IRISH MEMORIES

VIOLET FLORENCE MARTIN.

IRISH MEMORIES

BY
E. Œ. SOMERVILLE AND MARTIN ROSS
AUTHORS OF “SOME EXPERIENCES OF AN IRISH R.M.,”
“THE REAL CHARLOTTE,” ETC.
WITH 23 ILLUSTRATIONS FROM DRAWINGS BY
E. Œ. SOMERVILLE AND FROM PHOTOGRAPHS
THIRD IMPRESSION
NEW YORK:
LONGMANS, GREEN AND CO.
FOURTH AVENUE AND 30TH STREET
1918

PREFACE

I have many people to thank, for many things, and I have an explanation to make, but the thanks must come first.

I offer my most sincere gratitude to Mrs. Butler and to Professor Edgeworth, for their kindness in permitting me to print Miss Edgeworth’s letters to Mrs. Bushe; to Lord Dunsany, for the extract from “Plays of Gods and Men,” which has said for me what I could not say for myself; to the Editors of the Spectator and of Punch, for their permission to use Martin Ross’s letter and the quatrain to her memory; to the Hon. Mrs. Campbell, the Right Hon. Sir Horace Plunkett, P.C., Captain Stephen Gwynn, M.P., Lady Coghill, Colonel Dawson, and other of Martin Ross’s friends, for lending me the letters that she wrote to them; even when these are not quoted verbatim, they have been of great service to me, and I am very grateful for having been allowed to see them.

I have to explain what may strike some as singular, viz., the omission, as far as was practicable, from the letters of Martin Ross, and from this book in general, of the names of her and my friends and relatives who are still living. I have been guided by a consensus of the opinion of those whom I have consulted, and also by my remembrance of Martin Ross’s views on the subject, which she often expressed to me in connection with sundry and various volumes of Recollections, that have dealt with living contemporaries with a frankness that would have seemed excessive in the case of a memoir of the life of Queen Anne. If I have gone to the opposite extreme, I hope it may be found a fault on the right side.

E. Œ. SOMERVILLE.

September 20th, 1917.

CONTENTS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

THE TENTS OF THE ARABS.

ACT II.

King.

What is this child of man that can conquer Time and that is braver than Love?

Eznarza.

Even Memory....

He shall bring back our year to us that Time cannot destroy. Time cannot slaughter it if Memory says no. It is reprieved, though banished. We shall often see it, though a little far off, and all its hours and days shall dance to us and go by one by one and come back and dance again.

King.

Why, that is true. They shall come back to us. I had thought that they that work miracles, whether in Heaven or Earth, were unable to do one thing. I thought that they could not bring back days again when once they had fallen into the hands of Time.

Eznarza.

It is a trick that Memory can do. He comes up softly in the town or the desert, wherever a few men are, like the strange dark conjurers who sing to snakes, and he does his trick before them, and does it again and again.

King.

We will often make him bring the old days back when you are gone to your people and I am miserably wedded to the princess coming from Tharba.

Eznarza.

They will come with sand on their feet from the golden, beautiful desert; they will come with a long-gone sunset each one over his head. Their lips will laugh with the olden evening voices.

From “Plays of Gods and Men,” by Lord Dunsany.

IRISH MEMORIES

INTRODUCTORY

Perhaps I ought to begin by saying that I have always called her “Martin”; I propose to do so still. I cannot think of her by any other name. To her own family, and to certain of her friends, she is Violet; to many others she is best known as Martin Ross. But I shall write of her as I think of her.

* * * * *

When we first met each other we were, as we then thought, well stricken in years. That is to say, she was a little over twenty, and I was four years older than she. Not absolutely the earliest morning of life; say, about half-past ten o’clock, with breakfast (and all traces of bread and butter) cleared away.

We have said to each other at intervals since then that some day we should have to write our memoirs; I even went so far as to prepare an illustration—I have it still—of our probable appearances in the year 1920. (And the forecast was not a flattering one.) Well, 1920 has not arrived yet, but it has moved into the circle of possibilities; 1917 has come, and Martin has gone, and I am left alone to write the memoirs, with such a feeling of inadequacy as does not often, I hope, beset the historian.

These vagrant memories do not pretend to regard themselves as biography, autobiography, as anything serious or valuable. Martin and I were not accustomed to take ourselves seriously, and if what I may remember has any value, it will be the value that there must be in a record, however unworthy, of so rare and sunny a spirit as hers, and also, perhaps, in the preservation of a phase of Irish life that is fast disappearing. I will not attempt any plan of the path that I propose to follow. I must trust to the caprice of memory, supplemented by the diaries that we have kept with the intermittent conscientiousness proper to such. To keep a diary, in any degree, implies a certain share of industry, of persistence, even of imagination. Let us leave it at that. The diaries will not be brought into court.

CHAPTER I
THE MARTINS OF ROSS

A few years ago Martin wrote an account of her eldest brother, Robert, known and loved by a very wide circle outside his own family as “Ballyhooley.” He died in September, 1905, and in the following spring, one of his many friends, Sir Henniker Heaton, wrote to my cousin and begged her to help him in compiling a book that should be a memorial of Robert, of his life, his writings, and of his very distinguished and valuable political work as a speaker and writer in the Unionist cause. Sir Henniker Heaton died, and the project unfortunately fell through, but not before my cousin had written an account of Robert, and, incidentally, a history of Ross and the Martins which is in itself so interesting, and that, indirectly, accounts for so many of her own characteristics, that, although much that she had meant to write remains unaccomplished, I propose, unfinished though it is, to make it the foremost chapter in these idle and straying recollections.

AN ACCOUNT OF ROBERT JASPER MARTIN, OF ROSS. BY “MARTIN ROSS”

Part I

My brother Robert’s life began with the epoch that has changed the face and the heart of Ireland. It ended untimely, in strange accord with the close of that epoch; the ship has sunk, and he has gone down with it.

He was born on June 17th, 1846, the first year of the Irish famine, when Ireland brimmed with a potato-fed population, and had not as yet discovered America. The quietness of untroubled centuries lay like a spell on Connemara, the country of his ancestors; the old ways of life were unquestioned at Ross, and my father went and came among his people in an intimacy as native as the soft air they breathed. On the crowded estate the old routine of potato planting and turf cutting was pursued tranquilly; the people intermarried and subdivided their holdings; few could read, and many could not speak English. All were known to the Master, and he was known and understood by them, as the old Galway people knew and understood; and the subdivisions of the land were permitted, and the arrears of rent were given time, or taken in boat-loads of turf, or worked off by day-labour, and eviction was unheard of. It was give and take, with the personal element always warm in it: as a system it was probably quite uneconomic, but the hand of affection held it together, and the tradition of centuries was at its back.

The intimate relations of landlord and tenant were an old story at Ross. It was in the days of Queen Elizabeth that they began, when the Anglo-Norman families, known as the Tribes of Galway, still in the high summer of their singular and romantic prosperity, began to contemplate existence as being possible outside the walls of Galway Town, and by purchase or by conquest acquired many lands in the county. They had lived for three or four centuries in the town, self-sufficing, clannish and rich; they did not forget the days of Strong-Bow, who, in the time of Henry II, began the settlement of Galway, nor yet the leadership of De Burgho, and they maintained their isolation, and married and intermarried in inveterate exclusiveness, until, in the time of Henry VIII, relationship was so close and intricate that marriages were not easy. They rang the changes on Christian names, Nicholas, Dominick, Robert, Andrew; they built great houses of the grey Galway limestone, with the Spanish courtyards and deep archways that they learned from their intercourse with Spain, and they carved their coats of arms upon them in that indomitable family pride that is an asset of immense value in the history of a country. Even now, the shop-fronts of Galway carry the symbols of chivalry above their doors, and battered shields and quarterings look strangely down from their places in the ancient walls upon the customers that pass in beneath them.

It was in the sixteenth century that Robert Martin, one of the long and powerful line of High Sheriffs and Mayors of Galway, became possessed of a large amount of land in West Galway, and in 1590 Ross was his country place. From this point the Martins began slowly to assimilate West Galway; Ross, Dangan, Birch Hall, and Ballinahinch, marked their progress, until Ballinahinch, youngest and greatest of the family strongholds, had gathered to itself nearly 200,000 acres of Connemara. It fell, tragically, from the hand of its last owner, Mary Martin, Princess of Connemara, in the time of the Famine, and that page of Martin history is closed in Galway, though the descendants of her grandfather, “Humanity Dick” (for ever to be had in honourable remembrance as the author of “Martin’s Act for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals”), have kept alive the old name of Ballinahinch, and have opened a new and notable record for themselves in Canada.

Of Dangan, the postern gate by the Galway river remains; of Birch Hall, the ruins of a courtyard and of a manorial dove-cot; Ross, the first outpost, nurse of many generations of Martins, still stands by its lake and looks across it to its old neighbour, the brown mountain, Croagh Keenan.

Through a line of Jaspers, Nicholases and Roberts, the story of Ross moved prosperously on from Robert of Elizabeth’s times, untouched even by the hand of Cromwell, unshaken even when the gates of Galway, twelve miles away, opened at length to Ireton. Beyond the town of Galway, the Cromwellian did not set his foot; Connemara was a dark and barren country, and the Martins, Roman Catholic and Royalists to the core, as were all the other Tribes of Galway, held the key of the road.

