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ture herself; and this great master of humour moves us to tears or laughter without the semblance of an effort on his part; and as for those "inexpensive guests" that

sit beside our fireplaces at lone hours, or stroll with us in our solitary rambles, we owe more of them to him than to any other writer of the century.

ABUSE OF IRELAND.

Daniel O'Connell used to say that he was the best abused man in Europe; had he only lived till now he would have seen that the practice has been extended to all his countrymen of every class and condition, of every shade of politics, and every section of opinion. The leading journal especially has adopted this line, and the adjective Irish has been assumed as a disqualifier to all and everything it can be applied to. I am sure that this is not generous-I have my doubts if it be just.

First of all, we are abused too indiscriminately, and for faults diametrically the opposite of each other; secondly, we are sneered at for qualities which the greater nation is not sorry to utilise; and, last of all, we are treated as such acknowledged admitted inferiors as makes it a very polite piece of condescension for Englishmen to occupy themselves, even in their leisure hours, by admonishing us of our faults, and reminding us of our shortcomings. Our unhappy country, too, whose greatest crime we used to think was the being our birthplace, is now discovered to be a damp tract of dreary bog-unfruitful, unwholesome, and unpleasant without a soil to grow corn, or a sun to ripen it; spongy if undrained, and if drained, a "parched expanse of arid limestone." This is not cheerful, any more than to hear that it rains ten months in the year, and that if it only rained nine we should have no grass, and without grass could no longer fatten beeves for Britons to feed on, that being the last resource left us in our destitution.

Whatever we do, or attempt to do, by some unhappy fatality seems

wrong. If we stay at home, we are told that we are a poor - spirited set of creatures, satisfied with mere subsistence, and content to grovel on in our poverty. If we emigrate, we are reproached as people who have no loyalty, nor any attachment to the land of their birth.

One great authority declared that Ireland could never grow wheat, and yet Mr Whiteside t'other day assured us that we were ruined by the corn-laws. This is mighty hard to understand, and I own it puzzles me considerably.

But what has malt to do with table-beer?"

"They've raised the price of malt, I hear;

Surely if the country was unsuited to the grape, it could scarcely be injured by a tax on the exportation of wine!

Again, we are over-populated. The fatal tendency of the Irish to be venturous led to early marriages and large families; and it was a mercy to think that some had taken courage and gone off to America.

Then came another with Adam Smith' in his hand, to protest that population meant riches-even a population of Irishmen; and, last of all, an indignant patriot declared that the day was not perhaps very distant, when Ireland should be peopled by Scotchmen.

The Times,' however, capped all. It explained that Ireland must abandon tillage and forego manufactures-that her climate was unstable, her soil unfruitful, and her people lazy. She had, however, here and there, principally on the seaboard, some spots of picturesque beauty; and that Englishmen, partly out of a liking for scenery,

partly from pity, might occasionally come over and look at these, the duties of guide and cicerone being assigned to the native-who thus at last would have found an employment up to the level of his capacity and his inclination. This is no exaggeration of mine-I am inventing nothing-I read, twice over too, the article that contained this suggestion. It was made in perfect good faith, just as the writer might have counselled a North American savage to limit himself to the manufacture of mocassins, and not take to regular shoemaking.

Irishmen were deliberately told, by an authority that assumes to be not only the political director, but the moral arbiter of the nation, that there was nothing better for them to do than turn guides to Cockney tourists.

If poor Paddy's circumstances were such as to permit his having some leisure time at his disposal, I can easily believe what amusement he might obtain from the occupation recommended-what food for laughter he would derive from townbred ignorance and moneyed selfsufficiency-what stores of fun he would lay by from the crude remarks and stupid commentaries of wandering bagmen and the like; but the fact of reducing to a profession what ought only to be a pastime, gives a very different colour to the career.

The writer of this suggestion may not, however, have seen, as I have, a heavy traveller from the manufacturing districts gaining his Irish experiences from a bare-footed, ragged, half-famished native; and it is such an exhibition of intense drollery and sly raillery as one cannot readily forget: the quick instinct as to the nature of the stranger, his class and his habits -the subtle appreciation of the amount of his credulity-the racy enjoyment of his manifold blunders, and the thorough zest felt by a poor, half-naked, potato-fed creature for his mental superiority over

well-clad, well-to-do "Manchester" made up elements that worked into something highly dramatic.

Let me assure the happy discoverer of this theory for Ireland that, so far from increasing the opportunities to Paddy to measure his native quickness with Saxon stolidity, he would be wiser not to give heedless occasion for the compari

son.

