"If you and Mrs B. can come out here I think I shall persuade myself to live on till May at all events. I am resolved to meet you this spring, somewhere, anywhere. Whenever you can make your plans let me hear.
"I am rejoiced that you like my Albanian sketch story, and hope it will take.
"I wish you had time to look at "Kilgobbin." The talk is good enough--the story bad as can be."
_To Mr John Blackwood._
"Trieste, _April_ 9, 1872.
"A word to disabuse the world of the need of a "Political Programme"
which is well-timed just v now; and I send you a short O"D. to add to the others.
"I feel certain you will agree with my notion, and my only misgiving is, have I made myself clear enough?
"I have had a very sharp brush these last few days, and I am still wrestling with the enemy. I own I do not come up smiling after each round, but looking horribly grim. Let me only hear when there is a chance of seeing you and Mrs B. and your little girl, and I"ll at once apply for a renewal of my lease of life, though it be only for a week or two."
_To Mr John Blackwood._
"Trieste, _April_ 11,1872.
"It was only yesterday I sent off a short O"D. on the English demand for a "Political Programme," and I hope it has reached you, and more, that it is readable, for my hand and my head are degenerating _pari pa.s.su_.
"To-day I have got your welcome note, for which I thank you heartily. It will do me more good to see you than all my tinctures, and pray tell Mrs Blackwood she is quite right to bring her little girl with her. The journey, the new scenes and new faces, will be the healthiest excitement to a young mind, and, whether as correcting old ideas or storing up new ones, is a form of education not to be had of books or to be satisfied by governesses.
"You are really a good fellow to come and see me in a cabin. I can only say if it were a palace you would be equally welcome, and more welcome you could not be.
"I"ll not promise to go to England. I have scarcely wind for a "three-mile heat," but I"ll take a short run with you somewhere, and we"ll concert it when we meet. Rob. Lytton wrote to me a few days ago, and said how he hoped to see you. His wife has just had a boy, which I am heartily glad of, as they lately lost their only son. Mrs L. is the most charming, natural, and nice creature it is possible to imagine, and the crowning good fortune of Robert"s life is to have met her.
"From Vienna here--you can do it in one day--fourteen and a half hours; but if you prefer to halve it, there is a nice halting-place, Gratz, Styria, where you arrive about three o"clock and leave the following day about the same: the Hotel Elephant is excellent.
"Sydney and her man are at the Burlington, and well too--also their mother,--and can get you every detail of the journey _via_ whichever route you take. I think you are right to come by Germany and go back by Italy, though it be against the precepts of climate, but that Germany after Italy is like following a strawberry ice with sauerkraut. I think "Just like Rye" will be the best t.i.tle for the "O"Dowd," and "taking" as well as appropriate. Rose is still at Constantinople, I believe, trying to get the tobacco monopoly from the Government,--a huge affair of some millions sterling.
"The weather up to this was splendid here; now it has become "more Irish and less nice," and I fancy is one of the reasons of my maladies. One loves to lean on such subtleties, like the alderman who ascribed his health to his always having a strawberry in his wine-gla.s.s."
XXIII. LOOKING BACKWARDS 1871-1872
[The autobiographical and bibliographical notes which Lever arranged to supply for a new edition of his novels were written during the latter part of 1871 and the spring of 1872. Unfortunately he did not live to complete the intended series of prefaces. They disclose highly interesting and amusing glimpses of his career and opinions, and they contain very open confessions of his loose literary methods, as well as some acute criticisms of his writings.]
"HARRY LORREQUER."
That some thirty years after the sketches which form this volume were written I should be called upon to revise and re-edit them is strange enough to me, well remembering, as I do, with what little hope of permanence they were penned, how lightly they were undertaken, and how carelessly thrown together. But there is something still stranger in the retrospect, and that is, that these same papers--for originally they were contributed to "The Dublin University Magazine"--should mainly have directed the course of my future life, and decided my entire career.
