IRISH MEMORIES
[Illustration: VIOLET FLORENCE MARTIN.]
IRISH MEMORIES
BY
E. Œ. SOMERVILLE <small>AND</small> MARTIN ROSS
AUTHORS OF “SOME EXPERIENCES OF AN IRISH R.M.,”
“THE REAL CHARLOTTE,” ETC.
_WITH 23 ILLUSTRATIONS FROM DRAWINGS BY
E. Œ. SOMERVILLE AND FROM PHOTOGRAPHS_
_THIRD IMPRESSION_
NEW YORK:
LONGMANS, GREEN AND CO.
FOURTH AVENUE AND <small>30TH</small> STREET
1918
PREFACE
I have many people to thank, for many things, and I have an explanation
to make, but the thanks must come first.
I offer my most sincere gratitude to Mrs. Butler and to Professor
Edgeworth, for their kindness in permitting me to print Miss Edgeworth’s
letters to Mrs. Bushe; to Lord Dunsany, for the extract from “Plays of
Gods and Men,” which has said for me what I could not say for myself; to
the Editors of the _Spectator_ and of _Punch_, for their permission to
use Martin Ross’s letter and the quatrain to her memory; to the Hon.
Mrs. Campbell, the Right Hon. Sir Horace Plunkett, P.C., Captain Stephen
Gwynn, M.P., Lady Coghill, Colonel Dawson, and other of Martin Ross’s
friends, for lending me the letters that she wrote to them; even when
these are not quoted verbatim, they have been of great service to me,
and I am very grateful for having been allowed to see them.
I have to explain what may strike some as singular, viz., the omission,
as far as was practicable, from the letters of Martin Ross, and from
this book in general, of the names of her and my friends and relatives
who are still living. I have been guided by a consensus of the opinion
of those whom I have consulted, and also by my remembrance of Martin
Ross’s views on the subject, which she often expressed to me in
connection with sundry and various volumes of Recollections, that have
dealt with living contemporaries with a frankness that would have seemed
excessive in the case of a memoir of the life of Queen Anne. If I have
gone to the opposite extreme, I hope it may be found a fault on the
right side.
E. Œ. SOMERVILLE.
_September 20th, 1917._
CONTENTS
CHAP. PAGE
INTRODUCTORY 1
I.--THE MARTINS OF ROSS 3
II.--THE CHIEF 41
III.--MAINLY MARIA EDGEWORTH 51
IV.--OLD FORGOTTEN THINGS 61
V.--EARLY WEST CARBERY 71
VI.--HER MOTHER 78
VII.--MY MOTHER 87
VIII.--HERSELF 97
IX.--MYSELF WHEN YOUNG 106
X.--WHEN FIRST SHE CAME 119
XI.--“AN IRISH COUSIN” 128
XII.--THE YEARS OF THE LOCUST 140
XIII.--THE RESTORATION 153
XIV.--RICKEEN 169
XV.--FAITHS AND FAIRIES 181
XVI.--BELIEFS AND BELIEVERS 188
XVII.--LETTERS FROM ROSS 197
XVIII.--“TOURS, IDLE TOURS” 207
XIX.--OF DOGS 217
XX.--“THE REAL CHARLOTTE” 229
XXI.--SAINT ANDREWS 241
XXII.--AT ÉTAPLES 252
XXIII.--PARIS AGAIN 260
XXIV.--HORSES AND HOUNDS 272
XXV.--“THE IRISH R.M.” 286
XXVI.--OF GOOD TIMES 294
XXVII.--VARIOUS OPINIONS 309
XXVIII.--THE LAST 324
APPENDICES
I.--LETTERS FROM CHIEF JUSTICE CHARLES KENDAL
BUSHE TO MRS. BUSHE 329
II.--A NOTE BY CAPTAIN STEPHEN GWYNN, M.P. 335
III.--HER FRIENDS 337
IV.--BIBLIOGRAPHY 340
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
Violet Florence Martin (_Photograph_) _Frontispiece_
Ross House, Co. Galway (_inset_) The Martin
Coat of Arms (_Photograph_) _Facing page_ 8
Castle Haven Harbour (_Photo. by Martin Ross_) “ 64
Carberiae Rupes (_Photo. by Sir E. B. Coghill,
Bart._) “ 64
From the Garden, Drishane (_Photo. by Martin
Ross_) “ 90
Drishane House (_Photo. by Martin Ross_) “ 90
Hydrangeas, Drishane Avenue (_Photo. by
Martin Ross_) “ 90
Dans la Rive Gauche (_Drawing by E. Œ.
Somerville_) “ 118
Martin Ross on Confidence (_Photograph_) “ 122
Edith Œnone Somerville (_Photograph_) “ 138
A Castle Haven Woman (_Drawing by E. Œ.
Somerville_) “ 150
Martin Ross (_Photo. by Lady Coghill_) “ 158
Ross Lake (_Photograph_) “ 158
E. Œ. Somerville on Tarbrush (_Photograph_) “ 184
E. Œ. S.--Candy--Sheila--V. F. M. (_Photo. by
Sir E. B. Coghill, Bart._) “ 210
Candy (_Photo. by Martin Ross_) “ 226
E. Œ. S. and a Dilettante (_Photo. by Martin
Ross_) “ 226
“Chez Cuneo” (_Drawing by E. Œ. Somerville_) “ 264
The West Carbery Hounds (_Photo. by Miss
M. J. Robertson_) “ 275
At Bunalun. “Gone to Ground” (_Photo. by
Mr. Ambrose Cramer_) “ 288
Waiting for the Terriers (_Photo. by Mr. Ambrose
Cramer_) “ 288
West Carbery Hounds at Liss Ard (_Photograph_) “ 308
Portofino (_Photo. by Martin Ross_) “ 308
THE TENTS OF THE ARABS.
ACT II.
KING.
What is this child of man that can conquer Time and that is braver than
Love?
EZNARZA.
Even Memory....
He shall bring back our year to us that Time cannot destroy. Time cannot
slaughter it if Memory says no. It is reprieved, though banished. We
shall often see it, though a little far off, and all its hours and days
shall dance to us and go by one by one and come back and dance again.
KING.
Why, that is true. They shall come back to us. I had thought that they
that work miracles, whether in Heaven or Earth, were unable to do one
thing. I thought that they could not bring back days again when once
they had fallen into the hands of Time.
EZNARZA.
It is a trick that Memory can do. He comes up softly in the town or the
desert, wherever a few men are, like the strange dark conjurers who sing
to snakes, and he does his trick before them, and does it again and
again.
KING.
We will often make him bring the old days back when you are gone to your
people and I am miserably wedded to the princess coming from Tharba.
EZNARZA.
They will come with sand on their feet from the golden, beautiful
desert; they will come with a long-gone sunset each one over his head.
Their lips will laugh with the olden evening voices.
From “_Plays of Gods and Men_,” by LORD DUNSANY.
IRISH MEMORIES
INTRODUCTORY
Perhaps I ought to begin by saying that I have always called her
“Martin”; I propose to do so still. I cannot think of her by any other
name. To her own family, and to certain of her friends, she is Violet;
to many others she is best known as Martin Ross. But I shall write of
her as I think of her.
* * * * *
When we first met each other we were, as we then thought, well stricken
in years. That is to say, she was a little over twenty, and I was four
years older than she. Not absolutely the earliest morning of life; say,
about half-past ten o’clock, with breakfast (and all traces of bread and
butter) cleared away.
We have said to each other at intervals since then that some day we
should have to write our memoirs; I even went so far as to prepare an
illustration--I have it still--of our probable appearances in the year
1920. (And the forecast was not a flattering one.) Well, 1920 has not
arrived yet, but it has moved into the circle of possibilities; 1917 has
come, and Martin has gone, and I am left alone to write the memoirs,
with such a feeling of inadequacy as does not often, I hope, beset the
historian.
These vagrant memories do not pretend to regard themselves as
biography, autobiography, as anything serious or valuable. Martin and I
were not accustomed to take ourselves seriously, and if what I may
remember has any value, it will be the value that there must be in a
record, however unworthy, of so rare and sunny a spirit as hers, and
also, perhaps, in the preservation of a phase of Irish life that is fast
disappearing. I will not attempt any plan of the path that I propose to
follow. I must trust to the caprice of memory, supplemented by the
diaries that we have kept with the intermittent conscientiousness proper
to such. To keep a diary, in any degree, implies a certain share of
industry, of persistence, even of imagination. Let us leave it at that.
The diaries will not be brought into court.
CHAPTER I
THE MARTINS OF ROSS
A few years ago Martin wrote an account of her eldest brother, Robert,
known and loved by a very wide circle outside his own family as
“Ballyhooley.” He died in September, 1905, and in the following spring,
one of his many friends, Sir Henniker Heaton, wrote to my cousin and
begged her to help him in compiling a book that should be a memorial of
Robert, of his life, his writings, and of his very distinguished and
valuable political work as a speaker and writer in the Unionist cause.
Sir Henniker Heaton died, and the project unfortunately fell through,
but not before my cousin had written an account of Robert, and,
incidentally, a history of Ross and the Martins which is in itself so
interesting, and that, indirectly, accounts for so many of her own
characteristics, that, although much that she had meant to write remains
unaccomplished, I propose, unfinished though it is, to make it the
foremost chapter in these idle and straying recollections.
AN ACCOUNT OF ROBERT JASPER MARTIN, OF ROSS. BY “MARTIN ROSS”
PART I
My brother Robert’s life began with the epoch that has changed the face
and the heart of Ireland. It ended untimely, in strange accord with the
close of that epoch; the ship has sunk, and he has gone down with it.