From that conflict Ross emerged, minus most of its possessions in Galway town and suburbs; after the Restoration they were restored by the Decree of Charles II, but remained nevertheless in the hands of those to whom they had been apportioned as spoil. The many links that had bound Ross to Galway Town seem thenceforward to have been severed; during the eighteenth century the life of its owners was that of their surroundings, peaceful for the most part, and intricately bound up with that of their tenants. They were still Roman Catholic and Jacobite—a kinsman of Dangan was an agent for Charles Edward—and each generation provided several priests for its Church. With my great-grandfather, Nicholas, came the change of creed; he became a Protestant in order to marry a Protestant neighbour, Miss Elizabeth O’Hara, of Lenaboy; where an affair of the heart was concerned, he was not the man to stick at what he perhaps considered to be a trifle. It is said that at the end of his long life his early training asserted itself, and drew him again towards the Church of his fathers; it is certainly probable that he died, as he was born, a son of Rome.

But the die had been cast. His six children were born and bred Protestants. Strong in all ways, they were strong Protestants, and Low Church, according to the fashion of their time, yet they lived in an entirely Roman Catholic district without religious friction of any kind.

It was during the life of Nicholas, my great-grandfather, that Ross House was burned down; with much loss, it is believed, of plate and pictures; it had a tower, and stood beautifully on a point in the lake. He replaced it by the present house, built about the year 1777, whose architecture is not æsthetically to his credit; it is a tall, unlovely block, of great solidity, with kitchen premises half underground, and the whole surrounded by a wide and deep area. It suggests the idea of defence, which was probably not absent from the builder’s mind, yet the Rebellion of twenty years later did not put it to the test. In the great storm of 1839, still known as “The Big Wind,” my grandfather gathered the whole household into the kitchen for safety, and, looking up at its heavily-vaulted ceiling, said that if Ross fell, not a house in Ireland would stand that night. Many fell, but Ross House stood the assault, even though the lawn was white with the spray borne in from the Atlantic, six miles away. It has at least two fine rooms, a lofty well-staircase, with balusters of mahogany, taken out of a wreck, and it takes all day the sun into its heart, looking west and south, with tall windows, over lake and mountain. It is said that a man is never in love till he is in love with a plain woman, and in spite of draughts, of exhausting flights of stairs, of chimneys that are the despair of sweeps, it has held the affection of five generations of Martins.

A dark limestone slab, over the dining-room chimney-piece, bears the coat of arms—“a Calvary Cross, between the Sun in splendour on the dexter limb, and the Moon in crescent on the sinister of the second”—to quote the official description. The crest is a six-pointed star, and the motto, “Sic itur ad astra,” connects with the single-minded simplicity of the Crusader, the Cross of our faith with the Star of our hope. In the book of pedigrees at Dublin Castle it is stated that the arms were given by Richard Cœur de Lion to Oliver Martin, in the Holy Land; a further family tradition says that Oliver Martin shared Richard’s captivity in Austria. The stone on which the arms are carved came originally from an old house in Galway; it has the name of Robuck Martin below, and the date 1649 above. It is one of several now lying at Ross, resembling the lintels of doorways, and engraved with the arms of various Martins and their wives.

The Protestantism of my grandfather, Robert, did not deter him from marrying a Roman Catholic, Miss Mary Ann Blakeney, of Bally Ellen, Co. Carlow, one of three beauties known in Carlow and Waterford as “The Three Marys.” As in most of the acts of his prudent and long-headed life, he did not do wrong. Her four children were brought up as Protestants, but the rites of her Church were celebrated at Ross without let or hindrance; my brother Robert could remember listening at the drawing-room door to the chanting of the Mass inside, and prayers were held daily by her for the servants, all of whom, then as now, were Roman Catholics.

“Hadn’t I the divil’s own luck,” groaned a stable-boy, stuffing his pipe into his pocket as the prayer-bell clanged, “that I didn’t tell the Misthress I was a Protestant!”

ROSS HOUSE, CO. GALWAY.

(Inset) The Martin Coat of Arms.

She lived till 1855, a hale, quiet, and singularly handsome woman, possessed of the fortunate gift of living in amity under the same roof with the many and various relations-in-law who regarded Ross as their home. Family feeling was almost a religious tenet with my grandfather, and in this, as in other things, he lived up to his theories. Shrewd and patient, and absolutely proficient in the affairs of his property, he could take a long look ahead, even when the Irish Famine lay like a black fog upon all things; and when he gave up his management of the estate there was not a debt upon it. One of his sayings is so unexpected in a man of his time as to be worth repeating. “If a man kicks me I suppose I must take notice of that,” he said when reminded of some fancied affront to himself, “short of that, we needn’t trouble ourselves about it.” He had the family liking for a horse; it is recorded that in a dealer’s yard in Dublin he mounted a refractory animal, in his frock coat and tall hat, got him out of the yard, and took him round St. Stephen’s Green at a gallop, through the traffic, laying into him with his umbrella. He was once, in Dublin, induced to go to an oratorio, and bore it for some time in silence, till the choir reiterated the theme, “Go forth, ye sons of Aaron! Go!” “Begad, here goes!” said my grandfather, rising and leaving the hall.

My father, James, was born in 1804, and grew up endowed, as many still testify, with good looks and the peculiarly genial and polished manner that seemed to be an attribute of the Galway gentlemen of his time. He had also a gift with his pen that was afterwards to serve him well, but the business capacity of his father was strangely absent from the character of an otherwise able man. He took his degree at Trinity College, Dublin, and was intended for the Bar, but almost before his dinners were eaten he was immersed in other affairs. He was but little over twenty when he married Miss Anne Higinbotham. It was a very happy marriage; he and his wife, and the four daughters who were born to them, lived in his father’s house at Ross, according to the patriarchal custom of the time, and my father abandoned the Bar, and lived then, as always, the healthy country life that he delighted in. He shot woodcock with the skill that was essential in the days of muzzle-loaders, and pulled a good oar in his father’s boat at the regattas of Lough Corrib and Lough Mask, as various silver cups still testify. I remember seeing him, a straight and spare man, well on in his sixth decade, take a racing spin with my brothers on Ross Lake, and though his stroke was pronounced by the younger generation to be old-fashioned, and a trifle stiff, he held his own with them. Robert has often told me that when they walked the grouse mountains together, his father could, at the end of the day, face a hill better than he, with all his equipment of youth and athleticism.

Among the silver cups at Ross was a two-handled one, that often fascinated our childhood, with the inscription:

“FROM HENRY ADAIR OF LOUGHANMORE, TO
JAMES MARTIN OF ROSS.”

It was given to my father in memory of a duel in which he had acted as second, to Henry Adair, who was a kinsman of his first wife.

My father’s first wife had no son; she died at the birth of a daughter, and her loss was deep and grievous to her husband. Her four daughters grew up, very good-looking and very agreeable, and were married when still in their teens. Their husbands all came from the County Antrim, and two of them were brothers. Barklie, Callwell, McCalmont, Barton, are well-known names in Ireland to-day, and beyond it, and the children of his four elder sisters are bound to my brother Robert’s life by links of long intimacy and profound affection.

The aim of the foregoing résumé of family history has been to put forward only such things as seem to have been determining in the environment and heritage to which Robert was born. The chivalrous past of Galway, the close intimacy with the people, the loyalty to family ties, were the traditions among which he was bred; the Protestant instinct, and a tolerance for the sister religion, born of sympathy and personal respect, had preceded him for two generations, and a store of shrewd humour and common sense had been laid by in the family for the younger generation to profit by if they wished.

My father was a widower of forty when he first met his second wife, Miss Anna Selina Fox, in Dublin. She was then two and twenty, a slender girl, of the type known in those days as elegant, and with a mind divided in allegiance between outdoor amusements and the Latin poets. Her father, Charles Fox, of New Park, Co. Longford, was a barrister, and was son of Justice Fox, of the Court of Common Pleas. He married Katherine, daughter of Chief Justice Bushe, and died while still a young man; his children were brought up at Kilmurrey, the house of their mother’s father.

The career of the Right Honourable Charles Kendal Bushe, Chief Justice of Ireland, is a public one, and need not here be dwelt upon; but even at this distance of time it thrills the hearts of his descendants to remember his lofty indifference to every voice save those of conscience and patriotism, when, in the Irish House of Commons, he opposed the Act of Union with all the noble gift of language that won for him the name “Silver-tongued Bushe,” and left the walls ringing with the reiterated entreaty, “I ask you, gentlemen, will you give up your country!”

His attitude then and afterwards cost him the peerage that would otherwise have been his; but above the accident of distinction, and beyond all gainsaying, is the fact that in the list of influential Irishmen made before the Union, with their probable prices (as supporters of the Act) set over against them, the one word following the name of Charles Kendal Bushe is “Incorruptible.”

His private life rang true to his public utterances; culture and charm, and a swift and delightful wit, made his memory a fetish to those who lived under his roof. My mother’s early life moved as if to the music of a minuet. She learned Latin with a tutor, she studied the guitar, she sat in the old-fashioned drawing-room at Kilmurrey while “The Chief” read aloud Shakespeare, or the latest novel of Sir Walter Scott; she wrote, at eight years old, verses of smooth and virtuous precocity; at seventeen she translated into creditable verse, in the metre beloved of Pope, a Latin poem by Lord Wellesley, the then Viceroy, and received from him a volume in which it was included, with an inscription no less stately than the binding. In her outdoor life she was what, in those decorous days, was called a “Tomboy,” and the physical courage of her youth remained her distinguishing characteristic through life. Like the lilies of the field, she toiled not, neither did she spin, yet I have never known a more feminine character.

