Countryless, friendless, wifeless, childless, Godless;
Accused of heaven, and hated.—Make him Osmyn.
Thus have they dealt with me.
The writer in the Irish Quarterly Review assures his readers that the play ‘abounds in passages of great power and beauty;’ the extracts which he communicates, however, do not rise to the level of the best pages in Bertram or Fredolfo.—
One more tragedy contemplated by Maturin in his last years may yet be mentioned. A motive from the recent history of France had been suggested to him, to which he refers in a letter[164] of Oct. 20:th 1823:
I feel myself flattered by the reference to me contained in your letter.—I am not disposed to think favourably of the French Tragedies which are rather declamatory than impassioned but will do my utmost with the subject you have sent me.
The allusion to Buonaparte, appears to me to constitute the forte of the story, and as he is (fortunately for Europe) now dead, I cannot think that the most inveterate Jacobin would be offended by a representation of him on the stage to which I am convinced Mr. Kean’s powers would give the most distinguished effect.
The recipient of this letter is not known, nor anything else connected with the matter, with which all the biographers seem to be unacquainted. Among other unfulfilled projects is said[165] to have been a poem the scene of which was ‘to be laid in Ireland during the period of harps and minstrels;’ besides which Maturin wrote,[166] some time before his death, a short tale founded upon the family legend quoted in the first chapter of the present study.
A determination of Maturin ‘to devote himself more exclusively to the service of his calling’[167] led to the publication, in 1824, of Five Sermons on the Errors of the Roman Catholic Church. These controversial sermons were preached during the Lent of the same year before an audience unparalleled in number. ‘Never since Dean Kirwan’s time,’ it is stated in a contemporary memoir,[168] ‘were such crowds attracted to the Parish Church as during the delivery of these sermons; neither rain nor storm could subdue the anxiety of all classes and all persuasions to hear them.’ The sermons are explicitly said to be directed, not against Catholics, but Catholicism; Maturin endeavoured earnestly to avoid a tone of personal offensiveness, although it is much to be questioned whether he did not, in the following passage, underrate the attachment of the Irish Catholics to their faith:
I will add, that of all the Protestant Ministers in Dublin, I have happened to have the most extensive and intimate intercourse with Roman Catholics, and that I have found many of them so truly amiable and excellent, that I could heartily have wished myself, and all I loved, to be “almost and altogether like unto them, except their bonds”—but amongst all of them I have remarked such an obvious, though tacit admission, of the errors of their Church—such an earnest wish for scriptural instruction and mental enlargement—such a desire for the only true Catholic Emancipation, the emancipation of the intellect and the conscience, that though I would have felt it unfit to turn the stream of social conversation into the channel of controversy, I did most anxiously wish for an opportunity of pointing out to them in a public address, those errors of which they themselves appeared so deeply conscious.