What pictures of old Ireland—of Daly’s Club-House, the resort of the Irish members in College Green, still standing, but now converted into insurance offices. “I never pass the old club,” said Sir Thomas Staples, the last surviving member of the Irish House of Commons, to the writer, “without picturing it as I remember it, when Grattan, and Curran, and Ireland’s best blood strolled in after a fiery debate, or rushed out on the whisper of that awful word, ‘division.’ Very little would restore Daly’s to its original shape; and who knows but it may yet be revived, if repeal of the Union be carried?” Sir Thomas Staples is dead some years, and the Home-Rule question had not come to the front whilst he was yet numbered amongst the living. Shall we behold an Irish Parliament sitting once again in College Green? Shall Daly’s club be restored to its former splendor? Shall we see Mr. Butt, Mr. Sullivan, Mr. Mitchell Henry, with many other earnest sons of Ireland, enrolled amongst its members?
Who can forget the account of Godfrey O’Malley’s election, when, in order to avoid arrest for debt, he announced his own death in the papers, and, having travelled in the hearse to Connemara, reached his stronghold in the west, where bailiffs and process-servers foolhardy enough to cross the Shannon were compelled to eat their own writs under penalty of tar and feathers, and from whence he triumphantly addressed his constituents, appealing to their sympathies and support on the very powerful plea of having died for them? There is a story extant of Jackey Barrett which has not travelled far, if at all, beyond the walls of Trinity. Upon one occasion the vice-provost was dining off roast turkey in the glorious old Commons Hall, and next to him sat his nephew, the heir expectant to his enormous wealth. The turkey was somewhat underdone, and the nephew sent the drumsticks to be devilled. Some little delay occurred, which caused the vice-provost to observe to his kinsman with a malicious grin: “That devil is keeping you a long time waiting.” “Not half as long as you are keeping the devil waiting,” was the retort. Jackey never forgave him. What a creation is Mickey Free, that devoted, warm-hearted, rollicking Irish follower, that son of song and story, who, by his own account, sang duets with the commander-in-chief in the Peninsula, and wore a masterpiece of Murillo for a seat to his trousers! Mickey was quoted recently, during a debate in the British House of Commons on the Eastern question by Major O’Gorman, the jester-in-chief, vice Mr. Bernal Osborne, the rejected of Irish constituencies:
“For I haven’t a janius for work—
It was never a gift of the Bradies;
But I’d make a most illigant Turk,
For I’m fond of tobacco and ladies.”
The House roared, and even Mr. Disraeli, that was, allowed his parchment visage to snap into smiling. Charles Lever informed the writer that he originally intended Mickey Free for a mere stage servant, who comes on with a tray or exits with a chair or a table; but upon discovering that Mr. Free had made his mark he wrote him up. “I never could give a publisher a complete novel all at once,” said Mr. Lever, “although I have been offered very large sums of money for one; I always wait to see how my public like me, and write from month to month, trimming my sails to suit the popular breeze.”
Charles O’Malley was a brilliant success. A spirit of martial enthusiasm inflated the minds of the rising generation, until to be a dragoon became the day-dream of existence, and many an embryo warrior who failed in obtaining a commission compromised with a cruel destiny by accepting the queen’s shilling. The charm of the book is complete; and for break-neck, dashing narrative, for wit, sparkle, and genuine Irish drollery, interspersed here and there with tender touches of pathos and soft gray tones of sorrow, Charles O’Malley stands unrivalled, and will hold its own when hundreds of so-called Irish romances shall have returned to the dust out of which they should never have emerged, even into a spasmodic vitality.
Perhaps the only smart thing ever uttered by King George III. was when he taxed Sheridan with being afraid of the author of the School for Scandal; and perhaps Lever was afraid of the author of Charles O’Malley, as he published Con Cregan, Maurice Tiernay, Sir Jasper Carew, and one or two other novels anonymously; but a quickwitted public, detecting the ring of the true metal, compelled “Harry Lorrequer” to stand revealed. Novel followed novel in quick succession, Ireland providing the mine from which he dug his golden ore; and although he carries his readers to fairer climes and sunnier skies, somehow or other he contrives to land them safely and soundly in the “ould counthry” at last. We have not space, nor is it our province, to deal with Lever’s works in detail. No modern productions of fiction have gained a greater or more popular reputation for their writer. By no Irish author is he equalled in Irish humor, by no author is he surpassed in unwearying narrative. The foreign tone infused into some of his later productions is due to his residence in Italy. “You wish to have nothing to do, Lever? There is eight hundred a year; go and do it,” said the late Lord Derby, bestowing the vice-consulship of Spezzia upon him. Later on he was promoted to Trieste.
For a time Charles Lever edited the Dublin University Magazine, then a coruscation of all that was brilliant in literature. He resided at the village of Templeogue, situated in the lap of the Dublin mountains, with Sugar Loaf at one extremity, and Mount Pelier, with its ruined castle renowned for the orgies of the infamously-celebrated “Hell-fire Club,” at the other. Templeogue Lodge was the Mecca towards which all “choice spirits” devoutly turned, and the wit, repartee, song, jest, and story circulated within its walls made the Noctes Ambrosianæ but dull affairs in comparison. “One little room rises to recollection, with its quaint old sideboard of carved oak, its dark-brown cabinets, curiously sculptured, its heavy old brocade curtains, and all its queer devices of knick-knackery, where such meetings were once held, and where, throwing off the cares of life—shut out from them, as it were, by the massive folds of the heavy drapery across the door—we talked in all the fearless freedom of old friendship.” There are a few still surviving who will recognize that room, and recall with a throb of painful pleasure the nights at the little lodge at Templeogue.