He was born on June 17th, 1846, the first year of the Irish famine, when
Ireland brimmed with a potato-fed population, and had not as yet
discovered America. The quietness of untroubled centuries lay like a
spell on Connemara, the country of his ancestors; the old ways of life
were unquestioned at Ross, and my father went and came among his people
in an intimacy as native as the soft air they breathed. On the crowded
estate the old routine of potato planting and turf cutting was pursued
tranquilly; the people intermarried and subdivided their holdings; few
could read, and many could not speak English. All were known to the
Master, and he was known and understood by them, as the old Galway
people knew and understood; and the subdivisions of the land were
permitted, and the arrears of rent were given time, or taken in
boat-loads of turf, or worked off by day-labour, and eviction was
unheard of. It was give and take, with the personal element always warm
in it: as a system it was probably quite uneconomic, but the hand of
affection held it together, and the tradition of centuries was at its
back.
The intimate relations of landlord and tenant were an old story at Ross.
It was in the days of Queen Elizabeth that they began, when the
Anglo-Norman families, known as the Tribes of Galway, still in the high
summer of their singular and romantic prosperity, began to contemplate
existence as being possible outside the walls of Galway Town, and by
purchase or by conquest acquired many lands in the county. They had
lived for three or four centuries in the town, self-sufficing, clannish
and rich; they did not forget the days of Strong-Bow, who, in the time
of Henry II, began the settlement of Galway, nor yet the leadership of
De Burgho, and they maintained their isolation, and married and
intermarried in inveterate exclusiveness, until, in the time of Henry
VIII, relationship was so close and intricate that marriages were not
easy. They rang the changes on Christian names, Nicholas, Dominick,
Robert, Andrew; they built great houses of the grey Galway limestone,
with the Spanish courtyards and deep archways that they learned from
their intercourse with Spain, and they carved their coats of arms upon
them in that indomitable family pride that is an asset of immense value
in the history of a country. Even now, the shop-fronts of Galway carry
the symbols of chivalry above their doors, and battered shields and
quarterings look strangely down from their places in the ancient walls
upon the customers that pass in beneath them.
It was in the sixteenth century that Robert Martin, one of the long and
powerful line of High Sheriffs and Mayors of Galway, became possessed of
a large amount of land in West Galway, and in 1590 Ross was his country
place. From this point the Martins began slowly to assimilate West
Galway; Ross, Dangan, Birch Hall, and Ballinahinch, marked their
progress, until Ballinahinch, youngest and greatest of the family
strongholds, had gathered to itself nearly 200,000 acres of Connemara.
It fell, tragically, from the hand of its last owner, Mary Martin,
Princess of Connemara, in the time of the Famine, and that page of
Martin history is closed in Galway, though the descendants of her
grandfather, “Humanity Dick” (for ever to be had in honourable
remembrance as the author of “Martin’s Act for the Prevention of Cruelty
to Animals”), have kept alive the old name of Ballinahinch, and have
opened a new and notable record for themselves in Canada.
Of Dangan, the postern gate by the Galway river remains; of Birch Hall,
the ruins of a courtyard and of a manorial dove-cot; Ross, the first
outpost, nurse of many generations of Martins, still stands by its lake
and looks across it to its old neighbour, the brown mountain, Croagh
Keenan.
Through a line of Jaspers, Nicholases and Roberts, the story of Ross
moved prosperously on from Robert of Elizabeth’s times, untouched even
by the hand of Cromwell, unshaken even when the gates of Galway, twelve
miles away, opened at length to Ireton. Beyond the town of Galway, the
Cromwellian did not set his foot; Connemara was a dark and barren
country, and the Martins, Roman Catholic and Royalists to the core, as
were all the other Tribes of Galway, held the key of the road.
From that conflict Ross emerged, minus most of its possessions in Galway
town and suburbs; after the Restoration they were restored by the Decree
of Charles II, but remained nevertheless in the hands of those to whom
they had been apportioned as spoil. The many links that had bound Ross
to Galway Town seem thenceforward to have been severed; during the
eighteenth century the life of its owners was that of their
surroundings, peaceful for the most part, and intricately bound up with
that of their tenants. They were still Roman Catholic and Jacobite--a
kinsman of Dangan was an agent for Charles Edward--and each generation
provided several priests for its Church. With my great-grandfather,
Nicholas, came the change of creed; he became a Protestant in order to
marry a Protestant neighbour, Miss Elizabeth O’Hara, of Lenaboy; where
an affair of the heart was concerned, he was not the man to stick at
what he perhaps considered to be a trifle. It is said that at the end of
his long life his early training asserted itself, and drew him again
towards the Church of his fathers; it is certainly probable that he
died, as he was born, a son of Rome.
But the die had been cast. His six children were born and bred
Protestants. Strong in all ways, they were strong Protestants, and Low
Church, according to the fashion of their time, yet they lived in an
entirely Roman Catholic district without religious friction of any kind.
It was during the life of Nicholas, my great-grandfather, that Ross
House was burned down; with much loss, it is believed, of plate and
pictures; it had a tower, and stood beautifully on a point in the lake.
He replaced it by the present house, built about the year 1777, whose
architecture is not æsthetically to his credit; it is a tall, unlovely
block, of great solidity, with kitchen premises half underground, and
the whole surrounded by a wide and deep area. It suggests the idea of
defence, which was probably not absent from the builder’s mind, yet the
Rebellion of twenty years later did not put it to the test. In the great
storm of 1839, still known as “The Big Wind,” my grandfather gathered
the whole household into the kitchen for safety, and, looking up at its
heavily-vaulted ceiling, said that if Ross fell, not a house in Ireland
would stand that night. Many fell, but Ross House stood the assault,
even though the lawn was white with the spray borne in from the
Atlantic, six miles away. It has at least two fine rooms, a lofty
well-staircase, with balusters of mahogany, taken out of a wreck, and it
takes all day the sun into its heart, looking west and south, with tall
windows, over lake and mountain. It is said that a man is never in love
till he is in love with a plain woman, and in spite of draughts, of
exhausting flights of stairs, of chimneys that are the despair of
sweeps, it has held the affection of five generations of Martins.
A dark limestone slab, over the dining-room chimney-piece, bears the
coat of arms--“a Calvary Cross, between the Sun in splendour on the
dexter limb, and the Moon in crescent on the sinister of the second”--to
quote the official description. The crest is a six-pointed star, and the
motto, “Sic itur ad astra,” connects with the single-minded simplicity
of the Crusader, the Cross of our faith with the Star of our hope. In
the book of pedigrees at Dublin Castle it is stated that the arms were
given by Richard Cœur de Lion to Oliver Martin, in the Holy Land; a
further family tradition says that Oliver Martin shared Richard’s
captivity in Austria. The stone on which the arms are carved came
originally from an old house in Galway; it has the name of Robuck Martin
below, and the date 1649 above. It is one of several now lying at Ross,
resembling the lintels of doorways, and engraved with the arms of
various Martins and their wives.
The Protestantism of my grandfather, Robert, did not deter him from
marrying a Roman Catholic, Miss Mary Ann Blakeney, of Bally Ellen, Co.
Carlow, one of three beauties known in Carlow and Waterford as “The
Three Marys.” As in most of the acts of his prudent and long-headed
life, he did not do wrong. Her four children were brought up as
Protestants, but the rites of her Church were celebrated at Ross without
let or hindrance; my brother Robert could remember listening at the
drawing-room door to the chanting of the Mass inside, and prayers were
held daily by her for the servants, all of whom, then as now, were Roman
Catholics.
“Hadn’t I the divil’s own luck,” groaned a stable-boy, stuffing his pipe
into his pocket as the prayer-bell clanged, “that I didn’t tell the
Misthress I was a Protestant!”
[Illustration: ROSS HOUSE, CO. GALWAY.
(_Inset_) _The Martin Coat of Arms._]
She lived till 1855, a hale, quiet, and singularly handsome woman,
possessed of the fortunate gift of living in amity under the same roof
with the many and various relations-in-law who regarded Ross as their
home. Family feeling was almost a religious tenet with my grandfather,
and in this, as in other things, he lived up to his theories. Shrewd and
patient, and absolutely proficient in the affairs of his property, he
could take a long look ahead, even when the Irish Famine lay like a
black fog upon all things; and when he gave up his management of the
estate there was not a debt upon it. One of his sayings is so unexpected
in a man of his time as to be worth repeating. “If a man kicks me I
suppose I must take notice of that,” he said when reminded of some
fancied affront to himself, “short of that, we needn’t trouble ourselves
about it.” He had the family liking for a horse; it is recorded that in
a dealer’s yard in Dublin he mounted a refractory animal, in his frock
coat and tall hat, got him out of the yard, and took him round St.
Stephen’s Green at a gallop, through the traffic, laying into him with
his umbrella. He was once, in Dublin, induced to go to an oratorio, and
bore it for some time in silence, till the choir reiterated the theme,
“Go forth, ye sons of Aaron! Go!” “Begad, here goes!” said my
grandfather, rising and leaving the hall.
My father, James, was born in 1804, and grew up endowed, as many still
testify, with good looks and the peculiarly genial and polished manner
that seemed to be an attribute of the Galway gentlemen of his time. He
had also a gift with his pen that was afterwards to serve him well, but
the business capacity of his father was strangely absent from the
character of an otherwise able man. He took his degree at Trinity
College, Dublin, and was intended for the Bar, but almost before his
dinners were eaten he was immersed in other affairs. He was but little
over twenty when he married Miss Anne Higinbotham. It was a very happy
marriage; he and his wife, and the four daughters who were born to them,
lived in his father’s house at Ross, according to the patriarchal custom
of the time, and my father abandoned the Bar, and lived then, as always,
the healthy country life that he delighted in. He shot woodcock with the
skill that was essential in the days of muzzle-loaders, and pulled a
good oar in his father’s boat at the regattas of Lough Corrib and Lough
Mask, as various silver cups still testify. I remember seeing him, a
straight and spare man, well on in his sixth decade, take a racing spin
with my brothers on Ross Lake, and though his stroke was pronounced by
the younger generation to be old-fashioned, and a trifle stiff, he held
his own with them. Robert has often told me that when they walked the
grouse mountains together, his father could, at the end of the day, face
a hill better than he, with all his equipment of youth and athleticism.
