article Wolfe (Vol. II. p. 788) we have given a verse of Father Prout's French original for 'The Burial of Sir John Moore.' 'John Anderson, my jo,' was a mere translation by Burns into Scotch of the Latin original, duly produced by the Admirable Crichton-the Scotch version is even extended to The good Father had special joy in proving Moore's 'Irish Melodies' to be the merest translations from Greek, Latin, or French, as the case might be. This is part of a chapter of the Reliques: seven verses. From 'The Rogueries of Tom Moore.' The Blarney-stone in my neighbourhood has attracted hither many an illustrious visitor; but none has been so assiduous a pilgrim in my time as Tom Moore. While he was engaged in his best and most unexceptionable work on the melodious ballads of his country, he came regularly every summer, and did me the honour to share my humble roof repeatedly. He knows well how often he plagued me to supply him with original songs which I had picked up in France among the merry troubadours and carol-loving inhabitants of that once happy land, and to what extent he has transferred these foreign inventions into the Irish Melodies.' Like the robber Cacus, he generally dragged the plundered cattle by the tail, so as that, moving backwards into his cavern of stolen goods, the foot-tracks might not lead to detection. Some songs he would turn upside down, by a figure in rhetoric called ὕστερον πρότερον ; others he would disguise in various shapes; but he would still worry me to supply him with the productions of the Gallic muse; 'for, d'ye see, old Prout,' the rogue would say, Now I would have let him enjoy unmolested the renown which these 'Melodies' have obtained for him; but his last treachery to my round-tower friend [a bogus plagiarism from an Irish antiquary] has raised my bile, and I shall give evidence of the unsuspected robberies : 'Abstractæque boves abjuratæque rapinæ It would be easy to point out detached fragments and stray metaphors, which he has scattered here and there in such gay confusion that every page has within its limits a mass of felony and plagiarism sufficient to hang him. For instance, I need only advert to his 'Bard's Legacy.' Even on his dying bed this 'dying bard' cannot help indulging his evil pranks; for, in bequeathing his heart' to his 'mistress dear,' and recommending her to borrow' balmy drops of port wine to bathe the relic, he is all the while robbing old Clement Marot, who thus disposes of his remains : 'Quand je suis mort, je veux qu'on m'entère Dans la cave où est le vin ; Le corps sous un tonneau de Madère, Et la bouche sous le robin.' But I won't strain at a gnat when I can capture a camel- -a huge dromedary laden with pilfered spoil; for, would you believe it if you had never learned it from Prout, the very opening and foremost song of the collection, 'Go where glory waits thee,' is but a literal and servile translation of an old French ditty which is among my papers, and which I believe to have been composed by that beautiful and interesting 'ladye,' Françoise de Foix, Comtesse de Chateaubriand, born in 1491, and the favourite of Francis I., who soon abandoned her; indeed, the lines appear to anticipate his infidelity. They were written before the battle of Pavia. Chanson de la Comtesse de Chateaubriand à François I. Ce cœur, qu'il pense à moi ! Pense encore à moi ! Regnera sur toi ; Mais quand ta lèvre presse Méchant, pense à moi ! Tom Moore's Translation of this Song in the Go where glory waits thee; Oh, still remember me! Oh, then remember me ! But when friends are dearest, Oh, then remember me ! . . . A page or two later he gives the Latin original of 'Lesbia hath a beaming eye,' as written originally by himself, and sung by him to Moore in his parsonage of Watergrasshill ('Lesbia semper hic et inde Oculorum tela movit'). Mahony either in his own character or as Father Prout made really brilliant and melodious verse renderings from the classics and from the French and Italian; his renderings from Horace are in a wonderful and apt variety of rhyme and measure. Thus he renders the first verse of the Second Ode: Since Jove decreed in storms to vent The winter of his discontent, Thundering o'er Rome impenitent With red right hand, The flood-gates of the firmament Have drenched the land. And Ode Ninth begins thus: See how the winter blanches Groan from the weight of snow! Rivers within their channels. And he translated English songs, as we have seen, into most plausible Latin and French His translation of Gresset's Vert-Vert, the Parrot, reads wonderfully like an Ingoldsby Legend. His chapter on Modern Latin Poets' contains articles on and translations from Vida, Sarbiewski, Beza, Sannazar, Fracastoro, George Buchanan, and others. It is not always easy to know whether the Father is citing historical fact or giving pure imagination with circumstantial details, as in the case of the celebrated poem, De Con“ nubiis Florum,' by Diarmid M'Encroe from Kerry, published at Paris in 1727, which was the sole original of Erasmus Darwin's Loves of the Plants. 