The fact is, that when the rain is pouring down in the streets, the traveller has little else to remark except these peculiarities of his fellow-travellers and inn-sojourners; and, lest one should be led into further personalities, it is best to quit that water-drinking gormandiser at once, and, retiring to a private apartment, to devote one’s self to quiet observation and the acquisition of knowledge, either by looking out of the window and examining mankind, or by perusing books, and so living with past heroes and ages.
As for the knowledge to be had by looking out of window, it is this evening not much. A great wide, blank, bleak, water-whipped square lies before the bedroom window; at the opposite side of which is to be seen the Opposition Hotel, looking even more bleak and cheerless than that over which Mr. Kilroy presides. Large dismal warehouses and private houses form three sides of the square; and in the midst is a bare pleasure-ground surrounded by a growth of gaunt iron railings, the only plants seemingly in the place. Three triangular edifices that look somewhat like gibbets stand in the paved part of the square, but the victims that are consigned to their fate under these triangles are only potatoes, which are weighed there; and, in spite of the torrents of rain, a crowd of barefooted, red-petticoated women, and men in grey coats and flower-pot hats, are pursuing their little bargains with the utmost calmness. The rain seems to make no impression on the males; nor do the women guard against it more than by flinging a petticoat over their heads, and so stand bargaining and chattering in Irish, their figures indefinitely reflected in the shining, varnished pavement. Donkeys and pony carts innumerable stand around, similarly reflected; and in the baskets upon these vehicles you see shoals of herrings lying. After a short space this prospect becomes somewhat tedious, and one looks to other sources of consolation.
The eighteen-pennyworth of little books purchased at Ennis in the morning came here most agreeably to my aid; and indeed they afford many a pleasant hour’s reading. Like the Bibliothèque Grise, which one sees in the French cottages in the provinces, and the German Volksbuecher, both of which contain stores of old legends that are still treasured in the country, these yellow-covered books are prepared for the people chiefly; and have been sold for many long years before the march of knowledge began to banish Fancy out of the world, and give us, in place of the old fairy tales, Penny Magazines, and similar wholesome works. Where are the little harlequin-backed story-books that used to be read by children in England some thirty years ago? Where such authentic narratives as Captain Bruce’s Travels, The Dreadful Adventures of Sawney Bean, etc., which were commonly supplied to little boys at school by the same old lady who sold oranges and alycompayne?—they are all gone out of the world, and replaced by such books as Conversations on Chemistry, The Little Geologist, Peter Parley’s Tales about the Binomial Theorem, and the like. The world will be a dull world some hundreds of years hence, when Fancy shall be dead, and ruthless Science (that has no more bowels than a steam-engine) has killed her.
It is a comfort, meanwhile, to come on occasions on some of the good old stories and biographies. These books were evidently written before the useful had attained its present detestable popularity. There is nothing useful here, that’s certain; and a man will be puzzled to extract a precise moral out of the Adventures of Mr. James Freeny; or out of the legends in the Hibernian Tales; or out of the lamentable tragedy of the Battle of Aughrim, writ in most doleful Anglo-Irish verse. But, are we to reject all things that have not a moral tacked to them? ‘Is there any moral shut within the bosom of the rose?’ And yet, as the same noble poet sings (giving a smart slap to the utility people the while), ‘useful applications lie in art and nature,’ and every man may find a moral suited to his mind in them; or, if not a moral, an occasion for moralising.
Honest Freeny’s adventures (let us begin with history and historic tragedy, and leave fancy for future consideration), if they have a moral, have that dubious one which the poet admits may be elicited from a rose; and which every man may select according to his mind. And surely this is a far better and more comfortable system of moralising than that in the fable-books, where you are obliged to accept the story with the inevitable moral corollary that will stick close to it.
Whereas, in Freeny’s life, one man may see the evil of drinking, another the harm of horse-racing, another the danger attendant on early marriage, a fourth the exceeding inconvenience as well as hazard of the heroic highwayman’s life—which a certain Ainsworth, in company with a certain Cruikshank, have represented as so poetic and brilliant, so prodigal of delightful adventure, so adorned with champagne, gold lace, and brocade.
And the best part of worthy Freeny’s tale is the noble naïveté and simplicity of the hero as he recounts his own adventures, and the utter unconsciousness that he is narrating anything wonderful. It is the way of all great men, who recite their great actions modestly, and as if they were matters of course; as indeed to them they are. A common tyro, having perpetrated a great deed, would be amazed and flurried at his own action; whereas I make no doubt the Duke of Wellington, after a great victory, took his tea and went to bed just as quietly as he would after a dull debate in the House of Lords. And so with Freeny,—his great and charming characteristic is grave simplicity; he does his work; he knows his danger as well as another; but he goes through his fearful duty quite quietly and easily; and not with the least air of bravado, or the smallest notion that he is doing anything uncommon.
It is related of Carter, the Lion-King, that when he was a boy, and exceedingly fond of gingerbread-nuts, a relation gave him a parcel of those delicious cakes, which the child put in his pocket just as he was called on to go into a cage with a very large and roaring lion. He had to put his head into the forest-monarch’s jaws, and leave it there for a considerable time, to the delight of thousands: as is even now the case; and the interest was so much the greater, as the child was exceedingly innocent, rosy-cheeked, and pretty. To have seen that little flaxen head bitten off by the lion would have been a far more pathetic spectacle than that of the decapitation of some grey-bearded, old, unromantic keeper, who had served out raw meat and stirred up the animals with the pole, any time these twenty years; and the interest rose in consequence.
While the little darling’s head was thus enjawed, what was the astonishment of everybody to see him put his hand into his little pocket, take out a paper—from the paper a gingerbread-nut—pop that gingerbread-nut into the lion’s mouth, then into his own, and so finish at least twopennyworth of nuts!
The excitement was delirious: the ladies, when he came out of Chancery, were for doing what the lion had not done, and eaten him up—with kisses. And the only remark the young hero made was, ‘Uncle, them nuts wasn’t so crisp as them I had t’other day.’ He never thought of the danger,—he only thought of the nuts.