It was from her that her eldest son derived the highly strung temperament, the unconscious keenness of observation that was only stimulated by the short sight common to them both, the gift of rapid versifying, and a deftness and brilliance in epigram and repartee that came to both in lineal descent from “The Chief.” An instance of Robert’s quickness in retort occurs to me, and I will give it here. It happened that he was being examined in a land case connected with Ross. The solicitor for the other side objected to the evidence that he gave, as relating to affairs that occurred before he was born, and described it as “hearsay evidence.”

“Well, for the matter of that, the fact that I was born is one that I have only on hearsay evidence!” said Robert unanswerably.

My mother first met my father at the house of her uncle, Mr. Arthur Bushe, in Dublin. She met him again at a ball given by Kildare Street Club; they had in common the love of the classics and the love of outdoor life; his handsome face, his attractiveness, have been so often dwelt on by those who knew him at that time, that the mention of them here may be forgiven. In March, 1844, they were married in Dublin, and a month later their carriage was met a couple of miles from Ross by the tenants, and was drawn home by them, while the bonfires blazed at the gates and at the hall door, and the bagpipes squealed their welcome. Bringing with her a great deal of energy, both social and literary, a kicking pony, and a profound ignorance of household affairs, my mother entered upon her long career at Ross. That her sister-in-law, Marian Martin, held the reins of office was fortunate for all that composite establishment; when, later on, my mother took them in her delicate, impatient hands, she held the strictly logical conviction that a sheep possessed four “legs of mutton,” and she has shown me a rustic seat, hidden deep in laurels, where she was wont to hide when, as she said, “they came to look for me, to ask what was to be for the servants’ dinner.”

For the first year of her married life tranquillity reigned in house and estate; a daughter was born, and was accepted with fortitude by an establishment already well equipped in that respect. But a darker possibility than the want of an heir arose suddenly and engrossed all minds.

In July, 1845, my father drove to the Assizes in Galway, twelve and a half English miles away, and as he drove he looked with a knowledgeable eye at the plots of potatoes lying thick and green on either side of the road, and thought that he had seldom seen a richer crop. He slept in Galway that night, and next day as he drove home the smell of the potato-blight was heavy in the air, a new and nauseous smell. It was the first breath of the Irish famine. The succeeding months brought the catastrophe, somewhat limited in that first winter, a blow to startle, even to stun, but not a death-stroke. Optimistically the people flung their thoughts forward to the next crop, and bore the pinch of the winter with spasmodic and mismanaged help from the Government, with help, lesser in degree, but more direct, from their landlords.

In was in the following summer of stress and hope that my brother Robert was born, in Dublin, the first son in the Martin family for forty-two years, and the welcome accorded to him was what might have been expected. The doctor was kissed by every woman in the house, so he assured my brother many years afterwards, and, late at night as it was, my father went down to Kildare Street Club to find some friend to whom he could tell the news (and there is a touch of appropriateness in the fact that the Club, that for so many years was a home for Robert, had the first news of his birth).

Radiant with her achievement my mother posted over the long roads to Ross, in the summer weather, with her precious first-born son, and the welcome of Ross was poured forth upon her. The workmen in the yard kissed the baby’s hands, the old women came from the mountains to prophesy and to bless and to perform the dreadful rite of spitting upon the child, for luck. My father’s mother, honourable as was her wont towards her husband’s and son’s religion, asked my mother if a little holy water might be sprinkled on the baby.

“If you heat it you may give him a bath in it!” replied the baby’s mother, with irrepressible lightheartedness.

It may be taken for granted that he received, as we all did, secret baptism at the hands of the priest. It was a kindly precaution taken by our foster mothers, who were, it is needless to say, Roman Catholics; it gave them peace of mind in the matter of the foster children whom they worshipped, and my father and mother made no inquiries. Their Low Church training did not interfere with their common sense, nor did it blind them to the devotion that craved for the safeguard.

A month or two later the cold fear for the safety of the potatoes fell again upon the people; the paralysing certainty followed. The green stalks blackened, the potatoes turned to black slime, and the avalanche of starvation, fever and death fell upon the country. It was in the winter of 1847, “the black ’47,” as they called it, when Robert was in his second year, that the horror was at its worst, and before hope had kindled again his ears must have known with their first understanding the weak voice of hunger and the moan of illness among the despairing creatures who flocked for aid into the yard and the long downstairs passages of Ross. Many stories of that time remain among the old tenants; of the corpses buried where they fell by the roadside, near Ross Gate; of the coffins made of loose boards tied round with a hay rope. None, perhaps, is more pitiful than that of a woman who walked fifteen miles across a desolate moor, with a child in her arms and a child by her side, to get the relief that she heard was to be had at Ross. Before she reached the house the child in her arms was dead; she carried it into the kitchen and sank on the flags. When my aunt spoke to her she found that she had gone mad; reason had stopped in that whelming hour, like the watch of a drowned man.

A soup-kitchen was established by my father and mother at one of the gates of Ross; the cattle that the people could not feed were bought from them, and boiled down, and the gates were locked to keep back the crowd that pressed for the ration. Without rents, with poor rate at 22s. 6d. in the pound, the household of Ross staggered through the intimidating years, with the starving tenants hanging, as it were, upon its skirts, impossible to feed, impossible to see unfed. The rapid pens of my father and mother sent the story far; some of the great tide of help that flowed into Ireland came to them; the English Quakers loaded a ship with provisions and sent them to Galway Bay. Hunger was in some degree dealt with, but the Famine fever remained undefeated. My aunt, Marian Martin (afterwards Mrs. Arthur Bushe), caught it in a school that she had got together on the estate, where she herself taught little girls to read and write and knit, and kept them alive with breakfasts of oatmeal porridge. My aunt has told me how, as she lay in the blind trance of the fever, my grandfather, who believed implicitly in his own medical skill, opened a vein in her arm and bled her. The relief, according to her account, was instant and exquisite, and her recovery set in from that hour. She may have owed much to the determination of the Martins of that period that they would not be ill. My mother, herself a daring rebel against the thraldom of illness, used to say that at Ross no one was ill till they were dead, and no one was dead till they were buried. It was the Christian Science of a tough-grained generation.

The little girls whom my aunt taught are old women now, courteous in manner, cultivated in speech, thanks to the education that was given them when National Schools were not.

Our kinsman, Thomas Martin of Ballinahinch, fell a victim to the Famine fever, caught in the Courthouse while discharging his duties as a magistrate. He was buried in Galway, forty miles by road from Ballinahinch, and his funeral, followed by his tenants, was two hours in passing Ross Gate. In the words of A. M. Sullivan, “No adequate tribute has ever been paid to those Irish landlords—and they were men of every party and creed—who perished, martyrs to duty, in that awful time; who did not fly the plague-reeking workhouse, or fever-tainted court.” Amongst them he singled out for mention Mr. Martin of Ballinahinch, and Mr. Nolan of Ballinderry (father of Colonel Nolan, M.P.), the latter of whom died of typhus caught in Tuam Workhouse.

When Robert was three years old, the new seed potatoes began to resist the blight; he was nearly seven before the victory was complete, and by that time the cards that he must play had already been dealt to him.

Part II

The Famine yielded like the ice of the Northern Seas; it ran like melted snows in the veins of Ireland for many years afterwards. Landlords who had escaped ruin at the time were more slowly ruined as time went on and the money borrowed in the hour of need exacted its toll; Ross held its ground, with what stress its owners best knew. It was in those difficult years of Robert’s boyhood, when yet more brothers and sisters continued to arrive rapidly, that his father began to write for the Press. He contributed leading articles to the Morning Herald, a London paper, now extinct; he went to London and lived the life that the writing of leading articles entails, with its long waiting for the telegrams, and its small-hour suppers, and it told on the health of a man whose heart had been left behind him in the West. It tided over the evil time, it brought him into notice with the Conservative Party and the Irish Government, and probably gained for him subsequently his appointment of Poor Law Auditor.

His style in writing is quite unlike that of his eldest son; it is more rigid, less flowing; the sentences are short and pointed, evidently modelled on the rhythmic hammer-stroke of Macaulay; it has not the careless and sunshiny ease with which Robert achieved his best at the first attempt. That facility and versification that is akin to the gift of music, and, like it, is inborn, came from my mother, and came to him alone of his eight brothers and sisters; in her letters to her children she dropped into doggerel verse without an effort, rhymes and metres were in her blood, and to the last year of her life she never failed to criticise occasional and quite insignificant roughnesses in her son’s poems. Of her own polished and musical style one verse in illustration may be given.

“In the fond visions of the silent night,
I dreamt thy love, thy long sought love, was won;
Was it a dream, that vision of delight—?
I woke; ’twas but a dream, let me dream on!”