'The Groves of Blarney' would seem to exist in Greek, Latin, French, and old Irish MSS., FRANCIS SYLVESTER MAHONY. From a Photograph if we believe this veracious authority. He may, like one of his protégés, be said to have defied the Royal Irish Academy, a learned assembly which, alas! has neither a body to be kicked nor a soul to be damned.' 'The Shandon Bells' was one of the songs sung by Father Prout to Tom Moore, and on it, we are told, the ungracious guest, without acknowledgment, rings the changes in his 'Evening Bells.' The Shandon Bells. I often think of Those Shandon bells, Whose sounds so wild would, In the days of childhood, Fling round my cradle Their magic spells. On this I ponder And thus grow fonder, Sweet Cork, of thee; I've heard bells chiming, Cathedral shrine; Brass tongues would vibrate- Spoke nought like thine; Its bold notes free, Of the river Lee. I've heard bells tolling From the Vatican; Of Notre Dame. But thy sounds were sweeter Than the dome of Peter Flings o'er the Tiber, Pealing solemnly- The pleasant waters Of the river Lee. There's a bell in Moscow, While on tower and kiosk O, In Saint Sophia, The Turkman gets; And loud in air Calls men to prayer, Of tall minarets. Of the river Lee. Besides the volume of Final Reliques, there is an edition of The Works of Father Prout by Charles Kent (1881). Pierce Egan (1772-1849), a Londoner by birth, and the most popular sporting journalist of his day, is remembered as the author of Life in London, or the Days and Nights of Jerry Hawthorne and his elegant friend Corinthian Tom, a tale, or rather a series of sketches, which is said to have taken town and country by storm when it appeared in 1821. Thackeray has immortalised it in one of the best of his Roundabout Papers, where, however, he very fairly indicates its literary worth by confessing that on reperusal he found it a little vulgar,' and as a description of the sports and amusements of London in the Regency days, 'more curious than amusing.' Not a little of its interest is due to Cruikshank's illustrations. Its author, who spent his life in frequenting and reporting all the more notable races, prize-fights, cock-fights, cricket-matches, and executions in England, produced many other ephemeral works of a similar kind, among which Boxiana (1818) and The Loves of Florizel and Perdita (the Prince Regent and Mary Robinson, 1814) may be mentioned. He also published in 1828 a continuation of Life in London (republished in 1871), moralising its theme and killing off or converting its characters. His son, Pierce Egan the younger (1814-80), an etcher who illustrated his own and his father's works, was also a diligent journalist, and wrote more than twenty indifferent novels, one of which, The Snake in the Grass, published first in 1858, was reprinted in 1887. George Combe (1788-1858), phrenologist, was born, a brewer's son, in Edinburgh, and, bred a Writer to the Signet, practised till 1837, when he devoted himself to popularising his views on phrenology and education. A disciple of Spurzheim, he wrote two works on phrenology (1819 and 1824), one of which passed through a dozen editions; but his most important was The Constitution of Man (1828; 12th ed. 1900), which was violently opposed as materialist, subversive of the belief in immortality, and inimical to revealed religion. He laboured earnestly to reform education on rational and scientific principles; travelled and lectured at home, on the Continent, and in the United States; and published books on popular education, moral philosophy, criminal legislation, currency questions, and the relation between science and religion. Combe's ideas on popular education, anticipating modern methods, were carried out for some years in a secular school which he founded in Edinburgh in 1848, where the sciences were systematically taught, including physiology and, as was inevitable, phrenology. He was an intimate friend of Robert Chambers, Richard Cobden, and George Eliot; and his wife was a daughter of the great Mrs Siddons. There is a Life by Charles Gibbon (1878); and Combe's views and articles on Education were collected by Jolly (1879). George Combe wrote also a Life of his brother Andrew (1797-1847), physician to the king of the Belgians and to Queen Victoria, and author of a successful work on physiology. A Combe lectureship seeks to awaken public interest in the importance of physiology and hygiene in education and morals. Thomas Erskine (1788-1870) of Linlathen was admitted advocate in 1810, but ceased to practise after