On two or three occasions in the "NOTES AND QUERIES" instances have been
given of "Traditions from remote periods through few hands," of which it
would not be difficult to adduce numerous additional examples; but my
present purpose is to mention some within my personal experience, or
derived from authentic communication.
In 1781, and my eleventh year, a schoolfellow took me to see his
great-grandmother, a Mrs. Arthur, in Limerick, then aged one hundred and
eight years, whose recollection of that city's siege in 1691, when she
was eighteen, was perfectly fresh and unimpaired, as, indeed, she was
fond of showing by frequent and even unsolicited recurrence to its dread
scenes, in which the women, history tells us, fearlessly participated.
We are here then presented with an interval of one hundred and sixty
years between a memorable event and my recollection of its narrative by
a person actively engaged in it. The old lady's family had furnished a
greater number of chief magistrates to Limerick than any other recorded
in its annals.
Again in 1784, on a visit to my grandfather in the county of Limerick,
during a school vacation, I heard him, then in his eighty-sixth year,
say, that in 1714, on the accession to the British throne of the present
royal dynasty, he heard in Cork, where he was at school, a conversation
between several gentlemen on this change of the reigning family, when
one of them, a Mr. Martin, said that he was born the same day as Charles
II., on the 29th of May, 1631, and was present at the execution of
Charles I., the 29th of January, 1649. His family then resided in
London, where he joined Cromwell's Ironsides, and thence accompanied
them to Ireland. The transfer to him of some forfeited property
naturally induced him to settle there. Thus, between me and the
eye-witness of the regicidal catastrophe, only one person intervenes.
In 1830 there died in London, at the eastern extremity, called the
World's End, an Irishman, aged one hundred and eleven, named Gibson,
whose father, a Scotchman, he told me, served under the Duke of Monmouth
at the battle of Sedgemore in July, 1685, and afterwards, in July, 1690,
under William, at the Boyne. Supposing, as we well may, the father to
have been born about 1660, in 1830, before the son's decease, the two
successive lives thus embrace one hundred and seventy years. I had
rendered the son some services which made him very communicative to me.
The father married and settled in Tipperary, where he became a Roman
Catholic, and no adherent of O'Connell could be more ardent in his cause
than the son. This veteran had served full seventy years in the royal
navy.
In 1790 I recollect an old man of a hundred and twenty, who appeared
before the French National Assembly, and gave clear answers to questions
on events which he had witnessed one hundred and ten years before.
Similar lengths of personal remembrance are related of old Parr, Lady
Desmond, and others, whose ages exceeded one hundred and forty years.
The daughter-in-law of the French king, Charles IX. (widow of his
natural son, the Duke of Angoulême), survived that monarch by a hundred
and thirty-nine years (1574-1713),--a rare, if not an unexampled fact.
The famous Cardan, in his singular work, _De Vita Propriâ_, states that
his grandfather's birth anteceded his own by a hundred and fifty years
(1351-1501). Franklin relates that his grandfather was born in the
sixteenth century, and reign of Elizabeth, as Sir Stephen Fox, the
grandfather of our contemporary statesman, Charles, was born shortly
after the death of James I., in 1627. A very near connexion of my own,
though much younger, is the grandson of a gentleman whose birth
retrocedes to Charles II., in 1672. Niebuhr grounds one of his
objections to the truth of the early Roman history on the very great
improbability of the long period of two hundred and forty-five years
assigned to the collective reigns of the seven kings. It does, indeed,
exceed the average of enthroned life; but the seven monarchs of Spain,
from Ferdinand (the Catholic) to the French Bourbon, Philip V.,
inclusively, embraced a period of two hundred and sixty-seven years in
their successive rule (1469, when Ferdinand obtained the crown of
Arragon, and 1746, the date of Philip's death). The eminent German
historian offers, however, much stronger arguments in disbelief of the
Roman annals; but he had many predecessors in his views, though himself,
unquestionably, the most powerful writer on the subject.