberal for the Church." Mr. Gruneisen further asserts in plain words, " Prout told me the temptation he had at Rome," tliat is to this advancement — the archwag not impossibly meaning all the while to the conviviality. The Pall MalPs Correspondent, though frankly acknowledging, " I treated his statement at the time as a joke," adds, "but, from one of the highest Church authorities in Paris I sub- sequently had full confirmation of the fact that the Cardinal's hat was actually offered to him in prospect, and that he lost the distinction as I have intimated." On submitting these wild rumours and wilder asser- tions to the dispassionate judgment of Mgr. Rogerson, I have the latter's assurance that Prout at any rate never once spoke to him of a Cardinal's hat, and that for his own part he cannot consider the idea in any way to have accorded with Mahony's then character. Besides the original edition of "The Reliques," published in two volumes by James Fraser in 1836, another edition in one volume was issued from the press in i860, otherwise, during Mahony's lifetime, as an important integral part of Bohn's Illustrated Libraiy. Supplementary to these two editions, an exceedingly miscellaneous collection of his writings as a journalist and of memorabilia in his regard contributed by various hands, those of several of his friends, acquaintances, and contemporaries, appeared in 1875, under the editorship of Mr. Blanchard Jerrold, with the title of "Final Reliques of Father Prout." The materials compacted together in that volume, however, interesting and valuable though some of them undoubtedly were, it must be admitted were so loosely put together and so confusedly arranged, that their general effect was a source rather of disappointment than of satisfaction. The present edition of the collected "Works of Father Prout" is the third that has yet made its appearance. Several estimates of the genius and learning, the wit and wisdom, of Francis Mahony have been put forth at different times in the periodicals both of France and of England, three of which may be regarded as of sufficient intrinsic excellence to entitle them to be here enumerated. Two of these were from the skilled and scholarly hand of no less sound a critic than the late James Hannay, who first of all in the Universal Rroiew for February, i860, weighed in the balance and did not find wanting the humoristic erudition of Father Prout ; and who upon the morrow of C I xxxiv BiograpJiical Introduction. Mahony's decease, six years afterwards, with brilliant effect held up in contrast to each other in the A'orth British Revirui for September, 1866, those three typical humorists of England, Scotland, and Ireland, Pea- cock, Aytoun, and Prout. It was this last-mentioned paper beyond all question which in the following year suggested to a French critic the article entitled " Trois Ecrivains (humorist) Anglais," meaning Hood, Prout, and Thackeray, which in 1867 appeared in the J\ezntc Britan- niqiu. The Works themselves, however, which are here brought together, and arranged in chronological sequence, will, without any extraneous aid whatever in that direction, most surely guide the saga- cious reader to their just appraisement. They are as exhilarating as the first runnings of a well-filled wine-press, the gi-apes heaped together in which have been ripened by laughing suns and grown in classic vineyards. THE LATE ^. ^. of ^i^atergrassSill, in tf)c OTountg cf atcrifc, Irclanti, i COLLECTED AND ARRANGED BY OLIVER YORKE. PREAMBLE. [The Preface to the First Edition of the " Relique?," published in 1836, in two volumes post octavo, by James Fraser, of 215, Regent Street, vas thus entitled. The work was embellished with eighteen daintily-pencilled illustrations by Alfred Croquis, afterwards famous under his real name as Daniel Maclise the Royal Academician.] It is much to be regretted that our Author should be no longer in the land of the living, to furnish a general Preamble, explanatory of the scope and tendency of his multifarious writings. By us, on whom, with the con- tents of his coffer, hath devolved the guardianship of his glory, such de- ficiency is keenly felt ; having leanit from Epictetus that every sublunary thing has two handles {vav vpayi^a Suas ex«' ^a^as), and from experience that mankind are prone to take hold of the wrong one. King Ptolemy, to whom we owe the first translation of the Bible into a then vulgar tongue (and consequently a long array of "centenary celebrations "), proclaimed, in the pithy inscription placed by his order over the entrance of the Alex- andrian Library', that books were a sort of physic. The analogy is just, and pursuing it, we would remark that, like other patent medicines, they should invariably be accompanied with "directions for use." Such irpoKe- xxxvi Preamble. yofiiva. would we in the present case be delighted ourselves to supply, but that we have profitably studied the fable of La Fontaine entitled ^' VAnc qui portail les Reliqitcs''^ (liv. v. fab. 14). Nevertheless, it is not our intention, in giving utterance to such a very natu- ral regret, to insinuate that the present production of the lamented writer is unfinished, abortive, or incomplete : on the contrary, our interest prompts us to pronounce it complete, as far as it goes. It requires, in point of fact, no extrinsic matter ; and Prout, as an author, will be found what he was * in the flesh — ^^ ioius teres atqiie rotundiisy Still, a suitable introduction, furnished by a kindred genius, would in our idea be ornamental. The Pantheon of republican Rome, perfect in its simplicity, yet derived a sup- plementary grace from the portico superadded by Agrippa. All that remains for us to say under the circumstances is to deprecate the evil constructions which clumsy "journeymen" may hereafter put on the book. In our opinion it can bear none. The readers of Fraser's Magazine will recognize these twelve papers as having been originally put forth, under our auspices, in one year's consecu- tive numbers oi Regina — i.e., from the 1st of April, 1834, to the recurrence of that significant date iji 1835. For reprinting them in their present shape we might fairly allege the urgent ^''request of friends,'''' had not the epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot made that formula too ridiculous ; we will, there- fore content ourselves by stating that we merely seek to justify, by this undertaking, the confidential trust reposed in us by the parish of Water- grasshill. Much meditating on the materials that fill "the chest," and daily more impressed with the merit of our author, we thought it a pity that its wis- dom should be suffered to evaporate in magazine squibs. What impression could, in sooth, be made on the public mind by such desultory explosions? Never on the dense mass of readers can isolated random shots produce the effect of a regular y^w de peloton. For this reason we have arranged in one volume his files of mental musketry, to secure a simultaneous discharge. The hint, perhaps, of right belongs to the ingenious Fieschi. We have been careful to preserve the order of succession in which these essays first met the public eye, i:)refixing to each such introductory com- ments as from lime tci time we felt disposed to indulge in, with reference to synchronous occurrences— for, on looking back, we find we have been on some occasions historical, on others prophetical, and not unfrequcntly rhapsodical. This latter charge we fully anticipate, candidly confessing that we have l)een led into the practice by the advice and example of Pliny llic Younger : " Ipsa varietate,'" are his words, '' lentamus efficere td Pi'eamble. xxxvii alia aliis, qiuvdam fortasse offiuibiis pla^eant." This would appear to con- stitute the whole theory of miscellaneous \^Titing : nor ought it to be for- gotten by the admirers of more strictly methodical disquisition, that — "L'ennui naguit un jour de rubiformite." Caterers for public taste, we apprehend, should act on gastronomic principles; according to which ^^ toujoiirs Front''' would be far less acceptable than ^'toujoiifs perdn'x :''' hence the necessity for a few Iwrs d^cetevres. We have hitherto had considerable difficulty in establishing, to the satis- faction of refractor}- critics, the authenticity of one simple fact ; viz., that of our author's death, and the consequently posthumous nature of these publications. People absurdly persist in holding him in the light of a living writer : hence a sad waste of wholesome advice, which, if judiciously expended on some reclaimable smner, would, no doubt, fi-uctify in due season. In his case 'tis a dead loss — Prout is a literan.- mummy ! Folks should look to this : Lazarus will not come forth to listen to their stric- tures ; neither, should they happen to be in a complimentary mood, will Samuel arise at the witcherj^ of commendation. Objects of art and virtii lose considerably by not being viewed in their proper light ; and the common noonday effulgence is not the fittest for the right contemplation of certain capi d' opera. Canova, we know, preferred the midnight taper. Let therefore, ^^ 7it f maris reliqiiiis''' [F/iird. lib. i. fab. 22), the dim penumbra of a sepulchral lamp shed its solemn influence over the page of Prout, and alone preside at its perusal. Posthumous authorship, we must say, possesses infinite advantages ; and nothing so tmly senses a book as the writer's removal by death or trans- portation from the sphere or hemisphere of his readers. The ' ' Memoirs of Captain Rock " were rendered doubly interesting by being dated from Sidney Cove. Byron wrote from Venice with increased effect. Nor can we at all sympathize with the exiled Ovid's plaintive utterance, " Sine me, liber, ibis in u7-bem." His absence from town, he must have known, was a I'ight good thing for his "publisher under the pillars." But though distance be useful, death is unquestionably better. Far off, an author is respected ; dead, he is beloved. Extitictiis, amabitnr, [This theory is incidentally dwelt on by Prout himself in one of his many papers published by us, though not comprised within the present limited collection. In recounting the Roman adventures of his fellow- townsman Barr}-, he takes the occasion to contrast the neglect which his friend experienced during life with the rank now assigned him in pictorial celebrity. xxxvili Preamble. Ainsi les maitres de la Ijtc Partout exhalent leur chagrins ; Vivans, la haine les dechire, £t ces dieux, que la terre admire, Ont peu compte de jours serens. Longtemps la gloire fugitive Semble tromper leur noble orgeuil ; La gloire enfin pour eux arrive, Et toujours sa palme tardive Croit plus belle prfes d"un cerceuil. FoNTAN'ES, Ode a C /uttcaubHaJuL I've known the youth with genius cursed - I've mark'd his eye hope-lit at first ; Then seen his heart indignant burst. To find his efforts scom'd. Soft on his pensive hour I stole. And saw him draw, with anguish'd soul, GIor}''s immortal muster-roil. His name should have adom'd. His fate had been, with anxious mind, To chase the phantom Fame — to find His grasp eluded ! Calm, resign'd. He knows his doom — he dies. Tkefi comes Renown, tJien Fame appears, Glory proclaims the Coffin hers I Aye greenest over sepulchres Palm-tree and laurel rise. Prout, Notti Rotnaiu 7iel Palazzo Vatica)io.\ We recollect to have been forcibly struck with a practical application of this doctrine to commercial enterprise when we last visited Paris. The 2nd of November, being "All Souls'-day,"* had dra^^•n a concourse of melancholy people to Ph-c la [Chaise, ourselves with the rest ; on which occasion our eye was arrested, in one of the most sequestered walks of that romantic necropolis, by the faint glimmering of a delicious little lamp — a glow-worm of bronze — keeping silent and sentimental vigil under a modest urn of black marble, inscribed thus : — Ci-GiT FoLRMER CPicrre Victor), Inventeur brevete des lampcs dites sans fin, Brulant une centime d'huile a I'heure. IL FUT BON PERE, BON FILS, BON EPOf.V. .«;A VEUVE INCONSOLABLE Continue son commerce, Rue aux Ours, No. 19. Elle fait des envois dans les dcpartemens. N.B. ne pas confondre avec la boutique en face s.v.p. R. I. r. Preamble. xxxix We had been thinking of purchasing an article of the kind ; so, on our return, we made it a point to pass the Rue aiix Oiu's, and give our custom to the mournful Artemisia. On entering the shop, a rubicund tradesman accosted us ; but we intimated our w'ish to transact business with ' ' the widow," "La veuve inconsolable? " '^ Eh, pardieic! c'est mot! ]e suis, moi, Pien'e Fournier, inventeur, &c. : la veuve ii'est qiCun syf?ibole, un mythe.'''' We admired his ingenuity, and bought his lamp ; by the mild ray of which patent contrivance we have profitably pursued our editorial labours. OLIVER YORKE. Regent Street, Feb. 29, 1836. ■* In the first edition of the " Reliques" the date of All Souls' was given very literally indeed by a " clerical " error as the ist of November, xxxviii Preamble. Ainsi les maitres de la lyre Partout exhalent leur chagrins ; Vivans, la haine les dechire, £t ces dicux, que la terre admire, Ont peu compte de jours serens. Longtemps b gloire fugitive Semble tromper leur noble orgeuil ; La gloire enfin pour eux arrive, Et toujours sa palme tardive Croit plus belle prfes d'un cerceuil. FoNTANES, Ode a Chatcaiibriaiid. I've known the youth with genius cursed- - I've mark'd his eye hope-lit at first ; Then seen his heart indignant burst. To find his efforts scorn'd. Soft on his pensive hour I stole, And saw him draw, with anguish'd soul, Glor>''s immortal muster-roil. His name should have adorn 'd. His fate had been, with anxious mind. To chase the phantom Fame — to find His grasp eluded ! Calm, resign'd. He knows his doom — he dies. Then comes Renown, then Fame appears, Glory proclaims tJte Coffin hers ! Aye greenest over sepulchres Palm-tree and laurel rise. Pkol'T, Kotti Romanc ncl Palazzo Vatkano.