CHAPTER IV.
“That Latin was no more difficile,
Than to a black-bird ’tis to whistle.”
Butler.
The sloop which conveyed me from Holy Island to Kingstown, on my way to Dublin, had on board a merry Irishman, to whom I found myself attracted, because he had been in America. He was further acquainted with the family into which my mother’s brother had intermarried—the O’Mearas of Dundalk, of whom one, who was an officer in the garrison, was the object of my present visit.
Dennis was full of odd stories about Irish schoolmasters, fit successors of Swift’s Tom Sheridan; and he informed me that Captain O’Meara had once been a classical tutor, and was still rather conceited in regard to his attainments. He was a companion of Doctor Barrett, of Trinity College, and, as Dennis affirmed, carried more book-learning under a red-coat than many a bishop under a black one. But the half had not been told me.
After seeing the sights of a very beautiful city, driving round Phoenix Park, surveying the Four Courts, and Cathedral, and the palaces, and lawns of Trinity College, I sat down to make myself at home at Captain O’Meara’s. This was the less difficult, as the captain had four daughters, near enough in kindred and age to relieve me from my mauvaise honte, and Irish enough in complexion, mirth, and wit, to set my inexperienced brain in a very pleasurable whirl.
But the captain absorbed every thing to himself. When he discovered that I could comprehend a Latin saying, he gave up all other pursuits for that of riddling me with a fusilade of citations. I am sure such a character is unknown out of Ireland. Miss Mitford has given, in happy detail, the picture of one species in this genus, in her late work. We often meet with this sanguineous, overflowing, half-subtle, half-blundering, off-hand, good fellow, among unlettered Irishmen; but, in good truth, my Cousin O’Meara was a bit of a scholar, had taken prizes at college, was a correspondent of divers learned guilds, and had talked Latin, by the fortnight, with Sulpicians, who came over from France on church errands.
Imagine my gallant captain at his mahogany field of manœuvre, with forces of claret moving over the polished plane. Imagine him well-spread, rubicund, moist with the gentle drops of Bacchic dew, breathing heavily, gesturing vehemently, with fat, dimpled hand, and smiling as none but Hibernian lips and teeth can smile. Behold me in the costume of 1796, slender and brown, as becomes an American, unused to long potations, trembling lest I miss a meaning or violate a quantity, and anxiously waiting for the summons to follow the ladies to coffee.
“Cousin Henry,” said my host, with all the rotundity of a dean, “you say you have not read Aulus Gellius. Ah! we shall turn him over to-morrow. Not to have read the Attic Nights is, mon cher, the next thing to being a child of darkness. Aulus, my dear fellow—let the bottle tend hitherward—was an Athenian by domiciliation; in this, like Pomponius, who, you know, was denominated Atticus. Aulus came to Athens, my very respected and regarded kinsman—fill your glass—for the purpose of hearing those great expounders, Taurus and Phavorinus; much as you, mon cher, have come to classic Dublin, to hear—to hear—a-hem—to confabulate with your poor old kinsman.” And here he looked down on the amplitude of his well-stretched waistcoat, and the unwrinkled surface of a plump, feminine hand. “Barrett and I have often kept it up—pray let me see the claret—hour after hour, as to the question whether Phavorinus was a Roman or a Greek. You remember what Aulus says—ah! no, you have yet to peruse him—you shall hear my excursus on the later schools of Athens. Their dissertatiuncles—allow the phrase—were conversational; noctes coenaeque deorum.”
Here my fidgets became marked, especially as the clear ringing of a girlish trio was heard above stairs.
“Don’t move—you know I am off duty—you don’t weary me—the claret is good. Did I ever tell you what happened on a Twelfth night at Lord Mountstewart’s? My lord threw the key out of the window, and swore the party should not rise till a certain hogshead of claret was exhausted.” Fidgets more alarming. “On that night I delivered the speech which is so like Ammianus.”
In hopes of angering him, and so getting off, I ventured here on a citation of Gibbon, charging Ammian with bombast. But the smile only bespread his full-blown visage more benignly, as he continued—
“Nay, mon cher, Gibbon was incapable of measuring such dimensions of style as those of Ammianus Marcellinus. O, that we had his opening books! They are lost—unless Mai should turn them up in some Ambrosian palimpsest. Out of Dublin—the claret—there are not ten men who can taste the richness of Ammian. I will pronounce to you his description of one of Julian’s battles.”
Here a fit of irrepressible coughing took me to the window, and my diaphragm was so agitated, that the rehearsal was interrupted. Making my recovery as protracted as might be, I found my captain—still holding his glass, and still smiling—sunk into a sweet slumber, under cover of which, I slipped into the ladies’ apartment.
“Ha!” cried Grace O’Meara, “papa has let you off well. You have scarcely heard him pronounce the second Philippic.”
“No, no—that must still await me. But when did Irish officers become so enamoured of the ancients?”
“You must know, Cousin Harry,” said Miss Barbara, “papa dreams of little else. He has tried to teach us all Latin; but we made game of the accidence so effectually, that he is willing now to compound for French and Italian.”
Captain O’Meara, when claret was out of the question, was placid, sensible, and even dull. With a strong antipathy to the Saxon, he united an overweening regard for America, and drank Jefferson’s health with religious veneration. On his horse, in the Park, he looked every inch the hero, like those handsome, pursy, red-coats one sees in gilt frames around the hall in Free-Mason’s Tavern. His color was of the red, red rose, his teeth were ivory, and his voice was full and dulcet. Notwithstanding his pedantry, he communicated to me some most valuable hints concerning my Greek and Latin reading, and explained to me many a hard place in Plautus and Lucretius; reading from tall octavos of the Bipont edition, in crimson uniform. But he suffered no man to dispute the preëminence of Trinity College, or the authenticity of the Celtic annals. Remembering my father as a doctor, he would not hear me explain that I was not intending to walk in his steps.
“You will,” said he, “complete a course at Trinity—then, ho! for Leyden. There is the spot for the healing art. I know two Americans there; one of them fought O’Shaughnessy, our adjutant. Leyden, mon cher, is the modern Salerno. Never name Edinburgh—where the prelections—horresco referens—are in English. Leyden is your place. Don’t touch their gin—we call it Geneva, a corruption of the Dutch gedever, or juniper—stick to claret. You will find a compotator, that is, a bottle-companion, in Professor Van Valkenburg, in the street by the old Roman castle. Their anatomical preparations are alone worth a visit. And then the library”—
But I weary my readers with gossip of fifty odd years ago. My eyes grow dim. I must bid adieu to Dublin and the O’Meara’s.