his elder brother's death gave him the estate of Linlathen near Dundee. He was a man of a warmly devotional religious temperament, and the main aim of his half-dozen theological works, next to the promotion of pure religion and undefiled, was to insist on the ultimate universal salvation of mankind, and to argue that the conscience, and not miracle, was the chief evidence for a divine revelation. He strongly supported Macleod Campbell, deposed by the Church of Scotland for his doctrine of universal pardon and atonement through Christ; and amongst his intimate friends were men so unlike in their theological sympathies as F. D. Maurice, Dean Stanley, Carlyle, PrévostParadol, Vinet, and the Monods. See Erskine's Letters, edited by Dr Hanna (1877–78). Sir Francis Palgrave (1788-1861) was long deputy-keeper of the Public Records, and an indefatigable student of our early history. He was the son of Meyer Cohen, a Jewish stockbroker in London; but at his marriage (1823), having become a Christian, he assumed his mother's maiden name of Palgrave. He was articled to a solicitor; in 1827 was called to the Bar, pleading mainly in pedigree cases before the House of Lords; was a frequent contributor to the reviews ; and in 1831 contributed to Murray's 'Family Library' a History of England in the AngloSaxon period. Next year appeared his Rise and Progress of the English Commonwealth-a work which contains a mass of information regarding the most obscure part of our annals, with original records concerning the political institutions of ancient Europe. He afterwards wrote a more elaborate history, the last two volumes of which were published after his death-The History of Normandy and England (4 vols. 1851-64), which brings down the history to the death of Rufus. England owes him a debt of gratitude for the light he threw on the origin of its people and institutions. Hallam and Freeman, though dissenting from some of his conclusions, both highly praised his great achievement-that of making mediæval history intelligible. He insisted, rightly, as Freeman says, that European society and civilisation depended on the influence of Rome long after the fifth century, even when she had fallen and was 'tattered, sordid, and faded as was her imperial robe;' the chiefs of the barbarian dynasties assumed the semblance of the Cæsars, and employed their titles and symbols. Sir Francis, who was knighted in 1832 and was F.R.S., carefully arranged heretofore inaccessible piles of national documents, reported on them as deputy-keeper, and edited for the Record Commission Calendars of the Treasury, Documents illustrative of the History of Scotland, &c., wrote on the feudal system, Truths and Fictions of the Middle Ages, and a Hand-book for Travellers in Northern Italy. His style was sometimes too discursive. William Gifford Palgrave, Jesuit, traveller, consul, and author of books of travel, and Professor F. T. Palgrave, poet and critic, were his sons. John Lewis Burckhardt (1784-1817), though he spent but a year or two in England, ranks almost as an English author in virtue of his books of travel, written by him in English and revised by English friends. Born at Lausanne, he was educated at Neuchâtel, Leipzig, and Göttingen. In 1806 he brought an introduction from Blumenbach to Sir Joseph Banks, of the African Association, and in 1809 was sent to explore the interior of Africa. At Aleppo he studied more than two years; then, disguised as an Oriental, he visited Palmyra, Damascus, Lebanon, Nubia, and thence in 1814 as Sheikh Ibrahim' made the pilgrimage to Mecca, where, one of the first European Christians to enter the sacred city, he was accepted not only as a true believer but as a great Moslem scholar. In 1815 he returned to Cairo, and in 1816 ascended Mount Sinai. When at last on the point of joining the Fezzan caravan, the opportunity for which he had waited so long, he was carried off by dysentery at Cairo. The records of his journeys (three series), with volumes on Bedouins and Wahabis and on Arabic proverbs, were published in 1819-30. William Scoresby (1789-1857), Arctic explorer, born at Cropton near Whitby, sailed to the Greenland seas as a boy with his father, a whaling captain, and himself made several voyages to the whaling-grounds. He attended Edinburgh University, carried on investigations in natural history, botany, meteorology, and magnetism, and published the results in The Arctic Regions (1820) and Magnetical Investigations (2 vols. 1839-52). In 1822 he surveyed four hundred miles of the east coast of Greenland. After a course of study at Cambridge he was ordained (1825), and laboured at Liverpool, Exeter, and Bradford; but failing health compelled him to retire to Torquay in 1849. He was D.D., and was elected F.R.S. in 1824. There is a Life of him by his