THE COOK STREET PRINTER.
Shortly after the affair between the collegians and the police, a complaint preferred by the Crown solicitor was brought under my personal cognizance, and subsequently became the subject of a lyric production, in which it was almost impossible to determine whether exaggeration or fiction predominated. There was a printer in Cook Street remarkable for bodily deformity and mental acerbity. His trade almost entirely consisted in the publication of ballads, which were bought by itinerant vocalists, who came each evening to replenish their stocks of amatory, political, or comic productions. In proportion to the number of customers who crowded his shop and contended for a speedy supply, the publisher varied and multiplied his maledictions, and most impartially cursed and abused them all alike. His habitual vituperations were disregarded or laughed at, and were generally ascribed to mental infirmity; but he embarked in a speculation which brought him under the serious notice of the authorities as being intolerably offensive. He published an almanac, the marginal notes and memoranda of which were replete with sedition, and in which the public functionaries were grossly stigmatised. It happened that the corporation had effected a contract with the proprietor of a quarry in Wales for the supply of stone of a quality considered best adapted for the repair of the streets of Dublin, and the day on which the contract had been accepted by the civic body was noted in the almanac as the date of an infamous preference of foreign production, and an exclusion of Irish industry and material through corrupt and debasing motives. This statement, however, constituted no portion whatever of the charges preferred before me, which consisted almost entirely of references to former attempts of a rebellious character, with expressions of deep regret for their failure, and hopes that the patriotic energies of the Irish nation would, in the next encounter prove more effective in crushing Saxon despotism than had been the efforts of the glorious Sarsfield, the noble Lord Edward, the martyred Emmett, or the more recent champions of Hibernian freedom—O'Brien, Meagher, and Mitchell. Colonel Browne was not even aware of the proceedings before me having been instituted; and Mr. Whiteside, the present Chief Justice, was never concerned in any case before me during my tenure of magisterial office. The printer of the almanac appeared on a summons to show cause why informations should not be taken against him, and returned for trial on numerous and deliberate seditious statements published by him. The late Mr. John Adye Curran appeared as his counsel, and proposed to give sureties for his client's appearance to meet the charges preferred, if the Crown solicitor deemed it necessary to continue the prosecution, offering also to give up all copies of the almanac remaining in stock, and to abandon its future publication. The Crown solicitor, Mr. Kemmis, at once acceded to this proposal, and, on the sureties having been produced, I allowed the accused party to leave, and entered in the summons-book that the complaint was "dismissed without prejudice." I did not manifest the slightest sympathy for the delinquent, but informed him that he owed his escape from severe punishment entirely to the lenity of the Crown solicitor, and not to any disinclination on my part to have him made seriously and severely responsible for his misconduct. In a few days he became the subject of a lyric panegyric, in which his prosecution was attributed to Colonel Browne and Mr. Whiteside, and the stoppage of the proceedings was ascribed to me and to Mr. Curran; the course adopted by the latter gentleman being the only thread of truth interwoven in a web of fiction, and sung to an old Irish air, which I am not able to particularise. It has been entitled by an additional fiction—
THE LOWER CASTLE YARD.
You gallant-hearted Irishmen,
Come listen to my lay,
The melancholy muse I woo,
She comes in tears to-day.
Oh Wirra! Wirrasthrue, says she,
Sure Dublin's noblest bard
Is took before his tyrants
In the Lower Castle Yard.
In Cook Street was our Printer born,
In Cook Street was he bred,
The legends of Hibernia's land
His young ideas fed,
How Brian Coru and Granyah too,
Did Saxons disregard,
And the flag of green once waved serene
In the Upper Castle Yard.
His first animadversions
Were on the paving stones,
Why should you send your cash to Wales,
To Taffy or to Jones?
Why not lay down, throughout the town,
Your Irish granite hard?
And macadamize the dirty spies
In the Lower Castle Yard?
Colonel Browne, he being a Welshman,
Swore by St. David's bones
He'd prosecute the Irishman
Who dare oppose their stones.
He order'd Whiteside to indict
And carcerate the Bard;
Let him try, says he, Geology,
In the Lower Castle Yard.
But good luck to Frank Thorpe Porter,
That expounder of the laws,
Likewise to Adye Curran,
Who was counsel in the cause.
They tann'd the hide of long Whiteside,
And did him disregard,
And freed our Printer from his fangs,
In the Lower Castle Yard.