\ We recollect to have been forcibly struck with a practical application of this doctrine to commercial enterprise when we last visited Paris. The 2nd of November, being "All Souls'-day,"* had drawn a concourse of melancholy people to Pird la [Chaise, ourselves with the rest ; on which occasion our eye was arrested, in one of the most sequestered walks of that romantic necropolis, by the faint glimmering of a delicious little lamp — a glow-worm of bronze — keeping silent and sentimental vigil under a modest urn of black marble, inscribed thus : — Ci-ciT FouRNiER (Pierre Victor), Inventeur brevete des lampcs dites sans fin, Brulant une centime d'huile a I'heure. IL FLT BON I'ERE, BON FILS, BON ErOf.V. SA VEUVE INCONSOLABLE Continue son commerce. Rue aux Ours, No. 19. Kile fait des envois dans les dcpartemens. N.B. ne pas confondrc avcc la boutique en face s.v.r. R. I. P. Preamble. xxxix We had been thinking of purchasing an article of the kind ; so, on our return, we made it a point to pass the Rue aiix Ours, and give our custom to the mournful Artemisia. On entering the shop, a rubicund tradesman accosted us ; but we intimated our wish to transact business with ' ' the widow," "La veuve inconsolable? " ^'' Eh, parduic! c'est fuoil \q. suis, moi, Pierre Fournier, inventeur, &:c.: la veuve ii'est qiCuii symbole, tin rnythe.'''' We admired his ingenuity, and bought his lamp; by the mild ray of which patent contrivance we have profitably pursued our editorial labours, OLIVER YORKE. Regent Street, Feb. 29, 1836. * In the first edition of the " Reliques " the date of All Souls' was given very literally indeed by a " clerical " error as the ist of November, -.,« "Ai Covent Garden a sacred drama, on the story of Jephtha, conveying solemn impressions, is prohibited as a PROFANATION of the period of fasting and mortification ! There is no doubt ivhere the odium should fix— 071 the Lord Chamberlain or on the Bishop of London. Let some iiitelligent Member of Parliament bring the ques- tion before the House of Commons." Times, Feb. 20 and 21, 1834. THE WORKS OF FATHER PROUT. THE RELIOUES. I. J-atljcr |1rout's i^palagn for "^mi. HIS DEATH, OBSEQUIES, AND AN ELEGY. {Fraser's Magazine, April, 1834.) — — [Mahony's first contribution to Fraser appeared in the same number in which Carlyle completed the second of the three books of his " Sartor Resartus." The now well-known Magazine, which had already won to itself a high degree of popularity, had but just then rounded the fourth year of its existence. Its salient feature from its commencement had been, as it long continued to be, the publication in each monthly instalment of one in a singularly varied Gallery of Literary Characters. These were doubly sketched, and with about an equally startling vividness, by the pseudonymous pencil of Alfred Croquis, a young artist afterwards world-famous in his own name as Daniel Maclise, R.A., and, upon a confronting leaf, by the pen of an anonymous writer, who was in reality no less caustic and scholarly a wit than Dr. William Rlaginn, then the responsible editor of Regina. No. 47 in that Gallery portrayed thus, in walking costume, for the amuse- ment of the readers of Ffaser, the well-buttoned-up form and vinous countenance of Iheodore Hook, author of " Sayings and Doings." A couple of years afterwards, when "The Reliques " were collected together for independent publication, Maclise's facile pencil adorned this opening chapter with two embellishments, one of them forming the frontispiece to the first volume, being his wicked limning, under embowering nets, of Mahony seated vis-a-vis with his a/ter ego or eidolon Father Prout, each busily engaged, fork in hand, discussing his — ahem ! — " Apology for Lent ! " relays of dishes being brought in processionally to the already' well-laden board ; while the other, the companion vignette, appended to this opening instalment of the " Reliques," delineated, under the two significant words " Pace Implora," the reverend Father's solemn interment.] " Cependant, suivant la chronique, Le Careme, depuis un mois, Sur tout I'univers Catholique Etendait ses sevferes lois." — Cresset. There has been this season in town a sad outcry against Lent. For the first week the metropolis was in a complete uproar at the suppression of the oratorio ; and no act of authority since the fatal ordonnances of Charles X. bid fairer to revolutionize a capital than the message sent from Bishop Blom- field to Manager Bunn. That storm has happily blown over. The Cockneys, having fretted their idle hour, and vented their impotent ire through their C * "safety-valve," the press, have quietly relapsed into their wonted attitude of indifference and resumed their customary calm. The clamour of the day is now passed and gone, and tlie dramatic " murder of Jephtha " is forgotten. In truth, after all, there was something due to local remmiscences ; and when the present tenants of the " Garden" recollect that in by -gone days these " deep solitudes and awful cells " were the abode of fasting and austerity, they will not grudge the once-hallowed premises to commemorate in sober stillness the Wednesdays and Fridays of Lent. But let' that rest. An infringement on the freedom of theatricals, though in itself a grievance, will not, in all likeli- hood, be the immediate cause of a convulsion in these realms ; and it will probably require some more palpable deprivation to arouse the sleeping energies of John Bull, and to awake his dormant anger. It was characteristic of the degeneracy of the Romans, that while they crouched in prostrate servility to each imperial monster that swayed their desti- nies in succession, they never would allow their amusements to be invaded, nor tolerate a cessation of the sports of the amphitheatre ; so that even the despot, while he riveted their chains, would pause and shudder at the well-known ferocious cry of " Paiieiii et Circoises /" Now, food and the drama stand relatively to each other in very different degrees of importance in England ^ and while provisions are plentiful, other matters have but a minor influence on the popular sensibilities. The time may come, when, by the bungling measures of a \Vhig administration, brought to their full maturity of mischief by the ' studied neglect of the agricultural and shipping interests, the general disorgan- ization of the state-machinery at home, and the natural results of their inter- meddling abroad, — a dearth of the primary articles of domestic consumption may bring to the Englishman's fireside the broad conviction of a misrule and mismanagement too long and too sluggishly endured. It may then be too late to apply remedial measures with efficacy ; and the only resource left, may be, hke Caleb Balderstone at Wolf's Crag, to proclaim "a general fast." When that emergency shall arise, the quaint and original, nay, sometimes luminous and philosophic, views of Father Prout on the fast of Lent, may afford much matter for speculation to the British public ; or, as Childe Harold says, " Much that may give us pause, if pondered fittingly." Before we bring forward Father Prout's lucubrations on this grave subject, it maybe allowable, by way of preliminary observation, to remark, that, as far as Lent is concerned, as well indeed as in all other matters, " they manage these things differently abroad." In foreign countries a carni%^al is the appropriate prelude to abstemiousness ; and folks get such a surfeit of amusement during the satumalian days wliich precede its observance, that they find a grateful repose in the sedate quietude that ensues. The custom is a point of national taste, which I leave to its own merits ; but whoever has resided on tlie Continent must have obser\'ed that all this bacchanalian riot suddenly terminates on Shrove Tuesday ; the fun and frolic expire with the "boeuf-gras; " and the shouts of the revellers, so boisterous and incessant during the preceding week, on Ash Wednesday are heard no more. A singu- lar ceremony in all the churches— that of sprinkling over the congregation on that Wcdnescia/ the pulverized embers of the boughs of an evergreen (meant, I suppose, as an emblem and record of mans mortality)— appears to have the instantaneous effect of turning their tlioughts into a different channel : tile busy hum subsides at once; and learned commentators have found, in the fourth book of Virgil's Georgics, a prophetic allusion to tiiis magic operation : " Hi motus animorum atque hsec certamina t.anta Pulveris exii;ui jactu compres.sa quiescunt." Tlic non-consumption of butchers' meat, and the substitution of fish diet, is also a prorninent feature in the continental form of obser\-ing Lent ; and on this topic Father Prout has been remarkably discursive, as will be seen on perusal of the following pages. To explain ho'w I became the depositary of the reverend man's notions, and why he did not publish them in his lifetime (for, alas ! he is no more— peace be to his ashes ! ) is a duty which I owe the reader, and from which I am far from shrinking. I admit that some apology is required for conveying the lucid and clarified ideas of a great and good divine through the opaque and profane medium that is now employed to bring them under the public eye ; I account for it accordingly. ^ I am a younger son. I belong to an ancient, but poor and dilapidated house, of which the patrimonial estate was barely enough for mv elder ; hence, as my share resembled what is scientifically called an evanescent quantity, I was directed to apply to that noble refuge of unprovided genius— the bar ! To the bar, with a heavy heart and aching head, I devoted year after vear,' and was about to become a tolerable proficient in the black 'letter, when aii epistle from Ireland reached me in Fumival's Inn, and altered my prospects ma- terially. This despatch was from an old Roman Catholic aunt v.hom I had in that countn,', and whose house I had been sent to, when a child, on the specu- lation that this visit to my venerable relative, who, to her other good qualities, added that of being a resolute spinster, might determine her, as she was both rich and capricious, to make me her inheritor. The letter urged my imme- diate presence in the dying chamber of the Lady Cresswell ; and as no t'ime was to be lost, I contrived to reach in two days the'lonely and desolate mansion on \\'atergra55hill, in the vicinity of Cork. As I entered the apartment, by the scanty light of the lamp that gUmmered dimlv, I recognized, with some difficulty, the emaciated form of my gaunt and withered kinswoman, over whose features, originally thin and wan, the pallid hue of approaching death cast additional ghastUness. By the bedside stood the rueful and unearthly form of Father Prout ; and, while the son of chiaroscuro in which his figure appeared, half shrouded, half revealed, served to impress me with a proper awe for his solemn functions, the scene itself, and the probable consequences to me of this last interview with my aunt, affected me exceedinglv. I involun- tarily knelt ; and while I felt my hands grasped by the long, cold, and bony fingers of the dying, my whole frame thrilled ; and her words, the last she spoke in this world, fell on my ears with all the effect of a potent witchery, never to be forgotten! "Frank," said the Lady Cresswell, " my lands arid perishable riches I have bequeathed to you, though you hold not the creed of which this is a minister, and I die a worthless but steadfast votary : only promise me and this holy man that, in memory of one to whom vour 'welfare is dear, you will keep the fast of Lent while yo'u live ; and, as I ca'nnot control your inward belief, be at least in this respect a Roman Catholic : I ask no more." How could I have refused so simple an injunction? and what junior member of the bar would not hold a good rental by so easv a tenure ? In brief, I was pledged in that solemn hour to Father Prout, and to my kind and simple-hearted aunt, whose grave is in Rathcooney, and whose' soul is in heaven. During my short stay at Watergrasshill (a wild and romantic district, of which ever}' brake and fell, ever\' bog and quagmire, is well known to Crofton Croker— for it is the x&ry Arcadia of his fictions), I formed an intimacv with this Father Andrew Prout, the pastor of the upland, and a man celebrated in the south of Ireland. He was one of that race of priests now unfortunately extinct, or very neariy so, like the old breed of wolf-dogs, in the island : 'l allude to those of his order who were educated abroad, before the French revolution, and had imbibed, from associating with the polished and high-bom clergy of the old Galilean chturch, a loftier range of thought, and a superior deUcacy of sentiment. Hence, in his e\idence before the House of Lords, The Works of Father Prout. "the glorious Dan" has not concealed the grudge he feels towards those clergymen, educated on the Continent, who, having witnessed tlie doings of the sansculottes in P'rance, have no fancy to a rehearsal of th(i same in Ireland. Of this class was Prout. P.P. of Watergrasshill ; but his real value was very faintly appreciated by his rude flock : he was not understood by his contemporaries ; his thoughts were not their thoughts, neither could he commune with kindred souls on that wild mountain. Of his genealogy nothing was ever known with certainty ; but in this he resembled Melchizedek: like ICugene Aram, he had excited the most intense interest in the highest quarters, still did he studiously court retirement. He was thought by some to be deep in alchemy, like Friar Bacon ; but the gangers never even suspected him of distilling "potheen." He was known to have brought from France a spirit of the most chivalrous gallantry ; still, like Pension retired from the court of Louis XIV., he shunned the attractions of the sex, for the sake of his pastoral charge : but in the rigour of his abstinence, and the fmgality of his diet, he resembled no one, and none kept Lent so strictly. Of his gallantry one anecdote will be sufficient. The fashionable Mrs. P , with two female companions, travelling through the county of Cork, stopped for Divine service at the chapel of Watergrasshill (which is on the high road on the Dublin line), and entered its rude gate while Prout was addressing his congregation. His quick eye soon detected his fair visitants standing behind the motley crowd, by whom they were totally unnoticed, so intent were all on the discourse; when, interrupting the thread of his homily, to procure suitable accommodation for the strangers, "Boys!" cried the old man, "why don't ye give three chairs for the ladies?" "Three cheers for the ladies ! " re-echoed at once the parish clerk. It was what might be termed a clerical, but certainly a very natural, error; and so acceptable a proposal was suitably responded to by the frieze-coated multitude, whose triple shout shook the very cobwebs on the roof of the chapel ! — after which slight incident, service was quietly resumed. He was extremely fond of angling; a recreation which, while it ministered to his necessary relaxation from the toils of the mission, enabled him to observe cheaply the fish diet imperative on fast days. For this he had estab- lished his residence at the mountain-source of a considerable brook, which, after winding through the parish, joins the Blackwater at Fermoy ; and on its banks would be found, armed with his rod, and wrapped in his strange cassock, fit to personate the river-god or presiding genius of the stream. [Old Izaak VValton would have liked the man exceedingly.] His modest parlour would not ill become the hut of one of the fishermen of Galilee. A huge net in festoons curtained his casement ; a salmon-spear, sundry rods, and fishing tackle, hung round the walls and over his bookcase, which latter object was to him the perennial spring of refined enjoyment. Still he would sigh for the vast libraries of France, and her well-appointed scientific halls, wiiere he had spent his youth, in converse with the first literary characters and most learned divines ; and once he directed my attention to what appeared to be a row of folio volumes at the bottom of his collection, but which I found on trial to be so many large stone-flags, with parchment Ijacks, bearing the appropriate title of Cornelh \ L.M'IDK Opera qiuT extattt omnia : by which semblance of that old Jesuit's commen- taries he consoled himself for the absence of the original. His classic acquirements were considerable, as will appear by his essay on Lent; and while they made him a most instructive companion, his unobtrusive merit left the most favourable impression. The general character of a churchman is singularly improved by the tributary accomplishments of the scholar, and literature is like a pure grain of Araby's incense in the golden censer of religion. His taste for the fine arts was more genuine than might Fathei' P rout's Apology for Lent. be conjectured from the scanty specimens that adorned liis apartment, though perfectly in keeping