Even all the perfumes of Hindostan; its leaves, if they failed to convince, should, like those of the mysterious lotus, have inculcated silence; and if the finger of meditation did not rest on every line, and pause on every period, the volume, at least, should not be indicated to the vulgar by the finger of scorn. granting that there were in the book some errors of fancy, of judgment, or of style, which of us is without reproach in our juvenile productions? and though I myself am old, I am the more inclined to forgive the inaccuracies of youth. Again, when all is dark, who would object to a ray of light, merely because of the faulty or flickering mediuni by which it is transmitted? And if these round towers have been hitherto a dark puzzle and a mystery, must we scare away O'Brien because he approaches with a rude and unpolished but serviceable lantern? No; forbid it, Diogenes: and though Tommy may attempt to put his extinguisher on the towers and their historian, there is enough of good sense in the British public to make common cause with O'Brien the enlightener. Moore should recollect, that knowledge conveyed in any shape will ever find a welcome among us; and that, as he himself beautifully observes in his "Loves of the Angels" Sunshine broken in the rill, Though turn'd aside, is sunshine still." For my own part, I protest to Heaven, that were I, while wandering in a gloomy forest, to meet on my dreary path the small, faint, glimmering light even of a glow-worm, I should shudder at the thought of crushing with my foot that dim speck of brilliancy; and were it only for its being akin to brighter rays, honouring it for its relationship to the stars, I would not harm the little lamplighter as I passed along in the woodland shade. If Tommy is rabidly bent on satire, why does he not fall foul of Doctor Lardner, who has got the clumsy machinery of a whole Cyclopædia at work, grinding that nonsense which he calls "Useful Knowledge?" Let the poet mount his Pegasus, or his Rosinante, and go tilt a lance against the doctor's windmill. It was unworthy of him to turn on O'Brien, after the intimacy of private correspondence; and if he was inclined for battle, he might have found a seemlier foe. Surely my young friend was not the quarry on which the vulture should delight to pounce, when there are so many literary reptiles to tempt his beak and glut his maw! Heaven knows, there is fair game and plentiful carrion on the plains of Boeotia. In the poet's picture of the pursuits of a royal bird, we find such sports alluded to "In reluctantes dracones Egit amor dapis atque pugnæ." Let Moore, then, vent his indignation and satiate his voracity on the proper objects of a volatile of prey; but he will find in his own province of imaginative poetry a kindlier element, a purer atmosphere, for his winged excursions. Long, long may we behold the gorgeous bird soaring through the regions of inspiration, distinguished in his loftier as in his gentler flights, and combining, by a singular miracle of ornithology, the voice of the turtle-dove, the eagle's eye and wing, with the plumage of the "bird of Paradise." " MEM. On the 28th of June, 1835, died, at the Hermitage, Hanwell, Henry O'Brien, author of the Round Towers of Ireland." His portrait was hung up in the Gallery of REGINA on the 1st of August following; and the functionary who exhibits the "Literary Characters" dwelt thus on his merits : In the village graveyard of Hanwell (ad viii. ab urbe lapidem) sleeps the original of yonder sketch, and the rude forefathers of the Saxon hamlet have consented to receive among them the clay of a Milesian scholar. That "original" was no stranger to us. Some time back we had our misgivings that the oil in his flickering lamp of life would soon dry up; still, we were not prepared to hear of his light being thus abruptly extinguished. "One morn we missed him" from the accustomed table at the library of the British Museum, where the page of antiquity awaited his perusal; "another came-nor yet was he to be seen behind the pile of "Asiatic Researches," poring over his favourite Herodotus, or deep in the Zendavesta. "The next" brought tidings of his death. "Au banquet de la vie, infortuné convive, Je meurs, et sur la tombe où, jeune encor, j'arrive His book on the "Round Towers" has thrown more light on the early history of Ireland, and on the freemasonry of these gigantic puzzles, than will ever shine from the cracked pitchers of the "Royal Irish Academy," or the farthing candle of Tommy Moore. And it was quite natural that he should have received from them, during his lifetime, such tokens of malignant hostility as might sufficiently" tell how they hated his beams." The "Royal Irish" twaddlers must surely feel some compunction now, when they look back on their paltry transactions in the matter of the prize essay; and though we do not expect much from "Tom Brown the younger," or "Tom Little," the author of sundry Tomfudgeries and Tomfooleries, still it would not surprise us if he now felt the necessity of atoning for his individual misconduct by doing appropriate penance in a white sheet or a "blue and yellow" blanket when next he walks abroad in that rickety go-cart of drivelling dotage, the Edinburgh Review. While Cicero was quæstor in Sicily, he discovered in the suburbs of Syracuse the neglected grave of Archimedes, from the circumstance of a symbolical cylinder indicating the pursuits and favourite theories of the illustrious dead. Great was his joy at the recognition. No emblem will mark the sequestered spot where lies the Edipus of the Round Tower riddle-no hieroglyphic, But "Save daisies on the mould, Where children spell, athwart the churchyard gate, His name and life's brief date.' ye who wish for monuments to his memory, go to his native land, and there-circumspicite!