Robert was a nervous, warm-hearted boy, dark-eyed and romantic-looking; the sensitive nature that expanded to affection was always his, and made him cling to those who were kind to him. The vigorous and outdoor life of Ross was the best tonic for such a nature, the large and healthful intimacy with lake and woods, bog and wild weather, and shooting and rowing, learned unconsciously from a father who delighted in them, and a mother who knew no fear for herself and had little for her children. Everything in those early days of his was large and vigorous; tall trees to climb, great winds across the lake to wrestle with, strenuous and capable talk upstairs and downstairs, in front of furnaces of turf and logs, long drives, and the big Galway welcome at the end of them. One day was like another, yet no day was monotonous. Prayers followed breakfast, long prayers, beginning with the Psalms, of which each child read a verse in due order of seniority; then First and Second Lessons, frequently a chapter from a religious treatise, finally a prayer, from a work named “The Tent and Altar,” all read with excellent emphasis by the master of the house. In later years, after Robert had matriculated at Trinity College, I remember with what youthful austerity he read prayers at Ross, and with what awe we saw him reject “The Tent and Altar” and heard him recite from memory the Morning Prayers from the Church Service. He was at the same time deputed to teach Old Testament history to his brothers and sisters; to this hour the Judges of Israel are painfully stamped on my brain, as is the tearful morning when the Bible was hurled at my inattentive head by the hand of the remorseless elder brother.

Robert’s early schoolroom work at Ross was got through with the ease that may be imagined by anyone who has known his quickness in assimilating ideas and his cast-iron memory. As was the case with all the Ross children, the real interests of the day were with the workmen and the animals. The agreeability of the Galway peasant was enthralling; even to a child; the dogs were held in even higher esteem. Throughout Robert’s life dogs knew him as their friend; skilled in the lore of the affections, they recognised his gentle heart, and the devotion to him of his Gordon setter, Rose, is a thing to remember. Even of late years I have seen him hurry away when his sterner sisters thought it necessary to chastise an offending dog; the suffering of others was almost too keenly understood by him.

Reading aloud rounded off the close of those early days at Ross, Shakespeare and Walter Scott, Napier and Miss Edgeworth; the foundation of literary culture was well and truly laid, and laid with respect and enthusiasm, so that what the boy’s mind did not grasp was stored up for his later understanding, among things to be venerated, and fine diction and choice phrase were imprinted upon an ear that was ever retentive of music. Everyone who remembers his childhood remembers him singing songs and playing the piano. His ear was singularly quick, and I think it was impossible for him to sing out of tune. He learned his notes in the schoolroom, but his musical education was dropped when he went to school, as is frequently the case; throughout his life he accompanied himself on the piano by ear, with ease, if with limitations; simple as the accompaniments were, there was never a false note, and it seemed as if his hands fell on the right places without an effort.

A strange feature in his early education and in the establishment at Ross was James Tucker, an ex-hedge schoolmaster, whose long face, blue shaven chin, shabby black clothes, and gift for poetry have passed inextricably into the annals of the household. He entered it first at the time of the Famine, ostensibly to give temporary help in the management and accounts of the school which my aunt Marian had started for the tenants’ children; he remained for many years, and filled many important posts. He taught us the three R’s with rigour and perseverance, he wrote odes for our birthdays, he was controller-in-chief of the dairy; later on, when my father received the appointment of Auditor of Poor Law, under the Local Government Board, Tucker filled in the blue “abstracts” of the Auditor’s work in admirably neat columns. Robert’s recital of the multiplication table was often interrupted by wails for “Misther Tucker” and the key of the dairy, from the kitchenmaid at the foot of the schoolroom stairs, and the interruption was freely cursed, in a vindictive whisper, by the schoolmaster. Tucker was slightly eccentric, a feature for which there was always toleration and room at Ross; he entered largely into the schoolroom theatricals that sprang up as soon as Robert was old enough to whip up a company from the ranks of his brothers and sisters. The first of which there is any record is the tragedy of “Bluebeard,” adapted by him at the age of eight. As the author did not feel equal to writing it down, it was taught to the actors by word of mouth, he himself taking the title rôle. The performance took place privately in the schoolroom, an apartment discreetly placed by the authorities in a wing known as “The Offices,” beyond ken or call of the house proper. Tucker was stage manager, every servant in the house was commandeered as audience. The play met with much acceptance up to the point when Bluebeard dragged Fatima (a shrieking sister) round the room by her hair, belabouring her with a wooden sword, amid the ecstatic yells of the spectators, but at this juncture the mistress of the house interrupted the revels with paralysing suddenness. She had in vain rung the drawing-room bell for tea, she had searched and found the house mysteriously silent and empty, till the plaudits of the rescue scene drew her to the schoolroom. Players and audience broke into rout, and Robert’s first dramatic enterprise ended in disorder, and, if I mistake not, for the principals, untimely bed.

It was some years afterwards, when Robert was at Trinity, that a similar effort on his part of missionary culture ended in a like disaster. He became filled with the idea of getting up a cricket team at Ross, and in a summer vacation he collected his eleven, taught them to hold a bat, and harangued them eloquently on the laws of the game. It was unfortunate that its rules became mixed up in the minds of the players with a game of their own, called “Burnt Ball,” which closely resembles “Rounders,” and is played with a large, soft ball. In the first day of cricket things progressed slowly, and the unconverted might have been forgiven for finding the entertainment a trifle dull. A batsman at length hit a ball and ran. It was fielded by cover-point, who, bored by long inaction, had waited impatiently for his chance. In the enthusiasm of at length getting something to do, the recently learned laws of cricket were swept from the mind of cover-point, and the rules of Burnt Ball instantly reasserted themselves. He hurled the ball at the batsman, shouting: “Go out! You’re burnt!” and smote him heavily on the head.

The batsman went out, that is to say, he picked himself up and tottered from the fire zone, and neither then nor subsequently did cricket prosper at Ross.

Then, and always, Robert shared his enthusiasm with others; he gave himself to his surroundings, whether people or things, and, as afterwards, it was preferably people. He had the gift of living in the present and living every moment of it; it might have been of him that Carlyle said, “Happy men live in the present, for its bounty suffices, and wise men too, for they know its value.”

Throughout Robert’s school and college days theatricals, charades, and living pictures, written or arranged by him, continued to flourish at Ross. There remains in my memory a play, got up by him when he was about seventeen, in which he himself, despising the powers of his sisters, took the part of the heroine, with the invaluable Tucker as the lover. A tarletan dress was commandeered from the largest of the sisterhood, and in it, at the crisis of the play, he endeavoured to elope with Tucker over a clothes-horse, draped in a curtain. It was at this point that the tarletan dress, tried beyond its strength, split down the back from neck to waist; the heroine flung her lover from her, and backed off the stage with her front turned firmly to the audience, and the elopement was deferred sine die.

Those were light-hearted days, yet they were indelible in Robert’s memory, and the strength and savour of the old Galway times were in them as inextricably as the smell of the turf smoke and the bog myrtle. Nothing was conventional or stagnant, things were done on the spur of the moment, and with a total disregard for pomps and vanities, and everyone preferred good fun to a punctual dinner. Mingling with all were the poor people, with their cleverness, their good manners, and their unflagging spirits; I can see before me the carpenter painting a boat by the old boat quay, and Robert sitting on a rock, and talking to him for long tracts of the hot afternoon. At another time one could see Robert holding, with the utmost zeal and discrimination, a court of arbitration in the coach-house for the settling of an intricate and vociferous dispute between two of the tenants.

Life at Ross was of the traditional Irish kind, with many retainers at low wages, which works out as a costly establishment with nothing to show for it. A sheep a week and a cow a month were supplied by the farm, and assimilated by the household; it seemed as if with the farm produce, the abundance of dairy cows, the packed turf house, the fallen timber ready to be cut up, the fruitful garden, the game and the trout, there should have been affluence. But after all these followed the Saturday night labour bill, and the fact remains, as many Irish landlords can testify, that these free fruits of the earth are heavily paid for, that convenience is mistaken for economy, and that farming is, for the average gentleman, more of an occupation than an income.

The Famine had left its legacy of debt and a lowered rental, and further hindrances to the financial success of farm and estate were the preoccupation of my father’s life with his work as Auditor of Poor Law Unions, the enormous household waste that took toll of everything, and, last and most inveterate of all, my father’s generous and soft-hearted disposition.

One instance will give, in a few sentences, the relation between landlord and tenant, which, as it would seem, all recent legislation has sedulously schemed to destroy. I give it in the words of one of the tenants, widow of an eye-witness.

“The widow A., down by the lake-side” (Lough Corrib—about three miles away), “was very poor one time, and she was a good while in arrears with her rent. The Master sent to her two or three times, and in the end he walked down himself after his breakfast, and he took Thady” (the steward) “with him. Well, when he went into the house, she was so proud to see him, and ‘Your Honour is welcome!’ says she, and she put a chair for him. He didn’t sit down at all, but he was standing up there with his back to the dresser, and the children were sitting down one side the fire. The tears came from the Master’s eyes; Thady seen them fall down the cheek. ‘Say no more about the rent,’ says the Master, to her, ‘you need say no more about it till I come to you again.’ Well, it was the next winter the men were working in Gurthnamuckla, and Thady with them, and the Master came to the wall of the field and a letter in his hand, and he called Thady over to him. What had he to show him but the Widow A.’s rent that her brother in America sent her!”

It will not happen again; it belongs to an almost forgotten régime, that was capable of abuse, yet capable too of summoning forth the best impulses of Irish hearts. The end of that régime was not far away, and the beginning of the end was already on the horizon of Ross.

My grandfather, whose peculiar capacity might once have saved the financial situation, had fallen into a species of second childhood. He died at Ross, and I remember the cold thrill of terror with which I heard him “keened” by an old tenant, a widow, who asked permission to see him as he lay dead. She went into the twilit room, and suddenly the tremendous and sustained wail went through the house, like the voice of the grave itself.