with his favourite sport ; for there hung over the mantelpiece a print of Raphael's cartoon the " Miraculous Draught ;" here, "Tobith rescued by an Angel from the Fish;" and there, " St. Anthony preaching to the Fishes." With this learned Theban I held a long and serious converse on the nature of the antiquated observance I had pledged myself to keep up ; and oft have we discussed the matter at his frugal table, aiding our conferences with a plate of water-cresses and a red herring. I have taken copious notes of Father Front's leading topics ; and while I can vouch them as his genuine arguments, I will not be answerable for the style ; which may possibly be my own, and probably, like the subject, exceedingly jejune. I publish them in pure self-defence. I have been so often called on to explain my peculiarities relative to Lent, that I must resort to the press for a riddance of my persecutors. The spring, which exhilarates all nature, is to me but the herald of tribulation ; for it is accompanied in the Lent season with a recurrence of a host of annoyances consequent on the tenure by which I hold my aunt's property, I have at last resolved to state my case openly; and I trust that, takmg up arms against a sea of troubles, I may, by exposing, end them. Xo blessing comes unalloyed here below : there is ever a cankerworm in the rose ; a dactyl is sure to be mixed up with a spondee in the poetry of life ; and, as Homer sings, there stand two urns, or crocks, beside the throne of Jove, from which he doles out alternate good and bad gifts to men, but mostly both together. I grant, that to repine at one's share of the common allotment would indicate bad taste, and afford evidence of ill-humour : but still a passing insight mto my case will prove it one of peculiar hardship. As regularly as dinner is announced, so surely do I know that my hour is come to be stared at as a disciple of Pythagoras, or scrutinized as a follower of the Venetian Cornaro. I am "a lion" at "feeding time." To tempt me from my allegiance by the proffer of a turkey's wing, to eulogize the sirloin, or dwell on the //(:7;//^c'f(/ of the haunch, are among my friends' (?) practical sources of merriment. To reason with them at such unpropitious moments, and against such fearful odds, would be a hopeless experiment ; and I have learned from Horace and Father Prout, that there are certain viollia teitipora, fandi, which should always be attended to : in such cases I chew the cud of my resentment, and eke out my repast on salt-fish in silence. None will be disposed to question my claim to the merit of fortitude. In vain have I been summoned by the prettiest lisp to partake of the most tempting delicacies. I have declined each lady-hostess's hospitable offer, as if, to speak in classic parlance, Canidia tractavit dapes ; or, to use the vernacular phraseology of Moore, as if " The trail of the serpent was over them all." Hence, at the club I am looked on as a sort of rara avis ; or, to speaJc more appropriately, as an odd fish. Some have spread a report that I have a large share in the Hungerford Market ; others, that I am a Saint Simonian. A fellow of the Zoological Society has ascertained, forsooth, from certain maxillary appearances, that I am decidedly of the class of i^^vocpayoL, with a mixture of the herbivorous. When the truth is known, as it will be on the publication of this paper, it will be seen that I am no phenomenon what- ever. My witty cousin, Harriet R., will no longer consider me a fit subject for the exercise of her ingenuity, nor present me a copy of Gray's Poems, with the page turned down at "An Elegy on a Cat drowned m a Tub of Gold Fishes." She will perhaps, when asked to sing, select some other aria besides that eternal barcarolle, The Works of Father Front. " O pescator dell' onda, Vieni pescar in quii Colla bella tua barca ! " and if I happen to approach the loo-table, she will not think it again necessary to caution the old dowagers to take care of their Jis/i. Re-^c>io7is a nos moutons. When last I supped with leather Prout, on the eve of my departure from Watergrasshill (and I can only compare my reminis- cences of that classic banquet to Xenophon's account of the symposion of Plato), " Young man," said he, " you had a good aunt in the Lady Cresswell; and if you thought as we do, that the orisons of kindred and friends can benefit the dead, you should pray for her as long as you live. But you belong to a different creed — different, I mean, as to this particular point ; for, as a whole, your Church of England bears a close resemblance to ours of Rome. The "daughter will ever inherit the leading features of the mother; and though in your eyes the fresh and unwithered fascinations of the new faith may fling into the shade the more matronly graces of the old, somewhat on the principle of Horace, O inatre piilc/iKi filia piilchrior! still has our ancient worship many and potent charms. I could proudly dwell on the historic recollections that emblazon her escutcheon, the pomp and pageantry of her gorgeous liturgy " " Pardon me, reverend friend," I interposed, lest he should diverge, as was his habit, into some long-winded argument, foreign to the topic on which I sought to be informed, — "I do not undervalue the matronly graces of your venerable church ; but (pointing to the remnant of what had been a red her- ring) let us talk of her fish-diet and fast-days." "Ay, you are right there, child," resumed Prout ; " I perceive where my panegyric must end — * Desinit in piscem mulier formosa superne I ' You will get a famous badgering in town when you are found out to have for- sworn the flesh-pots ; and Lent will be a sad season for you among the Egyptians. But you need not be unprovided with plausible reasons for your abstinence, besides the sterling considerations of the rental. Notwithstanding that it has been said or sung by your Lord Byron, that ' Man IS a carnivorous production. And cannot live (as woodcocks do) on suction ; ' Still that noble poet (I speak from the record of his life and habits furnished us by Moore) habitually eschewed animal food, detested gross feeders, and in his own case lived most frugally, I might even .say ascetically ; and this abstemi- ousness he practised from a refinement of choice, for he had registered no vow- to heaven, or to a maiden aunt. The observance will no doubt proven trial of fortitude ; but for your part at the festive board, were you so criminal as to transgress, would not the spectre of the Lady Cresswell, like the ghost of Banquo, rise to rebuke you ? "And besides, these days of fasting are of the most remote antiquity; they are referred to .-is being in vogue at the first general council that legislated for Christendom at Nice, in Bilhynia, A.n. 325; and the subsequent assembly of bishops at Laodicea ratified the institution A.n. 364. Its discipline is fully de- veloped in the classic pages of the accomplished Tertullian, in the second century [Tract, de jcjiniiis). I .say no more. These are what Edmund Burke would call 'grave and reverend authorities,' and, in the silence of Holy Writ, may go as historic evidence of primitive Christianity ; but if you press me, I can no more show cause under the proper hand and seal of an apostle for keeping the fast on these days, than I can fur keeping the Sabbath on Sunday. "I do not choose to notice that sort of criticism, in its dotage, that would trace the custom to the well-known avocation of the early disciples : though that they were fishermen is most true, and that even after they had been raised to the aposiohc dignity, they relapsed occasionally into the innocent parsuit of their primeval caliing, still haunted the shores of the accustomed lake, and loved to disturb with their nets the crystal surface of Gennesareth. ' ' Lent is an institution which should have been long since rescued from the cobwebs of theolog}-, and restored to the domain of the pohtical economist, for there is no prospect of arguing the matter in a fair spirit among conflicting di\ines ; and, of all things, polemics are the most stale and unprofitable. Loaves and fishes have, in all ages of the church, had charms for us of the cloth ; yet how few would confine their frugal bill of fare to mere loaves and fishes ! So far Lent may be considered a stumbling-block. But here I dismiss theolog\- : nor shall I further trespass on your patience by angling for arguments in the muddy stream of church histor}-, as it rolls its troubled waters over the middle ages. "Your black-letter acquirements. I doubt not, are considerable; but have you adverted to a clause in Queen Elizabeth s enactment for the improvement of the shipping interests in the year 1564? Ycu will, I believe, find it to run thus : " A?2fio ~)0 Eliz. cap. v. sect. 11 : — 'And for encrease of provision of fishe by the more usual eating thereof, bee it further enacted, that from the feast of St. Mighell th'archangell, ano. Dni. fiftene hundreth threescore foure, ever}^ Wednesdaye in ever)' weeke through the whole yere shal be hereafter observed and kepte as the Saturdays in every weeke be or ought to be ; and that no person shal eat any fleshe no more than on the common Saturdays. " 12. — ' And bee it further enacted by th'auctontee aforesaid, for the commo- ditie and benifit of this realme, as well to growe the navie as in sparing and encrease of fleshe victual, that from and after the feast of Pentecost next coming, yt shall not be lawful for any p'son to eat any fleshe upon any days now usually observ-ed as fish-days ; and that any p'son offending herein shal forfeite three powndes for ever}- tyme." " I do not attach so much importance to the act of her royal successor, James L, who in 1619 issued a proclaiiiation, reminding his English subjects of the obligation of keeping Lent; because his Majesty's object is clearly ascer- tained to have been to encourage the traffic of his countn,"men the Scotch, who had just then embarked largely in the herring trade, and for whom the thrifty Stuart was anxious to secure a monopoly in the British markets. " But when, in 1627, I find the chivalrous Charles L, your mart}Ted king, sending forth from the banqueting-room of Whitehall his royal decree to the same effect, I am at a loss to trace his motives. It is known that Archbishop Laud's advice went to the effect of reinstating many customs of Cathohcity; but, from a more diligent consideration of the subject, I am more inclined to think that the king wished rather, by this display of austere practices, to soothe and conciliate the Puritanical portion of his subjects, whose religious notions A\ ere supposed (I know not how justly) to have a tendency to self-denial and the mortification of the flesh. Certain it is. that the Cai\-inists and Roimd- heads were greater favourites at Billingsgate than the high-church party ; from which we may conclude that they consumed more fish. A fact corroborated by the contemporary testimony of Samuel Butler, who says that, when the great struggle commenced, ' Each fisherwoman locked her fish up, , And trudged abroad to crj-, Xo Bishop I ' " I will only remark, in furtherance of my own views, that the king's beef- eaters, and the gormandizing Cavaliers of that period, could never stand in fair fight against the austere and fasting Cromwellians. " It is a vulgar error of vour countr^•men to connect ralour with roast beef, 8 Tlic Works of Father Front. or courage with plum-pudcing. Taere exists no such association; and I wonder this national mistake has not beau duly noticed by Jeremy Bentham in his ' Book of Fallacies." As soon might it be presumed that tlie pot-bellied Falstaff, faring on venison and sack, could overcome in prowess Owen Glen- dower, who, I suppose, fed on leeks ; or that the lean and emaciated Cassius was not a better soldier than a well-known sleek and greasy rogue who fled from the battle of Philippi. and. as he himself unbltishingly tells the world, left his buckler behirrd him : ' Relict), noii bene parmuhi: "I cannot contain my bile when I witness the mode in which the lower orders in your countr)' abuse the French, for whom they have found nothing in their Anglo-Saxon vocabulary so expressive of contempt as the term. ' frog- eater." A Frenchman is not supposed to be of the same flesh and blood as themselves ; but, like the water-snake described in the Georgics — ' Piscibus atram, Improbus ingluviera ranisque loquacibus implet.' Hence it is carefully instilled into the infant mind (when the young idea is taught how to shoot), that you won the victories of Poitiers and Agincourt mai'nly by the superiority of your diet. In hewing down the ranks of the foe- man, much of the English army's success is of course attributed to the dex- terous management of their cross-bills, but considerably more to their bill of fare. If I could reason with such simpletons, I would refer them to the records of the commissariat department of that day, and open to their vulgar gaze the folio vii. of Rymer's Fcedera, where, in the twelfth year of Edward III., A.D. 1338, at page 1021, they would find, that previous to the victory of Cressy there were shipped at Portsmouth, for the use of these gallant troops, fifty tons of Yarmouth herrings. Such were the supplies (rather urmsual now in the contracts at Somerset House) which enabled Edward and his valiant son to drive the hosts of France before them, and roll on the tide of war till the towers of Paris \ielded to the mighty torrent. After a hasty repast on such simple diet, might the Black Prmcc appropriately address his girded knight-s in Shakespearian phrase, ' Thus far into the bowels of the land Have we marched on without impediment.' "The enemy sorely grudged them their supplies. For it appears by the chronicles of Enguerrand de Monstrellet, the continuator of Froissart, that in 1429, while the English were besieging Orleans, the Duke of Bedford sent from his head-quarters, Paris, on the Ash Wednesday of that year, five hundred carts laden with herrings, for the use of the camp during Lent, when a party of French noblemen, viz., Xaintraille, Lahire, De la Tour de Cha\-igny, and the Chevalier de Lafayette (ancestor of the revolutionary veteran), made a desperate effort to intercept the convoy. But the English detachment, under whose safeguard was this precious deposit, fought pro aris et focis in its defence, and the assailants were routed with the loss of si.xscore knights and much plel)eian slaughter. Read Rapin s account of the affray, which was thence called ' la journCc des harcngs.' " What schoolboy is ignorant of the fact, that at the eve of the battle of Hastings, which gave to your Norman ancestors the conquest of the island, the conduct of the .Anglo-Britons was strongly contrasted with that of the invaders from France; for while in Harolds camp the besotted natives spent the night in revelling and gluttony, the Norman chivalry gave their time to fasting and devotion. — (C/V/rt'jw////, A.U. 1066.) " It has not escaped the penetrating mind of the sagacious Buffon, in his \-iews of man and man's propensities (which, after all, are the proper study of mankind), that a predilection for light food and spare diet has always been the characteristic of the Celtic and Eastern races ; while the Teutonic, the Sclav- onian, and Tartar branches of the human family betray an aboriginal craving for heaw meat, and are gross feeders. In many countries of Europe there has been a slight amalgamation of blood, and the international