'Then you must expend two more. Mrs C. has just sent me off a list of a few things that she wishes made while we are at anchor, and I see two poles for clotheslines. Saw off the sheave-holes, and put two pegs through at right angles—you know how I mean?' 'Yes, sir. What am I to do, sir, about the cucumber frame? My Lady Capperbar says that she must have it, and I haven't glass enough. They grumbled at the yard last time.'-' Mrs C. must wait a little. What are the armourers about?' They have been so busy with your work, sir, that the arms are in a very bad condition. The first-lieutenant said yesterday that they were a disgrace to the ship.' 'Who dares say that?'-' The first-lieutenant, sir.' 'Well, then, let them rub up the arms, and let me know when they are done, and we'll get the forge up.' 'The armourer has made six rakes and six hoes, and the two little hoes for the children; but he says that he can't make a spade.' 'Then I'll take his warrant away, by heavens ! since he does not know his duty. That will do, Mr Cheeks. I shall overlook your being in liquor this time; but take care. Send the boatswain to me.' (From The King's Own.) Marryat's Life and Letters (2 vols. 1872) was published by his daughter Florence, successively Mrs Ross Church and Mrs Lean, and herself a prolific novelist. See also the sketch by Mr D. Hannay in the 'Great Writers' series (1889). William Nugent Glascock (1787-1847) served with credit in the navy from 1800 till the year of his death, with long intervals of half-pay, during which he produced many good pictures of maritime life and adventures, based largely on his varied experiences afloat in the Baltic and the Mediterranean, off Portugal, Newfoundland, and the West Indies. The Naval Sketch-Book (1826), Sailors and Saints (1829), Tales of a Tar (1836), Land Sharks and Sea Gulls (1838), are all genuine tales of the sea, and display a hearty comic humour, a rich phraseology, and a cordial contempt for regularity of plot. Captain Glascock's Naval Service, or Officer's Manual, passed through several editions, and translated was used in the French, Russian, Swedish, and Turkish services. Edward Howard, a naval lieutenant who died still a comparatively young man in 1841, was a shipmate of Marryat's, and his sub-editor on the Metropolitan Magazine; and was the author of Rattlin the Reefer (1836), a capital sea-story sometimes published with Marryat's works, and wrongly attributed to Marryat, who was said to have edited it. It was very well received, and was followed by Outward Bound, Jack Ashore, Sir Henry Morgan the Buccaneer, and other stories. Several of these are better managed as to fable, particularly Outward Bound, but have not the same breadth of humour as Captain Glascock's novels. He ventured also on a poem, The Centiad (1841). Tom Hood, on whose staff in the New Monthly he served, spoke warmly of his work, and said Howard 'had just felt the true use of his powers when he was called to resign them.' Frederick Chamier (1796-1870) served in the navy from 1809 till 1827, and then produced, in imitation of Marryat, The Life of a Sailor (1832), Ben Brace, The Arethusa, Jack Adams, and Tom Bowling (1841), stories which for a time were very popular, and were mostly reprinted as recently as 1881-90. Count Königsmark (1845) was a historical romance. Captain Chamier continued James's Naval History, recorded his experiences of the French Revolution of 1848, and published in 1855 a painfully facetious book of travels in France, Switzerland, and Italy. Charles Wentworth Dilke (1789-1864), editor of the Athenæum, served twenty years in the Navy Pay-Office, and on retiring with a pension devoted himself wholly to literary occupations. He had long been a zealous student of literature, had in 1814-16 edited a continuation of Dodsley's 'old plays,' and had contributed much to the magazines and reviews, especially to the Retrospective. In 1829 he became part-proprietor of the Athenæum (founded by Silk Buckingham in 1828, and owned for a few months by John Sterling and others), and speedily became its supreme and highly effective editor. He soon had Charles Lamb, Tom Hood, Leigh Hunt, Allan Cunningham, Barry Cornwall, Chorley, and George Darley on his staff or amongst his contributors, and from abroad-an innovation in English journalism-he enlisted the services of Sainte-Beuve and Jules Janin. To ensure perfect impartiality, the editor withdrew from general society, saw as little as. possible of authors and publishers, and so long as he edited the paper did not himself contribute to its columns. He resigned the editorial charge in 1846, for three years edited the Daily News, and now began to contribute to the Athenæum the famous articles on Junius, Pope Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Burke, Wilkes, and Peter Pindar, which were published as The Papers of a Critic by Dilke's grandson, Sir Charles, in 1875. Dr Carruthers, who did not wholly agree with him, said that the personal history of Pope was never properly understood till it was taken up by Mr Dilke;' and his views were substantially adopted by Mr Elwin and Mr Courthope in the magistral edition. Dilke's contribution to the Junius controversy, mainly destructive of current theories, was the most important that had been made. Thomas Keightley (1789-1872), born in Dublin and educated at Trinity College, settled in London