Among the silver cups at Ross was a two-handled one, that often
fascinated our childhood, with the inscription:
“FROM HENRY ADAIR OF LOUGHANMORE, TO
JAMES MARTIN OF ROSS.”
It was given to my father in memory of a duel in which he had acted as
second, to Henry Adair, who was a kinsman of his first wife.
My father’s first wife had no son; she died at the birth of a daughter,
and her loss was deep and grievous to her husband. Her four daughters
grew up, very good-looking and very agreeable, and were married when
still in their teens. Their husbands all came from the County Antrim,
and two of them were brothers. Barklie, Callwell, McCalmont, Barton,
are well-known names in Ireland to-day, and beyond it, and the children
of his four elder sisters are bound to my brother Robert’s life by links
of long intimacy and profound affection.
The aim of the foregoing _résumé_ of family history has been to put
forward only such things as seem to have been determining in the
environment and heritage to which Robert was born. The chivalrous past
of Galway, the close intimacy with the people, the loyalty to family
ties, were the traditions among which he was bred; the Protestant
instinct, and a tolerance for the sister religion, born of sympathy and
personal respect, had preceded him for two generations, and a store of
shrewd humour and common sense had been laid by in the family for the
younger generation to profit by if they wished.
My father was a widower of forty when he first met his second wife, Miss
Anna Selina Fox, in Dublin. She was then two and twenty, a slender girl,
of the type known in those days as elegant, and with a mind divided in
allegiance between outdoor amusements and the Latin poets. Her father,
Charles Fox, of New Park, Co. Longford, was a barrister, and was son of
Justice Fox, of the Court of Common Pleas. He married Katherine,
daughter of Chief Justice Bushe, and died while still a young man; his
children were brought up at Kilmurrey, the house of their mother’s
father.
The career of the Right Honourable Charles Kendal Bushe, Chief Justice
of Ireland, is a public one, and need not here be dwelt upon; but even
at this distance of time it thrills the hearts of his descendants to
remember his lofty indifference to every voice save those of conscience
and patriotism, when, in the Irish House of Commons, he opposed the Act
of Union with all the noble gift of language that won for him the name
“Silver-tongued Bushe,” and left the walls ringing with the reiterated
entreaty, “I ask you, gentlemen, will you give up your country!”
His attitude then and afterwards cost him the peerage that would
otherwise have been his; but above the accident of distinction, and
beyond all gainsaying, is the fact that in the list of influential
Irishmen made before the Union, with their probable prices (as
supporters of the Act) set over against them, the one word following the
name of Charles Kendal Bushe is “Incorruptible.”
His private life rang true to his public utterances; culture and charm,
and a swift and delightful wit, made his memory a fetish to those who
lived under his roof. My mother’s early life moved as if to the music of
a minuet. She learned Latin with a tutor, she studied the guitar, she
sat in the old-fashioned drawing-room at Kilmurrey while “The Chief”
read aloud Shakespeare, or the latest novel of Sir Walter Scott; she
wrote, at eight years old, verses of smooth and virtuous precocity; at
seventeen she translated into creditable verse, in the metre beloved of
Pope, a Latin poem by Lord Wellesley, the then Viceroy, and received
from him a volume in which it was included, with an inscription no less
stately than the binding. In her outdoor life she was what, in those
decorous days, was called a “Tomboy,” and the physical courage of her
youth remained her distinguishing characteristic through life. Like the
lilies of the field, she toiled not, neither did she spin, yet I have
never known a more feminine character.
It was from her that her eldest son derived the highly strung
temperament, the unconscious keenness of observation that was only
stimulated by the short sight common to them both, the gift of rapid
versifying, and a deftness and brilliance in epigram and repartee that
came to both in lineal descent from “The Chief.” An instance of Robert’s
quickness in retort occurs to me, and I will give it here. It happened
that he was being examined in a land case connected with Ross. The
solicitor for the other side objected to the evidence that he gave, as
relating to affairs that occurred before he was born, and described it
as “hearsay evidence.”
“Well, for the matter of that, the fact that I was born is one that I
have only on hearsay evidence!” said Robert unanswerably.
My mother first met my father at the house of her uncle, Mr. Arthur
Bushe, in Dublin. She met him again at a ball given by Kildare Street
Club; they had in common the love of the classics and the love of
outdoor life; his handsome face, his attractiveness, have been so often
dwelt on by those who knew him at that time, that the mention of them
here may be forgiven. In March, 1844, they were married in Dublin, and a
month later their carriage was met a couple of miles from Ross by the
tenants, and was drawn home by them, while the bonfires blazed at the
gates and at the hall door, and the bagpipes squealed their welcome.
Bringing with her a great deal of energy, both social and literary, a
kicking pony, and a profound ignorance of household affairs, my mother
entered upon her long career at Ross. That her sister-in-law, Marian
Martin, held the reins of office was fortunate for all that composite
establishment; when, later on, my mother took them in her delicate,
impatient hands, she held the strictly logical conviction that a sheep
possessed four “legs of mutton,” and she has shown me a rustic seat,
hidden deep in laurels, where she was wont to hide when, as she said,
“they came to look for me, to ask what was to be for the servants’
dinner.”
For the first year of her married life tranquillity reigned in house and
estate; a daughter was born, and was accepted with fortitude by an
establishment already well equipped in that respect. But a darker
possibility than the want of an heir arose suddenly and engrossed all
minds.
In July, 1845, my father drove to the Assizes in Galway, twelve and a
half English miles away, and as he drove he looked with a knowledgeable
eye at the plots of potatoes lying thick and green on either side of the
road, and thought that he had seldom seen a richer crop. He slept in
Galway that night, and next day as he drove home the smell of the
potato-blight was heavy in the air, a new and nauseous smell. It was the
first breath of the Irish famine. The succeeding months brought the
catastrophe, somewhat limited in that first winter, a blow to startle,
even to stun, but not a death-stroke. Optimistically the people flung
their thoughts forward to the next crop, and bore the pinch of the
winter with spasmodic and mismanaged help from the Government, with
help, lesser in degree, but more direct, from their landlords.
In was in the following summer of stress and hope that my brother Robert
was born, in Dublin, the first son in the Martin family for forty-two
years, and the welcome accorded to him was what might have been
expected. The doctor was kissed by every woman in the house, so he
assured my brother many years afterwards, and, late at night as it was,
my father went down to Kildare Street Club to find some friend to whom
he could tell the news (and there is a touch of appropriateness in the
fact that the Club, that for so many years was a home for Robert, had
the first news of his birth).
Radiant with her achievement my mother posted over the long roads to
Ross, in the summer weather, with her precious first-born son, and the
welcome of Ross was poured forth upon her. The workmen in the yard
kissed the baby’s hands, the old women came from the mountains to
prophesy and to bless and to perform the dreadful rite of spitting upon
the child, for luck. My father’s mother, honourable as was her wont
towards her husband’s and son’s religion, asked my mother if a little
holy water might be sprinkled on the baby.
“If you heat it you may give him a bath in it!” replied the baby’s
mother, with irrepressible lightheartedness.
It may be taken for granted that he received, as we all did, secret
baptism at the hands of the priest. It was a kindly precaution taken by
our foster mothers, who were, it is needless to say, Roman Catholics; it
gave them peace of mind in the matter of the foster children whom they
worshipped, and my father and mother made no inquiries. Their Low Church
training did not interfere with their common sense, nor did it blind
them to the devotion that craved for the safeguard.
A month or two later the cold fear for the safety of the potatoes fell
again upon the people; the paralysing certainty followed. The green
stalks blackened, the potatoes turned to black slime, and the avalanche
of starvation, fever and death fell upon the country. It was in the
winter of 1847, “the black ’47,” as they called it, when Robert was in
his second year, that the horror was at its worst, and before hope had
kindled again his ears must have known with their first understanding
the weak voice of hunger and the moan of illness among the despairing
creatures who flocked for aid into the yard and the long downstairs
passages of Ross. Many stories of that time remain among the old
tenants; of the corpses buried where they fell by the roadside, near
Ross Gate; of the coffins made of loose boards tied round with a hay
rope. None, perhaps, is more pitiful than that of a woman who walked
fifteen miles across a desolate moor, with a child in her arms and a
child by her side, to get the relief that she heard was to be had at
Ross. Before she reached the house the child in her arms was dead; she
carried it into the kitchen and sank on the flags. When my aunt spoke to
her she found that she had gone mad; reason had stopped in that whelming
hour, like the watch of a drowned man.
A soup-kitchen was established by my father and mother at one of the
gates of Ross; the cattle that the people could not feed were bought
from them, and boiled down, and the gates were locked to keep back the
crowd that pressed for the ration. Without rents, with poor rate at
22_s._ 6_d._ in the pound, the household of Ross staggered through the
intimidating years, with the starving tenants hanging, as it were, upon
its skirts, impossible to feed, impossible to see unfed. The rapid pens
of my father and mother sent the story far; some of the great tide of
help that flowed into Ireland came to them; the English Quakers loaded a
ship with provisions and sent them to Galway Bay. Hunger was in some
degree dealt with, but the Famine fever remained undefeated. My aunt,
Marian Martin (afterwards Mrs. Arthur Bushe), caught it in a school that
she had got together on the estate, where she herself taught little
girls to read and write and knit, and kept them alive with breakfasts of
oatmeal porridge. My aunt has told me how, as she lay in the blind
trance of the fever, my grandfather, who believed implicitly in his own
medical skill, opened a vein in her arm and bled her. The relief,
according to her account, was instant and exquisite, and her recovery
set in from that hour. She may have owed much to the determination of
the Martins of that period that they would not be ill. My mother,
herself a daring rebel against the thraldom of illness, used to say that
at Ross no one was ill till they were dead, and no one was dead till
they were buried. It was the Christian Science of a tough-grained
generation.