pedigree in parts of the continent has become perplexed and doubtful : but the most obtuse observer can see that the phlegmatic habits of the Prussians and Dutch argue a different genealogical origin from that which produced the lively disposition of the tribes of Southern Europe. The best specimens extant of the genuine Celt are the Greeks, the Arabians, and the Irish, all of whom are temperate in their food. Among European denominations, in proportion as the Celtic in- fusion predominates, so in a corresponding ratio is the national character for abstemiousness. Nor would I thus dwell on an otherwise uninteresting specu- lation, were I not about to draw a corollar\% and show how these secret influ- ences become apparent at what is called the great epoch of the Reformation. The latent tendency to escape from fasting observances became then revealed, and what had lain dormant for ages was at once developed. The Tartar and Sclavonic breed of men flung off the yoke of Rome ; while the Celtic races remained faithful to the successor of the 'Usherman,' and kept Lent. " The Hollanders, the Swedes, the Saxons, the Prussians, and in Germany those circles in which the Gothic blood ran heaviest and most stagnant, hailed Luther as a deliverer from salt-fish. The fatted calf was killed, bumpers of ale went round, and Popery went to the dogs. Half Europe followed the impetus given to free opinions, and the congenial impulse of the gastric juice ; joining in reform, not because they loved Rome less, but because they loved sub- stantial fare more. Meantime neighbours differed. The Dutch, dull and opaque as their own Zuydersee, growled defiance at the Vatican when their food was to be controlled ; the Belgians, being a shade nearer to the Celtic family, submitted to the fast. While Hamburg clung to its beef, and West- phalia preserved her hams, Munich and Bavaria adhered to the Pope and to sour-crout with desperate fidelity. As to the Cossacks, and all that set of northern marauders, they never kept Lent at any time; and it would be arrant folly to e.xpect that the horsemen of the river Don, and the Esquimaux of the polar latitudes, would think of restricting their ravenous propensities in a Christian fashion; the very system of cookery adopted by these terrible hordes would, I fear, have given Dr. Kitchinerafit of cholera. The apparatus is graphically described by Samuel Butler : I will indulge you with part of the quotation : ' For like their countn-men the Huns, They cook their meat All day on horses' backs they straddle, Then every man eats up his saddle 1'* A strange process, no doubt : but not without some sort of precedent in classic records; for the Latin poet introduces young lulus at a picnic, in the ^neid, exclaiming — 'Heus ! etiam mensas consumimus.' " In England, as the inhabitants are of a mixed descent, and as there has ever been a disrehsh for any alteration in the habits and fireside traditions of the countr}', the fish-days were remembered long after every Popish observance had become obsolete ; and it was not until 1668 that butchers' meat finally estab- lished its ascendency in Lent, at the arrival of the Dutchman. We have seen the exertions of the Tudor dynasty under Elizabeth, and of the house of Stuart under James I. and Charles I., to keep up these fasts, which had flourished in the days of the Plantagenets, which the Heptarchy had revered, ■ * Hudibras, canto ii. 1. 275. 10 The Works of Father Front. which Alfred and Canute had scrupulously obser\'ed, and which had come down positively recommended by the Venerable Bede. William III. gave a death-blow to Lent. Until then it had lingered among the threadbare curates of the country, extrcrna per illos exccdcns terris vestigia fecit, having been long before exiled from the gastronomic hall of both Universities. But its extinction was complete. Its ghost might still remain, flitting through the land, without corporeal or ostensible form ; and it vanished totally with the fated star of the Pretender. It was William who conferred the honour of knighthood on the loin of beef ; and such was the progress of disaffection under Queen .Anne, that the folks, to manifest their disregard for the Pope, agreed that a certain ex- tremity of the goose should be denominated his nose ! "The indomitable spirit of the Celtic Irish preserved Lent in this country unimpaired — an event of such importance to England, that I sliall dwell on it by-and-by more fully. The Spaniards and Portuguese, although Gothic and Saracen blood has commingled in the pure current of their Phoenician pedi- gree, clung to Lent with characteristic tenacity. The Gallic race, even in the days of Caesar, were remarkably temperate, and are so to the present day. The French very justly abhor the gross, carcase-eating propensities of John Bull. But as to the keeping of Lent, in an ecclesiastical point of view, I can- not take on myself to vouch, since the ruffianly revolution, for their orthodoxy in that or any other religious matters. They are sadly deficient therein, though still delicate and refined in their cookery, like one of their crwn artistes, whose epitaph is in Pere la Chaise — ' Ci git qui dbs I'age le plus tendre Inventa !a sauce Kohert ; Mais jamais il ne put apprendre Ni son credo ni son pater.' " It was not so of old, when the pious monarchs of France dined pubhcly in Passion week on fasting fare, in order to recommend by their example the use of fish— when the heir-apparent to the crown delighted to be called a dolphin — and when one of your own kings, being on a visit to France, got so fond of their lamprey patties, that he died of indigestion on his return. "Antiquity has left us no document to prove that the early Spartans kept certain days of abstinence; but \.\\^\x black broth, of which the ingredients have puzzled the learned, must have been a fitting substitute for the soupe maigrc of our Lent, since it required a hard run on the banks of the Kurotas to make it somewhat palatable. At all events, their great lawgiver was an eminent ascetic, and applied himself much to restrict the diet of his hardy countrymen ; and if it is certain that tliere existed a mystic bond of union among the 300 Lacedemonians who stood in the gap of Thermopylae, it assuredly was not a beef-steak club of which Leonidas was president. "The Athenians were too cultivated a people not to appreciate the value of periodical days of self-denial and abstemiousness. Accordingly, on the eve of certain festivals, they fed exclusively on figs and the honey of Mount Hymettus. Plutarch expressly tells us that a solemn fast preceded the celebration of the Tiicrmophoria ; thence termed j/tjo-xFia. In looking over the works of tlie great geographer Strabo (lib. xiv.), I find sufficient evidence of the respect paid to Jish by the inhabitants of a distinguished Greek city, in which that erudite author says the arrival of the fishing-smacks in the harbour was announced joy- fully by sounding the ' tocsin ;' and that the musicians in the public piazza were left abruptly by the crowd, whenever the bell tolled for the sale of the herrings : Ki-JapuiOov I'rriCtiKUVfi.ti'ou thhi fiiu aKpoaa^uL Trai/Tas" cos 6t u KtoouiV o KUTu Tjjw oiJ/oTru>\iai/ f\\/o<\n](Tf. KUTu\i'rrni>Ti<: mr^Xdeiu etti to o\l/oi>. A custom to which Plutarch also refers in his Symposium of Plato, lib. iv. cap, 4 : Tous "TTfpi i^duoTTtoXiav avncicoDTw: k'«i toi; kwcwi/o^ o^ttos ukovovtu^. "That practices similar to our Lent existed among the Romans, may be Father Prout 's Apology for Lent. 1 1 gathered from various sources. In Ovid's Fasti (notwithstanding the title) I find nothing; but from the rehques of old sacerdotal memorials collected by Stephano Morcelli, it appears that Numa fitted himself by fasting for an inter- view with the mysterious inmate of Egeria's grotto. Li\y tells us that the decemvirs, on the occurrence of certain prodigies, were instructed by a vote of the senate to consult the Sibylline books ; and the result was the establishment of a fast in honour of Ceres, to be observed perpetually every five years. It is hard to tell whether Horace is in joke or in earnest when he introduces a vow relative to these days of penance — * Frigida si puerum quartana reliquerit Illo Manfe die quo tii indicts jej'unia nudus In Tyberi stabit I ' Scri/i. lib. ii. sat. 3, v. 290. But we are left in tlie dark as to whether they observed their fasts by restricting themselves to lentils and vegetable diet, or whether fish was allowed. On this interesting point we find nothing in the lan's of the twelve tables. However, a marked predilection for herbs, and such frugal fare, was distinctive of the old Romans, as the very names of the principal families sufficiently indicate. The Fabii, for instance, were so called from faba, a bean, on which simple aliment that indefatigable race of heroes subsisted for many generations. The noble line of the Lentuli derive their patronymic from a favourite kind of lentil, to which they were partial, and from which Lent itself is so called. The aristocratic Pisoes were similarly circumstanced ; for their family appellation will be found to signify a kind of vetches. Scipio was titled from cepe, an onion ;* and we may trace the surname and hereditary honours of the great Roman orator to the same horticultural source, for cicer in Latin means a sort of pea ; and so on through the whole nomenclature. ' ' Hence the Roman satirist, ever ahve to the follies of his age, can find nothing more ludicrovffi than the notion of the Egyptians, who entertained a religious repugnance to vegetable fare : ' Porrum et cepe nefas violare et frangere morsu, O sanctas gentes ! ' Juv. Sat. 15. And as to fish, the fondness of the people of his day for such food can be demonstrated from his fourth satire, where he dwells triumphantly on the cap- ture of a splendid tunny in the waters of the Adriatic, and describes the assembling of a cabinet council in the ' Downing Street ' of Rome to deter- mine how it should be properly cooked. It must be admitted that, since the Whigs came to office, although they have had many a pretty kettle of fish to deliberate upon, they have shown nothing half so dignified or rational in their decisions as the imperial privy council of Domitian. "The magnificence displayed by the masters of the world in getting up fish- ponds is a fact which every schoolboy has learnt, as well as that occasionally the murceiicB were treated to the luxury of a slave or two, flung in alive for their nutriment. The celebrity which the maritime villas of Baise obtained for that fashionable watering-place, is a further argument in point ; and we know that when the reprobate Verres was driven into exile by the brilliant declamation of Cicero, he consoled himself at Marseilles over a dish of sprats, with the reflec- tion that at Rome such a delicacy could not be procured in such high per- fection. "Simplicity and good taste in diet gradually declining in the Roman empire, the gigantic frame of the colossus itself soon hastened to decay. It burst of its own plethory. The example of the degenerate court had pervaded the provinces; and soon the whole body politic reeled, as after a surfeit of * Here Prout is in error. Scipio means a "walking-stick," and commemorates the filial piety of one of the geris Cornelia, who went about constantly supporting his totter- ing aged father. — O. Y. 12 The Works of Father Front debauchery. Vitellius had gormandized with vulgar gluttony; the Emperor Maximinus was a living sepulchre, where whole hecatombs of butchers' meat were daily entombed ; and no modern keeper of a table d'hote could stand a succession of such guests as Heliogabalus. Gibbon, whose penetrating eye nothing has escaped in the causes of tiie Decline and Fall, notices this vile propensity to overfeeding ; and shows that, to reconstruct the mighty system of dominion established by the rugged republicans (the Fabii, the Lentuli, and Pisoes) nothing but a bond, fide return to simple fare and homely pottage could be effectual, the hint was duly acted on. The Popes, frugal and abstemious, ascended the vacant throne of the Ccesars, and ordered Lent to be observed throughout the eastern and western world. "The theory of fasting, audits practical application, did wonders in that emerc^ency. It renovated the rotten constitution of Europe— it tamed the hungry hordes of desperate savages that rushed down with a war-whoop on the prostrate ruins of the empire— it taught them self-control, and gave them a masterdom over their barbarous propensities ;— it did more, it originated civilization and commerce. "A few straggling fishermen built huts on the flats of the Adriatic, for the convenience of resorting thither in Lent, to procure their annual supply of fish. The demand for that article became so brisk and so extensive through the vast dominions of the Lombards in northern Italy, that from a temporary establishment it became a permanent colony in the la^^iines. Working like the coral insect under the seas, with the same unconsciousness of the mighty result of their labours, these industrious men for a century kept on enlarging their nest upon the waters, till their enterprise became fully developed, and ' Venice sat in state, throned on a hundred isles. ' "The fasting necessities of France and Spain were ministered to by the rising republic of Geno:i, whose origin I delight to trace from a small fishing town to a mighty emporium of commerce, fit cradle to rock (in the infant Columbus) the destinies of a new world. Few of us have turned our attention to the fact, that our favourite fish, the John Dory, derives its name from the Genoese admiral, Doria, whose seamanship best thrived on meagre diet. Of Anne Chovy, who has given her name to another fish found in the Sardinian waters, no record remains ; but she was doubtless a heroine. Indeed, to revert to tiie humble herring before you, its etymology shows it to be well adapted for warlike stomachs, heer (its German root) signifying an army. In England, is not a .soldier synonymous with a lobster? " In the progress of maritime industry along the shores of southern, and sub- sequently of northern I'^urope, we find a love for freedom to grow up with a fondness for fish, l-^nterprise and liberty flourished among the islands of the Arcliipelago. And when Naples was to be rescued from tiiraldom, it was the hardy race of watermen who plied in her beauteous bay, that rose at Freedom's call to eflect her deliverance, when she basked for one short hour in its full sunshine under the gallant Masaniello. "As to the commercial grandeur, of which a constant demand for fish was the creating principle, to illustrate its importance, I need only refer to a remark- able expression of tliat deep politician, and exceedingly clever economist, Cliarles V., when, on a progress through a part of his dominions, on which the sun at that period never went down, he happened to pass through Amsterdam, in company witii the (^ueen of Hungary : on tiiat occasion, being complimented in the usual form by the burgomasters of his faithful city, he asked to see the mausoleum of John liachalen, tlie famous hcrring-barreller ; but when told that his grave, simple and unadorned, lay in liis native island in the Zuydersee, ' What ! ' cried the illustrious visitor, ' is it thus that my people of the Nether- lands sliow their gratitude to so great a man? Know ye not that the founda- \ tions of Amsterdam are laid on herring-bones?' Their