PATRIOTIC HUMBUG.
My country, oh! my country! it is for thee, for thee alone, I live; and for thee, my country, will I at any time cheerfully die—(Who’s that calling out fudge?) Nearest my heart is the wish for thy welfare. To see thee happy is the one only desire of my soul, and that thou mayest be so, is my constant prayer.
Night and day dost thou engross my thoughts, and all, all would I sacrifice to thy welfare! My private interests are as dust in the balance—(Who’s that again calling fudge?—turn him out, turn him out)—My private interests are as dust in the balance; and shame, shame, oh! eternal shame to the sordid wretch, unworthy to live, who should for a moment prefer his individual aggrandisement to his country’s good. Perish his name—perish the name of the miserable miscreant!
Wealth! what is wealth to me, my country, compared to thy happiness? Station! what is station, unless thou, too, art advanced? Power! what is power, unless the power of doing thee good? Oh, my country! My country, oh!—(Oh! oh! oh! from various parts of the house.) The patriot sits down, wiping his patriotic forehead with a white handkerchief, amidst thunders of applause.
Before going farther with our Illustrations—indeed we don’t know whether we shall go any farther with them at all or not, as we rather think we have given quite enough of them—before going farther, then, with any thing in the more direct course of our subject, we may pause a moment to remark how carefully every one who comes before the public to claim its patronage, conceals the real object of his doing so. How remote he keeps from this very delicate point! He never whispers its name—never breathes it. How cautiously he avoids all allusion to his own particular interest in the matter! From the unction with which he speaks of the excellences of the thing he has to dispose of, be it what it may, a Dutch cheese or a treatise on philosophy, the enthusiasm with which he dwells on them, you would imagine that he spoke out of a pure feeling of admiration of these excellences. You would never dream—for this he carefully conceals from you—that his sole object is to get hold of as much of your cash as he can; the Dutch cheese or the treatise on philosophy being a mere instrument to accomplish the desired transfer.
It is rather a curious feature this in the social character: every thing offered for sale is so offered through a pure spirit of benevolence, either for the public good or individual benefit; nothing for the sake of mere filthy lucre, or the particular interest of the seller—not at all. He, good soul, has no such motive—not he, indeed.
We said a little while since that we doubted whether we would give any farther illustrations of the great science of humbug. We have now made up our minds that we shall not. Although we could easily give fifty more, it is unnecessary.
We confess, however, to be under strong temptations to give “the candidate’s humbug”—to exhibit that gentleman doing over the constituency, making them, whether he be whig or tory, swallow the grossest fudge that ever was thrust down an unsuspecting gullet; but we refrain. We refrain also, in the meantime, from giving what we would call “the liberty and equality humbug;” together with several other humbugs equally instructive and edifying.
And now we think we hear our readers exclaim of ourselves, what a humbug!
By no means, gentle readers; there are exceptions to every general rule. We have sketched the great mass of mankind, but we have no doubt that there are some truly sincere persons—few indeed—in all the classes we have sketched; and we trust that we ourselves shall be reckoned amongst the number.
C.
ANCIENT IRISH LITERATURE,
NUMBER I.
The ancient literature of Ireland is as yet but little known to the world, or even to ourselves. Existing for the most part only in its original Celtic form, and in manuscripts accessible only to the Irish scholar resident in our metropolis, but few even of those capable of understanding it have the opportunity to become acquainted with it, and from all others it is necessarily hidden. We therefore propose to ourselves, as a pleasing task, to make our literature more familiar, not only to the Irish scholar, but to our readers generally who do not possess this species of knowledge, by presenting them from time to time with such short poems or prose articles, accompanied with translations, as from their brevity, or the nature of their subjects, will render them suitable to our limited and necessarily varied pages—our selections being made without regard to chronological order as to the ages of their composition, but rather with a view to give a general idea of the several kinds of literature in which our ancestors of various classes found entertainment.
The specimen which we have chosen to commence with is of a homely cast, and was intended as a rebuke to the saucy pride of a woman in humble life, who assumed airs of consequence from being the possessor of three cows. Its author’s name is unknown, but its age may be determined, from its language, as belonging to the early part of the seventeenth century; and that it was formerly very popular in Munster, may be concluded from the fact, that the phrase, Easy, oh, woman of the three cows! [Go réiḋ a bhean na ttrí mbó] has become a saying in that province, on any occasion upon which it is desirable to lower the pretensions of proud or boastful persons.
P.