-Glendalough, Devenish, Clondalkin, Inniscattery, rear their architectural cylinders; and each, through those mystic apertures that face the cardinal points, proclaims to the four winds of heaven, trumpet-tongued, the name of him who solved the problem of 3,000 years, and who first disclosed the drift of these erections! Fame, in the Latin poet's celebrated personification, is described as perched "Sublimi culmine tecti, Turribus aut altis." Eneid IV. That of O'B. is pre-eminently so circumstanced. From these proud pinnacles nothing can dislodge his renown. Moore, in the recent pitiful compilation meant for "a history," talks of these monuments as being so many "astronomical indexes." He might as well have said they were tubes for the purposes of gastronomy. 'Tis plain he knew as little about their origin as he may be supposed to know of the "Hanging Tower of Pisa," or the "Torre degli Asinelli," or how the nose of the beloved resembled the tower of Damascus. Concerning the subject of this memoir, suffice it to add that he was born in the kingdom of Iveragh, graduated in T.C.D. (having been classically "brought up at the feet of the Rev. Charles Boyton); and fell a victim here to the intense ardour with which he pursued the antiquarian researches that he loved. "Kerria me genuit; studia, heu! rapuêre; tenet nunc REGENT STREET, August 1, 1835. VI. Literature and the Jesuits. (Fraser's Magazine, September 1834.) —0— [This, in many ways, noble evidence of Mahony's gratitude to the great and learned Order to the fathers of which he owed so much of his ripe scholarship, appeared in the number of Fraser containing the portrait of the Rev. George Robert Gleig, author of "The Subaltern," twelve years afterwards appointed Chaplain-General of the Forces, the clerical novelist as portrayed by Maclise's pencil, hat in hand, and with his hands clasped before him, all but walking out of the picture as we examine his likeness. Rather incongruously, at the close of so loyal a tribute to his old masters, the Jesuits, Mahony, by appending to it his version of Jean Baptiste Louis Gresset's wonderfully humorous poem of " Vert-Vert," affords Croquis' wicked pencil the opportunity of introducing as a tailpiece to it in the 1836 edition his profane illustration of the scare in the cloisters, "Toutes pensent être à la fin du monde." Conspicuous, by the way, among the finest specimens of our author's graver Latin poetry, his Ode in celebration of the Vigil of Saint Ignatius Loyola, incidentally given in this sixth of the Prout Papers, is entitled to the reader's closest consideration.] "Alii spem gentis adultos Educunt fœtus: alii purissima mella Stipant, et liquido distendunt nectare cellas." VIRG. Georgic IV. "Through flowery paths Skill'd to guide youth, in haunts where learning dwells, PROUT. THE recent massacre by a brutal populace in Madrid of fourteen Jesuits, in the hall of their college of St. Isidoro, has drawn somewhat of notice, if not of sympathy, to this singular order of literati, whom we never fail, for the last three hundred years, to find mixed up with every political disturbance. There is a certain species of bird well known to ornithologists, but better still to mariners, which is sure to make its appearance in stormy weather-so constantly, indeed, as to induce among the sailors (durum genus) a belief that it is the fowl that has raised the tempest. Leaving this knotty point to be settled by Dr. Lardner in his "Cyclopædia," at the article of "Mother Carey's Chickens," we cannot help observing, meantime, that since the days of the French League under Henri Trois, to the late final expulsion of the branche aînée (an event which has marked the commencement of REGINA'S accession to the throne of literature), as well in the revolutions of Portugal as in the vicissitudes of Venice, in the revocation of the edict of Nantz, in the expulsion of James II., in the severance of the Low Countries from Spain, in the invasion of Africa by Don Sebastian, in the Scotch Rebellion of '45, in the conquest of China by the Tartars, in all the Irish rebellions, from Father Salmeron in 1561, and Father Archer (for whom see "Pacata Hibernia "), to that anonymous Jesuit who (according to Sir Harcourt Lees) threw the bottle at the Lord-Lieutenant in the Dublin Theatre some years ago, there is always one of this illfated society found in the thick of the confusion "And whether for good, or whether for ill, It is not mine to say; But still to the house of Amundevilie He abideth night and day! When an heir