majesties went on a pilgrimage to his tomb, as is related by Sir Hugh Willoughby in his ' Historic of Fishes.' " It would be of immense advantage to these countries were we to return unanimously to the ancient practice, and restore to the full extent of their wise pohcy the laws of Elizabeth. The revival of Lent is the sole remedv for the national complaints on the decUne of the shipping interest, the sole way to meet the outcry about corn-laws. Instead of Mr. Attwood's project for a change of currency, Mr. W'ilmot Horton's panacea of emigration, and Miss Martineau's preventive check, re-enact Lent. But mark, I do not go so far as to say that by this means all and everything desirable can be accomplished, nor do I undertake by it to pay off the national debt— though the Lords of the Treasury might learn that, when the disciples were at a loss to meet the de- mand of tax-collectors in their day, they caught a fish, and found in its gills sufficient to satisfy the revenue. (St. Matthnu' s Gospel, chap, xvii.) "Of all the varied resources of this great empire, the most important, in a national point of view, has long been the portion of capital afloat in the merchantmen, and the strength invested in the navy of Great Britain. True, the British thunder has too long slept under a sailor-king, and under so many galling national insults ; and it were full time to say that it shall no longer sleep on in the grave where Sir James Graham has laid it. But my concern is principally for the alarming depression of our merchants' property in vessels, repeatedly proved in evidence before your House of Commons. Poulett Thomson is right to call attention to the cries of the shipowners, and to that dismal howling from the harbours, described by the prophet as the forerunner of the fall of Babylon. " The best remedial measure would be a resumption of fish-diet during a portion of the year. Talk not of a resumption of cash payments, of opening the trade to China, or of finding a north-west passage to national prosperity. Talk net of ' calling spirits from the vasty deep,' when you neglect to elicit food and employment for thousands from its exuberant bosom. Visionary projectors are never without some complex system of beneficial improve- ment ; but I would say of them, in the words of an Irish gentleman who has lately travelled in search of religion, ' They may talk of the nectar that sparkled for Helen — Theirs is a fiction, but this is realitj-.' Melodies. Demand would create supply. Flotillas would issue from every seaport in the spring, and ransack the treasures of the ocean for the periodical market : and the wooden walls of Old England, instead of crumbling into so much rotten timber, would be converted into so many huge wooden spoons to feed the population. "It has been sweetly sung, as well as wisely said, by a genuine English writer, that ' Full man}- a gem of purest ray serene I'he dark, unfathom'd caves of ocean bear. ' To these undiscovered riches Lent would point the national eye, and direct the national energies. Very absurd would then appear the forebodings of the croakers, who with some plausibility now predict the approach of national bankruptcy and famine. Time enough to think of that remote contingency when the sea shall be exhausted of its live buUion, and the abyss shall cry, ' Hold, enough ! ' Time enough to fear a general stoppage, when the run on the Dogger Bank shall have produced a failure— when the shoals of the teem- ing north shall have refused to meet their engagements in the sunny waters of the south, and the drafts of the net shall have been dishonoured. " I am one of the many modern admirers of Edmund Burke, \vho, in his speech on American conciUation, has an arginnentum piscatorlum quite to my fancy. Telle ! Ifj^e ! " ' As to the wealth which tliese colonies have derived from the sea by their fisheries, you had all that matter fully opened at your bar. You surely thought these acquisitions of value; for they even seemed to excite your envy. And yet the spirit with which that enterprising employment hcis been exercised ought rather, in my opinion, to have raised your esteem and admiration. And pray, sir, what in the world is equal to it? Look at the manner in which the people of New England have carried on their fishery. While we follow them among the tumbling mountains of ice, penetrating into the deepest recesses of Hudson's Bay; while we are looking for them beneath the arctic circle, we hear that they have pierced into the opposite region of polar cold,— that they are at the antipodes, and engaged under the frozen serpent of the south, falkland Island, which seemed too remote and romantic an object for the grasp of national ambition, is but a stage and resting-place in the progress of their victorious industry. Nor is the equinoctial heat more discouraging to them than the accumulated winter of both the poles. We know, that while some of them draw the line and strike the harpoon on the coast of Africa, others run the longitude, and pursue their gigantic game along the shores of Brazil : no sea that is not vexed by their fisheries, no chmate that is not witness to their toils ! ' "Such glorious imaginings, such beatific dreams, would (I speak advisedly) be realized in these countries by Lent's magic spell ; and I have no doubt that our patriot King, the patron of so many very questionable reforms, will see the propriety of restoring the laws of Elizabeth in this matter. Stanislaus, the late pious king of Lorraine, so endeared himself to his subjects in general, and market-gardeners in particular, by his sumptuary regulations respecting vegetable die: in Lent, W\'a.\.\x\.\\\^ hortiis siccus of Nancy his statue has been placed, with an appropriate inscription : — * Vitales inter succos herbasque salubres, Quam benb stat populi vita salusque sui I * "A similar compliment would await his present Majesty William IV. from the shipowners, and the 'worshipful Fishmongers" Company," if he should adopt the suggestion thrown out here. He would figure colossally in Trafal- gar Square, pointing with his trident to Hungerford Market. The three- pronged instrument in his hand would be a most appropriate emblem (much more so than on the pinnacle of Buckingham Palace), since it would signify equally well the fork with wliich he fed his people, and the sceptre with which he ruled the world. ' Le trident dc Neptune est le sceptre du monde !' Then would be solved the grand problem of the Corn-Law question. Hitherto my Lord Fitzwilliam has taken nothing by his motions. But were Lent pro- claimed at Charing Cross and Temple Bar, and through tlie market towns of England, a speedy fall in the price of grazing stock, though it might afflict Lord Althorp, would eventually harmonize the jarring interests of agriculture and manufacturing industry. The supembundant population of the farming districts would crowd to the coast, and find employment in the fisheries ; while Devonshire House would repudiate for a time the huge sirloin, and receiving as a stibstitute the ponderous turbot, Spitalfields would exhibit on lier frugal board salt ling flanked with potatoes. A salutary taste for fish would be created in the inmost recesses of the island, an epoch most bene- ficial to the country would take date from that enactment. 'Oniiic qiium Proteus pccus cgit altos Viscrc montes.' FatJicr Front's Apology for Lent. 15 Xor need the landlords take alarm. People would not plough the ground less because they might plough the deep more ; and while smiling Ceres would still walk through our isle with her horn of plenty, Thetis would follo\y in her train with a rival cornucopia. " Mark the effects of this observance in Ireland, where it continues in its primitive austerity, undiminished, unshorn of its beams. The Irish may be wrong, but the consequences to Protestant England are immense. To Lent you o\ve the connection of the two islands ; it is the golden link that binds the two kingdoms together. Abolish fasting, and from tnat evil hour no beef or pork would be suffered by the wild natives to go over to your English markets ; and the export of provisions would be discontinued by a people that had unlearned the lessons of starvation. Adieu to shipments of live stock and consignments of bacon ! ^\'ere there not some potent mysterious spell over this country, think you we should allow the fat of the land to be everlastingly abstracted? Let us learn that there is no virtue in Lent, and repeal is triumphant to-morrow. \\q. are in truth a most abstemious race. Hence our great superiority over our Protestant fellow-countr\m-ien in the jury-box. It having been found that they could never hold out against hunger as we can when locked up, and that the verdict was generally carried by popish obstinacy, former administrations discountenanced our admission to serve on juries at all. Bv an oversight of Serjeant Lefroy, all this has escaped the framers of the new jury bill for Ireland. "To 'return to the Irish exports. The principal item is that of pigs. The hog is as essential an inmate of the Irish cabin as the Arab steed of the shepherds tent on the plains of Mesopotamia. Both are looked on as part of the household ; and the affectionate manner in which these dumb friends of the family are treated, here as well as there, is a trait of national resemblance, denoting a common origin. We are quite oriental in most of our peculiarities. The learned \'allancey will have it, that our consanguinity is with the Jews. I might elucidate the colonel's discovery, by showing how the pig in Ireland plaj-s the part of the scape-goat of the Isra'elites : he is a sacred thing, gets the run of the kitchen, is rarely molested, never killed, but alive and buoyant leaves the cabin when taken off by the landlord's driver for arrears of rent, and is then shipped clean out of the country, to be heard of no more. Indeed, the pigs of Ireland bear this notable resemblance to their cousins of Judea, that nothing can keep them from the sea,— a tendency which strikes all travellers in the interior of the island whenever they meet our droves of swine precipitating themselves towards the outports for shipment. " To ordinary observers this forbearance of the most ill-fed people on the face of the globe towards their pigs would appear inexplicable ; and if you have read the legend of Saint Anthony and his pig, you will understand the value of their resistance to temptation. ' ' They have a great resource in the potato. This capital esculent grows nowhere' in such perfection, not even in America, where it is indigenous. But it has often striick me that a greater national delinquency has occurred in the sad neglect of people in this country towards the memor)^ of the great and good mVn who conferred on us so valuable a boon, on his return from the expe- dition to Virginia. To Sir Walter Raleigh no monument has yet been erected, and nothing has been done to repair the injustice of his contemporaries. His head has rolled from the scaffold on Tower Hill ; and though he has fed with his discovery more families, and given a greater impulse to population, than any other benefactor of mankind, no testimonial exists to commem.orate his bene- faction. Nelson has a pillar in Dublin :— in the city of Limerick a whole column has been devoted to Spring Rice ! ! and the mighty genius of Raleigh is forgotten. I have seen some animals feed under the majestic oak on the acorns that fell from its spreading branches {glande sues hzti), without once 1 6 The Works of Father Front, looking up to the parent tree that showered down blessings on their ungrateful heads. " Here endeth the " Apolog>-," and so abruptly terminate my notes of Prout's Lenten vindicicB. But, alas ! still more abrupt was the death of this respect- able divine, which occurred last month, on Shrove Tuesday. There was a peculiar fitness in the manner of Anacreon's exit from this hfe ; but not so in the melancholy termination of Front's abstemious career, an account of which is conveyed to me in a long and pathetic letter from my agent in Ireland. It was well known that he disliked revelry on all occasions; but if there was a species of gormandizing which he more especially abhorred, it was that prac- tised in the parish on pancake-night, which he frequently endeavoured to dis- countenance and put down, but unsuccessfully. Oft did he tell his rude auditors (for he was a profound Hellenist) that such orgies had originated with the heathen Greeks, and had been even among them the source of many evils, as the ver>' name showed, Trav KaKov ! So it would appear, by Prout's ety- mology of the pancake, that in the English language there are many terms which answer the description of Horace, and ■' Graeco fonte cadunl parce detorta.' Contrary to his own better taste and sounder judgment, he was, however, on last Shrove Tuesday, at a wedding-feast of some of my tenantry, induced, from complacency to the' newly-married couple, to eat of the profane aliment ; and never was the Attic derivation of the pancake more wofully accomplished than in the sad result— for his condescension cost him his life. The indigestible nature of the compost itself might not have been so destructive in an ordinary case; but it was quite a stranger and ill at ease in Father Prout's stomach : it eventually proved fatal in its effects, and hurried him away from this vale of tears, leaving the parish a widow, and making orphans of all his parishioners. My agent writes that his funeral (or herring, as the Irish call it) was thronged by dense multitudes from the whole county, and was as well attended as if it were a monster meeting. The whole body of his brother clerg}', with the bishop as usual in full pontificals, were mourners on the occasion; and a Latin elegy was composed by the most learned of the order. Father Magrath, one, like Prout, of the old school, who had studied at Florence, and is still a corre- spondent of many learned Societies abroad. That elegy I have subjoined, as a record of Prout's genuine worth, and as a specimen of a kind of poetry called Leonine verse, little cultivated at the present day, but greatly in vogue at the revival of letters under Leo X. IN MORTEM VENERABILIS ANDREW PROUT, CARMEN. Quid juvat m. pulchro Sanctos dormire sepulchro ! Optimus usque botios nonne manebit honos ( Plebs tenuiT^^^d Pastoris condidit ossa, Splendida sed viiri mens petit astra viri. Porta patens esto ! coelum reseretur honesto. Neve sit i\ Petro jussus abire retro. Tota malam sortem sibi flet vicinia vtorievt, Ut pro patre solcnt undique rura dolcnt ; Sed rures_^rt«(?'r«^; secures hactenus «//'may>/««j justi comitabitur unus? Flendum est non tali, sed bene morte viali: iSIunera nunc Flom spargo. Sic flebile rore ¥\oresc3.t grajnen. Pace quiescat. Aiiieii. Sweet upland ! where, like hermit old, in peace sojourn'd This priest devout ; Mark where beneath thy verdant sod lie deep inum'd The bones of Prout ! Kor deck with monumental shrine or tapering column His place of rest, Whose soul, above earth's homage, meek yet solemn, Sits mid the blest. Much was he prized, much loved ; his stem rebuke O'erawed sheep-stealers ; And rDgues fear"d more the good man's single look Than forty Peelers. He's gone ; and discord s$bn I ween will visit The land with quarrels ; And the foul demon vex with stills illicit The village morals. Iso fatal chance could Happen more to cross The public wishes ; And all the neighbourhood deplore his loss. Except