Fond legends are to be found in Irish books regarding places where you may now see a round tower and a little old chapel, twelve feet square, where famous universities are once said to have stood, and which have accommodated myriads of students. Mrs. Hall mentions Glendalough, in Wicklow, as one of these places of learning; nor can the fact be questioned, as the universities existed hundreds of years since, and no sort of records are left regarding them. A century hence some antiquary may light upon a Dublin paper, and form marvellous calculations regarding the state of education in the country. For instance, at Bective-House seminary, conducted by Dr. J. L. Burke, Ex-Scholar T.C.D., no less than two hundred and three young gentlemen took prizes at the Midsummer examination: nay, some of the most meritorious carried off a dozen premiums a piece. A Dr. Delamere, Ex-Scholar T.C.D., distributed three hundred and twenty rewards to his young friends; and if we allow that one lad in twenty is a prizeman, it is clear that there must be six thousand four hundred and forty youths under the Doctor’s care.
Other schools are advertised in the same journals, each with its hundred of prize-bearers; and if other schools are advertised, how many more must there be in the country which are not advertised! There must be hundreds of thousands of prizemen, millions of scholars: besides national schools, hedge schools, infant schools, and the like. The English reader will see the accuracy of the calculation.
In the Morning Register, the Englishman will find something to the full as curious and startling to him: you read gravely in the English language how the Bishop of Aureliopolis has just been consecrated; and that the distinction has been conferred upon him by—the Holy Pontiff!—the Pope of Rome, by all that is holy! Such an announcement sounds quite strange in English, and in your own country, as it were; or isn’t it your own country? Suppose the Archbishop of Canterbury were to send over a clergyman to Rome, and consecrate him Bishop of the Palatine or the Suburra, I wonder how his Holiness would like that?
There is a report of Dr. Miley’s sermon upon the occasion of the new bishop’s consecration; and the Register happily lauds the discourse for its ‘refined and fervent eloquence.’ The doctor salutes the Lord Bishop of Aureliopolis on his admission among the ‘Princes of the Sanctuary,’ gives a blow en passant at the Established Church, whereof the revenues, he elegantly says, ‘might excite the zeal of Dives or Epicurus to become a Bishop,’ and having vented his sly wrath upon the ‘courtly artifice and intrigue’ of the Bench, proceeds to make the most outrageous comparisons with regard to my Lord of Aureliopolis; his virtues, his sincerity, and the severe privations and persecutions which acceptance of the episcopal office entails upon him.
‘That very evening,’ says the Register, ‘the new bishop entertained at dinner, in the Chapel-house, a select number of friends; amongst whom were the officiating prelates and clergymen who assisted in the ceremonies of the day. The repast was provided by Mr. Jude, of Grafton Street, and was served up in a style of elegance and comfort that did great honour to that gentleman’s character as a restaurateur. The wines were of the richest and rarest quality. It may be truly said to have been an entertainment where the feast of reason and the flow of soul predominated. The company broke up at nine.’
And so, my lord is scarcely out of chapel but his privations begin! Well. Let us hope that, in the course of his episcopacy, he incur no greater hardships, and that Dr. Miley may come to be a bishop too in his time; when perhaps he will have a better opinion of the Bench.
The ceremony and feelings described are curious, I think; and more so perhaps to a person who was in England only yesterday, and quitted it just as their Graces, Lordships, and Reverences were sitting down to dinner. Among what new sights, ideas, customs, does the English traveller find himself after that brief six hours’ journey from Holyhead!
There is but one part more of the papers to be looked at; and that is the most painful of all. In the law reports of the Tipperary Special Commission sitting at Clonmel, you read that Patrick Byrne is brought up for sentence, for the murder of Robert Hall, Esq.: and Chief Justice Doherty says: ‘Patrick Byrne, I will not now recapitulate the circumstances of your enormous crime; but guilty as you are of the barbarity of having perpetrated with your hand the foul murder of an unoffending old man—barbarous, cowardly, and cruel as that act was—there lives one more guilty man, and that is he whose diabolical mind hatched the foul conspiracy of which you were but the instrument and the perpetrator. Whoever that may be, I do not envy him his protracted existence. He has sent that aged gentleman, without one moment’s warning, to face his God: but he has done more, he has brought you, unhappy man, with more deliberation and more cruelty, to face your God, with the weight of that man’s blood upon you. I have now only to pronounce the sentence of the law:’—it is the usual sentence, with the usual prayer of the judge, that the Lord may have mercy upon the convict’s soul.
Timothy Woods, a young man of twenty years of age, is then tried for the murder of Michael Laffan. The Attorney-General states the case:—On the 19th of May last, two assassins dragged Laffan from the house of Patrick Cummins, fired a pistol-shot at him, and left him dead as they thought. Laffan, though mortally wounded, crawled away after the fall; when the assassins, still seeing him give signs of life, rushed after him, fractured his skull by blows of a pistol, and left him on a dunghill dead. There Laffan’s body lay for several hours, and nobody dared to touch it. Laffan’s widow found the body there two hours after the murder, and an inquest was held on the body as it lay on the dunghill. Laffan was driver on the lands of Kilnertin, which were formerly held by Pat Cummins, the man who had the charge of the lands before Laffan was murdered; and the latter was dragged out of Cummins’s house in the presence of a witness who refused to swear to the murderers, and was shot in sight of another witness, James Meara, who with other men was on the road: and when asked whether he cried out, or whether he went to assist the deceased, Meara answers, ‘Indeed I did not; we would not interfere—it was no business of ours!’
Six more instances are given of attempts to murder; on which the judge, in passing sentence, comments in the following way:—