I may quote from a former preface that I was living in a very secluded spot when I formed the idea of jotting down these stories, many of them heard in boyhood, others constructed out of real incidents that occurred to my friends in travel, and some again--"The Adventures of Trevanion"
and "The French Duellist," for instance--actual facts, well known to many who had formed part of the army of occupation in France. To give what consistency I might to a ma.s.s of incongruous adventure, to such a variety of strange situations befalling one individual, I was obliged to imagine a character, which probably my experiences--and they were not very mature at the time--a.s.sured me as being perfectly possible: one of a strong will and a certain energy, rarely persistent in purpose and perpetually the sport of accident, with a hearty enjoyment of the pleasure of the hour, and a very reckless indifference as to the price to be paid for it. If I looked out on my acquaintances, I believed I saw many of the traits I was bent on depicting, and for others I am afraid I had only to take a peep into myself. If it is an error, then, to believe that in these Confessions I have ever recorded any incidents in my own life, there is no mistake in supposing that in sketching Harry Lorrequer I was in a great measure depicting myself, and becoming, allegori-cally, an autobiographist. Here is a confession which, if thirty odd years had not rolled over, I might be indisposed to make; but time has enabled me to look back on my work, and even on myself, with a certain degree of impartiality, and to feel, as regards both, as the great Paley said a man feels after he has finished his dinner, "That he might have done better." It is perfectly unnecessary that I should say when and where I wrote these sketches; no thought of future authorship of any kind occurred to me, far less did I dream of abandoning my profession as a physician for the precarious livelihood of the pen. Indeed their success, such as it was, only became known to me after I had left Ireland and gone to live abroad, and it was there--at Brussels--my publishers wrote to me to request a continuance of my Confessions, with the a.s.surance that they had found favour in the world and flattering notice from the press. Though I have been what the sarcastic French moralist called "blessed with a bad memory" all my life, I can still recall the delight--I cannot call it less--with which I heard my attempt at authorship had been successful. I did not awake, indeed, "to find myself famous," but I well remember the thrill of triumphant joy with which I read the letter that said "Go on," and the entrancing ecstasy I felt at the bare possibility of becoming known one day as a writer. I have had, since then, some moments in which a partial success has made me very happy and very grateful, but I do not believe that all these put together, or indeed any possible favour the world might mete to me, would impart a t.i.the of the enjoyment I felt on hearing that "Harry Lorrequer" had been liked by the public, and that they asked for more of him. If this sort of thing amuses them, thought I, I can go on for ever; and believing this to be true, I launched forth with all that prodigal waste of material which, if it forms one of the reasons of success, is, strictly speaking, one among the many demerits of this story. That I neither husbanded my resources nor imagined that they could ever fail me were not my only mistakes; and I am tempted to show how little I understood of the responsibilities of authorship by repeating what I have told elsewhere,--an incident of the last number of "Harry Lorrequer." The MS. which contained the conclusion of the story had been sent through the Foreign Office bag from Brussels, and possibly had been mistaken for a despatch. At all events, like King Theodore"s letter it had been thrown on one side and forgotten. In this strait my publishers wrote to me in a strain that "the trade" alone knows how to employ towards an unknown author. Stung by the reproaches (and they were not mild) of my correspondent, I wrote back, enclosing another conclusion, and telling him to print either or both--as he pleased. Years after, I saw the first MS. (which came to hand at last) bound in my publisher"s library and lettered, "Another ending to H. L." When the great master of fiction condescended to inform the world on what small fragments of tradition or local anecdote the Waverley Novels were founded, he best exalted the marvellous skill of his own handiwork in showing how genius could develop the veriest incident of a life into a story of surpa.s.sing power and interest. I have no such secrets to reveal, nor have I the faintest pretension to suppose the public would care to hear about the sources from which I drew either my characters or my incidents. I have seen, however, such references to supposed portraiture of individuals in this story, that I am forced to declare there is but one character in the book of which the original had any existence, and to which I contributed nothing of exaggeration. This is Father Malachi Brennan.
The pleasant priest was alive when I wrote the tale, and saw himself in print and--worse still--in picture, not, I believe, without a certain mock indignation, for he was too racy a humourist and too genuine a lover of fun to be really angry at this caricature of him. The amusing author of "The Wild Sports of the West"--Hamilton Maxwell--was my neighbour in the little watering-place where I was living,* and our intimacy was not the less close from the graver character of the society around us. We often exchanged our experiences of Irish character and life, and in our gossipings stories were told, added to, and amplified in such a way between us that I believe neither of us could have p.r.o.nounced at last who gave the initiative of an incident, or on which side lay the authorship of any particular event.