the fishes ; For he kept Lent most strict, and pickled herring Preferred to gammon. Grim Death has broke his angling-rod ; his herring Delights the salmon. Ko more can he hook up carp, eel, or Irout, For fasting pittance, — Arts which Saint Peter loved, whose gate to Prout Gave prompt admittance. Llourn not, but verdantly let shamrocks keep His sainted dust ; The bad man's death it well becomes to weep, — Not so the just. 11. SIR WALTER SCOTT'S VISIT TO THE BLARNEY STONE. {Frasers Magazine, May, 1834.) [The number of Regina containing the record of Father Prout's deh'ghtf ul imaginary foregathering with Sir Walter Scott was the^e embellished with the portrait of the then Editor of TJie Age, Charles Molloy Westmacott, comely, black-whiskered, loosely- attired, seated slouchingly with a sort of rakish, sporting air about him, his hat upon the floor with a long-lashed whip trailing out of it, his foot, like a true critic's, brought down heavily on a book or two. As a grand choral finish to this second of the Prout Papers, came Mahony's memorable polj'glot version of the " Groves of Blarney," in which, upon confronting pages, appeared cheek-by-jowl the English and French as contrasted with the Greek and Latin. Twenty-three years after the issuing from the press of the original edition of the " Relique^," yet another version — in Italian — was put forth by Mahony as purporting to have been sung in bivouac among the woods near Lake Como, on the 25th of iVIay, 1859, by the Condottiere Giuseppe Garibaldi ; the title of this supple- mentary companion to the Doric, Vulgate, and Gallic translations, so long before produced, being "I Boschi di Blarnea." Immediately appended to the fragment of the Celtic manuscript reputed to have been obtained from the Royal Library at Copenhagen, appeared by way of tailpiece to this paper, in the edition of 1836, ^laclise's wonderfully comic yet lifelike sketch of Sir Walter when he had just said, "So here I kiss the stone."] ijeware, oeware Of the black friar, Vv'ho sitteth by Norman stone : •> For he mutters his prayer In the midnight air. And his mass of the days that are gone." BVRON'. Since the publication of this worthy man's " Apology for Lent," which, with some account of his lamented death and well-attended funeral, appeared in our last Number, we have written to his executors — (one of whom is P'ather Mat. Horrogan, P.P. of the neighbouring village of Blarney; and the other, our elegiac poet, Father Magrath)— in the hope of being able to negotiate for the valuable posthumous essays and fugitive pieces which we doubted not had been left behind in great abundance by the deceased. These two disinterested divines— fit associates and bosom-companions of Prout during his lifetime, and whon>, from their joint letters, we should think eminently qualified to pick up the fallen mantle of the departed prophet — have, in the most handsome manner, promised us all the literary and pliilosophic treatises bequeathed to them by the late incumbent of Watergrasshill ; expressing, in the very complimentary note which they have transmitted us. and which our modesty prevents us from inserting, their thanks and that of the whole parish, for our sympathy and condolence on this melancholy bereavement, and intimating at the same time A Pica for Pilgriviages. 19 their regret at not being able to send us also, for our private perusal, the collec- von of the good father's parochial sermons ; the whole of which (a most -.luable MS. I had been taken off for his o\\"n use by the bishop, whom he had .-ide his residuan.- legatee. These " sermons" must be doubtless good things in their ^\ay — a theological /isya dauAia — well adapted to swell the episcopal library ; but as we confessedly are, and suspect our readers likewise to be, a ver\- improper multitude amongst whom to statter such pearls, we shall console ourselves for that sacrifice by plunging head and ears into the abundant sources of intellectual refreshment to which we shall soon have access, and from which Frank Cress well, lucky dog I has drawn such a draught of inspiration. " Sacros ausus recludere fontes I " for assuredly we may defy any one that has perused Prout's \'indication of fish- diet (and li'ho, we ask, has not read it con. amore, conning it over with secret glee, and forthwith caUing out for a red herring?), not to prefer its simple unsophisticated eloquence to the oration of TxiWy pro Domo suo, or Barclay's "Apology for Quakers." After all, it may have been but a sprat to catch a whale, and the whole affair may turn out to be a Popish contrivance ; but if so, we have taken the bait ourselves: we have been, like Festus, "almost per- suaded," and Prout has wrought in us a sort of cuhnary conversion. \\'hy should we be ashamed to avow that we have been edified by the good man s blunt and straightforward logic, and drawn from his theories on fish a higher and more moral impression than from the dreamy visions of an " English Opium- eater," or any other "Confessions" of sensualism and gastronomy. If ihis "black friar" has got smuggled in among our contributors, like King Saul among the regular votaries of the sanctuary, it must be admitted that, hke the royal intruder, he has caught the tone and chimed in with the general harmony of ' our pohtical opinions — no Whighng among true Tories, no goose among swans. Argutos inter strepere anser olorcs. How we long to get possession of " the Prout Papers ! " that chest of learned lumber which haunts our nightly visions ! Already, in imagination, it is within our grasp ; our greedy hand hastily its lid " Unlocks, And all Arcadia breathes from j^onder box I " In this prolific age, when the most unlettered dolt can find a mare's nest in the domain of philosophy, why should not we also zx\, Eup»i\-au£z/ ! How much of novelty in his views ! how much embr\'o discovery must not Prout unfold ! It were indeed a pity to consign the writings of so eminent a scholar to oblivion : nor ought it be said, in scriptural phrase, of him, what is, alas ! applicable to so many other learned divines when they are dead, that " their works have followed them." Such was the case of that laborious French clergyman, the Abbe Trublet, of whom \'oltaire profanely sings : '■' L'Abbe Trublet ecrit, le Lethe sur ses rives Reijoi: avec plaisir ses feuilles fugitives I " WTiich epigram hath a recondite meaning, not obvious to the reader on a first perusal ; and being interpreted mto plain English, for the use of the London University, it may ran thus : '■' Lardner compiles — kind Lethe on her banks Receives the doctor's useful page with thanks." Such may be the fate of Lardner and of Trub'et, such the ultimate destiny that awaits their literarj' labours; but neither men, nor gods, nor our columns (those graceful pillars that support the Muses' temple i, shall suffer this old priest to remain in the unmerited obscurity from which Frank Cresswell first essaved to draw him. l"o that voung barrister we have wTitten, with a request 20 The Works of Father Front. that he would furnish us with further details concerning Prout, and, if possible, a few additional specimens of his colloquial wisdom ; reminding him that modern taste has a decided tendency towards illustrious private gossip, and recommending to him, as a sublime model of the dramatico-biographic style, my Ladv Blessington's "Conversations of Lord Byron." How far he has succeeded in following the ;V///j/7/'////.f of her ladyship's lantern, and how many bogs he has got immerged in because of the dangerous hint, \Vhich we gave him in an evil hour, the judicious reader will soon find out. Here is the com- munication. OLIVER YORKE. I.Iay I, 1834. Furiiiz'al's lint, April 14. ArKXOWLEDGlXG the receipt of your gracious mandate, O Queen of Peri- odicals ! and kissing the top of your ivory sceptre, may I be allowed to express unblamed my utter devotion to your orders, in the language of .'Eolus, quondam ruler of the winds : "Tuus, O Regina, quid optes Explorare labor, mihi jussa capessere fas est ! " without concealing, at the same time, my wonderment, and that of many other sober individuals, at your patronizing the advocacy of doctrines and usages belonging exclusively to another and far less reputable Queen (quean ?) whom I shall have sufficiently designated when I mention that she sits upon seven hills .'—\w stating which singular phenomenon concerning her, I need not add that her fundamental maxims must be totally different from yours. Many orthodox people cannot understand how you could have reconciled it to your conscience to publish, in its crude state, that Apology for Lent, vithout adding note or comment in refutation of such dangerous doctrines; and are still more amazed that a Popish parish priest, from the wild Irish hills, could have got among your contributors — "Claimed kindred there, and have that claim allowed." It will, however, no doubt, give you pleasure to learn, that you have established a lasting popularity among that learned set of men the fishmongers, who are never scaly of their support when deserved ; for, by a unanimous vote of the "worshipful company" last meeting-day, the marble bust of Father Prout, crowned with sea-weeds like a Triton, is to be placed in a conspicuous part of their new hall at London Bridge. But as it is the hardest thing imaginable to please all parties, your triumph is rendered incomplete by the grumbling of another not less respectable portion of the community. By your proposal for the non-consumption of butciiers' meat, you have given mortal offence to the dealers in horned cattle, and stirred up a nest of hornets in Smithfield. In your perambulations of the metropolis, go not into the bucolic purlieus of that dangerous district; beware of the enemy's camp; tempt not the ire of men armed with cold steel, else the long-dormant fires of that land celebrated in every age as a ticrra del fuego may be yet rekindled, and made " red with- uncommon wrath," for your especial roasting. Lord Althorp is no warm friend of yours; and by your making what he calls " a most unprovoked attack on the graziers, " you have not propitiated the winner of the prize o.x. " Foenumhabet in cornu, — hunc tu, Komane, caveto !" In vain would you seek to cajole the worthy chancellor of his Majesty's unfortunate exchequer, by the desirable prospect of a net revenue from the ocean: you will make no impression. His mind is not accessible to any reason- A Plea for Pilgrimages. 2i ing on that subject; and, like the shield of Telamon, it is WTapt in the impene- trable folds of seven tough bull-hides. But eliminating at once these insignificant topics, and setting aside all minor things, let me address myself to the grand subject of my adoption. Verily, since the days of that ornament of the priesthood, and pride of Venice, Father Paul, no divine has shed such lustre on the Church of Rome as Father Prout. His brain was a storehouse of inexhaustible knowledge, and his memory a bazaar, in which the intellectual riches of past ages were classified and arranged in marvellous and briUiant assortment. When, by the liberahty of his executor, you shall have been put in possession of his writings and posthumous papers, you will find I do not exaggerate ; for though his mere conversation was always instructive, still, the pen in his hand, more potent than the wand of Prospero, embelUshed es'en.- subject with an aerial charm ; and whatever department of literature it touched on, it was sure to illuminate and adorn, from the lightest and most ephemeral matters of the day, to the deepest and most abstruse problems of metaphysical inquiry ; \igorous and philosophical, at the same time that it is minute and playful ; having no parallel unless we liken it to the proboscis of an elephant, that can with equal ease shift an obelisk and crack a nut. Xor did he confine himself to prose. He was a chosen favourite of the nine sisters, and flirted openly with them all, his vow of celibacy preventing his forming a permanent alUance with one alone. Hence pastoral poetry, elegy, sonnets, and still grander effusions in the best style of Bob Montgomery, flowed from his muse in abundance ; but, I must confess, his peculiar forte lay in the Pindaric. Besides, he indulged copiously in Greek and Latin versi- fication, as well as in French, Italian, and High Dutch; of which accomphsh- ments I happen to possess some fine specimens from his pen ; and before I terminate this paper, I mean to introduce them to the benevolent notice of the candid reader. By these you will find, that the Doric reed of Theocritus was to him but an ordinary sylvan pipe— that the lyre of Anacreon was as familiar to him as the German flute— and that he played as well on the classic chords of the bard of Mantua as on the Cremona fiddle : at all events, he will prove far superior as a poet to the covey of unfledged rhymers who nestle in annuals and magazines. Sad abortions'! on which even you, O Queen, sometimes take compassion, infusing into them a life " \\Tiich did not j'ou prolong. The world had wanted many an idle song. " To return to his conversational powers : he did not waste them on the gene- laUtv of folks, for he despised the vulgar herd of Corkonians with whom it was 'his lot to mingle ; but when he was sure of a friendly circle, he broke out in resplendent stvle, often humorous, at times critical, occasionally profound, and alwavs interesting. Inexhaustible in his means of illustration, his fancy- was an un'wasted mine, into which you had but to sink a shaft, and you were sure of eliciting the finest ore, which came forth stamped with the impress of genius, and fit "to circulate among the most cultivated auditory : for though the mint of his brain now and then would issue a strange and fantastic coinage, sterling sense was sure to give it value, and ready wit to promote its currency. The rubbish and dust of the schools with which his notions were sometimes incmsted did not alter their intrinsic worth; people only wondered how the diaphanous mind of Prout could be obscured by such common stuff" : its brightness was still undiminished by the admixture ; and like straws in amber, without deteriorating the substan'ce, these matters only made manifest its transparency. Whenever he undertook to illustrate any subject worthy of him he was alwavs felicitous. I shall give you an instance. There stands on the borders of" his 'parish, near the village of Blarney, an 22 The Works of Fathc7' Front. old castle of the M 'Carthy family, rising abruptly from a bold cliff, at the foot ( of which rolls a not inconsiderable stream — the fond and frequent witness of Prout's angling propensities. The well-wooded demesne, comprising an extensive lake, a romantic cavern, and an artificial wilderness of rocks, belongs to the family of Jeffereys, which boasts in the Dowager Countess Glengall a most distinguished scion ; her ladyship's mother having been imm.ortalized under the title of " Lady Jeffers," with the other natural curiosities produced by this celebrated spot, in that never-sufficiently-to-be-encored song, the iiroves of Blarijcy. But neither the stream, nor the lake, nor the castle, nor the village (a sad ruin ! which, but for the recent establishment of a spinning factory by some patriotic Corkonian, would be swept away altogether, or possessed by the owls as a grant from Sultan ^lahmoud) ; — none of these picturesque objects has earned such notoriety for "the Groves" as a certain stone, of a basaltic kind, rather unusual in the district, placed on the pinnacle of the main tower, and endowed with the property of communicating to the happy tongue that comes in contact with its polished surface the gift of gentle, insinuating speech, with soft talk in all its ramifications, whether employed in vows and promises light as air, t-nta irTspoavra, such as lead captive the female heart ; or elaborate mystification of a grosser grain, such as may do for the House of Commons ; all summed up and characterized by the mysterious term Blarney.