face; but to it we went, and by the time half our little party were killed we began to be all alive again. Fortunately, the rebels had no guns, except pistols, cutlasses, and pikes; and as we had plenty of guns and ammunition, we put them all to the sword. Not a soul of them escaped, except some that were drowned in an adjacent bog; and in a very short time nothing was to be heard but silence. Their uniforms were all different colors, but mostly green. After the action, we went to rummage a sort of camp which they had left behind them. All we found was a few pikes without heads, a parcel of empty bottles full of water, and a bundle of French commissions filled up with Irish names. Troops are now stationed all around the country, which exactly squares with my ideas. I have only time to add that I am in great haste. "Yours truly, "P. S.-If you do not receive this, of course it must have miscarried therefore I beg you will write and let me know." Miss Edgeworth says, further, that "many bulls, reputed to be bred and born in Ireland, are of foreign extraction; and many more, supposed to be unrivalled in their kind, may be matched in all their capital points." To prove this, she cites numerous examples of well-known bulls, with their foreign prototypes, not only English and Continental, but even Oriental and ancient. Among the parallels of familiar bulls to be found nearer our American home since the skilful defender of Erin's naïveté wrote her Essay, one of the best is an economical method of erecting a new jail : The following resolutions were passed by the Board of Councilmen in Canton, Mississippi : 1. Resolved, by this Council, that we build a new Jail. 2. Resolved, that the new Jail be built out of the materials of the old Jail. 3. Resolved, that the old Jail be used until the new Jail is finished. It was a Frenchman who, in making a classified catalogue of books, placed Miss Edgeworth's Essay in the list of works on Natural History; and it was a Scotchman who, having purchased a copy of it, pronounced her "a puir silly body, to write a book on bulls, and no ane word o' horned cattle in it a', forbye the bit beastie [the vignette] at the beginning." Examples from the common walks of life and from periodical literature may readily be multiplied to show that these phraseological peculiarities are not to be exclusively attributed to Ireland. But if we adopt Coleridge's definition, which is, that "a bull consists in a mental juxtaposition of incongruous ideas, with the sensation, but without the sense, of connection," we shall find frequent instances of its occurrence among standard authors. Take the following blunders, for examples : Adam, the goodliest man of men since born Milton's Paradise Lost. The loveliest pair That ever since in love's embraces met.-Ib. B. iv. Swift, being an Irishman, of course abounds in blunders, some of them of the most ludicrous character; but we should hardly expect to find in the elegant Addison, the model of classical English, such a singular inaccuracy as the following:— So the pure limpid stream, when foul with stains Of rushing torrents and descending rains.-Cato. He must have seen in a blaze of blinding light (this is "ipsis Hibernis Hibernior") the vanity and evil, the folly and madness, of the worldly or selfish, and the grandeur and truth of the disinterested and Christian life.—Gilfillan's Bards of the Bible. The real and peculiar magnificence of St. Petersburgh consists in thus sailing apparently upon the bosom of the ocean, into a city of palaces.-Sedgwick's Letters from the Baltic. The astonished Yahoo, smoking, as well as he could, a cigar, with which he had filled all his pockets.― Warren's Ten Thousand a Year. Sir Walter Scott perpetrates a curious blunder in one of his novels, in making certain of his characters behold a sunset over the waters of a seaport on the eastern coast of Scotland. The following occurs in Dr. Latham's English Language. Speaking of the genitive or possessive case, he says, "In the plural number, however, it is rare; so rare, indeed, that whenever the plural ends in s (as it always does) there is no genitive." Byron says, I stood in Venice on the Bridge of Sighs, A palace and a prison on each hand. 66 a room (He meant a palace on one hand, and a prison on the other.) Dr. Johnson, in his Dictionary, defines a garret as on the highest floor in the house," and a cock-loft as "the room over the garret." For the sake of comparison, we recur to the favorite pasture of the genuine thorough-bred animal : An Irish member of