The little girls whom my aunt taught are old women now, courteous in
manner, cultivated in speech, thanks to the education that was given
them when National Schools were not.
Our kinsman, Thomas Martin of Ballinahinch, fell a victim to the Famine
fever, caught in the Courthouse while discharging his duties as a
magistrate. He was buried in Galway, forty miles by road from
Ballinahinch, and his funeral, followed by his tenants, was two hours in
passing Ross Gate. In the words of A. M. Sullivan, “No adequate tribute
has ever been paid to those Irish landlords--and they were men of every
party and creed--who perished, martyrs to duty, in that awful time; who
did not fly the plague-reeking workhouse, or fever-tainted court.”
Amongst them he singled out for mention Mr. Martin of Ballinahinch, and
Mr. Nolan of Ballinderry (father of Colonel Nolan, M.P.), the latter of
whom died of typhus caught in Tuam Workhouse.
When Robert was three years old, the new seed potatoes began to resist
the blight; he was nearly seven before the victory was complete, and by
that time the cards that he must play had already been dealt to him.
PART II
The Famine yielded like the ice of the Northern Seas; it ran like melted
snows in the veins of Ireland for many years afterwards. Landlords who
had escaped ruin at the time were more slowly ruined as time went on
and the money borrowed in the hour of need exacted its toll; Ross held
its ground, with what stress its owners best knew. It was in those
difficult years of Robert’s boyhood, when yet more brothers and sisters
continued to arrive rapidly, that his father began to write for the
Press. He contributed leading articles to the _Morning Herald_, a London
paper, now extinct; he went to London and lived the life that the
writing of leading articles entails, with its long waiting for the
telegrams, and its small-hour suppers, and it told on the health of a
man whose heart had been left behind him in the West. It tided over the
evil time, it brought him into notice with the Conservative Party and
the Irish Government, and probably gained for him subsequently his
appointment of Poor Law Auditor.
His style in writing is quite unlike that of his eldest son; it is more
rigid, less flowing; the sentences are short and pointed, evidently
modelled on the rhythmic hammer-stroke of Macaulay; it has not the
careless and sunshiny ease with which Robert achieved his best at the
first attempt. That facility and versification that is akin to the gift
of music, and, like it, is inborn, came from my mother, and came to him
alone of his eight brothers and sisters; in her letters to her children
she dropped into doggerel verse without an effort, rhymes and metres
were in her blood, and to the last year of her life she never failed to
criticise occasional and quite insignificant roughnesses in her son’s
poems. Of her own polished and musical style one verse in illustration
may be given.
“In the fond visions of the silent night,
I dreamt thy love, thy long sought love, was won;
Was it a dream, that vision of delight--?
I woke; ’twas but a dream, let me dream on!”
Robert was a nervous, warm-hearted boy, dark-eyed and romantic-looking;
the sensitive nature that expanded to affection was always his, and made
him cling to those who were kind to him. The vigorous and outdoor life
of Ross was the best tonic for such a nature, the large and healthful
intimacy with lake and woods, bog and wild weather, and shooting and
rowing, learned unconsciously from a father who delighted in them, and a
mother who knew no fear for herself and had little for her children.
Everything in those early days of his was large and vigorous; tall trees
to climb, great winds across the lake to wrestle with, strenuous and
capable talk upstairs and downstairs, in front of furnaces of turf and
logs, long drives, and the big Galway welcome at the end of them. One
day was like another, yet no day was monotonous. Prayers followed
breakfast, long prayers, beginning with the Psalms, of which each child
read a verse in due order of seniority; then First and Second Lessons,
frequently a chapter from a religious treatise, finally a prayer, from a
work named “The Tent and Altar,” all read with excellent emphasis by the
master of the house. In later years, after Robert had matriculated at
Trinity College, I remember with what youthful austerity he read prayers
at Ross, and with what awe we saw him reject “The Tent and Altar” and
heard him recite from memory the Morning Prayers from the Church
Service. He was at the same time deputed to teach Old Testament history
to his brothers and sisters; to this hour the Judges of Israel are
painfully stamped on my brain, as is the tearful morning when the Bible
was hurled at my inattentive head by the hand of the remorseless elder
brother.
Robert’s early schoolroom work at Ross was got through with the ease
that may be imagined by anyone who has known his quickness in
assimilating ideas and his cast-iron memory. As was the case with all
the Ross children, the real interests of the day were with the workmen
and the animals. The agreeability of the Galway peasant was enthralling;
even to a child; the dogs were held in even higher esteem. Throughout
Robert’s life dogs knew him as their friend; skilled in the lore of the
affections, they recognised his gentle heart, and the devotion to him of
his Gordon setter, Rose, is a thing to remember. Even of late years I
have seen him hurry away when his sterner sisters thought it necessary
to chastise an offending dog; the suffering of others was almost too
keenly understood by him.
Reading aloud rounded off the close of those early days at Ross,
Shakespeare and Walter Scott, Napier and Miss Edgeworth; the foundation
of literary culture was well and truly laid, and laid with respect and
enthusiasm, so that what the boy’s mind did not grasp was stored up for
his later understanding, among things to be venerated, and fine diction
and choice phrase were imprinted upon an ear that was ever retentive of
music. Everyone who remembers his childhood remembers him singing songs
and playing the piano. His ear was singularly quick, and I think it was
impossible for him to sing out of tune. He learned his notes in the
schoolroom, but his musical education was dropped when he went to
school, as is frequently the case; throughout his life he accompanied
himself on the piano by ear, with ease, if with limitations; simple as
the accompaniments were, there was never a false note, and it seemed as
if his hands fell on the right places without an effort.
A strange feature in his early education and in the establishment at
Ross was James Tucker, an ex-hedge schoolmaster, whose long face, blue
shaven chin, shabby black clothes, and gift for poetry have passed
inextricably into the annals of the household. He entered it first at
the time of the Famine, ostensibly to give temporary help in the
management and accounts of the school which my aunt Marian had started
for the tenants’ children; he remained for many years, and filled many
important posts. He taught us the three R’s with rigour and
perseverance, he wrote odes for our birthdays, he was
controller-in-chief of the dairy; later on, when my father received the
appointment of Auditor of Poor Law, under the Local Government Board,
Tucker filled in the blue “abstracts” of the Auditor’s work in admirably
neat columns. Robert’s recital of the multiplication table was often
interrupted by wails for “Misther Tucker” and the key of the dairy, from
the kitchenmaid at the foot of the schoolroom stairs, and the
interruption was freely cursed, in a vindictive whisper, by the
schoolmaster. Tucker was slightly eccentric, a feature for which there
was always toleration and room at Ross; he entered largely into the
schoolroom theatricals that sprang up as soon as Robert was old enough
to whip up a company from the ranks of his brothers and sisters. The
first of which there is any record is the tragedy of “Bluebeard,”
adapted by him at the age of eight. As the author did not feel equal to
writing it down, it was taught to the actors by word of mouth, he
himself taking the title _rôle_. The performance took place privately in
the schoolroom, an apartment discreetly placed by the authorities in a
wing known as “The Offices,” beyond ken or call of the house proper.
Tucker was stage manager, every servant in the house was commandeered as
audience. The play met with much acceptance up to the point when
Bluebeard dragged Fatima (a shrieking sister) round the room by her
hair, belabouring her with a wooden sword, amid the ecstatic yells of
the spectators, but at this juncture the mistress of the house
interrupted the revels with paralysing suddenness. She had in vain rung
the drawing-room bell for tea, she had searched and found the house
mysteriously silent and empty, till the plaudits of the rescue scene
drew her to the schoolroom. Players and audience broke into rout, and
Robert’s first dramatic enterprise ended in disorder, and, if I mistake
not, for the principals, untimely bed.
It was some years afterwards, when Robert was at Trinity, that a similar
effort on his part of missionary culture ended in a like disaster. He
became filled with the idea of getting up a cricket team at Ross, and in
a summer vacation he collected his eleven, taught them to hold a bat,
and harangued them eloquently on the laws of the game. It was
unfortunate that its rules became mixed up in the minds of the players
with a game of their own, called “Burnt Ball,” which closely resembles
“Rounders,” and is played with a large, soft ball. In the first day of
cricket things progressed slowly, and the unconverted might have been
forgiven for finding the entertainment a trifle dull. A batsman at
length hit a ball and ran. It was fielded by cover-point, who, bored by
long inaction, had waited impatiently for his chance. In the enthusiasm
of at length getting something to do, the recently learned laws of
cricket were swept from the mind of cover-point, and the rules of Burnt
Ball instantly reasserted themselves. He hurled the ball at the batsman,
shouting: “Go out! You’re burnt!” and smote him heavily on the head.
The batsman went out, that is to say, he picked himself up and tottered
from the fire zone, and neither then nor subsequently did cricket
prosper at Ross.
Then, and always, Robert shared his enthusiasm with others; he gave
himself to his surroundings, whether people or things, and, as
afterwards, it was preferably people. He had the gift of living in the
present and living every moment of it; it might have been of him that
Carlyle said, “Happy men live in the present, for its bounty suffices,
and wise men too, for they know its value.”
