The first advertisement that meets our eye is promising.
It is the late proclamation of an Irish mayor, in which we are informed, that certain business is to be transacted in that city “every Monday (Easter Sunday only excepted).” This seems rather an unnecessary exception; but it is not an inadvertency, caused by any hurry of business in his worship; it is deliberately copied from a precedent, set in England, by a baronet formerly well known in parliament, who, in the preamble to a bill, proposed that certain regulations should take place “on every Monday (Tuesday excepted).” We fear, also, that an English mayor has been known to blunder. Some years ago the mayor of a capital English city published a proclamation and advertisement, previous to the races, “that no gentleman will be allowed to ride on the course, but the horses that are to run.” A mayor’s blundering proclamation is not, however, worth half so much in the eye of ridicule as a lord lieutenant’s.
“A saint in crape is twice a saint in lawn.”
A bull on the throne is worth twice as much as a bull in the chair.
“By the lord lieutenant and council of Ireland.
A proclamation.
———,
“Whereas the greatest economy is necessary in the consumption
of all species of grain, and especially in the consumption of
potatoes, &c.
“Given at the council chamber in Dublin.”
This is the first time we have been informed, by authority, that potatoes are a species of grain; but we must accede to this new botanical arrangement, when published under such splendid auspices. The assertion certainly is not made in distinct terms: but all who understand the construction of language must imply the conclusion that we draw from these premises. A general position is in the first member of the sentence laid down, “that the greatest economy is necessary in the consumption of all species of grain.” A particular exemplification of the principle is made in the next clause, “especially in the consumption of potatoes.”
The inference is as plain as can be made.
The next article in our newspaper is an advertisement of lands to be let to an improving tenant:—“A few miles from Cork, in a most sporting country, bounded by an uncommon fine turf bog, on the verge of which there are a number of fine lime kilns, where that manure may be had on very moderate terms, the distance for carriage not being many hundred yards. The whole lands being now in great heart, and completely laid down, entirely surrounded, and divided by impenetrable furze ditches, made of quarried stones laid edgeways.”
It will be a matter of difficulty to the untravelled English reader to comprehend how furze ditches can be made of quarried stones laid edgeways, or any way; and we fear that we should only puzzle his intellects still more if we should attempt to explain to him the mysteries of Irish ditching in the technical terms of the country. With the face of a ditch he may be acquainted, but to the back and gripe, and bottom of the gripe, and top of the back of a ditch, we fear he is still to be introduced.
We can never sufficiently admire these furze ditches made of quarried stones; they can, indeed, be found only in Ireland; but we have heard in England of things almost as extraordinary. Dr. Grey, in his erudite and entertaining notes on Hudibras, records the deposition of a lawyer, who, in an action of battery, told the judge “that the defendant beat his client with a certain wooden instrument called an iron pestle.” Nay, to go further still, a wise annotator on the Pentateuch, named Peter Harrison, observed of Moses’ two tables of stone, that they were made of shittim-wood. The stone furze ditches are scarcely bolder instances of the catachresis than the stone tables of shittim-wood. This bold figure of rhetoric in an Irish advertisement of an estate may lead us to expect that Hibernian advertisers may, in time, emulate the fame of Christie, the prince of auctioneers, whose fine descriptive powers can make more of an estate on paper than ever was made of it in any other shape, except in the form of an ejectment. The fictions of law, indeed, surpass even the auctioneer’s imagination; and a man may be said never to know the extent of his own possessions until he is served with a process of ejectment. He then finds himself required to give up the possession of a multitude of barns, orchards, fish-ponds, horse-ponds, dwelling-houses, pigeon-houses, dove-cotes, out-houses, and appurtenances, which he never saw or heard of, and which are nowhere to be found upon the surface of the habitable globe; so that we cannot really express this English legal transaction without being guilty of an Irish bull, and saying that the person ejected is ousted from places which he never entered.