* Prout's theory on this subject might have remained dormant for ages, and perhaps been ultimately lost to the world at large, were it not for an event which occurred in the summer of 1825, while I (a younker then) happened to be on that visit to my aunt at \\'atergrasshill which eventually secured me her inheritance. The occurrence I am about to commemorate was, in truth, one of the first magnitude, and well calculated, from its importance, to form an epoch in the .Annals of the Parish. It was the arrival of Sir Walter Scott at Blarney, towards the end of the month of July. Nine years have now rolled away, and the " Ariosto of the North " is dead, and our ancient constitution has since fallen under the hoofs of the Whigs ; quenched is many a beacon-light in church and state — Prout himself is no more; and plentiful indications tell us we are come upon evil days: but still may I be allowed to feel a pleasurable, though somewhat saddened emotion, while I revert to that intellectual meeting, and bid memory go back in "dream sublime" to the glorious exhibition of Prout's mental powers. It was, in sooth, a great day for old Ireland ; a greater still for Blarney ; but, greatest of all, it dawned, Prout, on thee ! Then it was that thy light was taken from under its sacerdotal bushel, and placed conspicuously before a man fit to appreciate the effulgence of so brilliant a luminary — a light which I, who pen these words in sorrow, alas ! shall never gaze on more— a light " That ne'er sh.ill shine again On Blarney's stream !" That day it illumined the " cave," the " shady walks," and the "sweet rock- close," and sent its gladdening beam into the gloomiest vaults of the ancient • To Crofton Croker belongs the merit of elucidating this obscure tradition. It appears tliat in 1602, when tlie .Spaniards were exciting our chieftains to h.irass the English authorities, Cormac M'Dermot Carthy held, among other dependencies, the castle of lllarney, and had concluded an armistice with the Lord-president, on condition of sur- rendering this fort to an English garrison. Day after day did his lordship look for the fulfilment of the compact; while the Irish Pozzo di Horgo, as loath to part with his stronghold as Russia to relinquish the Dardanelles, kept protocolizing with soft promises and delusive delays, until at last Carew became the laughing-stock of Elipbeth's minis- ters, and ''Blarney talk " proverbial. [It is a singtdar coincidence, that while Crofton was engat^ed in tracing the origin of this Irish term, D'Isr.aeli was equally well employed in cvolvmg the pedigree of the English word " Fudge. "J A Plea for Pilgrimages. fort ; for all the recondite recesses of the castle were explored in succession by the distinguished poet and the learned priest, and Prout held a candle to Scott. W'q read with interest, in the historian Polybius, the account of Hannibal's interview with Scipio on the plains of Zama ; and often have we, in our school- boy davs of unsophisticated feeling, sympathized with Ovid, when he told us that he' only got a glimpse of Virgil ; but Scott basked for a whole summer's day in the blaze of Prout's wit, and witnessed the coruscations of his learning. The great Marius is said never to have appeared to such advantage as when seated on the ruins of Carthage : with equal dignity Prout sat on the Blarney stone, amid ruins of kindred glory. Zeno taught in the "porch;" Plato loved to muse alone on the bold jutting promontory of Cape Sunium; Socra- tes, bent on finding Truth, " ?« sylvis Academi qiccErerc vcrum," sought her among the bowers of Academus; Prout courted the same coy nymph, and wooed her in the " groves of Blarney." I said that it was in the summer of 1825 that Sir Walter Scott, in the pro- gress of his tour through Ireland, reached Cork, and forthwith intimated his wish to proceed at once on a visit to Blarney Castle. For him the noble river, the magnificent estuary, and unrivalled harbour of a city that proudly bears on her civic escutcheon the well-applied motto, '' Statio bene fid.i carinis," had but little attraction when placed in competition with a spot sacred to the Muses, and wedded to immortal verse. Such was the interest which its connection with the popular literature and traditionary stories of the country had excited in that master-mind — such the predominance of its local reminiscences — such the transcendent influence of song ! For this did the then "Great Unknown" wend his way through the purlieus of "Golden Spur," traversing the great manufacturing fauxbourg of "Black Pool," and emerging by the " Red Forge ; " so intent on the classic object of his pursuit, as to disregard the unpromising aspect of the vestibule by which alone it is approachable. Many are the splendid mansions and hospitable halls that stud the suburbs of the " beautiful city," each boasting its grassy lawn and placid lake, each decked with park and woodland, and each well furnished with that paramount appendage, a batterie de cuisine ; but all these castles were passed unheeded by, carent quia vate sacro. Gorgeous residences, picturesque seats, magnificent' villas, they be, no doubt ; but unknown to hterature, in vain do they plume themselves on their architectural beauty ; in vain do they spread wide their well-proportioned ii}ings—\\\.QS cannot soar aloft to the regions of celebrity. On the eve of that memorable day I was sitting on a stool in the priest's parlour, poking the turf fire, while Prout, who had been angling all day, sat nodding over his " brevtary," and, according to my calculation, ought to be at the last psalm of vespers, when a loud official knock, not usual on thatbleiik hill, bespoke the presence of no ordinary personage. Accordingly, the "wicket, opening with a latch," ushered in a messenger clad in the livery of the ancient and loyal corporation of Cork, who announced himself as the bearer of a despatch from the mansion-house to his reverence; and, handing it with that deferential awe which even his masters felt for the incumbent of Watergrasshill, immediately withdrew. The letter ran thus : — Coimcil Chamber, Jiily 24, 1S25. Very Reverend Doctor Prout, Cork harbours within its walls the illustrious author of Wayerley. On recei\'ing the freedom of our ancient city, which we presented to him (as usual towards distinguished strangers) in a box car\-ed out of a chip of the Blarney stone, he expressed his determination to visit the old block itself. As he will, therefore, be in your neighbourhood to-morrow, and as no one is better able to 24 The Works of Father Prout. do the honours than you (our burgesses being sadly deficient in learning, as you and I well know), your attendance on the celebrated poet is requested by your old friend and foster-brother, George Knapp,* il/(z;vr. Never shall I forget the beam of triumph that lit up the old man's features on the perusal of Knapp's pithy summons ; and right warmly did he respond to my congratulations on the prospect of thus coming in contact with so dis- tinguished an author. " You are right, child ! " said he; and as I perceived by his manner that he was about to enter on one of those rambling trains of thought — half-homily, half-soliloquy— in which he was wont to indulge, I settled myself by the fireplace, and prepared to go through my accustomed part of an attentive listener. "A great man, Frank ! A truly great man ! No token of ancient days escapes his eagle glance, no venerable memorial of former times his observant scrutiny; and still, even he, versed as he is in the monumentary remains of by- gone ages, may yet learn something more, and have no cause to regret his visit to Blarney. Yes ! since our ' groves ' are to be honoured by thapresence of the learned baronet, ' Sylvae sint consule dignse ! ' let us make them deserving of his attention. He shall fix his antiquarian eye and rivet his wondering gaze on the rude basaltic mass that crowns the battle- ments of the main tower ; for though he may have seen the ' chair at Scone," where the Caledonian kings were crowned ; though he may have examined that Scotch pebble in Westminster Abbey, which the Cockneys, in the exercise of a delightful credulity, believe to be 'Jacob's pillow ;' though he may have visited the misshapen pillars on Salisbury plain, and the Rock of Cashel, and the ' Hag's Bed,' and St. Kevin's petrified matelas at Glendalough, and many a cromlech of Druidical celebrity, — there is a stone yet unexplored, which he shall contemplate to-morrow, and place on record among his most profitable days that on which he shall have paid it homage : ' Hunc, Macrine, diem numera meliore lapillo !* " I am old, Frank. In my wild youth I have seen many of the celebrated writers that adorned the decline of the last centun,', and shed a lustre over France, too soon eclipsed in blood at its sanguinary close. I have conversed * The republic of letters has great reason to complain of Dr. Maginn, for his non- fulfilment of a positive pledge to publish "a great historical work" on the Mayor of Cork. Owing to this desideratum in the annals of the Empire, I am compelled to bring into notice thus abruptly the most respectable civic worthy that has worn the cocked hat and chain since the days of John Walters, who boldly proclaimed Perkin Warbeck, in the reign of Henry VII., in the market-place of that beautiful city. Knapp's virtues and talents did not, like those of Donna Ines, deserve to be called " Classic all, Nor lay they chiefly in the mathematical," for his favourite pursuit during the canicule of 1825, was the extermination of mad dogs; and so vigorously did lie urge the carnage during the summer of his mayoralty, that some thought he wished to eclipse the exploit of .St. Patrick in destroying the breed alto- gether, as the saint did that of toads. A Cork poet, the hiureate of the mansion-house, has celebrated Kn.ipp's prowess in a didactic composition, entitled " Dog-Killing, a I'oem ;" in which the mayor is likened toApullo in the Grecian camp before Troy, in the opening of the " Iliad : " — h.VTa.p /3ou? irpcoTOi' ty Caley. London, 1S25. Vol. iii. pt. i. p. 40S. 30 The Works of FatJicr Front, SCOTT. I was aware of the existence of that document, as also of the remark made by one Erasmus of Rotterdam concerning the said cave : " Xon desunt hodie qui descendant, sedprius triduano enecti jejunio ne sano capite ingrediantur."* Erasmus, reverend friend, was an honour to your cloth ; but as to Edward III., I am not surprised he should have encouraged such excursions, as he belonged to a family whose patronymic is traceable to a pilgrim's vow. My reverend friend is surely in possession of the historic fact, that the name of Plantagenet is derived from plantc de gencsf, a sprig of heath, which the first Duke of Anjou wore in his helmet as a sign of penitential humiliation, when about to depart for the Holy Land ; though why a broom-sprig should indicate lowliness is not satisfactorily explained. PROUT. The monks of that day, who are reputed to have been verj^ ignorant, were perhaps acquainted with the "Georgics" of Virgil, and recollected the verse — " Quid majora sequar? Sallces Jaimilesqjce Genistce." n. 434. SCOTT. I suppose there is some similar recondite allusion in that unaccountable deco- ration of eve:-y holy traveller's accoutrement, the scollop-shell? or was it merely used to quaff the waters of the brook ? PROUT, It was first assumed by the penitents who resorted to the shrine of St. Jago di Compostella, on the western coast of Spain, to betoken that they had extended their penitential excursion so far as that sainted shore ; just as the palm-branch was sufficient evidence of a visit to Palestine. Did not the soldiers of a Roman general fill their helmets with cockles on the brink of the German Ocean? By the bye, when my laborious and learned friend the renowned Abbe Trublet, in vindicating the deluge against \'oltaire, instanced the heaps of marine remains and conchylia on the ridge of the Pyrenees, the witty reprobate of Eerney had the unblushing effrontery to assert that those were shells left behind by the pilgrims of St. Jacques on recrossing the moun- tains. SCOTT. I must not, meantime, forget the oljjects of my devotion ; and with your benison, reverend father, shall proceed to examine the "stone." * Erasmus in Adagia, artic. de antro Trophonii. See also Camden's account of this cave in his Ilybemue Dcscriptio, edition of 15^4, p. 671. It is-a singular fact, though little known, that from the visions said to occur in this cavern, and bruued abroad by the frat'jrnity of monks, whose connection with Italy was constant and intimate, Dante took the first hint of his Divina Commedia, II Furgatorio. Such was the celebrity this cave had obtained in Spain, that the great dramatist Calderon made it the subject of one of his best pieces ; and it was so well known at the court of Ferrara, that Ariosto introduced it into his Orlando Fiirioso, canto x. stanza 92. "Quindi Ruggier, poichb di banda in banda Vide gl' Inglesi, ando verso 1' Irlanda E vide Ibernia fabulosa, dove II santo vccchiarel fece la cava In che tanta merco par che si trove, Che r uom vi purga ogni sua colpa prava ! " [F. Cresswell.] A Pica for Pilgrimages, 3 1 PROUT. You behold, Sir Walter, in this block the most valuable remnant of Ireland's ancient glor>-, and the most precious lot of her Phoenician inheritance ! Pos- sessed of this treasure, she may well be designated " First flower of the earth and first gem of the sea ; " for neither the musical stone of Memnon, that "so sweetly played in tune," nor the oracular stone at Delphi, nor the lapidary talisman of the Lydian Gyges, nor the colossal granite shaped into a sphinx in Upper Egypt, nor Stonehenge, nor the Pelasgic walls of Italy's Palaestrina, offer so many attrac- tions. The long-sought lapis fhilosophorum, compared with this jewel, dwindles into insignificance ; nay, the savoury fragment which was substituted for the infant Jupiter, when Saturn had the mania of devouring his children ; the Luxor obelisk ; the treaty-stone of Limerick, with all its historic endear- ments ; the zodiacal monument of Denderach, with all its astronomic impor- tance; the Elgin marbles with all their sculptured, the Arundelian with all their lettered, riches, — cannot for a moment stand in competition with the Blarney block. What stone in the world, save this alone, can communicate to the tongue that suavity of speech, and that splendid effronter}^ so necessary to get through life ? Without this resource, how could Brougham have managed to delude the English public, or Dan O'Connell to gull even his own country- men? How could St. John Long thrive? or Dicky Shell prosper? What else could have transmuted mv old friend Pat Lardner into a man of letters — LL.D., F.R.S.L. and E., M.R.I. A., F.R.A.S., F.L.S., F.Z.S., F.C.P.S., &c., &c.? What would have become of Spring Rice? and who would have heard of Charley Phillips ? When the good fortune of