It seemed as if Ross had borne a charmed life during the troubles of the later ’sixties. The Fenian rising of 1867 did not touch it; the flicker of it was like sheet lightning in the Eastern sky, but the storm passed almost unheard. It had been so in previous risings; Ross seemed to be geographically intended for peace. It is bounded on the east by the long waters of Lough Corrib, on the west by barren mountains, stretching to the Atlantic, on the north by the great silences of Connemara. Within these boundaries the mutual dependence of landlord and tenant remained unshaken; it was a delicate relation, almost akin to matrimony, and like a happy marriage, it needed that both sides should be good fellows. The Disestablishment of the Irish Church came in 1869, a direct blow at Protestantism, and an equally direct tax upon landlords for the support of their Church, but of this revolution the tenants appeared to be unaware. In 1870 came Gladstone’s Land Act, which by a system of fines shielded the tenant to a great extent from “capricious eviction.” As evictions, capricious or otherwise, did not occur at Ross, this section of the Act was not of epoch-making importance there; its other provision, by which tenants became proprietors of their own improvements, was also something of a superfluity. It was 1872 that brought the first cold plunge into Irish politics of the new kind.

In February of that year Captain Trench, son of Lord Clancarty, contested one of the divisions of County Galway in the Conservative interest, his opponent being Captain Nolan, a Home Ruler. It went without saying that my father gave his support to the Conservative, who was also a Galway man, and the son of a friend. Up to that time it was a matter of course that the Ross tenants voted with their landlord. Captain Trench canvassed the Ross district, and there was no indication of what was about to happen, or if there were, my father did not believe it. The polling place for that part of the country was in Oughterard, about five miles away; my father drove there on the election day, and on the hill above the town was met by a man who advised him to turn back. A troop of cavalry glittered in the main street and the crowd seethed about them. My father drove on and saw a company of infantry keeping the way for Mr. Arthur Guinness, afterwards Lord Ardilaun, as he convoyed to the poll a handful of his tenants from Ashford at the other side of Lough Corrib to vote for Captain Trench, he himself walking in front with the oldest of them on his arm. During that morning my father ranged through the crowd incredulously, asking for this or that tenant, unable to believe that they had deserted him. It was a futile search; with a few valiant exceptions the Ross tenants, following the example of the rest of the constituency, voted according to the orders of their Church, and Captain Nolan was elected by a majority of four to one. It was a priest from another part of the diocese who gave forth the mandate, with an extraordinary fury of hatred against the landlord side; one need not blame the sheep who passed in a frightened huddle from one fold to another. When my father came home that afternoon, even the youngest child of the house could see how great had been the blow. It was not the political defeat, severe as that was, it was the personal wound, and it was incurable. A petition against the result of the election brought about the famous trial in Galway, at which Judge Keogh, himself a Roman Catholic, denounced the priestly intimidation that was established in the mouths of many witnesses. The Ballot Act followed in June, but these things could not soothe the wounded spirit of the men who had trusted in their tenants.

Startlingly, the death of a Galway landlord followed on the election. He was a Roman Catholic, and belonged to one of the oldest families in the county; on his death-bed he desired that not one of his tenants should touch his coffin. It was not in that spirit that my father, a few weeks afterwards, faced the end. In March he caught cold on one of his many journeys of inspection; he was taken ill at the Galway Club, and a slow pleurisy followed. He lay ill for a time in Galway, and the longing for home strengthened with every day.

“If I could hear the cawing of the Ross crows I should get well,” he said pitifully.

He was brought home, but he was even then past hope.

Some scenes remain for ever on the memory. In the early afternoon of the 23rd of April, I looked down through the rails of the well-stair case, and saw Robert come upstairs to his father’s room, his tall figure almost supported on the shoulder of one of the men. All was then over, and the last of the old order of the Landlords of Ross had gone, murmuring,

“I am ready to meet Thee, Eternal Father!”

Part III

With the death of my father the curtain fell for ever on the old life at Ross, the stage darkened, and the keening of the tenants as they followed his coffin was the last music of the piece.

Two or three months afterwards the house was empty. In the blaze of the June weather, the hall door, that had always stood open, was shut and barred, and, in the stillness, the rabbits ventured up to the broad limestone steps where once the talk of the house had centred in the summer evenings. For the first time in its history Ross House was empty; my mother and her children had embarked upon life in Dublin, and Robert, like his father before him, had gone to London to write for the Press.

For five or six years Robert lived in London. He belonged to the Arundel Club, where lived and moved the Bohemians of that day, the perfect and single-hearted Bohemians, who were, perhaps, survivals of the days of Richard Steele, and have now vanished, unable to exist in the shadeless glare of Borough Councils. Their literary power was unquestioned, the current of their talk was strong, with baffling swirl and eddy, and he who plunged in it must be a resourceful and strong swimmer. Linked inseparably with those years of London life was my mother’s cousin, W. G. Wills, the playwright, poet and painter, who in these early ’seventies had suddenly achieved celebrity as a dramatist, with the tragedy of “Charles I.” If a record could be discovered of the hierarchs of the Bohemians it would open of itself at the name of Willie Wills. Great gifts of play-writing and portrait-painting rained upon him a reputation that he never troubled himself about; he remained unalterably himself, and, clad in his long grey ulster, lived in his studio a life unfettered by the clock. Of his amazing ménage, of the strange and starveling hangers-on that followed him as rooks follow the plough, to see what they could pick up, all who knew him had stories to tell. Of the luncheons at his studio, where the beefsteak came wrapped in newspaper, and the plates that were hopelessly dirty were thrown out of the window; of the appointments written boldly on the wall and straightway forgotten; the litter of canvases, the scraps of manuscript, and among and above these incidents, the tranquillity, the charm, the agreeability of Willie Wills.[1]

Robert has found him and my mother lunching together gloriously on mutton chops, cooked by being flung into the heart of the fire.

“Just one more, Nannie,” said the dramatist, as Robert entered, spearing a blazing fragment and presenting it to his boon companion with a courtly gesture.

In the old days at Ross, Willie Wills was a frequent guest, and held the children in thrall—as he could always ensnare and hold children—with his exquisite story-telling. Their natural guardians withdrew with confidence, as Willie began, with enormous gravity, the tale of “The Little Old Woman who lived in the Dark Wood, and had one long yellow Tooth,” and, returning after an interval, heard that “at this momentous crisis seven dead men, in sacks, staggered into the room—!” while, in the fateful pause that followed, the clamour of the children, “Go on, Willie Wills!” would rise.

Robert and Willie Wills were in many aspects of character and of gifts unlike, yet with some cousinly points in common. Both were cultivated and literary, yet seldom read a book; both were sensitive to criticism, and even touchingly anxious for approval; both were delightful companions in a tête-à-tête. Where sympathy is joined with imagination, and sense of humour with both, it is a combination hard to beat. Robert regarded routine respectfully, if from afar, and sincerely admired the efforts of those who endeavoured to systematise his belongings. Willie Wills was superbly indifferent to surroundings, yet took a certain pride in new clothes. The real points of resemblance were in heart; the chivalrous desire to help the weak, and the indelible filial instinct that glows in natures of the best sort, and marks unfailingly a good son as a good fellow through all the nations of the world.

Throughout these London days Robert wrote for the Globe and other papers, chiefly paragraphs and light articles, that ran from his pen with the real enjoyment that he found in writing them at the last moment. He seemed to do better when working against time than when he had large days in hand and a well-ordered writing-table inviting his presence. He found these things thoroughly uninspiring, and facilities for correcting his work were odious to him. Proofs he never looked at; he said he couldn’t face them; probably because of the critical power that underlay his facility.

London with Robert in it was then, as ever, for Robert’s family, a place with a different meaning—a place of theatre tickets, of luncheons, of newspaper news viewed from within, of politics and actors reduced to human personalities. It was a fixed rule that he should meet his female relatives on their arrival at Euston; it is on record that he was once in time, but it is also recorded that on that occasion the train was forty minutes late. The hum of London seasons filled his brain; London may be attractive or repellent, but it will be heard, and it made strong music for a nature that loved the stir of men and the encounter of minds. Four hundred miles away lay Ross in the whispering stillness of its summer woods, and the monotony of its winter winds, producing heavy bags of woodcock after its kind, while its master “shot folly as she flew,” and found his game in the canards of Fleet Street and Westminster. It was inevitable as things stood, but in that alienation both missed much that lay in the power of each to give.

It was while Robert was living in London that the resignation of Mr. Gladstone took place. Out of the ensuing general election in the spring of 1873 came Isaac Butt and his lieutenants, with a party of sixty Home Rulers behind them; Ireland had sent them instead of the dozen or so of the previous Parliament, and it was said that Ireland had done it in the new-found shelter of the Ballot Act. Robert knew, as anyone brought up as he was must know, that for most of Ireland the Ballot Act could not be a shelter. The Galway election of 1872 had shown to all in whose hands the great power of the franchise lay. One indefensible position had been replaced by another, feudal power by clerical, and only those who knew Robert well, understood how hard it hit him. He shot at Ross occasionally, he visited it now and then, and at every visit his perceptive nature was aware that a new spirit was abroad; in spite of the genuine and traditional feeling of the people for their old allies, in spite of their good breeding, and their anxious desire to conceal the rift. The separation had begun, and only those who have experienced it will understand how strange, how wounding it is.