Throughout Robert’s school and college days theatricals, charades, and
living pictures, written or arranged by him, continued to flourish at
Ross. There remains in my memory a play, got up by him when he was about
seventeen, in which he himself, despising the powers of his sisters,
took the part of the heroine, with the invaluable Tucker as the lover. A
tarletan dress was commandeered from the largest of the sisterhood, and
in it, at the crisis of the play, he endeavoured to elope with Tucker
over a clothes-horse, draped in a curtain. It was at this point that the
tarletan dress, tried beyond its strength, split down the back from neck
to waist; the heroine flung her lover from her, and backed off the stage
with her front turned firmly to the audience, and the elopement was
deferred _sine die_.
Those were light-hearted days, yet they were indelible in Robert’s
memory, and the strength and savour of the old Galway times were in them
as inextricably as the smell of the turf smoke and the bog myrtle.
Nothing was conventional or stagnant, things were done on the spur of
the moment, and with a total disregard for pomps and vanities, and
everyone preferred good fun to a punctual dinner. Mingling with all were
the poor people, with their cleverness, their good manners, and their
unflagging spirits; I can see before me the carpenter painting a boat by
the old boat quay, and Robert sitting on a rock, and talking to him for
long tracts of the hot afternoon. At another time one could see Robert
holding, with the utmost zeal and discrimination, a court of arbitration
in the coach-house for the settling of an intricate and vociferous
dispute between two of the tenants.
Life at Ross was of the traditional Irish kind, with many retainers at
low wages, which works out as a costly establishment with nothing to
show for it. A sheep a week and a cow a month were supplied by the farm,
and assimilated by the household; it seemed as if with the farm produce,
the abundance of dairy cows, the packed turf house, the fallen timber
ready to be cut up, the fruitful garden, the game and the trout, there
should have been affluence. But after all these followed the Saturday
night labour bill, and the fact remains, as many Irish landlords can
testify, that these free fruits of the earth are heavily paid for, that
convenience is mistaken for economy, and that farming is, for the
average gentleman, more of an occupation than an income.
The Famine had left its legacy of debt and a lowered rental, and further
hindrances to the financial success of farm and estate were the
preoccupation of my father’s life with his work as Auditor of Poor Law
Unions, the enormous household waste that took toll of everything, and,
last and most inveterate of all, my father’s generous and soft-hearted
disposition.
One instance will give, in a few sentences, the relation between
landlord and tenant, which, as it would seem, all recent legislation has
sedulously schemed to destroy. I give it in the words of one of the
tenants, widow of an eye-witness.
“The widow A., down by the lake-side” (Lough Corrib--about three miles
away), “was very poor one time, and she was a good while in arrears with
her rent. The Master sent to her two or three times, and in the end he
walked down himself after his breakfast, and he took Thady” (the
steward) “with him. Well, when he went into the house, she was so proud
to see him, and ‘Your Honour is welcome!’ says she, and she put a chair
for him. He didn’t sit down at all, but he was standing up there with
his back to the dresser, and the children were sitting down one side the
fire. The tears came from the Master’s eyes; Thady seen them fall down
the cheek. ‘Say no more about the rent,’ says the Master, to her, ‘you
need say no more about it till I come to you again.’ Well, it was the
next winter the men were working in Gurthnamuckla, and Thady with them,
and the Master came to the wall of the field and a letter in his hand,
and he called Thady over to him. What had he to show him but the Widow
A.’s rent that her brother in America sent her!”
It will not happen again; it belongs to an almost forgotten _régime_,
that was capable of abuse, yet capable too of summoning forth the best
impulses of Irish hearts. The end of that _régime_ was not far away, and
the beginning of the end was already on the horizon of Ross.
My grandfather, whose peculiar capacity might once have saved the
financial situation, had fallen into a species of second childhood. He
died at Ross, and I remember the cold thrill of terror with which I
heard him “keened” by an old tenant, a widow, who asked permission to
see him as he lay dead. She went into the twilit room, and suddenly the
tremendous and sustained wail went through the house, like the voice of
the grave itself.
It seemed as if Ross had borne a charmed life during the troubles of
the later ’sixties. The Fenian rising of 1867 did not touch it; the
flicker of it was like sheet lightning in the Eastern sky, but the storm
passed almost unheard. It had been so in previous risings; Ross seemed
to be geographically intended for peace. It is bounded on the east by
the long waters of Lough Corrib, on the west by barren mountains,
stretching to the Atlantic, on the north by the great silences of
Connemara. Within these boundaries the mutual dependence of landlord and
tenant remained unshaken; it was a delicate relation, almost akin to
matrimony, and like a happy marriage, it needed that both sides should
be good fellows. The Disestablishment of the Irish Church came in 1869,
a direct blow at Protestantism, and an equally direct tax upon landlords
for the support of their Church, but of this revolution the tenants
appeared to be unaware. In 1870 came Gladstone’s Land Act, which by a
system of fines shielded the tenant to a great extent from “capricious
eviction.” As evictions, capricious or otherwise, did not occur at Ross,
this section of the Act was not of epoch-making importance there; its
other provision, by which tenants became proprietors of their own
improvements, was also something of a superfluity. It was 1872 that
brought the first cold plunge into Irish politics of the new kind.
In February of that year Captain Trench, son of Lord Clancarty,
contested one of the divisions of County Galway in the Conservative
interest, his opponent being Captain Nolan, a Home Ruler. It went
without saying that my father gave his support to the Conservative, who
was also a Galway man, and the son of a friend. Up to that time it was a
matter of course that the Ross tenants voted with their landlord.
Captain Trench canvassed the Ross district, and there was no indication
of what was about to happen, or if there were, my father did not believe
it. The polling place for that part of the country was in Oughterard,
about five miles away; my father drove there on the election day, and on
the hill above the town was met by a man who advised him to turn back. A
troop of cavalry glittered in the main street and the crowd seethed
about them. My father drove on and saw a company of infantry keeping the
way for Mr. Arthur Guinness, afterwards Lord Ardilaun, as he convoyed to
the poll a handful of his tenants from Ashford at the other side of
Lough Corrib to vote for Captain Trench, he himself walking in front
with the oldest of them on his arm. During that morning my father ranged
through the crowd incredulously, asking for this or that tenant, unable
to believe that they had deserted him. It was a futile search; with a
few valiant exceptions the Ross tenants, following the example of the
rest of the constituency, voted according to the orders of their Church,
and Captain Nolan was elected by a majority of four to one. It was a
priest from another part of the diocese who gave forth the mandate, with
an extraordinary fury of hatred against the landlord side; one need not
blame the sheep who passed in a frightened huddle from one fold to
another. When my father came home that afternoon, even the youngest
child of the house could see how great had been the blow. It was not the
political defeat, severe as that was, it was the personal wound, and it
was incurable. A petition against the result of the election brought
about the famous trial in Galway, at which Judge Keogh, himself a Roman
Catholic, denounced the priestly intimidation that was established in
the mouths of many witnesses. The Ballot Act followed in June, but these
things could not soothe the wounded spirit of the men who had trusted
in their tenants.
Startlingly, the death of a Galway landlord followed on the election. He
was a Roman Catholic, and belonged to one of the oldest families in the
county; on his death-bed he desired that not one of his tenants should
touch his coffin. It was not in that spirit that my father, a few weeks
afterwards, faced the end. In March he caught cold on one of his many
journeys of inspection; he was taken ill at the Galway Club, and a slow
pleurisy followed. He lay ill for a time in Galway, and the longing for
home strengthened with every day.
“If I could hear the cawing of the Ross crows I should get well,” he
said pitifully.
He was brought home, but he was even then past hope.
Some scenes remain for ever on the memory. In the early afternoon of the
23rd of April, I looked down through the rails of the well-stair case,
and saw Robert come upstairs to his father’s room, his tall figure
almost supported on the shoulder of one of the men. All was then over,
and the last of the old order of the Landlords of Ross had gone,
murmuring,
“I am ready to meet Thee, Eternal Father!”
PART III
With the death of my father the curtain fell for ever on the old life at
Ross, the stage darkened, and the keening of the tenants as they
followed his coffin was the last music of the piece.
Two or three months afterwards the house was empty. In the blaze of the
June weather, the hall door, that had always stood open, was shut and
barred, and, in the stillness, the rabbits ventured up to the broad
limestone steps where once the talk of the house had centred in the
summer evenings. For the first time in its history Ross House was empty;
my mother and her children had embarked upon life in Dublin, and Robert,
like his father before him, had gone to London to write for the Press.
For five or six years Robert lived in London. He belonged to the Arundel
Club, where lived and moved the Bohemians of that day, the perfect and
single-hearted Bohemians, who were, perhaps, survivals of the days of
Richard Steele, and have now vanished, unable to exist in the shadeless
glare of Borough Councils. Their literary power was unquestioned, the
current of their talk was strong, with baffling swirl and eddy, and he
who plunged in it must be a resourceful and strong swimmer. Linked
inseparably with those years of London life was my mother’s cousin, W.
G. Wills, the playwright, poet and painter, who in these early
’seventies had suddenly achieved celebrity as a dramatist, with the
tragedy of “Charles I.” If a record could be discovered of the hierarchs
of the Bohemians it would open of itself at the name of Willie Wills.
Great gifts of play-writing and portrait-painting rained upon him a
reputation that he never troubled himself about; he remained unalterably
himself, and, clad in his long grey ulster, lived in his studio a life
unfettered by the clock. Of his amazing _ménage_, of the strange and
starveling hangers-on that followed him as rooks follow the plough, to
see what they could pick up, all who knew him had stories to tell. Of
the luncheons at his studio, where the beefsteak came wrapped in
newspaper, and the plates that were hopelessly dirty were thrown out of
the window; of the appointments written boldly on the wall and
straightway forgotten; the litter of canvases, the scraps of manuscript,
and among and above these incidents, the tranquillity, the charm, the
agreeability of Willie Wills.[1]
Robert has found him and my mother lunching together gloriously on
mutton chops, cooked by being flung into the heart of the fire.
