O’Sullivan, lineally descended from the King of the Lakes, not many years since vegetated on a retired spot of his hereditary dominions at Killarney; and, though overwhelmed by poverty and deprivation, kept up in his mind a visionary dignity. Surveying from his wretched cottage that enchanting territory over which his ancestors had reigned for centuries, I have been told he never ceased to recollect his royal descent. He was a man of gigantic stature and strength; of uncouth, yet authoritative mien—not shaming his pretensions by his presence. He was frequently visited by those who went to view the celebrated lakes, and I have conversed with many who have seen him: but at a period when familiar intercourse has been introduced between actual princes and their subjects, tending undoubtedly to diminish in the latter the sense of individual respect and distance, so wholesome to royalty, the poor descendant of the renowned O’Sullivan had no reason to expect much commiseration from modern sensibility.
The frequent and strange revolutions of the world within the last forty years, the radical alterations in all the material habits of society,—announced the commencement of a new era: and the ascendancy of commerce over rank, and of avarice over every thing, completed the regeneration. But, above all, the loosening of those ties which bound kindred and families, in one common interest, to uphold their race and name;—the extinction of that spirit of chivalry which sustained those ties;—and the common prostitution of the heraldic honours of antiquity;—have steeled the human mind against the lofty and noble pretensions of birth and rank; and while we superficially decry the principles of equality, we are travelling toward them, by the shortest and most dangerous road degeneracy and meanness can point out.
I confess myself to be a determined enemy to the Utopian vision of political and social equality: in the exercise of justice alone should the principle of equality be paramount; in any other sense, it never did, and never can, for any length of time, exist in Europe.
Miss Edgeworth’s “Castle Rackrent” and “Fashionable Tales” are incomparable in truly depicting several traits of the rather modern Irish character: they are perhaps on one point a little overcharged; but, in some parts, may be said to exceed the generality of Lady Morgan’s Irish novels. Fiction is less perceptible in them: they have a greater air of reality—of what I have myself often and often observed and noted in full progress and actual execution throughout my native country. Nothing is exaggerated: the stories and names are coined, but the characters and incidents are “from life.” The landlord, the agent, and the attorney of “Castle Rackrent” (in fact every person it describes) were neither fictitious nor even uncommon characters: and the changes of landed property in the county where I was born (where perhaps they have prevailed to the full as widely as in any other of the united empire) owed, in nine cases out of ten, their origin, progress, and catastrophe to circumstances in no wise differing from those so accurately painted in Miss Edgeworth’s narrative.
Though moderate fortunes have frequently and fairly been realised by agents, yet, to be on the sure side of comfort and security, a country gentleman who wishes to send down his estate in tolerably good order to his family should always be his own receiver, and compromise any claim rather than employ an attorney to arrange it.
I recollect to have seen in Queen’s County a Mr. Clerk, who had been a working carpenter, and when making a bench for the session justices at the court-house, was laughed at for taking peculiar pains in planing and smoothing the seat of it. He smilingly observed, that he did so to make it easy for himself, as he was resolved he would never die till he had a right to sit thereupon: and he kept his word:—he was an industrious man, and became an agent; honest, respectable, and kind-hearted, he succeeded in all his efforts to accumulate an independence: he did accumulate it, and uprightly: his character kept pace with the increase of his property, and he lived to sit as a magistrate on that very bench that he sawed and planed.
I will not quit the subject without saying a word about another of Lady Morgan’s works—“Florence Macarthy,” which, “errors excepted,” possesses an immensity of talent in the delineation of the genuine Irish character. The judges, though no one can mistake them, are totally caricatured; but the Crawleys are superlative, and suffice to bring before my vision, in their full colouring, and almost without a variation, persons and incidents whom and which I have many a time encountered. Nothing is exaggerated as to them; and Crawley himself is the perfect and plain model of the combined agent, attorney, and magistrate—a sort of mongrel functionary whose existence I have repeatedly reprobated, and whom I pronounce to be at this moment the greatest nuisance and mischief experienced by my unfortunate country, and only to be abated by the residence of the great landlords on their estates. No people under heaven could be so easily tranquillised and governed as the Irish: but that desirable end is alone attainable by the personal endeavours of a liberal, humane, and resident aristocracy.
A third writer on Ireland I allude to with more pride on some points, and with less pleasure on others; because, though dubbed “The bard of Ireland,” I have not yet seen many literary productions of his on national subjects that have afforded me unalloyed gratification.
He must not be displeased with the observations of perhaps a truer friend than those who have led him to forget himself. His “Captain Rock” (though, I doubt not, well intended), coming at the time it did and under the sanction of his name, is the most exceptionable publication, in all its bearings as to Ireland, that I have yet seen. Doctor Beattie says, in his Apology for Religion, “if it does no good, it can do no harm:” but, on the contrary, if “Captain Rock” does no harm, it could certainly do no good.
Had it been addressed to, or calculated for, the better orders, the book would have been less noxious: but it is not calculated to instruct those whose influence, example, or residence could either amend or reform the abuses which the author certainly exaggerates. It is not calculated to remedy the great and true cause of Irish ruin—the absenteeism of the great landed proprietors: so much the reverse, it is directly adapted to increase and confirm the real grievance, by scaring every landlord who retains a sense of personal danger, and I know none of them who are exempt from abundance of it, from returning to a country where “Captain Rock” is proclaimed by the “Bard of Ireland” to be an Immortal Sovereign. The work is, in fact, dangerous: it is an effusion of party, not a remonstrance of patriotism. It is a work better fitted for vulgar éclat than for rational approbation. Its effects were not calculated on; and it appears to me, in itself, to offer one of the strongest arguments against bestowing on the lower orders in Ireland the power of reading. Could reading Captain Rock be of service to the peasantry?