It was not universal, and theoretical hostility strove always with the soft voice of memory. My father was still to all, “The Masther, the Lord have mercy on him”; the Martins were still “The Family,” who could do no wrong, whose defects, if such were admitted, were revered. “The Martin family hadn’t good sight,” said a tenant, “but sure the people say that was a proof of their nobility.”

There is an incident of one of Robert’s visits to Ross that is not too small to be worth recording. He had given his Gordon setter, Rose, to a friend who lived five miles away from Ross, and she had settled down with resignation to her new life. Trained in the language of the drawing-room, she may have heard it said that Robert was at Ross, or her deep and inscrutable perceptions may have received a wave of warning of his nearness. Whatever it was that prompted her, the old dog made her way alone to Ross, and found her master there.

In 1877 Robert turned his steps again to Dublin, and before the year was out he was living with his grandmother, and was immersed in the life, political, theatrical and social, of Dublin.

My mother’s mother, Mrs. Fox, was, as has been said, a daughter of Chief Justice Bushe, and was a notable member of a remarkable band of brothers and sisters. Strongly humorous, strongly affectionate, a doughty politician, original in every idea, and delightful in her prejudices; a black letter authority on Shakespeare and Scott, a keen debater upon Carlyle, upon Miss Rhoda Broughton, upon all that was worth reading. I can see her declaiming “Henry IV” to Robert and his brethren, with irrepressible gestures of her hand, with a big voice for Falstaff, and a small voice for Mine Hostess, and an eye that raked the audience lest it should waver in attentiveness. Even as clearly can I see her, as, at a time of crisis,—it was, I think, after Gladstone’s attack on Trinity College,—she sprang from her chair, and speechlessly wrung the hand of someone who had rushed into her dining-room, crying,

“Gladstone has resigned!”

That was how she and her family took their politics.

She loved Robert with a touching devotion, and I think those days in Herbert Street were deeply woven into his memory. It was a quiet street, with a long strip of grass and hawthorns, instead of houses, forming one side of it, part of the grounds of the convent that stood at the end. There the birds sang, and a little convent bell spelt out the Angelus with a friendly voice; the old red-brick house, with its old furniture and its old china, the convent bell, with its reminder of cloistered calm, all made a suitable setting for the strictly ordered, cultured life of the old lady who bestowed on them their appropriateness.

In the spring of ’78 Robert was in the thick of amateur theatricals. He was never a first-rate actor, but he was a thoroughly reliable one; he always knew his part, though none could say how or when he learned it, he could “gag” with confidence, and dropped on to his cue unerringly, and he had that liking for his audience that is the shortest cut to being on good terms with them. His gift in ready verse was not allowed to remain idle. He wrote prologues, he arranged singing quadrilles; when the Sheridan Club had a guest whom it delighted to honour, it was Robert who wrote and recited the ode for the occasion; an ode that never attempted too much, and just touched the core of the matter.

With the close of the ’seventies came the burst into the open of the Irish Parliamentary Party, in full cry. Like hounds hunting confusedly in covert, they had, in the hands of Isaac Butt, kept up a certain amount of noise and excitement, keen, yet uncertain as to what game was on foot. From 1877 it was Parnell who carried the horn, a grim, disdainful Master, whose pack never dared to get closer to him than the length of his thong; but he laid them on the line, and they ran it like wolves.

Up to 1877 crops and prices were good, even remarkably so, and rents were paid. Following that year came, like successive blows on the same spot, three bad harvests that culminated in the disastrous season of 1879-80. It was in 1847 that the Famine broke the heart and the life of O’Connell; it was the partial failure of the crop of ’79 and ’80 that created Parnell’s opportunity—so masterful a factor has been the potato in the destinies of Irishmen.

In 1879 the rents began to fail. The distress was not comparable to that of ’47, but it brought about a revolution infinitely greater. At its close it left the Irish tenant practically owner of his land, with a rent fixed by Government, and the feudal link with the landlord was broken for ever. On the Ross estate a new agent had inaugurated a new policy, excellent in theory, abhorrent to those whom it concerned, the “striping” of many of the holdings, in order to give to each tenant an equal share of good and bad land. Anyone who knows the Irish tenant will immediately understand what it means to interfere with his land, and, above all things, to give to another tenant any part of it. It was done nevertheless. The long lines of stone wall ran symmetrically parallel over hill and pasture and bog, and the symmetry was hateful and the equality bitter to those most concerned. It is probable that the discontent sank in and prepared the way for the mischief that was coming.

By the winter of 1879 the pinch had become severe. The tenants, by this time two or three years in arrear, did not meet their liabilities, and most landlords went without the greater part of their income. Robert, among many others, began to learn what it was to be deprived of the moderate income left to him after the charges on his estate were paid. He never again received any.

Three Relief Funds in Dublin coped as best they could with the distress of the Irish poor. One of them was worked with great enthusiasm and organising power by the Duchess of Marlborough, and by every means known to a most capable leader of Society she lured from Society of all grades a ready “rate in aid.” Entertainments sprang up—theatricals, bazaars, concerts—that helped the Fund and at the same time put heart into the flagging Dublin season, and Robert was in the thick of charitable endeavour. His first Irish song, the leader of a long line that culminated later in “Ballyhooly,” was written at about this time, “The Vagrants of Erin,” a swinging tune, that marched to words National enough for any party.

“Give me your hand, if owld Ireland’s the land
From which you may chance to be farin’,”

it began, with all its author’s geniality, and the Irish audience responded to its first chords with drowning applause. Once, as he sang it, accompanying himself, and swinging with the tune, the music stool began to sway in ominous accord. “First it bent, and syne it brake,” and Robert staggered to his feet, but just in time.

“This is a pantomime song, with a breakdown in it!” he said, while the head of the stool rolled from its broken stalk and trundled down the stage.

He had the gift of making friends with his audience; as he came on to the platform to sing, his air of enjoyment, his friendly eyes, even his single eyeglass, had already done half the business. He took them, as it were, to his bosom, and whatever might be their grade, he did his best for them. In spite of the liberties he took with time, words and tune, he was singularly easy to accompany, for anyone acquainted with his methods and prepared to cast himself (it was generally herself) adrift with him, and trust to ear instead of to book. However far afield Robert might range, whatever stories he told, he would surely drop back into the key and the words, like a wild duck into the water, with a just sufficient hint to the waiting coadjutor that his circling flight was ending. His topical songs of those early ’eighties have died, as all of their kind must die. He wrote down nothing, the occasion is forgotten, and the brain in which they had their being has passed from us. One or two points and hits remain with me. In the year that Shotover won the Oaks, a commemorating verse ended:

“Of course she was Shot over,
She’d a Cannon on her back!”

In one of the songs, the explanation of the failure of the ships Alert and Discovery to reach the North Pole was that “those on the Discovery were not on the Alert.”

In spite of the thunderous political background of the early ’eighties, in spite of the empty pockets of those dependent on Irish rents, in spite of the crime that drew forth the Crimes Act, the fun and the spirit were inextinguishable in Dublin.

But the political background was growing blacker, and the thunder more loud. Gladstone’s Land Act of 1881 had not pacified Ireland, even though it made the tenant practically owner of his land, even though the rents were fixed by Government officials, whose mission was to coax sedition to complacence, if not to loyalty. Ireland was falling into chaos. Arrears of rent, Relief Committees, No Rent manifestoes, Plan of Campaign evictions, Funds for Distressed Irish Ladies, outrages, boycotting, and Parnell stirring the “Seething Pot” with a steady hand, while his subordinates stoked the fire. Boycotting was responded to by the Property Defence Association, and in 1882 Robert went forth under its auspices as an “Emergency man.” His business was to visit the boycotted landlords and farmers and to supply them with men—from the North, for the most part—to do the farm work. Those who do not know Ireland, and for whom the word boycotting has no personal associations, can hardly realise what that dark time meant to its victims. The owners of boycotted lands, unable to get food or necessaries of any kind from the local tradespeople, imported supplies from England and the North, and opened stores in their stable yards for such of the faithful as stood firm. Ladies, totally unaccustomed to outdoor labour, saved crops and herded cattle, matters that in themselves might have been found interesting, if arduous, but the terror was over all, and in face of bitter antagonism the task was too great.

It was at this work that Robert knew, for the first time, what it was to have every man’s hand against him, to meet the stare of hatred, the jeer, and the side-long curse; to face endless drives on outside cars, with his revolver in his hand; to plan the uphill tussle with boycotted crops, and cattle for which a market could scarcely be found; to know the imminence of death, when, by accidentally choosing one of two roads, he evaded the man with a gun who had gone out to wait for him. It taught him much of difficult men and of tangled politics, he learned how to make the best of a bad business, and how to fight in a corner; it made him a proficient in Irish affairs, and it added to his opinions a seriousness based on strong and moving points.

Gladstone had faced a dangerous Ireland with concession in one hand and coercion in the other, and however either may go in single harness, there is no doubt that they cannot with success be driven as a pair. There followed the Maamtrasna murders, the extermination of the Huddy family, the assassination in Phœnix Park of Lord Frederick Cavendish and Mr. Burke, the attempted assassination of Judge Lawson opposite Kildare Street Club. When Robert was entering into the deep places of his last illness, he spoke with all his wonted grasp of details of those webs of conspiracy. Tradesmen who came from Dublin to work in Kylemore Castle (then the property of Mr. Mitchell Henry) infected the mind of Northern Connemara with the idea that assassination was a fitting expression of political opinion. The murders of the Maamtrasna district followed. The stately mountains beheld the struggle and the slaughter, and the sweet waters of Lough Mask closed upon the victims.

