66 Reliques, the same animated writer enlarged with gusto in the Universal Review upon their general excellence as a piquant mixture of toryism, 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 deliciously put it, "as a father shows his love for his children-by playing 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 genus irritabile. 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, ipsissima verba, the French of the ill-starred Marquis Cinq-Mars! 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 Nora 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 Moore's rapturous ejaculation, "O my Nora's gown for me, That floats as wild as mountain breezes, 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 way free, O how their glittering taketh me!' when, in the good Father's blending of his recollection of the two in his harmonious numbers, he added a perfecting charm to each in his— "Noræ tunicam præferres, Mahony was just thirty years of age when he assumed his place—a foremost one from the very first by right of his wit and learning-among the select band of the contributors to Fraser's Magazine. His earliest paper there, the first of the four-and-twenty 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 Regina 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 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 referring 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 offhand way the ménage 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 companions, 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 modern languages. The earliest testimony afforded by him of his holding thus completely under his command not only the resources of the two great classic tongues, but of Norman-French as well, was his turning, as by a very tour de force, Millikin's roystering celebration of "The Groves of Blarney" into a triple polyglot-" Blarneum Nemus," 'H 'Tλŋ Bλapviên, 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 Copenhagen; an Italian version, "I Boschi di Blarnea," being set forth by Mahony upwards of a quarter of a century afterwards as having been sung by Garibaldi on the 25th May, 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 Jure 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'Meara, were but the chorus, however, attendant upon Sir Walter Scott, the illustrious guest of the incumbent of Watergrasshill. 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 loquitur). Quid est sacerdotium? 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-otium cum diggin' 'taties!" In the course of the "Carousal" occurs the Padre's noble version in Latin of Campbell's "Hohenlinden," the ringing sapphics of his "Prælium apud Hohenlinden " not unworthily echo ing the heroic original. 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! utinam sanos mea Ierna recogitet annos!" It was in the fourth of the Prout papers, which appeared in the July number of Regina, 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 Chenedollé. 66 A score of equally brilliant, bizarre, fantastic, and hilarious contributions from the hand of Frank Mahony followed these in rapid and almost unbroken succession through the double-columned pages of Regina, until, in 1836, the whole were collected together in two volumes for separate publication as 'Father Prout's Reliques." Maclise-who had been all the while embellishing Fraser 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 Béranger, 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 embellishments 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 nom de 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 Fraser 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_pays his tribute of respect and gratitude to his Jesuit instructors. "Literature and the Jesuits" is the title of it; and it is from the celebration of the apiary in the " Georgics" that Mahony has aptly selected his motto "Alii spem gentis adultos Educunt fœtus: alii purissima mella Stipant, et liquido distendunt nectare cellas." His 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, he 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 that he has a sort of "drop serene" in his eye, seeing that he only, as he expresses it, winks at the rogueries of the Jesuits-never reddening 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 masterpiece produced years afterwards by the Count de Montalembert, "Les Moines de l'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." وو He enumerates with exultation, among a throng of other illustrious pupils of the great Society, Descartes, Torricelli, Tasso, Bossuet, Corneille, Molière, Fontenelle, Bellarmine, Cornelius à 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— 'Quæ regio in terris nostri non plena laboris ?" Grandly he sings, there, too, in his own voice, though nominally in that of an old schoolfellow of Prout's, who died in 1754, as a Jesuit Missionary in Cochin China, the noble Latin ode in which he commemorates the Vigil and Triumphs of the great founder of the Order, Ignatius Loyola-- "Tellus gigantis sentit itur; simul Persecuted from generation to generation; ruthlessly expelled from Venice ; twice (it may be 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 quæ exercitatio ab optimarum artium disciplinis 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 irrepressible resilience of his nature as a satiric humorist, he evidently enough for the sheer relief of unbending after so much unwonted seriousness, upsets into English verse the extravagant drollery of the Jesuit Gresset's comic poem Vert-Vert," the Parrot who, although he can sing of him one while in the days of his original innocence, 66 "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. Having unburdened his mind thus in Fraser between 1834 and 1836 of a good deal of the miscellaneous load of familiar humour and out-of-theway 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 Bentley's Miscellany. The very first page of the new periodical was Prout'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 form of "A Poetical Épistle from Father Prout to Boz," under date Genoa, the 14th of December, 1837. Intermediately between these two contributions, Mahony had been pouring out his rhymed drolleries abundantly enough, though for the most part in a very fragmentary 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 O'Dryscull, the Schoolmaster of Watergrasshill being ostensibly, in the instance of three of them, the intermediary for their transmission. Again, in the Miscellany, 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! Heu! 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 dic eris nostra Lalagé; Before the close of his connection as a regular contributor with Bentley's Miscellany, 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 ties 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 Hungary, through Asia Minor, through Greece and Egypt, until in 1841 the observant nomad returning to the South of France, paused while there, to all appearance solely for rest and reflection. Before setting_out on these peregrinations he had, in 1837, passed through the press in London, with notes and illustrations, a little duodecimo, entitled "La Boullaye le Gouz in Ireland." By the time his wanderings eastward were completed he settled down into what came to be thenceforth his confirmed character-that of a bookish, scholarly flâneur, loitering through life by preference in continental cities; with quips and cranks galore for every one he encountered; gladdened by the chance, whenever he was lucky enough to stumble across one, of foregathering with an old friend from whom he had long drifted apart, and |