* Portstewart
It would have been well had our intercourse stopped at these confidences, but, unfortunately, it did not. We often indulged in little practical jokes on our more well-conducted neighbours, and I remember that the old soldier from whom I drew some of the features I have given to Colonel Kamworth was especially the mark of these harmless pleasantries. Our Colonel was an excellent fellow, kind-hearted and hospitable, but so infatuated with a propensity to meddle with every one, and to be a partner in the joys, the afflictions, the failures, or the successes of all around him, that, with the best possible intentions and the most sincere desire to be useful to his neighbours, he became the cause of daily misconceptions and mistakes, sowed discord where he meant unity, and, in fact, originated more trouble and more distrust than the most malevolent mischief-maker of the whole country-side. I am forced to own that the small persecutions with which my friend Maxwell and myself followed the worthy Colonel, the wrong intelligence with which we supplied him, particularly as regarded the rank and station of the various visitors who came down during the bathing season; the false scents on which we sent him, and the absurd enterprises on which we embarked him, even to the extent of a mock address which induced him to stand for the "borough"--the address to the const.i.tuency being our joint production,--all these follies, I say, more or less disposed me, I am sure, to that incessant flow of absurd incident which runs through this volume, and which, after all, was little more than the reflex of our daily plot-tings and contrivings. I believe my old friend the Colonel is still living: if he be, and he should read these lines, let him also read that I have other memories of him than those of mere jest and pleasantry--memories of his cordial hospitality and genial good nature,--and that there are few things I would like better than to meet and talk with him over bygones, knowing no one more likely to relish a pleasant reminiscence than himself, no one more certain to forgive a long-past liberty taken with him. If there are many faults and blunders in this tale which I would willingly correct, if there be much I would curtail or cut out altogether, and if there be also occasionally incidents of which I could improve the telling, I am held back from any attempts of this kind by the thought that it was by these sketches, such as they are, I first won the hearing from the public which for more than thirty years has never deserted me, and that the favour which has given the chief pride and interest to my life dates from the day I was known as Harry Lorrequer. The life of a physician has nothing so thoroughly rewarding, nothing so cheering, so full of hearty encouragement, as in the occasional friendships to which it opens the way. The doctor attains to a degree of intimacy, and stands on a footing of confidence so totally exceptional, that if personal qualities lend aid to the position, his intercourse becomes friendship. Whether, therefore, my old career gave me any a.s.sistance in new roads, whether it imparted to me any habits of investigation as applicable to the full in morals as in matter, it certainly imparted to me the happy incident of standing on good terms with--I was going to say--my patient (and perhaps no better word could be found for him who has heard me so long, trusted me so much, given me so large a share in his favours, and come to look on me with such friendliness). It would be displaying the worst in me if I did not own that I owe to my books not only the most pleasant intimacies of my life, but some of my closest friendships. A chance expression, a fairly shadowed thought, a mere chord struck at random by a pa.s.sing hand, as it were, has now and then placed me, as mesmerists call it, _en rapport_ with some one who may have thought long and deeply on what I had but skimmed over; and straightway there was a bond between us. No small satisfaction has it been to me occasionally to hear that out of the over-abundance of my own buoyancy and light-heartedness--and I had a great deal of both long ago--I have been able to share with my neighbour and given him part of my sunshine, and only felt the warmer myself. A great writer--one of the most eloquent historians who ever ill.u.s.trated the military achievements of his country--once told me that, as he lay sick and careworn after a fever, it was in my own reckless stories of soldier life that he found the cheeriest moments of his solitude: and now let me hasten to say that I tell this in no spirit of boastfulness, but with the heartfelt grat.i.tude of one who has gained more by hearing that confession than Harry Lorrequer ever gained by all his own. If to go over again the pages that I wrote so many years ago is in a measure to revisit in age the loved scenes of boyhood, and to ponder over pa.s.sages the very spirit of whose dictation is dead and gone,--if all this has its sadness, I am cheered by remembering that I am still addressing many old and dear friends, and have also for my audience the sons and grandsons, and, what I like better, the daughters and granddaughters, of those who once listened to Harry Lorrequer.
"CHARLES O"MALLEY."