in 1824 as a writer of books, and published a series of histories of Greece, Rome, and England, long used as school manuals; books on the Greek War of Independence and on the Crusades; notes to Virgil and Horace; a Life of Milton and an edition of his works. His Fairy Mythology (1850) is, however, by far his most important work, and is still useful, though, like all books of that date dealing with folklore, it must be read with a certain caution. William Maginn (1793–1842) was one of the wittiest, most accomplished, and versatile writers of his time in prose and verse, but has left little permanent memorial of his genius or acquirements. He was born at Cork, was educated at Trinity College, Dublin, assisted his father in conducting an academy in his native city, and in 1816 (not in 1819, as is usually said) was made LL.D. by his alma mater. It was in 1819 that he began to write for Blackwood's Magazine. His papers were lively, learned, often abusive, and sometimes libellous; he was a keen political partisan, a Tory of the old Orange stamp, who gave no quarter to an opponent. At the same time there was so much scholarly wit and literary power about Maginn's contributions that all parties read and admired him. For nine years he was one of the most constant writers in Blackwood, and his Odoherty papers (prose and verse) were eagerly welcomed. He had removed to London in 1823, and adopted literature as a profession. In 1824 John Murray the publisher commenced a daily newspaper, The Representative; and Maginn was engaged as Paris correspondent. His residence in France was short; the Representative soon collapsed, and Maginn returned to London to 'spin his daily bread out of his brains.' He was associated with Dr Stanley Lees Giffard in conducting the Standard newspaper, and when Fraser's Magazine was established in 1830, he became one of its chief literary supporters, contributing thereto the famous 'Gallery of Literary Characters,' illustrated by Maclise; probably neither Thackeray nor Carlyle did as much for the popularity of Fraser as Maginn did. One article in this periodical (1836), a review of the poor novel of Berkeley Castle, led to a hostile meeting between Maginn and its author, the Hon. Grantley Berkeley. Mr Berkeley had brutally assaulted Fraser, the publisher of the offensive criticism, when Maginn wrote to him, declaring that he was the author— hence the challenge and the duel. The parties exchanged shots thrice, Maginn being slightly wounded. Maginn's life, literary and personal, became very irregular; intemperance gained upon him; the indisputable original of Thackeray's 'Captain Shandon,' he was often arrested and in jail; but his good-humour seems never to have forsaken him. His burlesque review of Southey's Doctor was called 'a farrago of Rabelaisian wit and learning'-a description that applies to a good Ideal of his work. He wrote a series of really admirable Shakespeare papers for Blackwood in 1837, and in the following year he commenced a series of sixteen Homeric ballads. In 1842 he was again in prison, and his health gave way. One of his friends wrote to Sir Robert Peel, describing the lamentable condition of the decayed wit, and the minister sent him £100, which Maginn did not live to receive. He died a discharged but insolvent debtor at Walton-on-Thames. The esteem in which he was held by his contemporaries may be gathered from the so-called epitaph on him by Lockhart-or, rather, the genial elegy: Here, early to bed, lies kind WILLIAM MAGINN, For your Tories his fine Irish brains he would spin, to be derived from Maginn's Latin versions of Chevy Chase' and 'Back and side go bare' may be guessed from a verse of the former : Persaeus ex Northumbria Et omnibus cognatis. Byron and Campbell are treated only less contemptuously in several articles than are Keats and Shelley, as types of the Cockney school; the Thus kindly I scatter Thy globe o'er the street, In a not unjustified protest against the acceptance of Irish songs manufactured for the English market, he comments on the rhyming of 'girls' and 'bells : ' The rhyme here marks this brute [the author] to be a bestial Cockney.' The Berkeley Castle review not merely calls the novel 'in conception the most impertinent, in execution about the stupidest it has ever been our misfortune to read,' and comments on its 'horribly vulgar and ungrammatical writing;' but on the moral side speaks of 'looseness and dirt' and 'these bestialities towards the ladies of England;' asks (by name) the peer to whose wife the novel was dedicated if he could not borrow a horsewhip to avenge such an insult; and to emphasise the bad taste of the author's family pride in naming the novel, dwells on the fact that the author's mother lived with his father as his mistress before she was married to him. From 'Bob Burke's Duel.' a 'The day of that hunt was the very day that led to my duel with Brady. He was a long, straddling, waddlemouthed chap, who had no more notion of riding a hunt than a rhinoceros. He was mounted on a showyenough-looking mare, which had been nerved by Rodolphus Bootiman, the horse-doctor, and though "; good 'un to look at, was a rum 'un to go;" and before she was nerved, all the work had been taken out of her by long Lanty Philpot, who sold her to Brady after dinner for fifty pounds, she being not worth twenty in her best day, and Brady giving his bill at three months for the fifty. My friend the ensign was no judge of a horse, and the event showed that my cousin Lanty was no judge of a bill-not a cross of the fifty having been paid from that day to this, and it is out of the question now, it being long past the statute of limitations, to say nothing of Brady having since twice taken the benefit of the Act. So both parties jockeyed one another, having that pleasure, which must do them instead of profit. 