Parliament, speaking of a certain minister's well-known love of money, observed, "Let not the honorable member express a contempt for money,-for if there is any one office that glitters in the eyes of the honorable member, it is that of purse-bearer: a pension to him is a compendium of all the cardinal virtues. All his statesmanship is comprehended in the art of taxing; and for good, better, and best, in the scale of human nature, he invariably reads pence, shillings, and pounds. I verily believe," continued the orator, rising to the height of his conception, "that if the honorable gentleman were an undertaker, it would be the delight of his heart to see all mankind seized with a common mortality, that he might have the benefit of the general burial, and provide scarfs and hat-bands for the survivors." The manager of a provincial theatre, finding upon one occasion but three persons in attendance, made the following address:"Ladies and gentlemen-as there is nobody here, I'll dismiss you all. The performances of this night will not be performed; but they will be repeated to-morrow evening." A Hibernian gentleman, when told by his nephew that he had just entered college with a view to the church, said, "I hope that I may live to hear you preach my funeral sermon." An Irishman, quarrelling with an Englishman, told him if he didn't hold his tongue, he would break his impenetrable head, and let the brains out of his empty skull. "My dear, come in and go to bed," said the wife of a jolly son of Erin, who had just returned from the fair in a decidedly how-come-you-so state: "you must be dreadful tired, sure, with your long walk of six miles." "Arrah! get away with your nonsense," said Pat: "it wasn't the length of the way, at all, that fatigued me: 'twas the breadth of it." A poor Irishman offered an old saucepan for sale. His children gathered around him and inquired why he parted with it. "Ah, me honeys," he answered, "I would not be afther parting with it but for a little money to buy something to put in it." A young Irishman who had married when about nineteen years of age, complaining of the difficulties to which his early marriage subjected him, said he would never marry so young again if he lived to be as ould as Methuselah. In an Irish provincial paper is the following notice :— Whereas Patrick O'Connor lately left his lodgings, this is to give notice that if he does not return immediately and pay for the same, he will be advertised. "Has your sister got a son or a daughter?" asked an Irishman of a friend. "Upon my life," was the reply, "I don't know yet whether I'm an uncle or aunt.” "I was going," said an Irishman, "over Westminster Bridge. the other day, and I met Pat Hewins. 'Hewins,' says I, 'how are you? Pretty well,' says he, thank you, Donnelly.' 'Donnelly!' says I: 'that's not my name.'Faith, no more is mine Hewins,' says he. So we looked at each other again, and sure it turned out be neither of us; and where's the bull of that, now?" Echo Verse. ADDISON says, in No. 59 of the Spectator, "I find likewise in ancient times the conceit of making an Echo talk sensibly and give rational answers. If this could be excusable in any writer, it would be in Ovid, where he introduces the echo as a nymph, before she was worn away into nothing but a voice. (Met. iii. 379.) The learned Erasmus, though a man of wit and genius, has composed a dialogue upon this silly kind of device, and made use of an echo who seems to have been an extraordinary linguist, for she answers the person she talks with in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, according as she found the syllables which she was to repeat in any of those learned languages. Hudibras, in ridicule of this false kind of wit, has described Bruin bewailing the loss of his bear to a solitary echo, who is of great use to the poet in several distichs, as she does not only repeat after him, but helps out his verse and furnishes him with rhymes." Euripides in his Andromeda-a tragedy now lost-had a similar scene, which Aristophanes makes sport with in his Feast of Ceres. In the Greek Anthology (iii. 6) is an epigram of Leonidas, and in Book IV. are some lines by Guaradas, commencing α Αχὼ φίλα μοι συγκαταίνεσόν τί.β τί; (Echo! I love: advise me somewhat.-What?) The French bards in the age of Marot were very fond of this conceit. Disraeli gives an ingenious specimen in his Curiosities of Literature. The lines here transcribed are by Joachim de Bellay : Qui est l'auteur de ces maux avenus?-Venus. Qu'étois-je avant d'entrer en ce passage?-Sage. |