The success of "Harry Lorrequer" was the reason for writing "Charles O"Malley." That I myself was in nowise prepared for the favour the public bestowed on my first attempt is easily enough understood.
The ease with which I strung my stories together--in reality the "Confessions of Harry Lorrequer" are little more than a note-book of absurd and laughable incidents--led me to believe that I could draw on this vein of composition without any limit whatever. I felt, or thought I felt, an inexhaustible store of fun and buoyancy within me, and I began to have a misty half-confused impression that Englishmen generally laboured under a sad-coloured temperament, and were proportionately grateful to any one who would rally them, even pa.s.singly, out of their despondency, and give them a laugh without much trouble for going in search of it. When I set to work to write "Charles O"Malley," I was, as I have ever been, very low with fortune, and the success of a new venture was pretty much as eventful to me as the turn of the right colour at _rouge-et-noir_. At the same time, I had then an amount of spring in my temperament, and a power of enjoying life, which I can honestly say I never found surpa.s.sed. The world had for me all the interest of an admirable comedy, in which the part allotted to myself, if not a high or a foreground one, was eminently suited to my taste, and brought me, besides, sufficiently often on the stage to enable me to follow all the fortunes of the piece. Brussels (where I was then living) was adorned at the period with most agreeable English society. Some leaders of the fashionable world of London had come there to refit and recruit, both in body and estate. There were several pleasant people, and a great number of pretty people; and so far as I could judge, the fashionable dramas of Belgrave Square and its vicinity were being performed in the Rue Royale and the Boulevard de Waterloo with very considerable success. There were dinners, b.a.l.l.s, _dejeuners_, and picnics in the Bois de Cambre, excursions to Waterloo, and select little parties to Boisfort (a charming little resort in the forest), whose intense c.o.c.kneyism became perfectly inoffensive, being in a foreign land and remote from the invasion of home-bred vulgarity. I mention these things to show the adjuncts by which I was aided, and the rattle of gaiety by which I was, as it were, "accompanied" when I tried my voice.
The soldier element tinctured our society strongly, and, I will add, most agreeably. Amongst those whom I remember best were several old Peninsulars. Lord Combermere was of this number; and another of our set was an officer who accompanied--if indeed he did not command--the first boat party who crossed the Douro. It is needless to say how diligently I cultivated a society so full of all the storied details I was eager to obtain, and how generously disposed were they to give me all the information I needed. On topography especially were they valuable to me, and with such good result that I have been more than once complimented on the accuracy of my descriptions of places which I have never seen.
When, therefore, my publishers asked me could I write a story in the Lorrequer vein,--a story in which active service and military adventure could figure more prominently than mere civilian life, and where achievements of a British army might form the staple of the narrative,--I was ready to reply: "_Not one, but fifty,_" Do not mistake me, and suppose that any overweening confidence in my literary powers would have emboldened me to make this reply: my whole strength lay in the fact that I could not recognise anything like literary effort in the matter. If the world would only condescend to read that which I wrote precisely as I was in the habit of talking, nothing could be easier.