Now, these slights are not peacemakers, and we, the poorer and the more helpless people, ought at least to have kind words; and yet there is one more grievance which, I own, is, to my own feeling, harder to bear than even these. It is the assertion-made so frequently, declared so roundly, and proclaimed so unblushingly, that it has passed into a popular belief-that any Irishman who has ever risen to high honours and great renown, will be found, on examination, to possess traits and characteristics the very opposite to those that distinguish his countrymen-being, in short, a sort of lusus naturæ Paddy

who knows if not a Saxon egg, surreptitiously stolen, and placed in the Celtic nest! Sterne they only half give us. Swift some deny us altogether; for my own part, I'd not fight for him. Goldsmith they only concede to us whenever they disparage him. As for Edmund Burke, he puzzles them sorely. Burke, the great orator, the master of every form of eloquence, we might be permitted to claim, because, by calling it Irish eloquence, its condemnation was fixed for ever. But Burke the logician-Burke the statesmanBurke the philosopher-the man who foresaw more in the working out of events than any man of his age, who could trace effects to their causes, and predicate from the actual what must be the future-him they deny us, and declare that all these gifts were English. There was an Irishman, too, who called himself Arthur Wellesley, and what an amount of ingenuity was expended to show that his origin was

a mistake, and that he was only Irish in so far that his birth was a bull!

Now, I am no Repealer-no Young-Ireland man-no Feenian -no Erin-go-braghite; but I am downright weary, heart-sick of that everlasting depreciation of Ireland which is the stock theme of news

papers. When the House is up, and nothing of interest before the public, why not take a turn at Scotland, or even the Isle of Man? I'm sure, for a diversion, one might be able to find out something ill to allege of the Channel Islands. I'll look up something against Sark myself before the autumn is over.

BE ALWAYS READY WITH THE PISTOL.

"Be always ready with the pistol," were amongst the last, if not the very last, words of counsel spoken by Henry Grattan to his son, and if they be read aright, are words of deep knowledge and wisdom, and not the expressions of malevolence or of passion.

No man of his age-very few men of any age-was ever more exempted by the happy accidents of his nature from reliance on mere force than Henry Grattan. He combined within his character almost every attribute that gives a man power over his fellows. With the vigour and energy of a lion he had an almost womanly gentleness. There was a charm in his manner, and a persuasiveness in his address, that the most prejudiced of his political enemies were the first to acknowledge. It was the temperament of an ancient Roman in all that regarded dignity, unswerving purpose, and high devotion to country, blended with a far nobler and purer patriotism than ever Roman knew; and yet this man, armed with these great gifts, endowed with a superiority so unquestionable, had to own that there were not only occasions in life in which all individual supremacy must be merged that a man may measure himself with another vastly his inferior in intellect, but that it is a positive duty not to decline, but actually to welcome, the occasion that may prove how ready the ablest man is to accept the arbitrament of the most vulgar-minded.

When Dr Johnson stamped in a discussion because his adversary had done so, saying, "Sir, I will not concede to you the advantage

of even a stamp!" he completely expressed this principle, and showed how essential it is that high intellect should not show itself deficient in whatever constitutes the strength of an inferior order of men.

In Grattan's day a duel was a common occurrence; almost every man in public life had fought more than once. Indeed, it was deemed a very doubtful sincerity that hesitated to stake life on the assertion of any line of action; and he who declined a provocation was as irretrievably ruined as if he had been convicted of forgery. In fact, it was almost in this light it was regarded. Courage being deemed so essentially part of a gentleman's nature, the discovery that it was wanting implied that degree of falsehood and deception that amounted to dishonour.

Rude as this chivalry was, it reacted most favourably on manners; the courtesy of debate was never violated by any of those coarse contradictions and unseemly denials which lower parliamentary habits. Men knew well that the questions which touched personal honour were to be settled in another place, and that he who transgressed the limits of a certain reserve did so with the full consciousness of all that might come of it.

It was rare, too, to find that anything like bitterness survived the "meeting." The quarrel once decided, men returned to the daily business of life without a particle of animosity towards each other. They had settled their difference, and there was an end of it. When Mr Corry was lying ill of his wound

after his duel with Grattan, a friend came to sit with him one day, and after talking some time in the darkened room, let fall some remark reflecting on the conduct of the other's late antagonist, "Hist!" cried Corry, "there's a little fellow asleep at the foot of the bed would send a ball through you if he heard that," the little fellow being Henry Grattan himself, who had never quitted the bedside of the wounded man, and who had just dropped off asleep from over-fatigue and watching.

Now, to compass generosity like this was surely worth something; and I am by no means so certain that an equal degree of kind feeling would follow on one of our present-day altercations, when right honourable and honourable gentlemen are led to the interchange of courtesies more parliamentary than polite; nay, I am perfectly convinced that the good-fellowship of that time, confessedly greater than now, was mainly owing to the widely-spread respect for personal courage which pervaded public life.

I think I hear some one say, "This bloodthirsty Irishman wants to throw us all back into the barbarism that prevailed in the days before the Union;" but I want nothing of the kind. I think that, at the period referred to, the point of honour was too pedantically upheld; I think men resigned life on grounds totally unequal to such an appeal; I think there was an undue touchiness, an over-tensity, in the intercourse of the time that was neither wholesome nor beneficial; but I will by no means concede that all the advantage is on one side, because we have decreed that a duel is a disgrace, and that the man who fights one is disqualified for everything.