'She was a bay chestnut, and nothing would do Brady but he must run her at a little gap which Miss Dosy was going to clear, in order to show his gallantry and agility; and certainly I must do him the credit to say that he did get his mare on the gap, which was no small feat, but there she broke down, and off went Brady, neck and crop, into as fine a pool of stagnant green mud as you would ever wish to see. He was ducked regularly in it, and he came out, if not in the jacket, yet in the colours, of the Rifle Brigade, looking rueful enough at his misfortune, as you may suppose. But he had not much time to think of the figure he cut, for before he could well get up, who should come right slap over him but Miss Dosy herself upon Tom the Devil, having cleared the gap and a yard beyond the pool in fine style. Brady ducked, and escaped the horse, a little fresh daubing being of less consequence than the knocking out of his brains, if he had any; but he did not escape a smart rap from a stone which one of Tom's heels flung back with such unlucky accuracy as to hit Brady right in the mouth, knocking out one of his eye-teeth (which I do not recollect). Brady clapped his hand to his mouth, and bawled, as any man might do in such a case, so loud that Miss Dosy checked Tom for a minute, to turn round, and there she saw him making the most horrid faces in the world, his mouth streaming blood, and himself painted green from head to foot with as pretty a coat of shining slime as was to be found in the province of Munster. "That's the gentleman you just leapt over, Miss Dosy," said I, for I had joined her, "and he seems to be in some confusion." "I am sorry," said she, "Bob, that I should have in any way offended him or any other gentleman by leaping over him, but I can't wait now. Take him my compliments, and tell him I should be happy to see him at tea at six o'clock this evening, in a different suit." Off she went, and I rode back with her message (by which means I was thrown out), and, would you believe it, he had the ill manners to say "the h;" but I shall not repeat what he said. It was impolite to the last degree, not to say profane, but perhaps he may be somewhat excused under his peculiar circumstances. There is no knowing what even Job himself might have said immediately after having been thrown off his horse into a green pool, with his eye-tooth knocked out, his mouth full of mud and blood, on being asked to a tea-party. 'He-Brady, not Job-went, nevertheless-for, on our return to Miss Dosy's lodgings we found a triangular note, beautifully perfumed, expressing his gratitude for her kind invitation, and telling her not to think of the slight accident which had occurred. How it happened, he added, he could not conceive, his mare never having broken down with him before-which was true enough, as that was the first day he ever mounted her—and she having been bought by himself at a sale of the Earl of Darlington's horses last year, for two hundred guineas. She was a great favourite, he went on to say, with the Earl, who often rode her, and ran at Doncaster by the name of Miss Russell. All this latter part of the note was not quite so true, but then it must be admitted that when we talk about horses we are not tied down to be exact to a letter. If we were, God help Tattersal's! 'To tea, accordingly, the ensign came at six, wiped clean, and in a different set-out altogether from what he appeared in on emerging from the ditch. He was, to make use of a phrase introduced from the ancient Latin into the modern Greek, togged up in the most approved style of his Majesty's Forty-eighth foot. Bright was the scarlet of his coat-deep the blue of his facings.' 'I beg your pardon,' said Antony Harrison, here interrupting the speaker; the Forty-eighth are not royals, and you ought to know that no regiment but those which are royal sport blue facings. I remember, once upon a time, in a coffee-shop, detecting a very smart fellow, who wrote some clever things in a Magazine published in Edinburgh by one Blackwood, under the character of a military man, not to be anything of the kind, by his talking about ensigns in the fusileers-all the worldknowing that in the fusileers there are no ensigns, but in their place second lieutenants. Let me set you right there, Bob; the facings your friend Brady exhibited to the wondering gaze of the Mallow tea-table must have been buff-pale buff.' Buff, black, blue, brown, yellow, Pompadour, brickdust, no matter what they were,' continued Burke, in no wise pleased by the interruption, they were as bright as they could be made, and so was all the lace, and other traps which I shall not specify more minutely, as I am in presence of so sharp a critic. He was, in fact, in full dress as you know is done in country quarters-and being not a bad plan and elevation of a man, looked well enough. Miss Dosy, I perceived, had not been perfectly ignorant of