Not alone was it easy, but it was intensely interesting and amusing to myself to be so engaged. The success of "Harry Lorrequer" had been freely wafted across the German Ocean: it was very intoxicating incense, and I set to work on my second book with a thrill of hope as regards the world"s favour which--and it is no small thing to say it--I can yet recall. I can recall, too,--and I am afraid more vividly still,--some of the difficulties of my task when I endeavoured to form anything like an accurate or precise idea of some campaigning incident, or some pa.s.sage of arms, from the narratives of two distinct and separate "eye-witnesses." What mistrust I conceived for all eye-witnesses from my own brief experience of their testimonies! What an impulse did it lend to me to study the nature and the temperament of the narrator as an indication of the peculiar colouring he might lend his narrative! And how it taught me to measure the force of the French epigram that it was the alternating popularity of Marshal Soult that decided whether he won or lost the battle of Toulouse! While, however, I was sifting these evidences, and separating, as well as I might, the wheat from the chaff, I was in a measure training myself for what, without my then knowing it, was to become my career in life. My training was not without a certain amount of labour, but so light and pleasant was the labour, so full of picturesque peeps at characters and of humorous views of human nature, that it would be the rankest ingrat.i.tude if I did not own that I gained all my earlier experiences of the world in very pleasant company, highly enjoyable at the time and with matter for charming souvenirs long afterwards. That certain traits of my acquaintances found themselves embodied in some of the characters of this story,* I do not seek to deny. The principle of natural selection adapts itself to novels as well as to nature, and it would have demanded an effort above my strength to have disabused myself at the desk of all the impressions of the dinner-table, and to have forgotten features which interested or amused me. One of the personages of my tale I drew, however, with very little aid from fancy. I would go so far as to say that I took him from the life, if my memory did not confront me with the lamentable inferiority of my picture to the great original which it was meant to portray. With the exception of the quality of courage, I never met a man who contained within himself so many of the traits of Falstaff as the individual who furnished me with "Major Monsoon." But the Major--I must call him so, though that rank was far beneath his own--was a man of unquestionable bravery. His powers as a story-teller were to my thinking unrivalled; the peculiar reflections on life which he would pa.s.singly introduce--the wise apothegms--were of a morality essentially of his own invention; he would indulge in the unsparing exhibition of himself in situations such as other men would never have confessed,--all blended up with a racy enjoyment of life, dashed occasionally with sorrow that our tenure of it was short of patriarchal. All these idiosyncracies, accompanied by a face redolent of intense humour and a voice whose modulations were managed with the skill of a consummate artist, were above me to convey; nor indeed, as I re-read any of the adventures in which he figures, am I other than ashamed at the weakness of my drawing and the poverty of my colouring. In order to show that I had a better chance to personify him than is usually the lot of a novelist,--that I possessed, so to say, a vested interest in his life and adventures,--I will relate a little incident; and my accuracy, if necessary, can be attested by another actor in the scene who yet survives. I was living a bachelor life at Brussels--my family being at Ostend for the bathing--during the summer of 1840. The city was comparatively empty, all the so-called society being absent at the various spas or baths of Germany. One member of the British Legation, who remained at his post to represent the mission, and myself, making common cause of our desolation and ennui, spent much of our time together and dined _tete-a-tete_ every day. It chanced that one evening, as we were hastening through the park on our way to dinner, we espied the Major--as "Major" I must speak of him--lounging about with that half-careless, half-observant air which indicated a desire to be somebody"s--anybody"s--guest rather than to surrender himself to the homeliness of domestic fare.
* "Charles O" Malley."
"There"s that confounded old Monsoon!" said my diplomatist friend. "It"s all up if he sees us, and I can"t endure him." Now I must remark that my friend, though very far from being insensible to the humouristic side of the Major"s character, was not always in the vein to enjoy it, and when he was so indisposed he could invest the object of his dislike with something little short of repulsiveness. "Promise me," said he, as Monsoon came towards us, "you"ll not ask him to dinner." Before I could make any reply the Major was shaking a hand of either of us, rapturously expatiating over his good luck at meeting us. "Mrs M.," said he, "has got a dreary party of old ladies to dine with her, and I have come out here to find some pleasant fellow to join me and take our mutton-chop together."
"We"re behind our time, Major," said my friend. "Sorry to leave you so abruptly, but must push on. Eh, Lorrequer?" added he, to evoke corroboration from me.
"Harry says nothing of the kind," interrupted Monsoon. "He says, or he"s going to say, "Major, I have a nice bit of dinner waiting for me at home,--enough for two, will feed three; or, if there be a shortcoming, nothing easier than to eke out the deficiency by another bottle of Moulton. Come along with us then, Monsoon, and we shall be all the merrier for your company."" Repeating his words, "Come along, Monsoon,"
I pa.s.sed my arm within his, and away we went. For a moment my friend tried to get free and leave me, but I held him fast and carried him along in spite of himself. He was, however, so chagrined and provoked that till the moment we reached my door he never uttered a word nor paid the slightest attention to Monsoon, who talked away in a vein that occasionally made gravity all but impossible. Dinner proceeded drearily enough: the diplomatist"s stiffness never relaxed for a moment, and my own awkwardness damped all my attempts at conversation. Not so, however, Monsoon; he ate heartily, approved of everything, and p.r.o.nounced my wine to be exquisite. He gave us a discourse upon sherry and the Spanish wines in general; told us the secret of the Amontillado flavour; and explained the process of browning, by boiling down wine, which some are so fond of in England. At last he diverged into anecdote. "I was once fortunate enough," said he, "to fall upon some of that choice sherry from the St Lucas Luentas which is always reserved for royalty. It was a pale wine, delicious in the drinking, and leaving no more flavour in the mouth than a faint dryness that seemed to say, "Another gla.s.s." Shall I tell you how I came by it?" And scarcely pausing for a reply, he told the story of having robbed his own convoy and stolen the wine he was in charge of for safe conveyance.* I wish I could give any, even the weakest, idea of how he narrated the incident,--the struggle between duty and temptation, and the apologetic tone of voice in which he explained that the frame of mind which succeeds to any yielding to seductive influences is often in the main more profitable to a man than is the vainglorious sense of having resisted a temptation. "Meekness is the mother of all virtues," said he, "and there is no meekness without frailty." The story, told as he told it, was too much for the diplomatist"s gravity, and at last he fairly roared with laughter. As soon as I myself recovered from the effects of his drollery I said, "Major, I have a proposition to make. Let me tell that story in print and I"ll give you five Naps."