nephew (1861). Charles Knight (1791-1873), author and publisher, was the son of a Windsor bookseller; and with his father he in 1811 established the Windsor and Eton Express, editing it until 1821, and at the same time printing the Etonian. The Plain Englishman (1820-22), a first attempt to produce good cheap literature, was jointly edited by Knight and Commissioner Locker of Greenwich Hospital. In London from 1822 on, Knight, now a general publisher, founded Knight's Quarterly Magazine. For the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge he published many works and serials, including the Penny Magazine (1832-45). The Penny Cyclopædia was begun in 1838, and was followed by the English Cyclopædia (1854-61), the British Almanac, and its Companion. He edited a Pictorial Shakespeare, and wrote a Life of Shakespeare. Other works were The Land We Live In, Once Upon a Time, and Knowledge is Power. In 1862 he completed his Popular History of England. Half-hours with the Best Authors, Half-hours of English History, and Half-hours with the Best Letter-writers were compilations by himself; and from 1860 he was publisher of the London Gazette. He wrote autobiographical Passages of a Working Life (1863-65); and there is a Life of him by Alice Clowes (1892). Dionysius Lardner (1793-1859), after serving for four years as clerk to his father, a Dublin solicitor, studied at Trinity College. He attracted attention by works on algebraic geometry (1823) and the calculus (1825), but is best known as the originator and editor of Lardner's Cyclopædia (132 vols. 1830-44). This was followed by the historical Cabinet Library (12 vols. 1830-32) and Museum of Science and Art (12 vols. 1854-56). In 1828 Lardner had been appointed Professor of Natural Philosophy and Astronomy in University College, London; but in 1840, married man though he was, he ran away with the wife of an army officer, and went to the United States, where he made £40,000 by lecturing. He lived in Paris from 1845 to 1859, and died at Naples. He was not related to Nathaniel Lardner (Vol. II. p. 247). Sir Francis Bond Head (1793-1875), born of Portuguese-Jewish ancestry at Higham in Kent, was educated at Rochester and Woolwich Academy, and served 1811-25 in the Engineers, being present at Waterloo. Manager then of the unsuccessful La Plata Mining Company, he published Rough Notes taken during some Rapid Journeys across the Pampas and among the Andes (1827). The work was exceedingly popular, and the reputation of Galloping Head,' as the gay captain was termed, was increased by his Bubbles from the Brunnens of Nassau (1834). Governor of Upper Canada 1835-37, and created a baronet in 1836, he published a narrative of his not very successful administration, which was more amusing than convincing. Turning again to purely literary pursuits, Sir Francis wrote The Emigrant (1852), and a series of essays in the Quarterly Review, afterwards republished as Stokers and Pokers-Highways and Byways. He wrote a Life of Bruce, the Abyssinian traveller, for the 'Family Library.' The national defences of this country appearing to Sir Francis lamentably deficient, he issued a note of warning, The Defenceless State of Great Britain (1850). Visits to Paris and Ireland produced A Faggot of French Sticks, or Paris in 1851, and A Fortnight in Ireland (1852). In 1869 he produced a practical work, The Royal Engineer.— His brother, Sir George Head (1782-1855), a Peninsular veteran, wrote Forest Scenery in the Wilds of North America (1829), Home Tours in England, 1835-37, and some other works. Tawell the Murderer. Whatever may have been his fears, his hopes, his fancies, or his thoughts, there suddenly flashed along the wires of the electric telegraph, which were stretched close beside him, the following words: A murder has just been committed at Salthill, and the suspected murderer was seen to take a first-class ticket for London by the train which left Slough at 7 h. 42 m. P.M. He is in the garb of a Quaker, with a brown greatcoat on, which reaches nearly down to his feet. He is in the last compartment of the second first-class carriage.' And yet, fast as these words flew like lightning past him, the information they contained, with all its details, as well as every secret thought that had preceded them, had already consecutively flown millions of times faster; indeed, at the very instant that, within the walls of the little cottage at Slough, there had been uttered that dreadful scream, it had simultaneously reached the judgment-seat of heaven! On arriving at the Paddington station, after mingling for some moments with the crowd, he got into an omnibus, and as it rumbled along, taking up one passenger and putting down another, he probably felt that his identity was every minute becoming confounded and confused by the