Month by month the net of conspiracy was woven, and life was the prize played for in wonderful silence and darkness, and murder was achieved like a victory at chess. We know how the victories were paid for. I do not forget the face of Timothy Kelly, as he stood in the dock and was tried for participation in the Phœnix Park murders. There is a pallor of fear that is remembered when once seen, and to see that sick and desperate paleness on the face of a boy of seventeen is to feel for ever the mystery and enormity of his crime, and the equal immensity of the punishment. Unforgettable, too, is the moment when his mother took her seat in the witness chair to support the alibi put forward on his behalf, and looked her boy in his white and stricken face, white and stricken as he. Yet she did not waver, and gave her evidence quietly and collectedly.

A phrase or two from the speech for the defence has fixed itself in the memory.

“Take the scales of Justice,” said the Counsel, with a wide gesture of appeal towards the jury; “lift them far above the reach of passion and prejudice, into those serener regions above where Justice herself reigns supreme——”

Death brooded palpably over the brown and grey Court, and held the tense faces of all in his thrall, and weighted every syllable of the speeches. Never was the irrelevancy of murder as a political weapon made more clear, and the fearful appropriateness of capital punishment seemed clear too, mystery requited with mystery.

When we came into the Court we were told that the jury would disagree, there being at least one “Invincible” on the list, and it was so. But with the next trial the end was reached, and the trapped creature in the dock, with the men who were his confederates, went down into the oblivion into which they had thrust their prey.

Many years ago a mission priest delivered a sermon in Irish in the bare white chapel that stands high on a hill above Ross Lake. I remember one sentence, translated for me by one of the congregation.

“Oh black seas of Eternity, without height or depth, bay, brink, or shore! How can anyone look into your depths and neglect the salvation of his soul!”[2]

It expresses all that need now be remembered of the Phœnix Park murders.

* * * * *

CHAPTER II
“THE CHIEF”

It is a commonplace, even amounting to a bromide, to speak of the breadth, the depth, and the length of the ties of Irish kinship. In Ireland it is not so much Love that hath us in the net as Relationship. Pedigree takes precedence even of politics, and in all affairs that matter it governs unquestioned. It is sufficient to say that the candidate for any post, in any walk of life—is “a cousin of me own, by the Father”—“a sort of a relation o’ mine, by the Mother”—and support of the unfittest is condoned, even justified.

I am uncertain if the practice of deifying a relationship by the employment of the definite article is peculiar to Munster, or even to Ireland. “The fawther,” “the a’nt.” He who speaks to me of my father as “The Fawther,” implies a sort of humorous intimacy, a respect just tinged with facetiousness, that is quite lacking in the severe directness of “your father.”

There was once a high magnate of a self-satisfied provincial town (its identity is negligible). An exhibition was presently to be held there, and it chanced that a visit from Royalty occurred shortly before the completion of the arrangements. It also chanced that a possible visit to Ireland of a still greater Personage impended—(this was several years ago). The lesser Royalty partook of lunch with the magnate, and the latter broached the question of a State opening of the exhibition by the august visitor to be.

“When ye go back to London, now,” he beguiled, “coax the Brother!”

How winning is the method of address! It has in it something of the insidious coquetry of the little dog who skips, in affected artlessness, uninvited, upon your knee.

I have strayed from my text, which was the potency of the net of relationship. Being Irish, I have to acknowledge its spell, and I think it is indisputable that a thread, however slender, of kinship adds a force to friendship.

Martin’s mother and mine were first cousins, granddaughters of Chief Justice Charles Kendal Bushe, and of his wife, Anne Crampton. I have heard my mother assert that she had seventy first cousins, all grandchildren of “The Chief,” but I think there was a touch of fancy about this. There is something sounding and sumptuous about the number seventy, and some remembrance of Ahab and his seventy relatives may have been in it. In her memoir of her brother Robert, Martin has given some suggestion of the remarkable charm and influence of these great-grandparents of ours. The adoration that both of them inspired distils like a perfume from every record of them. They seem to have obliterated all their rival grandfathers and grandmothers. One reflects that each of the seventy first cousins must have possessed four grandparents, yet, in the radiance of this couple, the alternative grandpapas and grandmammas appear to have been, in the regard of their grandchildren, no more than shadows.

They lived in a strangely interesting time, the time of the Union, when there was room in the upper classes for each individual to be known to each, and the proportion of those that governed, and those that were governed, was as the players in an international cricket match to the lookers-on; and it is not too much to boast that, out of a very brilliant team, there was no better innings played than that of Charles Kendal Bushe. When, as in “the ’98,” the lookers-on attempted to join in the game, the result exemplified their incapacity and the advantages of the existing arrangement.

Martin had been given by her mother a boxful of old family letters; one of those pathetic collections of letters that no one either wants, or looks at, or feels justified in burning. I know not for how many years they had been hidden away. We had talked, every now and then, of examining them, but the examination had been postponed for a more convenient season that never came. Now life is emptier, and time seems of less value; I have read them all, and I think that some extracts from them will not come amiss among these memories.

It would require a sounder historian than I, and one who had specialised in Irish affairs of the latter years of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries, to deal adequately with these old papers. The Chief Justice and his wife lived intensely, in the very heart of the most intense time, probably, that Ireland has ever known. They knew all the rebel leaders, Wolfe Tone, Lord Edward Fitzgerald, and the rest of the splendid romantics who fought and died, and lit with the white flame of devotion one page at least of Ireland’s history. The names of Plunket, Grattan, Saurin, later, O’Connell, and others less well known, are found in many of these letters, and there are valentines from “Jemmy Saurin,” apostrophising “the blue eyes of Kitty” (one of the Chief’s daughters, and grandmother of “Martin Ross”); genuine, perhaps, but more probably faked by the young lady’s heartless relatives; anagrams upon the name of Charles Kendal Bushe, and an epigram, written by C. K. B. himself, which has a very charming deftness, and shall be transcribed here.

To Chloe
(To accompany the gift of a watch)

Among our fashionable Bands,
No wonder Time should love to linger,
Allowed to place his two rude hands
Where others dare not lay a finger.

The more I investigate the contents of the old letter box the more fascinating they prove themselves to be.

I must, at all events, endeavour to refrain from irrelevant quotation—(even regretfully omitting “The cure for Ellen P.’s spots. Kate writes me word her face is now as clear as chrystal”)—and will try to deal only with such of the contents of the box as come legitimately within my scope.

The Chief’s letters cover a wide period, from about 1795 (a couple of years after his marriage) to 1837. One does not, perhaps, find in them the brilliance that is associated with his name in public life and in general society. Those from which I have made extracts were written to his wife. Deeply woven in them is the devotion to her that was the mainspring of his life, and in works of devotion one need not expect to find epigram.[3]

In one of them, written in 1807, he writes from Dublin, to her, in the country, telling her of “an unfortunate business” in which he, “without any personal ill-will to anyone,” “found it his duty to take a part.” He deplores that “among the Members of the Bar coldness and jealousy prevail, where there had been the utmost harmony and unanimity.” “It is not in my nature to like such a state of things,” he says, and, I believe, says truly, “and when I am alone my spirits are affected by it in a way that I wou’d not for the World confess to anyone but you. I am told that I am libell’d in the newspapers, which I dont know for I have not read them, and which I wou’d not care about, from the same motives that have so often, to your knowledge, made me indifferent about being prais’d in them.... You remember on a former trying occasion how I acted and I can never forget the heroism with which you supported me and encourag’d me in a conduct which was apparently ruinous in its consequences to yourself and our darling Babies. Ever since you left this, my mind has been agitated in the way I have described to you. I am seven years older and my nerves twenty years older than at the period of the Union. Judge, then, the delight I feel at the prospect of seeing again so soon, the bosom friend dearer than all, the only person upon whose heart I can repose my own when weary—I judge of it by the pleasure I feel in thus unburthening myself to you, and in the consciousness that the very writing of this letter has given me the only warm, comfortable and confidential glow of heart which I have felt since you left me. Adieu beloved Nan—Pray burn this immediately” (twice underlined) “and let no human being learn anything of those thoughts which to you alone I wou’d communicate. Ever yours C. K. B.”

It is a hundred and more years since this injunction was written. The paper is stained and brittle, and I think that perhaps a tear, perhaps also a kiss or two, have contributed a little to the staining. But though she disobeyed him I believe he has forgiven her. I hope he will also forgive a great-granddaughter who has chanced upon this record of a disobedience that few could blame and that any lover would extol.

Long afterwards the same thought came in nearly the same words to another Irishman, the poet, George Darley, and he wrote those lines that have in them the same note of whispered tenderness that still breathes from the discoloured page of the letter that should have been burned a hundred years ago.

“One in whose gentle bosom I
Can pour my inmost heart of woes,
Like the care-burthened honey-fly
That hides his murmurs in the rose.”

* * * * *

I have said that it was an interesting time to be alive in, this junction of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. That the Chief’s sympathies were, as I have already mentioned, with the men on the losing side is very well known. In one of the early letters to his wife, he speaks of having had “a very prosperous circuit,” and says his business was “pretty general, not confin’d to friends or United Irishmen, tho these latter have been no bad friends to me either.” He did not defend their methods, but he stood by his friends, and to the end of his life he stood by his opinions.