is born, he is heard to mourn, That ancient line, in the pale moonshine BYRON. However, notwithstanding the various and manifold commotions which these Jesuits have confessedly kicked up in the kingdoms of Europe and the commonwealth of Christendom, we, OLIVER YORKE, must admit that they have not deserved ill of the Republic of Letters; and therefore do we decidedly set our face against the Madrid process of knocking out their brains; for, in our view of things, the pineal gland and the cerebellum are not kept in such a high state of cultivation in Spain as to render superfluous a few colleges and professors of the litera humaniores. George Knapp, the vigilant mayor of Cork, was, no doubt, greatly to be applauded for demolishing with his civic club the mad dogs which invested his native town; and he would have won immortal laurels if he had furthermore cleared that beautiful city of the idlers, gossips, and cynics, who therein abound; but it was a great mistake of the Madrid folks to apply the club to the learned skulls of the few literati they possessed. We are inclined to think (though full of respect for Robert Southey's opinion) that, after all, Roderick was not the last of the Goths in Spain. When the Cossacks got into Paris in 1814, their first exploit was to eat up all the tallow-candles of the conquered metropolis, and to drink the train oil out of the lamps, so as to leave the "Boulevards' in Cimmerian darkness. By murdering the schoolmasters, it would seem that the partisans of Queen Christina would have no great objection to a similar municipal arrangement for Madrid. But all this is a matter of national taste; and as our gracious REGINA is no party to "the quadruple alliance," she has determined to adhere to her fixed system of non-intervention. Meantime the public will peruse with some curiosity a paper from Father Prout, concerning his old masters in literature. We suspect that on this occasion sentimental gratitude has begotten a sort of "drop serene" in his eye, for he only winks at the rogueries of the Jesuits; nor does he redden for them the gridiron on which he gently roasts Dr. Lardner and Tom Moore. But the great merit of the essay is, that the composer evidently had opportunities of a thorough knowledge of his subject-a matter of rare occurrence, and therefore quite refreshing. He appears, indeed, to be fully aware of his vantage-ground: hence the tone of confidence, and the firm, unhesitating tenour of his assertions. This is what we like to see. A chancellor of England who rarely got drunk, Sir Thomas More, has left this bit of advice to folks in general: Wise men alwaye affirme and say that tis best for a man diligently for to apply to the business he can, and in no wyse another facultie. Acting on this principle, how gladly would we open our columns to a treatise by our particular friend, Marie Taglioni, on the philosophy of hops!-how cheerfully would we welcome an essay on heavy wet from the pen of Dr. Wade, or of Jack Reeve, or any other similarly qualified Chevalier de Malte! We should not object to a tract on gin from Charley Pearson; nor would we exclude Lord Althorp's thick notions on "flummery," or Lord Brougham's XXX. ideas on that mild alcohol which, for the sake of peace and quietness, we shall call "tea." Who would not listen with attention to Irving on a matter of "unknown tongues," or to O'Brien on " Round Towers?" Verily it belongeth to old Benjamin Franklin to write scientifically on the paratonnère; and his contemporary, Talleyrand, has a paramount claim to lecture on the weather-cock. "Sumite materiam vestris qui scribitis æquam Viribus.' Turning finally to thee, O Prout! truly great was thy love of frolic, but still more remarkable thy wisdom. Thou wert a most rare combination of Socrates and Sancho Panza, of Scarron and the venerable Bede! What would we not have given to have cracked a bottle with thee in thy hut on Watergrasshill, partaking of thy hospitable "herring," and imbibing thy deep flood of knowledge with the plenitude of thy "Medoc?" Nothing gloomy, narrow, or pharisaical, ever entered into thy composition-"In wit, a man; simplicity, a child." The wrinkled brow of antiquity softened into smiles for thee; and the Muses must have marked thee in thy cradle for their own. Such is the perfume that breathes from thy chest of posthumous elucubrations, conveying a sweet fragrance to the keen nostrils of criticism, and recalling the funeral oration of the old woman in Phædrus over her emptied flagon "O suavis anima! quale te dicam bonum REGENT STREET, 1st Sept. 1834. OLIVER YORKE. WATERGRASSHILL, Dec. 1833. ABOUT the middle of the sixteenth century, after the vigorous arm of an Augustinian monk had sounded on the banks of the Rhine that loud tocsin of *See this excellent didactic poem printed at length in the elaborate preface to Dr. Johnson's Dictionary. [Mahony should rather have said in the sequel to the famous preface entitled "The History of the English Language."] It is entitled "A merrie Jest, how a Sarjeant would learn to play ye Frere; by Maister Thomas More, in hys youthe." [The last six lines as printed by the Doctor run Whan an hatter In theology.] |