the above-mentioned individuals can be traced to any other source, save and except the Blarney stone, I am ready to renounce my belief in it altogether. This palladium of our country was brought hither originally by the Phoe- nician colony that peopled Ireland, and is the best proof of our eastern parentage. The inhabitants of Tyre and Carthage, who for many years had the Blarney stone in their custody, made great use of the privilege, as the proverbs fides Punka, Tyriosque bUlngucs, testify. Hence the origin of this wondrous tahsman is of the remotest antiquity. Strabo, Diodorus, and Pliny, mention the arrival of the Tyrians in Ireland about the year 883 before Christ, according to the chronology of Sir Isaac Xewton, and the twenty-first year after the sack of Troy. Now, to show that in all their migrations they carefully watched over this treasure of eloquence and source of diplomacy, I need only enter into a few etymological details. Carthage, where they settled for many centuries, but which turns out to have been only a stage and resting-place in the progress of their western wanderings, bears in its very name the trace of its having had in its possession and custody the Blarney stone. This city is called in the Scrip- ture Tarsus, or Tarshish, C'*U"in, which in Hebrew means a valuable stone, a stone of price, rendered in your authorized (?) version, where it occurs in the 28th and 39th chapters of Exodus, by the specific term beryl, a sort of jewel. In his commentaries on this word, an eminent rabbi, Jacob Rodrigues iMoreira, the Spanish Jew, says that Carthris;e is evidently the Tarsus of the Bible, and he reads the word thus— Ijunn,. accounting for the termina- tion in ish, by which Carthago becomes Larshish, in a very plausible way : "now," says he, " our peoplish have de very great knack of ending dere vords in ish ; for if you go on the 'Change, you will hear the great man Xicholish Rotchild calling the English coin monish." — See Lectures delivered in the Western Sy?iagogue, by J. R. AI. But, further, does it not stand to reason that there must be some other latent 32 TJie Works of FatJier Front. way of accounting for the purchase of as much grou7id as an ox-hide ivould cover, besides the generally received and most unsatisfactory explanation ? The fact is, the Tyrians bought as much land as their Blarney stone would require to fix itself solidly, — " Taurine quantum potult circumdare tergo ; " and having got that much, by the talismanic stone they humbugged and deluded the simple natives, and finally became the masters of Africa. SCOTT. I confess yoM have thro\\-n a new and unexpected light on a most obscure passage in ancient history ; but how the stone got at last to the county of Cork, appears to me a difficult transition. It must give you great trouble. PROUT. My dear sir, don't mention it ! It went to Minorca with a chosen body of Carthaginian adventurers, who stole it away as their best safeguard on the expedition. They first settled at Port Mahon,— a spot so called from the clan of the O'Mahonys, a powerful and prolific race still flourishing in this county; just as the Nile had been previously so named from the tribe of the O'Xeils, its aboriginal inhabitants. All these matters, and mzxiv more curious points, will be one day revealed to the world by my friend Henry O'Brien, in his work on the Round'Towers of Ireland. Sir, we built the pyramids before we left Eg}-pt ; and all those obelisks, sphinxes, and Memnonic stones, were but emblems of the great relic before you. George Knapp, who had looked up to Prout with dumb amazement from the commencement, here pulled out his spectacles, to examine more closely the old block, while Scott shook his head doubtingly. " I can convince the most obstinate sceptic, Sir Walter," continued the learned doctor, "of the intimate connection that subsisted between us and those islands which the Romans called insula; BaUares, without knowing the signification of the words which they thus apphed. That they were so called from the Blarney stone, will appear at once to any person accustomed to trace Celtic derivations : the Ulster king of arms, Sir WiUiam Beiham, has shown it by the following scale." Here Prout traced with his cane on the muddy floor of the castle the words " ^a'Lc.KV.cs z"N.fzvov re A|ui- lore. The lingering hours beguiled." Goldsmith. Before we reume the thread (or yam) of Frank Cresswell's narrative con- cerning the memorable occurrences which took place at Blarney, on the remark- able occasion of Sir Walter Scott's visit to " the groves," we feel it imperative on us to set ourselves right with an illustrious correspondent, relative to a most important particular. We have received, through that useful medium of the interchange of human thought, "the twopenny post," a letter which we think of the utmost consequence, inasmuch as it goes to impeach the veracity, not of Father Prout [pairem quis dicere falsum audcat f), but of the young and some- what facetious barrister who has been the volunteer chronicler of his life and opinions. For the better understanding of the thing, as it is likely to become ^.qucesiio z'exata in other quarters, we may be allowed to bring to recollection that, in enumerating the many eminent men who had kissed the Blarney stone during Prout's residence in the parish — an experience extending itself over a period of nearly half a century- — Doctor D. Lardner was triumphantly mentioned by the benevolent and simple-minded incumbent of Watergrasshill, as a proud and incontestable instance of the \-irtue and efficacy of the tahsman, applied to the most ordinary materials with the most miraculous result. Instead of feehng a lingering remnant of gratitude towards the old parei^t-block for such super- natural interposition on his behalf, and looking back to that " kiss" with fond 40 TJie Works of Father Front. and filial recollection— instead of allowing "the stone " to occupy the greenest spot in the wilderness of his memory — "the stone" that first sharpened his intellect, and on which ought to be inscribed the line of Horace, " Fungor vice cotis, acutum Reddere quae valeat ferrum, exsors ipsa secandi" — instead of this praiseworthy expression of tributary acknowledgment, the Doctor writes to us denying all obligation in the quarter alluded to, and con- tradicting most flatly the "soft impeachment" of having kissed the stone at all. His note is couched in such peevish terms, and conceived in such fretful mood, that we protest we do not recognize the tame and usually unexcited tracings of his gentle pen ; but rather suspect he has been induced, by some medical wag, to use a quill plucked from the membranous integument of that celebrated " man-porcupine " who has of late exhibited his hirsuteness at the Middlesex Hospital. "London U)iiversity, May Zth. "Sir, "I owe it to the great cause of ' Useful Knowledge,' to which I have dedicated my past labours, to rebut temperately, yet firmly, the assertion reported to have been made by the late Rev. Mr. Prout (for whom I had a high regard), in conversing with the late Sir Walter Scott on the occasion alluded to in your ephemeral work ; particularly as I find the statement re- asserted by that widely-circulated journal" the Morning Herald oi yesterday's date. Were either the reverend clergyman or the distinguished baronet now living, I would appeal to their candour, and so shame the inventor of that tale. But as both are withdrawn by death from the literary world, I call on you, sir, to insert in your next Number this positive denial on my part of having ever kissed that stone; the supposed properiies of which, I am ready to prove, do not bear the test of chymical analysis. I do recollect having been solicited by the present Lord Chancellor of England (and also of the London Univer- sity), whom I am proud to call my friend (though you have given him the sobriquet of Bridlegoose, with your accustomed want of deference for great names), to join him, when, many years ago, he privately embarked on board a Westmoreland collier to perform his devotions at Blarney. That circumstance is of old date ; it was about the year that Paris was taken by the allies, and certainly previous to the Queens trial. But I did not accompany the then simple Harry Brougham, content with what nature had done for me in that particular department. " Vou will please insert this disavowal from, " Sir, ' ' Your occasional reader, " DioNYSius Lardner, D.D. " P.S.— If you neglect me, I shall take care to state my own case in the Cyclopaedia. Ill prove that the block at Blarney is an ' Aerolithe,' and that your statement as to its Phoenician origin is unsupported by historical evidence. Recollect, you have thrown the first stone." Now, to us, considering these things, and much pondering on the Doctor's letter, it seemed advisable to refer the matter to our reporter, Frank Cresswell aforesaid, who has given us perfect satisfaction. P.y him our attention was called, first, to the singular bashfulness of the learned man, in curtailing from his signature the usual appendages that shed such lustre o'er his name. He lies before us in this epistle a simple D. D., whereas he certainly is entitled to write himself F.R.S., M.R.I. A., F.R.A.S., F.L.S., F.Z.S., F.C.P.S.. &c. Father Proufs Carousal. 41 Thus, in his letter, "we saw him," to borrow an illustration from the beautiful episode of James Thomson, "We saw him charming ; but we saw not half — The rest his downcast modesty concealed." Next as to dates : how redolent of my Uncle Toby — "about the year Den- dermonde \vas taken by the allies." The reminiscence was probably one of which he was unconscious, and we therefore shall not call him a plagiary ; but how slylv, how diabolically does he seek to shift the onus and gravamen of the whole 'business on the rickety shoulders of his learned friend Bridlegoose ! This will not do, O sage Thaiimaturgus / By implicating " Bridois6n," you shall not extricate yourself— "^/ z'//«/d tu digitus, et hie;" and Frank Cress- well has let us into a secret. Know then, all men, that among these never-too- anxiously-to-be-looked-out-for " Prout Papers," there is a positive record of theinitia'tionbothof Henry Brougham and Patrick Lardner to the freemasonry of the Blarney stone ; and, more important still— (O, most rare document !) — there is to be found amid the posthumous treasures of Father Prout the original project of a University at Blarney, to be then and there founded by the united efforts of Lardner, Dan O'Connell, and Tom Steele ; and of which the Doctor's " AEROLITHE " was to have been the corner-stone. [Frank Cresswell tells us that the statutes, and the whole getting up of that contemplated Alma Mater have been reproduced like a " twice-boiled cabbage " —a sort of cramhe repeiita — in the Gower Street Academy for young Cockneys ; but that the soil being evidently not congenial to the plant, unless it be transferred back to Blarney, the place of its nativity, it must droop and die. So we often told the young' gulls that frequent the school itself— so we told Lardner, the great oracle of its votaries — so we often told Lord Brougham and Vaux, the sublime shepherd of the whole flock : " Formosi pecoris custos, formosior ipse ! "] We therefore rely on the forthcoming Prout Papers for a confirmation of all we have said ; and here do we cast down the glove of defiance to the champion of Stinkomalee, even though he come forth armed to the teeth in a panoply, not, of course, forged on the classic anvil of the Cyclops, however laboriously hammered in the clumsy arsenal of his own " Cyclopaedia." We know there is another world, where every man will get his due according to his deserts ; but if there be a limbuspatrinn, or hterary purgatory, where the effrontery and ingratitude of folks ostensibly belonging to the republic of letters are to be visited with condign retribution, we think we behold in that future middle state of purification (which, from our friend's real name, we shall call Patricks Purgatory), Pat Lardner rolling the Blarney stone, d la Sisyphus, up the hill of Science. Kat ^j/y "Ziffvcpou ticrsioov Kparsp^ aXyt' £)(;oi»Ta Aaav fiaaraX^ovTa tteXoooiou aficpOTspycTLU, AuTiS ETTElTCt TTSCOVOE KvXlVOtTO AAAS ANAIAH2 ! And now we return to the progress of events on Watergrasshill, and to matters more congenial to the taste of our Regina. OLIVER YORKE. Regent Street, ist Jiuie, 1835. Furnival's Inn, May 14. Accept, O Queen ! my compliments congratulatory on the unanimous and most rapturous welcome with which the whole literary world hath met, on its first entrance into life, that wonderful and more than Siamese bantling your 42 The Works of Father P^'oiit. " Polyglot edition " of the "Groves of Blarney." Of course, various are the conjectures of the gossips in Paternoster Row as to the real paternity of that " most delicate monster ; " and some have the unwarrantable hardihood to hint that, like the poetry of Sternhold and Hopkins, your incomparable lyric must be referred to a joint-stock sort of parentage : but, entre nous, how stupid and mahgnant are all such insinuations ! How little do such simpletons suspect or know of the real source from which hath emanated that rare combination of the Teian lyre and theTipperary bagpipe — of the Ionian dialect blending har- moniously with the Cork brogue; an Irish potato seasoned with Attic salt, and the humours of Donnybrook wed to the glories of Marathon ! Verily, since the days of the great Complutensian Polyglot (by the compilation of which the illustrious Cardinal Ximenes so endeared himself to the bibliomaniacal world), since the appearance of that still grander effort of the " Clarendon" at Oxford, the "Tetrapla," originally compiled by the most laborious and eccentric father of the Church, Origen of Alexandria, nothing has issued from the press in a completer form than your improved quadruple version of the " Groves of Blarney." The celebrated proverb, lucus d non lucendo, so often quoted with mahcious meaning and for invidious purposes, is no longer applic- able Xo your " Groves :" this quaint conceit has lost its sting, and, to speak in Gully's phraseology, you have taken the shine out of it. What a halo of glory, what a flood of lustre, will henceforth spread itself over that romantic " plan- tation !" How oft shall its echoes resound with the voice of song, Greek, French, or Latin, according to the taste or birthplace of its European visitors ; all charmed with its shady bowers, and enraptured with its dulcet melody ! From the dusty purlieus of High Holborn, where I pine in a foetid atmosphere, my spirit soars afar to that enchanting scenery, wafted on the wings of poesy, and transported with the ecstasy of Elysium — " Videor pios Errare per lucos, amoenge • Quos et aquae subeunt et aurae ! " Mine may be an illusion, a hallucination, an " amabilis insania," if you will ; but meantime, to find some solace in my exile from the spot itself, I cannot avoid poring, with more than antiquarian relish, over the different texts placed by you in such tasteful juxtaposition, anon comparing and collating each par- ticular version with alternate gusto — " Amant alterna Camcenae." How pure and pellucid the flow of harmony ! how resplendent the well-grouped images, shining, as it were, in a sort of milky way, or poetic galaxy, through your glorious columns ; to which I cannot do better than apply a line of St. Gregory (the accomplished Greek father) of Nazianzene — 'H