Among the domestic sorrows was the loss of a child, in 1821, immediately after its birth. When Lady Morgan called to inquire after Mrs. Maturin during her confinement, Maturin sent her this reply: ‘My angel is better, The Cherub is flown’—which words she noted down on a letter she received from him shortly afterwards.—That there were troubles also of another kind can be inferred from some lines in the above-mentioned letter to Sir Charles: ‘You terrify me by saying there is a prejudice against me amongst the Catholics; what have I done? I have never been a partizan—my voice was never heard at a meeting—I am not a public man in the least—what can I have done?’ Whatever this may have reference to, the answer obviously would have been, that he had written Melmoth. Although he had never meant to offend his Catholic townsmen, their resentment was not altogether inexplicable, and it is certainly curious that it should have come to him so unexpectedly. If the Methodists had not been favourably disposed towards him after the publication of Women, he now got the Catholics against him; but as it was only the errors of both creeds he had wished to attack, he must have suffered much from the feeling of having, perhaps, given personal offence.—Yet in all this dreariness there would occasionally be outbursts of the old eccentricity and the invincible desire sometimes to assume the rôle of a grand seigneur, which he, in his harmless way, imagined best to suit him. The following anecdote[162] has a characteristic ring about it:
Sir Charles raised a subscription for him, amounting to fifty pounds. The first use he made of it was to give a grand party. There was little furniture in the reception room, but at one end there had been erected an old theatrical property throne under a canopy of crimson velvet, where he and Mrs. Maturin sat to receive their visitors.—
That Maturin did not greatly care about the completion of The Universe is evident from the fact that he was, so early as 1821, engaged on a new play. In a note to Lady Morgan he mentions that it will be acted at Hawkins’—‘the profits will be far inferior to those of Covent Garden, but they will be something.’ Still the play was, later on, sent to Covent Garden, Sir Charles undertaking to use his influence with Kean who appears, from the very first, to have been unwilling to accept it. In a letter dated Dec. 16, 1822, Maturin writes to Sir Charles:
I never felt my “lack of words” so great as at this moment when they altogether fail me in adequately expressing my gratitude for your kindness. Matters are not however so bad as it is Elliston, not Kean, who has rejected the play. I have written to Kean to beg him to read over the play himself, and to assure him I will acquiesce in his judgment, whatever it be.
I need not say how much it would enhance my numerous obligations to Lady Morgan were she to write to Kean merely to enforce my request, to beg he will read over the play (which he has not done) and determine for himself whether it is worthy of his powers or not.
No decision of his can diminish my gratitude to Lady M—— and to you.
Whether there was an intervention on the part of Lady Morgan or not, the play was doomed never to see the light. It can hardly have been any other than the one to which Watts refers in his autobiographical notes:[163]
He had another tragedy in the hands of Edmund Kean, but on this he could obtain no decision whatever. It was entitled Osmyn, and is said to have been the most careful and effective of his dramatic compositions. I made many attempts to obtain its restitution, but in vain. On one occasion I attacked Kean before a large party, and dwelt upon the cruel injury which Maturin had sustained from his persistent disregard of the matter. Finally, I obtained from him a promise that the M. S. should be forthcoming, if I could call in Clarges Street for it on the ensuing day. This of course I did, but was denied access to Mr. Kean, who was said to be too ill to see me.
The only person who has been able to give an account of and publish some extracts from the play is the writer in the Irish Quarterly Review 1852. He states that a completed tragedy called The Siege of Salerno was found among Maturin’s manuscripts after his death, without explaining when and how he had an opportunity of seeing it. He states further that the plot bears, in conception, some resemblance to Byron’s Siege of Corinth—the hero in both works being, in fact, a renegade who leads Turkish forces against a Christian town. The passage quoted in the Irish Quarterly Review consists of a scene where Osmyn—the copy sent to Kean apparently bore the name of the hero—relates the story of his life. He has formerly been the prince of Salerno, the very town which he now attacks as a Turkish captain. He lived in happiness with his wife Matilda, when suddenly his enemy
Manfred, the terror of the neighbouring states;