Of the consequences that have followed on the severe penalties against duelling in the service, I own frankly I cannot venture to speak, and for this reason I cannot trust my temper to speak calmly. The gross insults, the cruel wrongs, the insufferable outrages passed on

men who, to resent them, must have accepted their own irretrievable ruin, are themes I dare not permit myself to discuss. Neither will I suffer myself to say one word in disparagement of a system which honourable men are daily submitting to, with what heartburning and indignation Heaven alone could tell us! but, writing as I do in these sketches fully as much with reference to a public opinion outside Great Britain as within her limits, I desire to say that this legislation of ours about duelling, and the whole tone of our public opinion on the subject, has severely damaged us in Continental estimation. In the first place, no foreigner can possibly understand an Englishman's unwillingness to "go out," except on grounds that would impeach personal courage, because no foreigner knows enough of our public feeling to comprehend the fatal injury inflicted on a man's career in England, by the repute of his having fought a duel. There is not a section in all the complex machinery of our society against which the delinquent does not hurl his defiance. As an eminent Irish judge, more remarkable for the bathos than the accuracy of his eloquence, once said, "The practice is inhuman, it is uncivilised, it is unchristian; nay, gentlemen of the jury, I will go further-it is illegal!"

Now, what man has the courage to face not merely the chance of being shot, but the certainty of being stigmatised? I desire to declare here that I am not speaking vaguely or from hearsay. So far as a long residence amongst foreigners in nearly all parts of Europe enables a man to pronounce, I claim the right to declare that I know something about them; and I know of nothing that seems, through every separate people of the Continent, so universal as the belief that Englishmen do not like to "go

out."

If a Frenchman or an Italian accept a challenge to a duel, it is a sort of brevet of bravery; wounded

or unwounded, he comes home from the field a hero. The newspapers record the achievement as something glorious, and his friends call to see him as a species of Paladin. If he can but drive out with his arm in a sling, his fortune is made; and his recognition in a café, his smile of bland and triumphant heroism, is a thing to be accepted with gratitude. Contrast this with the Englishman, hiding not alone from the law, but from public opinion; not merely dreading the Attorney-General, but far more fearing his aunt in Cheltenham, whose heir he was to have been, but who, being "a Christian woman," will certainly have nothing. to do with one who sought the blood of a fellow-creature-albeit a fellow-creature who had inflicted the deepest wound on his honour.

Think of him, I say, neither backed by the press, nor sustained by his friends, but nursing his fractured femur in solitude, with the consciousness that he has ruined his fortune and done for his character that all the moments he can spare from his poultices must be passed in apologies to his friends, and reiterated assurances that he only accepted the issue of arms after an amount of provocation that almost brought on an apoplexy! And, last of all, imagine all the ridicule that awaits him-the pasquinades in the 'Saturday,' and the caricatures in 'Punch;' and while the noble Count, his antagonist, struts the "Bois " as a Bayard, he must skulk about like a felon that has escaped by a flaw in the indictment; a creature of whom the world must be cautious, as of a dog that was once mad, and that no one will guarantee against a return of hydrophobia!

They say no man would ever wish to be rescued from drowning if he only knew the tortures that awaited him from what is called the Humane Society. Indeed, the very description of them makes the guillotine or the garrotte seem in comparison like a mild anodyne; but is not this exactly the position

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of the unfortunate man in question? Be ready with the pistol indeed! Be ready to accept loss of station, loss of respect, disinheritance, estrangement of friends, coldness of every one not because you were quarrelsome or contentiousnot because, being steady of hand and unerring of eye, you could venture to assume a tone that was likely to be resented-but simply because, with such French as they taught you at Rugby, you would not permit the Count Hyppolite de Coupegorge to revile your nation and defame your countrywomen in an open café, but threatened to throw him and his shako into the street.

Turn for a moment from the individual to the nation, and see if this damaging conviction has not a great deal to do with the estimate of our country now formed by all foreigners. We have not, it is true, any enemy so grossly unjust as to deny courage to our nation; but there is a current belief fast settling into a conviction that we are not "ready with the pistol"-that we require more provocation, and endure more outrage, than any one else; and that it is always safe to assume that we will never fight if we can possibly help it.

The sarcasm of the first Napoleon, when he called us a nation of shopkeepers, had a far deeper and broader significance than a reference to our trading propensities. It went to imply, that in cultivating a spirit of gain, we had sacrificed the sentiment of glory; and that the lower ambition of money - getting had usurped the place that should be occupied by a high and noble chivalry. It was a very good thing to teach Frenchmen this; no better lesson could have been inculcated than a contempt for a people who had always beaten them. Still, as a mere measure of convenience, it is rather hard on us that we must be reduced to maintain our character for courage by far more daring feats-by bolder deeds and more enduring efforts, than are called for from any other people. The man who is ready with the pistol goes

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