Nemesis was the daughter of Nox; and poor Blades looked miserably ill, when he came down next morning to breakfast—no, not to break fast, but only to wish he could. At daybreak, we had heard sounds of soda-water, but Schweppe had striven in vain. The fact is, that whiskey, like love, can “brook no rival near its throne,” and Kinahan, and Bass, and Guinness were at war all over Blades. We scarcely knew him again, as he sat in rueful contemplation of an egg, which he had accepted, hoping against hope, but had now no strength to crack:—
“For his heart was hot and restless,
And his life was full of care;
And the burden laid upon him
Seemed greater than he could bear.”
Had he been Tyndarus, and the egg before him one of Leda's, he could not have looked at it with a more fixed and mystified expression; or he might have been reflecting sorrowfully upon that fatal goose egg, which, long before the Norman Conquest, had wrought such woes on Ireland. I will venture, at all events, to repeat the legend. Domhnall, the king, having invited Congal, his foster-son, together with the principal swells of his court, to a grand banquet (though he had been warned by Maelcobba, a celebrated monk and fortune-teller, to do nothing of the kind), sent out his purveyors to procure a supply of delicacies in general, and of goose eggs in particular. Now there lived, in the county of Meath, a Bishop Ere of Slaine, who spent his days in the river Boyne, immersed up to his arm-pits, and reading his psalter, which lay upon the bank. Whether he entertained hopes of being translated to the see of Bath and Wells, and was under a course of preparatory training, or whether he had a prescient belief in the water-cure, or whatever his motives may have been, thus he passed his mornings (to the immense edification of his diocese, and with nothing on but his mitre), and then went home to dine. One evening he had hurried to his hermitage, a little ruffled in temper, having been very disrespectfully accosted during the day by some boatmen, who had hit him in the eye with a decayed pear, but consoling himself with the prospect of his favourite dinner, namely, “a goose egg and a half, and three sprigs of watercresses,” when he was dismayed to find his establishment (which consisted of an elderly charwoman) in tears, and to hear that the king's purveyors had been, and poached his eggs for him. Then (the chroniclers proceed to tell) the Bishop he “cussed, and eke swore hee, verrye bewtifulle.” He excommunicated the auxiliary gander and put the goose under a perpetual pip, “bekase,” said he, “if they'd niver layed them, and she (the charwoman) had only popped them under the bedclothes, he'd bet six to four they'd niver been found.” But he was grandest of all, when he cursed the eggs, shell, white, and yolk, solemnly imploring complete and speedy suffocation upon any party who should stick a spoon in them. And his anathemas, we read, were so far fruitful, that on the night of the King's banquet, Congal's goose egg changed, as he was gloating over it, into a common hen egg, whereupon he was so greatly exasperated, that he felt himself under the necessity of slashing at his neighbours indiscriminately with a drawn sword; a general battle ensued; and “Ireland was not for one night thenceforward in the enjoyment of peace or tranquillity.” 1
1 From The Banquet of Dun na-gedh, and the Battle of Magh
Rath. Translated from the original Irish by John O'Donovan.
Printed for the Irish Archaeological Society.
Blades, I say, might have been meditating mournfully on this accursed egg, but, whether or no, there he sat; and Melancholy marked him for her own. Quantum mutatus! The remains of a fire balloon, soaked and rusting in some long damp grass, not less resemble the gaudy globe, which went up yesternight; and never can I obliviate the agony of his expression, as the waiter presented a large dish of bacon in close proximity to his nose.
“A moment o'er his face
A tablet of unutterable thoughts was traced,
And then,” with a groan, which won all our sympathy, “abiit,
excessif, evasit, erupi, Anglicé, poor Blades, he bolted!
We also, having contributed to Mr. Carr's Album autographs, which will, no doubt, be ultimately sold at sixty guineas a-piece, (say pounds, if you take the pair) proceeded by the car to Kylemore.