“Just one more, Nannie,” said the dramatist, as Robert entered, spearing
a blazing fragment and presenting it to his boon companion with a
courtly gesture.
In the old days at Ross, Willie Wills was a frequent guest, and held the
children in thrall--as he could always ensnare and hold children--with
his exquisite story-telling. Their natural guardians withdrew with
confidence, as Willie began, with enormous gravity, the tale of “The
Little Old Woman who lived in the Dark Wood, and had one long yellow
Tooth,” and, returning after an interval, heard that “at this momentous
crisis seven dead men, in sacks, staggered into the room--!” while, in
the fateful pause that followed, the clamour of the children, “Go on,
Willie Wills!” would rise.
Robert and Willie Wills were in many aspects of character and of gifts
unlike, yet with some cousinly points in common. Both were cultivated
and literary, yet seldom read a book; both were sensitive to criticism,
and even touchingly anxious for approval; both were delightful
companions in a _tête-à-tête_. Where sympathy is joined with
imagination, and sense of humour with both, it is a combination hard to
beat. Robert regarded routine respectfully, if from afar, and sincerely
admired the efforts of those who endeavoured to systematise his
belongings. Willie Wills was superbly indifferent to surroundings, yet
took a certain pride in new clothes. The real points of resemblance were
in heart; the chivalrous desire to help the weak, and the indelible
filial instinct that glows in natures of the best sort, and marks
unfailingly a good son as a good fellow through all the nations of the
world.
Throughout these London days Robert wrote for the _Globe_ and other
papers, chiefly paragraphs and light articles, that ran from his pen
with the real enjoyment that he found in writing them at the last
moment. He seemed to do better when working against time than when he
had large days in hand and a well-ordered writing-table inviting his
presence. He found these things thoroughly uninspiring, and facilities
for correcting his work were odious to him. Proofs he never looked at;
he said he couldn’t face them; probably because of the critical power
that underlay his facility.
London with Robert in it was then, as ever, for Robert’s family, a place
with a different meaning--a place of theatre tickets, of luncheons, of
newspaper news viewed from within, of politics and actors reduced to
human personalities. It was a fixed rule that he should meet his female
relatives on their arrival at Euston; it is on record that he was once
in time, but it is also recorded that on that occasion the train was
forty minutes late. The hum of London seasons filled his brain; London
may be attractive or repellent, but it will be heard, and it made strong
music for a nature that loved the stir of men and the encounter of
minds. Four hundred miles away lay Ross in the whispering stillness of
its summer woods, and the monotony of its winter winds, producing heavy
bags of woodcock after its kind, while its master “shot folly as she
flew,” and found his game in the canards of Fleet Street and
Westminster. It was inevitable as things stood, but in that alienation
both missed much that lay in the power of each to give.
It was while Robert was living in London that the resignation of Mr.
Gladstone took place. Out of the ensuing general election in the spring
of 1873 came Isaac Butt and his lieutenants, with a party of sixty Home
Rulers behind them; Ireland had sent them instead of the dozen or so of
the previous Parliament, and it was said that Ireland had done it in the
new-found shelter of the Ballot Act. Robert knew, as anyone brought up
as he was must know, that for most of Ireland the Ballot Act could not
be a shelter. The Galway election of 1872 had shown to all in whose
hands the great power of the franchise lay. One indefensible position
had been replaced by another, feudal power by clerical, and only those
who knew Robert well, understood how hard it hit him. He shot at Ross
occasionally, he visited it now and then, and at every visit his
perceptive nature was aware that a new spirit was abroad; in spite of
the genuine and traditional feeling of the people for their old allies,
in spite of their good breeding, and their anxious desire to conceal the
rift. The separation had begun, and only those who have experienced it
will understand how strange, how wounding it is.
It was not universal, and theoretical hostility strove always with the
soft voice of memory. My father was still to all, “The Masther, the Lord
have mercy on him”; the Martins were still “The Family,” who could do no
wrong, whose defects, if such were admitted, were revered. “The Martin
family hadn’t good sight,” said a tenant, “but sure the people say that
was a proof of their nobility.”
There is an incident of one of Robert’s visits to Ross that is not too
small to be worth recording. He had given his Gordon setter, Rose, to a
friend who lived five miles away from Ross, and she had settled down
with resignation to her new life. Trained in the language of the
drawing-room, she may have heard it said that Robert was at Ross, or her
deep and inscrutable perceptions may have received a wave of warning of
his nearness. Whatever it was that prompted her, the old dog made her
way alone to Ross, and found her master there.
In 1877 Robert turned his steps again to Dublin, and before the year was
out he was living with his grandmother, and was immersed in the life,
political, theatrical and social, of Dublin.
My mother’s mother, Mrs. Fox, was, as has been said, a daughter of Chief
Justice Bushe, and was a notable member of a remarkable band of brothers
and sisters. Strongly humorous, strongly affectionate, a doughty
politician, original in every idea, and delightful in her prejudices; a
black letter authority on Shakespeare and Scott, a keen debater upon
Carlyle, upon Miss Rhoda Broughton, upon all that was worth reading. I
can see her declaiming “Henry IV” to Robert and his brethren, with
irrepressible gestures of her hand, with a big voice for Falstaff, and a
small voice for Mine Hostess, and an eye that raked the audience lest it
should waver in attentiveness. Even as clearly can I see her, as, at a
time of crisis,--it was, I think, after Gladstone’s attack on Trinity
College,--she sprang from her chair, and speechlessly wrung the hand of
someone who had rushed into her dining-room, crying,
“Gladstone has resigned!”
That was how she and her family took their politics.
She loved Robert with a touching devotion, and I think those days in
Herbert Street were deeply woven into his memory. It was a quiet street,
with a long strip of grass and hawthorns, instead of houses, forming one
side of it, part of the grounds of the convent that stood at the end.
There the birds sang, and a little convent bell spelt out the Angelus
with a friendly voice; the old red-brick house, with its old furniture
and its old china, the convent bell, with its reminder of cloistered
calm, all made a suitable setting for the strictly ordered, cultured
life of the old lady who bestowed on them their appropriateness.
In the spring of ’78 Robert was in the thick of amateur theatricals. He
was never a first-rate actor, but he was a thoroughly reliable one; he
always knew his part, though none could say how or when he learned it,
he could “gag” with confidence, and dropped on to his cue unerringly,
and he had that liking for his audience that is the shortest cut to
being on good terms with them. His gift in ready verse was not allowed
to remain idle. He wrote prologues, he arranged singing quadrilles; when
the Sheridan Club had a guest whom it delighted to honour, it was Robert
who wrote and recited the ode for the occasion; an ode that never
attempted too much, and just touched the core of the matter.
With the close of the ’seventies came the burst into the open of the
Irish Parliamentary Party, in full cry. Like hounds hunting confusedly
in covert, they had, in the hands of Isaac Butt, kept up a certain
amount of noise and excitement, keen, yet uncertain as to what game was
on foot. From 1877 it was Parnell who carried the horn, a grim,
disdainful Master, whose pack never dared to get closer to him than the
length of his thong; but he laid them on the line, and they ran it like
wolves.
Up to 1877 crops and prices were good, even remarkably so, and rents
were paid. Following that year came, like successive blows on the same
spot, three bad harvests that culminated in the disastrous season of
1879-80. It was in 1847 that the Famine broke the heart and the life of
O’Connell; it was the partial failure of the crop of ’79 and ’80 that
created Parnell’s opportunity--so masterful a factor has been the potato
in the destinies of Irishmen.
In 1879 the rents began to fail. The distress was not comparable to that
of ’47, but it brought about a revolution infinitely greater. At its
close it left the Irish tenant practically owner of his land, with a
rent fixed by Government, and the feudal link with the landlord was
broken for ever. On the Ross estate a new agent had inaugurated a new
policy, excellent in theory, abhorrent to those whom it concerned, the
“striping” of many of the holdings, in order to give to each tenant an
equal share of good and bad land. Anyone who knows the Irish tenant will
immediately understand what it means to interfere with his land, and,
above all things, to give to another tenant any part of it. It was done
nevertheless. The long lines of stone wall ran symmetrically parallel
over hill and pasture and bog, and the symmetry was hateful and the
equality bitter to those most concerned. It is probable that the
discontent sank in and prepared the way for the mischief that was
coming.
By the winter of 1879 the pinch had become severe. The tenants, by this
time two or three years in arrear, did not meet their liabilities, and
most landlords went without the greater part of their income. Robert,
among many others, began to learn what it was to be deprived of the
moderate income left to him after the charges on his estate were paid.
He never again received any.
Three Relief Funds in Dublin coped as best they could with the distress
of the Irish poor. One of them was worked with great enthusiasm and
organising power by the Duchess of Marlborough, and by every means known
to a most capable leader of Society she lured from Society of all grades
a ready “rate in aid.” Entertainments sprang up--theatricals, bazaars,
concerts--that helped the Fund and at the same time put heart into the
flagging Dublin season, and Robert was in the thick of charitable
endeavour. His first Irish song, the leader of a long line that
culminated later in “Ballyhooly,” was written at about this time, “The
Vagrants of Erin,” a swinging tune, that marched to words National
enough for any party.
“Give me your hand, if owld Ireland’s the land
From which you may chance to be farin’,”
it began, with all its author’s geniality, and the Irish audience
responded to its first chords with drowning applause. Once, as he sang
it, accompanying himself, and swinging with the tune, the music stool
began to sway in ominous accord. “First it bent, and syne it brake,” and
Robert staggered to his feet, but just in time.
