LITMIR.BIZ

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actions, to go where you will and when you will. Till that moment the world has been a comparative blank; the trammels of school or the ties of tutorship have bound and restrained you. You have been living, as it were, within the rules of court – certain petty privileges permitted, certain small liberties allowed; but now you come forth disenchanted, disenthralled, emancipated, free to come as to go – a man in all the plenitude of his volition; and, better still, a man without the heavy, depressing weight of responsibility that makes manhood less a blessing than a burden. The first burst of life is indeed a glorious thing; youth, health, hope, and confidence have each a force and vigour they lose in after years: life is then a splendid river, and we are swimming with the stream – no adverse waves to weary, no billows to buffet us, we hold on our course rejoicing.

      The sun was peering between the curtains of my window, and playing in fitful flashes on the old oak floor, as I lay thus ruminating and dreaming over the fature. How many a resolve did I then make for my guidance – how many an intention did I form – how many a groundwork of principle did I lay down, with all the confidence of youth! I fashioned to myself a world after my own notions; in which I conjured up certain imaginary difficulties, all of which were surmounted by my admirable tact and consummate cleverness. I remembered how, at both Eton and Sandhurst, the Irish boy was generally made the subject of some jest or quiz, at one time for his accent, at another for his blunders. As a Guardsman, short as had been my experience of the service, I could plainly see that a certain indefinable tone of superiority was ever asserted towards our friends across the sea. A wide-sweeping prejudice, whose limits were neither founded in reason, justice, or common sense, had thrown a certain air of undervaluing import over every one and every thing from that country. Not only were its faults and its follies heavily visited, but those accidental and trifling blemishes – those slight and scarce perceptible deviations from the arbitrary standard of fashion – were deemed the strong characteristics of the nation, and condemned accordingly; while the slightest use of any exaggeration in speech – the commonest employment of a figure or a metaphor – the casual introduction of an anecdote or a repartee, were all heavily censured, and pronounced “so very Irish!” Let some fortune-hunter carry off an heiress – let a lady trip over her train at the drawing-room – let a minister blunder in his mission – let a powder-magazine explode and blow up one-half of the surrounding population, there was but one expression to qualify all – “How Irish! how very Irish!” The adjective had become one of depreciation; and an Irish lord, an Irish member, an Irish estate, and an Irish diamond, were held pretty much in the same estimation.

      Reared in the very hot-bed, the forcing-house, of such exaggerated prejudice, while imbibing a very sufficient contempt for everything in that country, I obtained proportionably absurd notions of all that was Irish. Our principles may come from our fathers; our prejudices certainly descend from the female branch. Now, my mother, notwithstanding the example of the Prince Regent himself, whose chosen associates were Irish, was most thoroughly exclusive on this point. She would admit that a native of that country could be invited to an evening party under extreme and urgent circumstances – that some brilliant orator, whose eloquence was at once the dread and the delight of the House – that some gifted poet, whose verses came home to the heart alike of prince and peasant – that the painter, whose canvas might stand unblushingly amid the greatest triumphs of art – could be asked to lionise for those cold and callous votaries of fashion, across the lake of whose stagnant nature no breath of feeling stirred, esteeming it the while, that in her card of invitation he was reaping the proudest proof of his success; but that such could be made acquaintances or companions, could be regarded in the light of equals or intimates, the thing never entered into her imagination, and she would as soon have made a confidant of the King of Kongo as a gentleman from Connaught.

      Less for the purposes of dwelling upon my lady-mother’s “Hibernian horrors,” than of showing the school in which I was trained, I have made this somewhat lengthened exposé. It may, however, convey to my reader some faint impression of the feelings which animated me at the outset of my career in Ireland.

      I have already mentioned the delight I experienced with the society at the Viceroy’s table. So much brilliancy, so much wit, so much of conversational power, until that moment I had no conception of. Now, however, while reflecting on it, I was actually astonished to find how far the whole scene contributed to the support of my ancient prejudices. I well knew that a party of the highest functionaries – bishops and law-officers of the crown – would not have conducted themselves in the same manner in England. I stopped not to inquire whether it was more the wit or the will that was wanting; I did not dwell upon the fact that the meeting was a purely convivial one, to which I was admitted by the kindness and condescension of the Duke; but, so easily will a warped and bigoted impression find food for its indulgence, I only saw in the meeting an additional evidence of my early convictions. How far my theorising on this point might have led me – whether eventually I should have come to the conclusion that the Irish nation were lying in the darkest blindness of barbarism, while, by a special intervention of Providence, I, was about to be erected into a species of double revolving light – it is difficult to say, when a tap at the door suddenly aroused me from my musings.

      “Are ye awake, yet?” said a harsh, husky voice, like a bear in bronchitis, which I had no difficulty in pronouncing to be Corny’s.

      “Yes, come in,” cried I; “what hour is it?”

      “Somewhere after ten,” replied he, sulkily; “you’re the first I ever heerd ask the clock, in the eight years I have lived here. Are ye ready for your morning?”

      “My what?” said I, with some surprise.

      “Didn’t I say it, plain enough? Is it the brogue that bothers you?”

      As he said this with a most sarcastic grin he poured, from a large jug he held in one hand, a brimming goblet full of some white compound, and handed it over to me. Preferring at once to explore, rather than to question the intractable Corny, I put it to my lips, and found it to be capital milk punch, concocted with great skill, and seasoned with what O’Grady afterwards called “a notion of nutmeg.”

      “Oh! devil fear you, that he’ll like it. Sorrow one of you ever left as much in the jug as ‘ud make a foot-bath for a flea.”

      “They don’t treat you over well, then, Corny,” said I, purposely opening the sorest wound of his nature.

      “Trate me well! faix, them that ‘ud come here for good tratement, would go to the devil for divarsion. There’s Master Phil himself, that I used to bate, when he was a child, many’s the time, when his father, rest his sowl, was up at the coorts – ay, strapped him, till he hadn’t a spot that wasn’t sore an him – and look at him now; oh, wirra! you’d think I never took a ha’porth of pains with him. Ugh! – the haythins! – the Turks!”

      “This is all very bad, Corny; hand me those boots.”

      “And thim’s boots!” said he, with a contemptuous expression on his face that would have struck horror to the heart of Hoby. “Well, well.” Here he looked up as though the profligacy and degeneracy of the age were transgressing all bounds. “When you’re ready, come over to the master’s, for he’s waiting breakfast for you. A beautiful hour for breakfast, it is! Many’s the day his father sintenced a whole dockful before the same time!”

      With the comforting reflection that the world went better in his youth, Corny drained the few remaining drops of the jug, and, muttering the while something that did not sound exactly like a blessing, waddled out of the room with a gait of the most imposing gravity.

      I had very little difficulty in finding my friend’s quarters; for, as his door lay open, and as he himself was carolling away, at the very top of his lungs, some popular melody of the day, I speedily found myself beyond the threshold.

      “Ah! Hinton, my hearty, how goes it? your headpiece nothing the worse, I hope, for either the car or the claret? By-the-by, capital claret that is! you’ve nothing like it in England.”

      I could scarce help a smile at the remark, as he proceeded,

      “But come, my boy, sit down; help yourself to a cutlet, and make yourself quite at home in Mount O’Grady.”

      “Mount

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