* The story of the stolen sherry is told in "Charles O"Malley."
"Are you serious, Harry?" said he. "Is this on honour?"
"On honour a.s.suredly," I replied.
"Let me have the money down on the nail and I"ll give you leave to have me and my whole life,--every adventure that ever befell me,--ay, and if you like, every moral reflection that my experiences have suggested."
"Done!" cried I. "I agree."
"Not so fast," said the diplomatist. "We must make a protocol of this: the high contracting parties must know what they give and what they receive. I"ll draw out the treaty." He did so, at full length, on a sheet of that solemn blue-tinted paper dedicated to despatch purposes, duly setting forth the concession and the consideration. Each of us signed the doc.u.ment; it was witnessed and sealed; and Monsoon pocketed my five Napoleons, filling a b.u.mper to any success the bargain might bring me. This doc.u.ment, along with my university degree, my commission in a militia regiment, and a vast amount of letters (very interesting to me), were seized by the Austrian authorities on the way from Como to Florence in the August of 1847, being deemed part of a treasonable correspondence--purposely allegorical in form,--and they were never restored to me. I freely own that I"d give all the rest willingly to repossess myself of the Monsoon treaty. To show that I did not entirely fail in making my "Major" resemble the great original from whom I copied, I may mention that he was speedily recognised by the Marquis of Londonderry, the well-known Sir Charles Stuart of the Peninsular campaign. "I know that fellow well," said he. "He once sent me a challenge, and I had to make him a very humble apology. The occasion was this: I had been out with a single aide-de-camp to make a reconnaissance in front of Victor"s division; and to avoid attracting any notice, we covered over our uniform with two common grey overcoats which reached to the feet, effectually concealing our rank. Scarcely, however, had we topped a hill which commanded a view of the French, when a shower of sh.e.l.ls flew over and around us. Amazed to think that we had been so quickly noticed, I looked around me and discovered, quite close in my rear, your friend Monsoon with what he called his staff,--a popinjay set of rascals dressed out in green and gold, and with more plumes and feathers than ever the general staff boasted. Carried away by momentary pa.s.sion at the failure of my reconnaissance, I burst out with some insolent allusion to the harlequin a.s.sembly which had drawn the French fire upon us. Monsoon saluted me respectfully and retired without a word; but I had scarcely reached my quarters when a "friend" of his waited upon me with a message,--a categorical message it was, too: "It must be a meeting or an ample apology." I made the apology--a most full one--for the "Major" was right and I had not a fraction of reason to sustain me. We have been the best of friends ever since." I had heard the story before this from Monsoon, but I did not then accord it all the faith that was its due; and I admit that the accidental corroboration of this one event very often served to puzzle me afterwards, when I listened to tales in which the Major seemed to be a second Munchausen.
It might be that he was amongst the truest and most matter-of-fact of historians. May the reader be not less embarra.s.sed than myself! is my sincere, if not very courteous, prayer. I have no doubt that often in recounting some strange incident--a personal experience it always was--he was himself carried away by the credulity of his hearers and the amount of interest he could excite in them, rather than by the story. He possessed the true narrative style, and there was a marvellous instinct in the way in which he would vary a tale to suit the tastes of an audience, while his moralisings were almost certain to take the tone of a humouristic quiz of the company. Though fully aware that I was availing myself of the contract that delivered him into my hands, and though he dined with me two or three times a-week, he never lapsed into any allusion to his appearance in print, and "O"Malley"had been published some weeks when he asked me to lend him "that last thing"--he forgot the name of it--I was writing.*
* He refers here to his last visit in 1871.--E. D.