the rank and condition of the gentleman over whom she had leaped, for she was dressed in her purple satin body and white skirt, which she always put on when she wished to be irresistible, and her hair was suffered to flow in long ringlets down her fair neck-and, by Jupiter! it was fair as a swan's, and as majestic too--and no mistake. Macnamara looked divine that evening. Yes! Dosy 'Never mind! Tea was brought in by Mary Keefe, and it was just as all other teas have been and will be. Do not, however, confound it with the wafer-sliced and hot-watered abominations which are inflicted, perhaps justly, on the wretched individuals who are guilty of haunting soirées and conversaziones in this good and bad city of London. The tea was congou or souchong, or some other of these Chinese affairs, for anything I know to the contrary; for, having dined at the house, I was mixing my fifth tumbler when tea was brought in, and Mrs Macnamara begged me not to disturb myself; and she being a lady for whom I had a great respect, I complied with her desire; but there was a potato-cake, an inch thick and two feet in diameter, which Mrs Macnamara informed me in a whisper was made by Dosy after the hunt. 6.66 If you Poor chicken," she said, "if she had the strength, she has the willingness; but she is so delicate. saw her handling the potatoes to-day." "Madam," said I, looking tender and putting my hand on my heart, "I wish I was a potato !" 'I thought this was an uncommonly pathetic wish, after the manner of the Persian poet Hafiz, but it was scarcely out of my mouth when Ensign Brady, taking a cup of tea from Miss Dosy's hand, looking upon me with an air of infinite condescension, declared that I must be the happiest of men, as my wish was granted before it was made. I was preparing to answer, but Miss Dosy laughed so loud that I had not time, and my only resource was to swallow what I had just made. The ensign followed up his victory without mercy.' See the Life by R. W. Montagu, prefixed to Maginn's Miscel lanies (2 vols. 1885). The Gallery was republished in 1874 and, edited by Bates, in 1883. Francis Sylvester Mahony (1804-66), the creator of Father Prout and the Oliver Yorke of Fraser's Magazine, was, like Maginn, a native of Cork, and even more scholarly, accomplished, versatile, witty, and gifted with facile and felicitous utterance in prose and verse. He was educated at St Acheul, the Jesuit college at Amiens, and in Paris; among the Jesuits he lived, as he said, in an atmosphere of Latin, and became a first-rate Latin scholar. He was admitted to the Society, taught in an Irish college, but for extraordinarily unconventional irregularities in a seminarist (including coursing and deep drinking) was pronounced to be no longer a Jesuit in 1830, and, obtaining with some difficulty priest's orders in 1832, officiated at Cork. But erelong he quarrelled with his bishop, and, settling in London, became one of the writers in Fraser's Magazine; and during 1834-36 he contributed a series of papers, afterwards collected as The Reliques of Father Prout. From the gay tavern life of the 'Fraserians,' Mahony went abroad and travelled, 1837-41, in Hungary, Greece, and Asia Minor. He became in 1846 Roman correspondent of the Daily News, and his letters were in 1847 collected and published as Facts and Figures from Italy, by Don Jeremy Savonarola, Benedictine Monk. For the last eight years of his life quite Bohemian, though latterly his wit became more caustic and his ways less sociable-he lived chiefly in Paris, and was the correspondent of the Globe, his letters forming the chief attraction of that journal. He died reconciled to the Church. A volume of Final Memorials of Father Prout, published in 1876 by Blanchard Jerrold, sufficiently illustrated Mahony's wonderful facility in Latin composition, his wit, quaint sayings, genial outbursts of sentiment, pathos, absurdity and satire jumbled together, and a certain reverence for religion among all his convivialities. James Hannay said of him: 'Mahoney's fun is essentially Irish-fanciful, playful, odd, irregular, and more grotesque than Northern fun. In one of his own phrases, he is an Irish potato, seasoned with Attic salt.' Much of the fun of the Reliques arises out of Father Prout's regretful proof that the best songs of some of the most admired modern authors are the merest plagiarisms or translations from ancient Greek, medieval Latin, or old French originals, which he solemnly produces with dates and all necessary particulars to authenticate them-the poems and the facts all alike out of his own head. And he often pursued his jest beyond the limits prescribed by piety to the dead and by good taste, and the fun evaporates in tedium or annoyance. Father Prout declares himself to have been the son of Dean Swift by Stella, to whom the Dean had been privately married; and the Dean's madness was wholly occasioned, not by the causes usually alleged, but by the kidnapping of this (purely supposititious) son by William Wood, the halfpenny hero whom Swift denounced. In the 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, 'The best of all ways To lengthen our lays, Is to steal a few thoughts from the French, "my dear."' 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 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 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 Frencn. His |