[Q] This was the celebrated society called the Académie de ces Messieurs: it numbered among its members all the more celebrated wits of the day.
From the London Times
IRELAND IN THE LAST AGE.
Recollections of Curran.
If the work of Mr. Charles Phillips were a description of the Roman bar in the time of Hadrian, it would scarcely be more completely than at present the picture of a time and system entirely passed away; yet he professes to give us—and performs his promise—a somewhat gossipping and very amusing description of the Irish bar, and the great men belonging to it, very little more than half a century since. But we travel and change quickly in these days of steam and railroads; even Time himself appears now to have attached his travelling carriage to a locomotive, and in the space of one man's life performs a journey that in staid and ancient days would have occupied the years of many generations, and, as if in illustration of the fleeting nature of men and things and systems at this time, here we find a contemporary (at this moment hardly past the prime of life) giving us portraits, and relating anecdotes of men with whom he, in his youth, lived in intimate and professional relations, but who seem now as absolutely to belong to a bygone order of things, as if they had wrangled before the Dikasts of Athens, or pleaded before the Prætor at Rome. Mr. Phillips seems to feel this, and, as the gay days of his sanguine youth flit by his memory, the retrospect brings, as it will ever bring, melancholy, and even sadness, with it. Yielding himself up to the dominion of feeling, in place of keeping his reason predominant, he mourns over the past, as if, in comparison with the present, it were greatly more worthy. Forgetting that there is a change also in himself; that the capacity for enjoyment is largely diminished; that hope has been fulfilled, or is for ever frustrate; he tests the present by his own emotions, instead of weighing with philosophic indifference the relative merits of the system that he describes, and of that in which he lives. We are told—
"'Tis distance lends enchantment to the view;"
but, when age comes upon us, we must turn and look back, if we desire to enjoy this pleasing hallucination.
But in what is the present of Ireland so different from the past, in which our fathers lived? And what do these repinings mean? What is the charm that has for ever faded? The answer to this question, if complete, would occupy a volume, for the composition of which that of Mr. Phillips might well serve in the character of une pièce historique, abounding, as it does, in apt and instructive illustration, and giving, by its aggregation of anecdotes and descriptions, a somewhat confused but still interesting and lively picture of a very curious and stirring period. There lies, indeed, at the bottom of this inquiry a question with which the practical statesman has now little reason to trouble himself, but which, nevertheless, to the speculative philosopher, cannot fail to be a subject of never-failing interest.
The great physical discoveries of modern times, by which the powers of nature are made to act in subservience to the use and comfort of mankind, steadily tend to one great political result, viz., the permanently uniting and knitting together of much larger numbers of men into one and the same community, and subjecting them to one and the same Government, and that Government one of law and not of force, than was ever known or possible during the early days of man's history. This result, as regards the peace of the world and all the material comforts of life, is highly favorable. Whether the same can be said, of the mental vigor and moral excellence of the human race is a question upon which men may speculate, but which time alone can satisfactorily answer.