“This is a pantomime song, with a breakdown in it!” he said, while the
head of the stool rolled from its broken stalk and trundled down the
stage.
He had the gift of making friends with his audience; as he came on to
the platform to sing, his air of enjoyment, his friendly eyes, even his
single eyeglass, had already done half the business. He took them, as it
were, to his bosom, and whatever might be their grade, he did his best
for them. In spite of the liberties he took with time, words and tune,
he was singularly easy to accompany, for anyone acquainted with his
methods and prepared to cast himself (it was generally herself) adrift
with him, and trust to ear instead of to book. However far afield
Robert might range, whatever stories he told, he would surely drop back
into the key and the words, like a wild duck into the water, with a just
sufficient hint to the waiting coadjutor that his circling flight was
ending. His topical songs of those early ’eighties have died, as all of
their kind must die. He wrote down nothing, the occasion is forgotten,
and the brain in which they had their being has passed from us. One or
two points and hits remain with me. In the year that Shotover won the
Oaks, a commemorating verse ended:
“Of course she was Shot over,
She’d a Cannon on her back!”
In one of the songs, the explanation of the failure of the ships _Alert_
and _Discovery_ to reach the North Pole was that “those on the Discovery
were not on the Alert.”
In spite of the thunderous political background of the early ’eighties,
in spite of the empty pockets of those dependent on Irish rents, in
spite of the crime that drew forth the Crimes Act, the fun and the
spirit were inextinguishable in Dublin.
But the political background was growing blacker, and the thunder more
loud. Gladstone’s Land Act of 1881 had not pacified Ireland, even though
it made the tenant practically owner of his land, even though the rents
were fixed by Government officials, whose mission was to coax sedition
to complacence, if not to loyalty. Ireland was falling into chaos.
Arrears of rent, Relief Committees, No Rent manifestoes, Plan of
Campaign evictions, Funds for Distressed Irish Ladies, outrages,
boycotting, and Parnell stirring the “Seething Pot” with a steady hand,
while his subordinates stoked the fire. Boycotting was responded to by
the Property Defence Association, and in 1882 Robert went forth under
its auspices as an “Emergency man.” His business was to visit the
boycotted landlords and farmers and to supply them with men--from the
North, for the most part--to do the farm work. Those who do not know
Ireland, and for whom the word boycotting has no personal associations,
can hardly realise what that dark time meant to its victims. The owners
of boycotted lands, unable to get food or necessaries of any kind from
the local tradespeople, imported supplies from England and the North,
and opened stores in their stable yards for such of the faithful as
stood firm. Ladies, totally unaccustomed to outdoor labour, saved crops
and herded cattle, matters that in themselves might have been found
interesting, if arduous, but the terror was over all, and in face of
bitter antagonism the task was too great.
It was at this work that Robert knew, for the first time, what it was to
have every man’s hand against him, to meet the stare of hatred, the
jeer, and the side-long curse; to face endless drives on outside cars,
with his revolver in his hand; to plan the uphill tussle with boycotted
crops, and cattle for which a market could scarcely be found; to know
the imminence of death, when, by accidentally choosing one of two roads,
he evaded the man with a gun who had gone out to wait for him. It taught
him much of difficult men and of tangled politics, he learned how to
make the best of a bad business, and how to fight in a corner; it made
him a proficient in Irish affairs, and it added to his opinions a
seriousness based on strong and moving points.
Gladstone had faced a dangerous Ireland with concession in one hand and
coercion in the other, and however either may go in single harness,
there is no doubt that they cannot with success be driven as a pair.
There followed the Maamtrasna murders, the extermination of the Huddy
family, the assassination in Phœnix Park of Lord Frederick Cavendish and
Mr. Burke, the attempted assassination of Judge Lawson opposite Kildare
Street Club. When Robert was entering into the deep places of his last
illness, he spoke with all his wonted grasp of details of those webs of
conspiracy. Tradesmen who came from Dublin to work in Kylemore Castle
(then the property of Mr. Mitchell Henry) infected the mind of Northern
Connemara with the idea that assassination was a fitting expression of
political opinion. The murders of the Maamtrasna district followed. The
stately mountains beheld the struggle and the slaughter, and the sweet
waters of Lough Mask closed upon the victims.
Month by month the net of conspiracy was woven, and life was the prize
played for in wonderful silence and darkness, and murder was achieved
like a victory at chess. We know how the victories were paid for. I do
not forget the face of Timothy Kelly, as he stood in the dock and was
tried for participation in the Phœnix Park murders. There is a pallor of
fear that is remembered when once seen, and to see that sick and
desperate paleness on the face of a boy of seventeen is to feel for ever
the mystery and enormity of his crime, and the equal immensity of the
punishment. Unforgettable, too, is the moment when his mother took her
seat in the witness chair to support the _alibi_ put forward on his
behalf, and looked her boy in his white and stricken face, white and
stricken as he. Yet she did not waver, and gave her evidence quietly and
collectedly.
A phrase or two from the speech for the defence has fixed itself in the
memory.
“Take the scales of Justice,” said the Counsel, with a wide gesture of
appeal towards the jury; “lift them far above the reach of passion and
prejudice, into those serener regions above where Justice herself reigns
supreme----”
Death brooded palpably over the brown and grey Court, and held the tense
faces of all in his thrall, and weighted every syllable of the speeches.
Never was the irrelevancy of murder as a political weapon made more
clear, and the fearful appropriateness of capital punishment seemed
clear too, mystery requited with mystery.
When we came into the Court we were told that the jury would disagree,
there being at least one “Invincible” on the list, and it was so. But
with the next trial the end was reached, and the trapped creature in the
dock, with the men who were his confederates, went down into the
oblivion into which they had thrust their prey.
Many years ago a mission priest delivered a sermon in Irish in the bare
white chapel that stands high on a hill above Ross Lake. I remember one
sentence, translated for me by one of the congregation.
“Oh black seas of Eternity, without height or depth, bay, brink, or
shore! How can anyone look into your depths and neglect the salvation of
his soul!”[2]
It expresses all that need now be remembered of the Phœnix Park murders.
* * * * *
CHAPTER II
“THE CHIEF”
It is a commonplace, even amounting to a bromide, to speak of the
breadth, the depth, and the length of the ties of Irish kinship. In
Ireland it is not so much Love that hath us in the net as Relationship.
Pedigree takes precedence even of politics, and in all affairs that
matter it governs unquestioned. It is sufficient to say that the
candidate for any post, in any walk of life--is “a cousin of me own, by
the Father”--“a sort of a relation o’ mine, by the Mother”--and support
of the unfittest is condoned, even justified.
I am uncertain if the practice of deifying a relationship by the
employment of the definite article is peculiar to Munster, or even to
Ireland. “The fawther,” “the a’nt.” He who speaks to me of my father as
“The Fawther,” implies a sort of humorous intimacy, a respect just
tinged with facetiousness, that is quite lacking in the severe
directness of “your father.”
There was once a high magnate of a self-satisfied provincial town (its
identity is negligible). An exhibition was presently to be held there,
and it chanced that a visit from Royalty occurred shortly before the
completion of the arrangements. It also chanced that a possible visit to
Ireland of a still greater Personage impended--(this was several years
ago). The lesser Royalty partook of lunch with the magnate, and the
latter broached the question of a State opening of the exhibition by the
august visitor to be.
“When ye go back to London, now,” he beguiled, “coax the Brother!”
How winning is the method of address! It has in it something of the
insidious coquetry of the little dog who skips, in affected artlessness,
uninvited, upon your knee.
I have strayed from my text, which was the potency of the net of
relationship. Being Irish, I have to acknowledge its spell, and I think
it is indisputable that a thread, however slender, of kinship adds a
force to friendship.
Martin’s mother and mine were first cousins, granddaughters of Chief
Justice Charles Kendal Bushe, and of his wife, Anne Crampton. I have
heard my mother assert that she had seventy first cousins, all
grandchildren of “The Chief,” but I think there was a touch of fancy
about this. There is something sounding and sumptuous about the number
seventy, and some remembrance of Ahab and his seventy relatives may have
been in it. In her memoir of her brother Robert, Martin has given some
suggestion of the remarkable charm and influence of these
great-grandparents of ours. The adoration that both of them inspired
distils like a perfume from every record of them. They seem to have
obliterated all their rival grandfathers and grandmothers. One reflects
that each of the seventy first cousins must have possessed four
grandparents, yet, in the radiance of this couple, the alternative
grandpapas and grandmammas appear to have been, in the regard of their
grandchildren, no more than shadows.
They lived in a strangely interesting time, the time of the Union, when
there was room in the upper classes for each individual to be known to
each, and the proportion of those that governed, and those that were
governed, was as the players in an international cricket match to the
lookers-on; and it is not too much to boast that, out of a very
brilliant team, there was no better innings played than that of Charles
Kendal Bushe. When, as in “the ’98,” the lookers-on attempted to join in
the game, the result exemplified their incapacity and the advantages of
the existing arrangement.
Martin had been given by her mother a boxful of old family letters; one
of those pathetic collections of letters that no one either wants, or
looks at, or feels justified in burning. I know not for how many years
they had been hidden away. We had talked, every now and then, of
examining them, but the examination had been postponed for a more
convenient season that never came. Now life is emptier, and time seems
of less value; I have read them all, and I think that some extracts from
them will not come amiss among these memories.
It would require a sounder historian than I, and one who had specialised
in Irish affairs of the latter years of the eighteenth and the beginning
of the nineteenth centuries, to deal adequately with these old papers.