""Major Monsoon" was Commissary-General Mayne.... When he entered a town," Lever declared, "he hastened to the nearest church and appropriated whatever plate or costly reliquaries he could seize. He once had a narrow escape from hanging, after having actually undergone a drum-head court-martial. When the allied armies entered Paris, Wellington was of course the constant figure of attraction. At a grand fete he took wine (or went through the form of it) with any officer whose face was remembered by him. The Commissary-General was a guest at this entertainment, and Wellington"s eye rested on him. Up went the hand and gla.s.s as a signal, and bows were wellnigh exchanged, when the Duke thundered out, "Oh! I thought I had hanged you at Badajoz. Never mind, I"ll do it next time. I drink your health.""--Fitzpatrick"s "Life of Lever." Of Frank Webber I have said elsewhere that he was one of my earliest friends, my chum at college, and in the very chambers in Old Trinity where I have located Charles O"Malley. He was a man of the highest order of abilities, with a memory that never forgot; but he was ruined and run to seed by the idleness that came of a discursive uncertain temperament. Capable of anything--he spent his youth in follies and eccentricities, every one of which, however, gave indications of a mind inexhaustible in resources and abounding in devices and contrivances. Poor fellow! he died young; and perhaps it is better it should have been so. Had he lived to a later day, he would most probably have been found a foremost leader of Fenianism; and from what I knew of him, I can say that he, would have been a more dangerous enemy to English rule than any of those dealers in the petty larceny of rebellion we have lately seen amongst us. Of Mickey Free I had not one, but one thousand, types. Indeed I am not quite sure that in my late visit to Dublin, I did not chance on a living specimen of the "Free"
family, much readier in repartee, quicker at an _apropos_, and droller in ill.u.s.tration, than my own Mickey. The fellow was "boots" at a great hotel in Sackville Street; and he afforded me more amus.e.m.e.nt and some heartier laughs than it has always been my fortune to enjoy in a party of wits. His criticisms on my sketches of Irish character were about the shrewdest and the best I ever listened to; and that I am not bribed to this opinion by any flattery, I may remark that they were often more severe than complimentary, and that he hit every blunder of image, every mistake in figure, of my peasant characters with an acuteness and correctness which made me very grateful to know that his daily occupations were limited to the blacking of boots and not to the "polishing off" of authors. I should like to own that "Charles O"Malley"
was the means of according me a more heartfelt glow of satisfaction, a more gratifying sense of pride, than anything I ever have written. My brother, at that time the rector of an Irish parish, once forwarded to me a letter from a lady, unknown to him, who had heard that he was the brother of "Harry Lorrequer," and who addressed him not knowing where a letter might be directed to myself. The letter was the grateful expression of a mother, who said: "I am the widow of a field-officer, and with an only son, for whom I obtained a presentation to Woolwich; but seeing in my boy"s nature certain traits of nervousness and timidity which induced me to hesitate on embarking him in the career of a soldier, I became very unhappy, and uncertain which course to decide upon. While in this state of uncertainty I chanced to make him a birthday present of "Charles O"Malley," the reading of which seemed to act like a charm on his whole character, inspiring him with a pa.s.sion for movement and adventure, and spiriting him on to an eager desire for a military life. Seeing that this was no pa.s.sing enthusiasm but a decided and determined bent, I accepted the cadetship for him, and his career has been not alone distinguished as a student, but one which has marked him out for an almost hare-brained courage and for a dash and heroism that give high promise for his future. Thank your brother for me," she continued,--"a mother"s thanks for the welfare of an only son, and say how I wish that my best wishes for him and his could recompense him for what I owe him." I humbly hope that it may not be imputed to me as unpardonable vanity the recording of this incident. It gave me intense pleasure when I heard it; and now, as I look back on it, it invests the story for myself with an interest which nothing else that I have written can afford me.
"JACK HINTON"