In hopes of angering him, and so getting off, I ventured here on a citation of Gibbon, charging Ammian with bombast. But the smile only bespread his full-blown visage more benignly, as he continued—
“Nay, mon cher, Gibbon was incapable of measuring such dimensions of style as those of Ammianus Marcellinus. O, that we had his opening books! They are lost—unless Mai should turn them up in some Ambrosian palimpsest. Out of Dublin—the claret—there are not ten men who can taste the richness of Ammian. I will pronounce to you his description of one of Julian’s battles.”
Here a fit of irrepressible coughing took me to the window, and my diaphragm was so agitated, that the rehearsal was interrupted. Making my recovery as protracted as might be, I found my captain—still holding his glass, and still smiling—sunk into a sweet slumber, under cover of which, I slipped into the ladies’ apartment.
“Ha!” cried Grace O’Meara, “papa has let you off well. You have scarcely heard him pronounce the second Philippic.”
“No, no—that must still await me. But when did Irish officers become so enamoured of the ancients?”
“You must know, Cousin Harry,” said Miss Barbara, “papa dreams of little else. He has tried to teach us all Latin; but we made game of the accidence so effectually, that he is willing now to compound for French and Italian.”
Captain O’Meara, when claret was out of the question, was placid, sensible, and even dull. With a strong antipathy to the Saxon, he united an overweening regard for America, and drank Jefferson’s health with religious veneration. On his horse, in the Park, he looked every inch the hero, like those handsome, pursy, red-coats one sees in gilt frames around the hall in Free-Mason’s Tavern. His color was of the red, red rose, his teeth were ivory, and his voice was full and dulcet. Notwithstanding his pedantry, he communicated to me some most valuable hints concerning my Greek and Latin reading, and explained to me many a hard place in Plautus and Lucretius; reading from tall octavos of the Bipont edition, in crimson uniform. But he suffered no man to dispute the preëminence of Trinity College, or the authenticity of the Celtic annals. Remembering my father as a doctor, he would not hear me explain that I was not intending to walk in his steps.
“You will,” said he, “complete a course at Trinity—then, ho! for Leyden. There is the spot for the healing art. I know two Americans there; one of them fought O’Shaughnessy, our adjutant. Leyden, mon cher, is the modern Salerno. Never name Edinburgh—where the prelections—horresco referens—are in English. Leyden is your place. Don’t touch their gin—we call it Geneva, a corruption of the Dutch gedever, or juniper—stick to claret. You will find a compotator, that is, a bottle-companion, in Professor Van Valkenburg, in the street by the old Roman castle. Their anatomical preparations are alone worth a visit. And then the library”—
But I weary my readers with gossip of fifty odd years ago. My eyes grow dim. I must bid adieu to Dublin and the O’Meara’s.