The Chief Justice and his wife lived intensely, in the very heart of the
most intense time, probably, that Ireland has ever known. They knew all
the rebel leaders, Wolfe Tone, Lord Edward Fitzgerald, and the rest of
the splendid romantics who fought and died, and lit with the white flame
of devotion one page at least of Ireland’s history. The names of
Plunket, Grattan, Saurin, later, O’Connell, and others less well known,
are found in many of these letters, and there are valentines from “Jemmy
Saurin,” apostrophising “the blue eyes of Kitty” (one of the Chief’s
daughters, and grandmother of “Martin Ross”); genuine, perhaps, but more
probably faked by the young lady’s heartless relatives; anagrams upon
the name of Charles Kendal Bushe, and an epigram, written by C. K. B.
himself, which has a very charming deftness, and shall be transcribed
here.
TO CHLOE
(_To accompany the gift of a watch_)
Among our fashionable Bands,
No wonder Time should love to linger,
Allowed to place his two rude hands
Where others dare not lay a finger.
The more I investigate the contents of the old letter box the more
fascinating they prove themselves to be.
I must, at all events, endeavour to refrain from irrelevant
quotation--(even regretfully omitting “The cure for Ellen P.’s spots.
Kate writes me word her face is now as clear as chrystal”)--and will try
to deal only with such of the contents of the box as come legitimately
within my scope.
The Chief’s letters cover a wide period, from about 1795 (a couple of
years after his marriage) to 1837. One does not, perhaps, find in them
the brilliance that is associated with his name in public life and in
general society. Those from which I have made extracts were written to
his wife. Deeply woven in them is the devotion to her that was the
mainspring of his life, and in works of devotion one need not expect to
find epigram.[3]
In one of them, written in 1807, he writes from Dublin, to her, in the
country, telling her of “an unfortunate business” in which he, “without
any personal ill-will to anyone,” “found it his duty to take a part.”
He deplores that “among the Members of the Bar coldness and jealousy
prevail, where there had been the utmost harmony and unanimity.” “It is
not in my nature to like such a state of things,” he says, and, I
believe, says truly, “and when I am alone my spirits are affected by it
in a way that I wou’d not for the World confess to anyone but you. I am
told that I am libell’d in the newspapers, which I dont know for I have
not read them, and which I wou’d not care about, from the same motives
that have so often, to your knowledge, made me indifferent about being
prais’d in them.... You remember on a former trying occasion how I acted
and I can never forget the heroism with which you supported me and
encourag’d me in a conduct which was apparently ruinous in its
consequences to yourself and our darling Babies. Ever since you left
this, my mind has been agitated in the way I have described to you. I am
seven years older and my nerves twenty years older than at the period of
the Union. Judge, then, the delight I feel at the prospect of seeing
again so soon, the bosom friend dearer than all, the only person upon
whose heart I can repose my own when weary--I judge of it by the
pleasure I feel in thus unburthening myself to you, and in the
consciousness that the very writing of this letter has given me the only
warm, comfortable and confidential glow of heart which I have felt since
you left me. Adieu beloved Nan--Pray _burn_ this _immediately_” (twice
underlined) “and let no human being learn anything of those thoughts
which to you alone I wou’d communicate. Ever yours C. K. B.”
It is a hundred and more years since this injunction was written. The
paper is stained and brittle, and I think that perhaps a tear, perhaps
also a kiss or two, have contributed a little to the staining. But
though she disobeyed him I believe he has forgiven her. I hope he will
also forgive a great-granddaughter who has chanced upon this record of a
disobedience that few could blame and that any lover would extol.
Long afterwards the same thought came in nearly the same words to
another Irishman, the poet, George Darley, and he wrote those lines that
have in them the same note of whispered tenderness that still breathes
from the discoloured page of the letter that should have been burned a
hundred years ago.
“One in whose gentle bosom I
Can pour my inmost heart of woes,
Like the care-burthened honey-fly
That hides his murmurs in the rose.”
* * * * *
I have said that it was an interesting time to be alive in, this
junction of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. That the Chief’s
sympathies were, as I have already mentioned, with the men on the losing
side is very well known. In one of the early letters to his wife, he
speaks of having had “a very prosperous circuit,” and says his business
was “pretty general, not confin’d to friends or United Irishmen, tho
these latter have been no bad friends to me either.” He did not defend
their methods, but he stood by his friends, and to the end of his life
he stood by his opinions.
In a letter written by Mrs. Bushe to their son Charles, at Castlehaven,
after the death of the Chief (that is to say, forty-three years, at
least, after the Act of Union), she speaks of the chaotic state of the
country, and the ruin caused by the arbitrary and ill-considered
enforcement of the recent Poor Law legislation. “Useless however to
complain. England has the _might_ which supersedes the right, and we are
punished now for our own folly in consenting to the _Union_! Just what
your Father predicted--‘when Ireland gives up the _rights_ that she has,
what right has she then to complain?’--How true this little squib of the
poor dear C----” (Chief). “Happy for him he did not live to see the ruin
he predicted!”
The following account of a visit to Edgeworthstown forms part of a
letter, written at Omagh and dated Monday, August 16th, 1810. It is from
Chief Justice Bushe to his wife; the beginning portion of the letter is
printed in the Appendix I. (page 332).
“I am not surpriz’d that you ask about Edgeworthstown, and I can only
tell you that every thing which Smyly has often said to us in praise of
it is true and unexaggerated. Society in that house is certainly on the
best plan I have ever met with. Edgeworth is a very clever fellow of
much talent, and tho not deeply inform’d on any subject, is highly
(which is consistent with being superficially) so in all. He talks a
great deal and very pleasantly and loves to exhibit and perhaps obtrude
what he wou’d be so justifiably vain of (his daughter and her works) if
you did not trace that pride to his predominant Egotism, and see that he
admires her because she is _his_ child, and her works because they are
_his_ Grand Children. Mrs. Edgeworth is uncommonly agreeable and has
been and not long ago very pretty. She is a perfect Scholar, and at the
same time a good Mother and housewife. She is an excellent painter, like
yourself, and like you has been oblig’d by producing Originals to give
up Copying: She is you know a 5th or 6th Wife and her last child was his
22d. Two Miss Sneyds, amiable old maids, live with him. They are sisters
of one of his wives, a beautiful and celebrated Honoria Sneyd, mention’d
in Miss Seward’s Monody on Major André and known by her misfortune in
having been betroth’d to that poor fellow. They are Litchfield people
of the old literary set of the Garricks Dr. Johnson Miss Seward &c. &c.
There are many young Edgeworths male and female all of promise and
talent and all living round the same table with this set among whom I
have not yet mention’d Miss Edgeworth, because I consider you as already
knowing her from her works. In such a Society you may suppose
Conversation must be good, but I was not prepared to find it so easy. It
is the only set of the kind I ever met with in which you are neither led
nor driven, but actually fall, and that imperceptibly, into literary
topics, and I attribute it to this that in that house literature is not
a treat for Company upon Invitation days, but is actually the daily
bread of the family. Miss Edgeworth is for nothing more remarkable than
for the total absence of vanity. She seems to have studied her father’s
foibles for two purposes, to avoid them and never to appear to see them,
and what does not always happen, her want of affectation is unaffected.
She is as well bred and as well dress’d and as easy and as much like
other people as if she was not a celebrated author. No pretensions, not
a bit of blue stocking is to be discover’d. In the Conversation she
neither advances or keeps back, but mixes naturally and cheerfully in
it, and tho in the number of words she says less than anyone yet the
excellence of her remarks and the unpremeditated point which she gives
them makes you recollect her to have talk’d more than others. I was
struck by a little felicity of hers the night I was there. Shakespear
was talk’d of as he always is, and I mentioned what you have lately
heard me speak of as a literary discovery and curiosity, that he has
borrow’d the Character of Cardinal Wolsey from Campion, the old
Chronicler of Ireland. This was new to them and Edgeworth began one of
his rattles--
“‘Well Sir, and has the minute, and the laborious, and the
indefatigable, and the prying, and the investigating Malone found
this out?’
“Miss Edgeworth said, almost under her breath,
“‘It was too large for him to see!’
“Is not that good Epigram? I think it is. Edgeworth gave her the
advantage of taking her into France with his Wife and others of his
family during the short peace, and they were persons to improve
such an opportunity. Miss Edgeworth’s Madame Fleury, in the
Fashionable Tales is form’d on a true story which she learn’d
there. You will think this no description unless you know what her
figure is, and face &c. &c. I think her very good looking and can
suppose that she _was_ once pretty. Imagine Miss Wilmot at about 43
years old for such I suppose Miss E. to be, with all the
Intelligence of her Countenance perhaps encreas’d and the
Sensibility preserv’d but somewhat reduc’d, the figure very smart
and neat as it must be if like Miss W’s but some of its beautiful
redundancies retir’d upon a peace Establishment.
“Such is Miss Edgeworth but take her for all in all, there is
nothing like her to be seen, or rather to be known, for it is
impossible to be an hour in her Company without recognizing her
Talent, benevolence and worth.
“An interesting anecdote occurs to me that Edgeworth told us and
forc’d her to produce the proof of.
“Old Johnson of St. Paul’s Churchyard London has always been her
bookseller and purchas’d her Works at first experimentally and
latterly liberally. He died a few months ago and rather suddenly
and a few hours before his death he sent for his nephew to whom he
bequeath’d his property and who succeeded him in his business and
told him that he felt he had done Miss E. injustice in only giving
her £450 for Fashionable Tales and desir’d him to give her £450
more. He died that day and the next the Nephew sent her an account
of the Transaction and the £450. This story only requires to be
told by Miss E. I read the original letter.
“Adieu beloved Nan. I have scribbled very much but since I left
town I have no other opportunity of chatting to you.
“Ever your
C. K. B.”