exchange of fellow-passengers for strangers that was constantly taking place. But all the time he was thinking, the cad of the omnibus-a policeman in disguise-knew that he held his victim like a rat in a cage. Without, however, apparently taking the slightest notice of him, he took one sixpence, gave change for a shilling, handed out this lady, stuffed in that one, until, arriving at the Bank, the guilty man, stooping as he walked towards the carriage-door, descended the steps; paid his fare; crossed over to the Duke of Wellington's statue, where pausing for a few moments, anxiously to gaze around him, he proceeded to the Jerusalem Coffee-house, thence over London Bridge to the Leonard Coffee-house in the Borough, and finally to a lodging-house in Scott's Yard, Cannon Street. He probably fancied that, by making so many turns and doubles, he had not only effectually puzzled all pursuit, but that his appearance at so many coffee-houses would assist him, if necessary, in proving an alibi; but, whatever may have been his motives or his thoughts, he had scarcely entered the lodging when the policeman— who, like a wolf, had followed him every step of the way-opening the door, very calmly said to him-the words no doubt were infinitely more appalling to him even than the scream that had been haunting him'Haven't you just come from Slough?' The monosyllable No,' confusedly uttered in reply, substantiated his guilt. The policeman made him his prisoner; he was thrown into jail, tried, found guilty of wilful murder, and hanged. A few months afterwards we happened to be travelling by rail from Paddington to Slough, in a carriage filled with people all strangers to one another. Like English travellers, they were all mute. For nearly fifteen miles no one had uttered a single word, until a short-bodied, short-necked, short-nosed, exceedingly respectable-looking man in the corner, fixing his eyes on the apparently fleeting posts and rails of the electric telegraph, significantly nodded to us as he muttered aloud: Them's the cords that hung John Tawell!' (From Stokers and Pokers.) John Edmund Reade (1800-70), son of the squire of Barton Manor in Berkshire, published in 1825 The Broken Heart and other Poems, followed by a series of epics, tragedies, and novels, including Cain the Wanderer and the Revolt of the Angels (1830), Italy (1838), and Catiline (1839). In much of his verse he modelled himself closely on Byron, not hesitating to plagiarise pretty extensively; passages and phrases can also be traced directly to Scott and Wordsworth, as well as to many other English authors ancient and modern. Sir Roderick Impey Murchison (17921871) was born at Tarradale, Ross-shire, and educated at Durham and the Military College, Great Marlow; he served in Spain and Portugal, and was present at Vimeiro and Corunna. Quitting the army in 1816, he devoted himself to geology; and erelong his establishment of the Silurian system won him the Copley Medal and European fame, increased by his exposition of the Devonian, Permian, and Laurentian systems. He explored parts of Germany, Poland, and the Carpathians; and in 1840-45, with others, carried out a geological survey of the Russian Empire. It was now that, struck with the resemblance between the Ural Mountains and some Australian ranges, he startled the world by foreshadowing (1844) the discovery of gold in Australia. In 1855 he was made director-general of the Geological Survey and director of the Royal School of Mines. His investigations into the crystalline schists of the Highlands led him to a theory (not free from important error) of regional metamorphism on a large scale. He was Vice-President of the Royal Society, and President of the Geological Society and of the British Association (1846); a K.C.B. from 1846, he was made a baronet in 1863. His principal works were The Silurian System (1839) and The Geology of Russia in Europe and the Urals (1845; 2nd ed. 1853). There is a Life of him by Sir Archibald Geikie (1875). Albany William Fonblanque (1793-1872), son of a London Commissioner of Bankruptcy and great-grandson of a naturalised Huguenot, was bred a lawyer, but soon became a journalist, writing for the Times and other papers. As editor from 1830 of the Examiner, he exercised great influence on public opinion; his best articles were reprinted as England under Seven Administrations (1837). In 1847 he became Statistical Secretary to the Board of Trade. There is a Life of him (1874). William Hamilton Maxwell (1792-1850), the first conspicuous writer of the roistering, rollicking military novels Lever was afterwards identified with, was a Newry Ulsterman, Scottish both on the father's and the mother's side. He studiedor enjoyed life-at Trinity College, Dublin, and as captain fought in the Peninsula and at Waterloo. |