TRADITIONS FROM REMOTE PERIODS THROUGH FEW HANDS.
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.
J. R. (An Octogenarian.)
P.S.—In Vol. iv., p. 73., Madame du Châtelet's epitaph on Voltaire contains an error, where canis twice appears, but should be carus. The lady's object was certainly complimentary, not sarcastic. My crampt writing was of course the cause of the mistake, though, in the opinion of many, the substituted word would not appear inapplicable to Voltaire. A subjoined article of the same page, "Children at a Birth," reminds me of something analogous in Mercier's Tableau de Paris, where reference is made to the Mémoires de l'Académie des Sciences for the fact. The wife of a baker, it is there stated, in the short space of seven years, produced one-and-twenty children, or three at each annual birth; and, to prove that the prolific faculty was exclusively his, he made a maid servant similarly the mother of three children at a birth. The major portion, it appears, of this numerous progeny long survived. Bayle, in his article of Tiraqueau, a French advocate of the sixteenth century, quotes an epigram, which would make him the father of forty-five children, and, it is added, by one wife. If so, several must at least have been twins:
"Fæcundus facundus aquæ Tiraquellus amator,
Terquindecim librorum et liberum parens;
Qui nisi restinxisset aquis abstemius ignes,
Implesset orbem prole animi atque corporis."
The accomplished authoress of A Residence on the Shores of the Baltic (1841, 2 volumes) was, it is well known, one of four congenital children in Norwich, where her father was an eminent physician.
J. R.
Cork, August, 1851.