[77]. They called him the Venison Pasty: a coarse, black, hard crust, with excellent feeding inside of it.
Bartholomew Hoare was inferior to both. He wrote better, but spoke most disagreeably;—his harangues being sententious and diffuse, though not destitute of point. He was ill-tempered, arrogant, and rude, with a harsh expression of countenance; but withal, what was termed “an able man.” In point of intellect, indeed, he perhaps exceeded Egan, but in heart I must rank him inferior. Egan was popular with the most talented men of his profession: Hoare could never attain professional popularity in any shape, though he numbered some great men among his friends.
These are merely fugitive sketches of three members of the Irish bar who (I knew not why) were generally named together, but whose respective careers terminated very differently. Bartholomew Hoare died in great distress.
The chief baron, Lord Yelverton, got one day after dinner, at his house at Fairview, into an argument with Egan, which in truth he always courted, and led him on in so droll a way as never failed to enhance the merriment of the company. Hoare never heard an argument in his life between any two persons, or upon any subject, wherein he did not long to obtrude; and Fletcher, if he thought he had conceived a good hit, was never easy till he was delivered of it. On the evening in question, the trio had united in contesting with their host all manner of subjects, which he had himself designedly started, to excite them. His lordship was in high glee, and played them off in a style of the most superior wit and cleverness, assisted (for he was a first-rate scholar) by much classic quotation: by successive assaults he upset the three, who were as less than one in the hands of Yelverton, when he chose to exert himself. The evening certainly turned out among the pleasantest I ever passed in society.
Lord Yelverton’s wit and humour had a weight and solidity in it, which emitted a fervid as well as a blazing light. I opened not my lips:—had I mingled in their disputation, I should not only have got my full portion of the tattooing (as they termed it), but also have lost, in becoming an actor, the gratification of witnessing the scene. At length Lord Yelverton wrote under the table with a pencil the following words, and sent the scrap by a servant to me:—“Barrington, these fellows will never stop!—pray write something about them, and send it to me.”—I left the room, and having written the following parody in a hand to resemble printing, sent it in to his lordship sealed as a letter:—
Three pleaders, in one vulgar era born,
Mount-Melic, Cork, and Blarney, did adorn:
In solemn surliness the first surpass’d,