In a letter written by Mrs. Bushe to their son Charles, at Castlehaven, after the death of the Chief (that is to say, forty-three years, at least, after the Act of Union), she speaks of the chaotic state of the country, and the ruin caused by the arbitrary and ill-considered enforcement of the recent Poor Law legislation. “Useless however to complain. England has the might which supersedes the right, and we are punished now for our own folly in consenting to the Union! Just what your Father predicted—‘when Ireland gives up the rights that she has, what right has she then to complain?’—How true this little squib of the poor dear C——” (Chief). “Happy for him he did not live to see the ruin he predicted!”

The following account of a visit to Edgeworthstown forms part of a letter, written at Omagh and dated Monday, August 16th, 1810. It is from Chief Justice Bushe to his wife; the beginning portion of the letter is printed in the Appendix I. (page 332).

“I am not surpriz’d that you ask about Edgeworthstown, and I can only tell you that every thing which Smyly has often said to us in praise of it is true and unexaggerated. Society in that house is certainly on the best plan I have ever met with. Edgeworth is a very clever fellow of much talent, and tho not deeply inform’d on any subject, is highly (which is consistent with being superficially) so in all. He talks a great deal and very pleasantly and loves to exhibit and perhaps obtrude what he wou’d be so justifiably vain of (his daughter and her works) if you did not trace that pride to his predominant Egotism, and see that he admires her because she is his child, and her works because they are his Grand Children. Mrs. Edgeworth is uncommonly agreeable and has been and not long ago very pretty. She is a perfect Scholar, and at the same time a good Mother and housewife. She is an excellent painter, like yourself, and like you has been oblig’d by producing Originals to give up Copying: She is you know a 5th or 6th Wife and her last child was his 22d. Two Miss Sneyds, amiable old maids, live with him. They are sisters of one of his wives, a beautiful and celebrated Honoria Sneyd, mention’d in Miss Seward’s Monody on Major André and known by her misfortune in having been betroth’d to that poor fellow. They are Litchfield people of the old literary set of the Garricks Dr. Johnson Miss Seward &c. &c. There are many young Edgeworths male and female all of promise and talent and all living round the same table with this set among whom I have not yet mention’d Miss Edgeworth, because I consider you as already knowing her from her works. In such a Society you may suppose Conversation must be good, but I was not prepared to find it so easy. It is the only set of the kind I ever met with in which you are neither led nor driven, but actually fall, and that imperceptibly, into literary topics, and I attribute it to this that in that house literature is not a treat for Company upon Invitation days, but is actually the daily bread of the family. Miss Edgeworth is for nothing more remarkable than for the total absence of vanity. She seems to have studied her father’s foibles for two purposes, to avoid them and never to appear to see them, and what does not always happen, her want of affectation is unaffected. She is as well bred and as well dress’d and as easy and as much like other people as if she was not a celebrated author. No pretensions, not a bit of blue stocking is to be discover’d. In the Conversation she neither advances or keeps back, but mixes naturally and cheerfully in it, and tho in the number of words she says less than anyone yet the excellence of her remarks and the unpremeditated point which she gives them makes you recollect her to have talk’d more than others. I was struck by a little felicity of hers the night I was there. Shakespear was talk’d of as he always is, and I mentioned what you have lately heard me speak of as a literary discovery and curiosity, that he has borrow’d the Character of Cardinal Wolsey from Campion, the old Chronicler of Ireland. This was new to them and Edgeworth began one of his rattles—

“‘Well Sir, and has the minute, and the laborious, and the indefatigable, and the prying, and the investigating Malone found this out?’

“Miss Edgeworth said, almost under her breath,

“‘It was too large for him to see!’

“Is not that good Epigram? I think it is. Edgeworth gave her the advantage of taking her into France with his Wife and others of his family during the short peace, and they were persons to improve such an opportunity. Miss Edgeworth’s Madame Fleury, in the Fashionable Tales is form’d on a true story which she learn’d there. You will think this no description unless you know what her figure is, and face &c. &c. I think her very good looking and can suppose that she was once pretty. Imagine Miss Wilmot at about 43 years old for such I suppose Miss E. to be, with all the Intelligence of her Countenance perhaps encreas’d and the Sensibility preserv’d but somewhat reduc’d, the figure very smart and neat as it must be if like Miss W’s but some of its beautiful redundancies retir’d upon a peace Establishment.

“Such is Miss Edgeworth but take her for all in all, there is nothing like her to be seen, or rather to be known, for it is impossible to be an hour in her Company without recognizing her Talent, benevolence and worth.

“An interesting anecdote occurs to me that Edgeworth told us and forc’d her to produce the proof of.

“Old Johnson of St. Paul’s Churchyard London has always been her bookseller and purchas’d her Works at first experimentally and latterly liberally. He died a few months ago and rather suddenly and a few hours before his death he sent for his nephew to whom he bequeath’d his property and who succeeded him in his business and told him that he felt he had done Miss E. injustice in only giving her £450 for Fashionable Tales and desir’d him to give her £450 more. He died that day and the next the Nephew sent her an account of the Transaction and the £450. This story only requires to be told by Miss E. I read the original letter.

“Adieu beloved Nan. I have scribbled very much but since I left town I have no other opportunity of chatting to you.

“Ever your
C. K. B.”

CHAPTER III
MAINLY MARIA EDGEWORTH

There is a portrait of Mrs. Bushe that is now in the possession of one of her many great-grandchildren, Sir Egerton Coghill. It is a small picture, in pastel, very delightful in technique, and the subject is worthy of the technique. Nancy Crampton was her name, and the picture was probably done at the time of her marriage, in 1793, and is a record of the excellent judgment of the future Lord Chief Justice of Ireland.

It would be hard to find a more charming face. From below a cloud of brown curls, deep and steady blue eyes look straight into yours from under level brows. The extreme intellectuality of the expression does not master its sweetness. In looking at the picture the lines come back—

“One in whose gentle bosom I
Can pour my inmost heart of woes.”

No wonder that in the troublous days of the Union, when bribes and threats assailed the young barrister who was already a power in the land, no wonder indeed that he often, as he says in one of his letters, “heav’d a sigh, and thought of Nancy,” and knew “with delight” that on her heart he could repose his own when weary.

Here, I think, may fitly be given some lines that the Chief wrote, when he was an old man, to accompany the gift to his wife of a white fur tippet.

To a Tippet.

Soon as thy milk-white folds are prest
Like Wreaths of Snow about her breast,
Oh guard that precious heart from harm
Like thee ’t is pure, like thee ’t is warm.

Love and wit are immortal, we know, but the spirit is rare that can inspire them after nearly fifty years of married life; yet rarer, perhaps, the young heart that can persuade them still to dwell with it and to overlook the silver head.

I grieve that I have been unable to find any of Mrs. Bushe’s earlier letters. She was a brilliant creature in all ways, and had a rare and enchanting gift as an artist, which, even in those days, when young ladies of quality were immured inexorably within the padded cell of the amateur, could scarce have failed to make its mark, had she not, as the Chief, with marital complacency, observed, devoted herself to “making originals instead of copies.”

In her time there were few women who gave even a moment’s thought to the possibilities of individual life as an artist, however aware they might be—must have been—of the gifts they possessed. I daresay that my great-grandmother was well satisfied enough with what life had brought her—“honour, love, obedience, troops of friends.” In one of her letters, written when she was a very old woman, she writes gaily of the hateful limitations of old age, and says:

“When people will live beyond their time such things must be, and I have a right to be thankful that old Time has put on his Slippers, and does not ride roughshod over me.”

(Which shows, I think, that marriage had subdued the artist in her, and had, in compensation, evoked the philosopher.)

It is clear, from the last letter in the preceding chapter, that Miss Edgeworth and Mrs. Bushe had not met before 1810. How soon afterwards they met, and the friendship, that lasted for the rest of their lives, began, I cannot ascertain. In one of Miss Edgeworth’s letters (quoted in one of the many volumes that have been written about her) she says:

“Having named Mrs. Bushe, I must mention that whenever I meet her she is my delight and admiration, from her wit, humour, and variety of conversation.”

Among the contents of the letter-box that Martin gave me are several letters from Miss Edgeworth, and they testify to the fact that she lost no time in falling in love with her “very dear Mrs. Bushe.”

I recognise, gratefully, how highly I am privileged in being permitted to include in my book these letters from the brilliant pioneer of Irish novelists. To the readers and lovers of, for example, “Castle Rackrent,” they may seem a trifle disappointing in their submission to the conventions of their period, a period that decreed a mincing and fettered mode for its lady letter-writers, and rigorously exacted from its females the suitable simper.

The writing is pale, prim, and pointed, undeniably suggestive of prunes, and prisms, and papa (that inveterate papa of Maria’s); yet, in spite of the fetters of convention, the light step is felt, and although the manner may mince, it cannot conceal the humour, the spirit, and the charm of disposition.

Miss Edgeworth was born in the same year as Chief Justice Bushe, and died six years later than he, in 1849. Her friendship with Mrs. Bushe remained unbroken to the last, and their mutual admiration continued unshaken. In such of Miss Edgeworth’s letters to my great-grandmother as I have seen, she speaks but little of literary work. One of the later letters, however (dated 1827), accompanied a present of one of her books; the date would make it appear that this was one of the sequels to “Early Lessons”—(in which the unfortunate Rosamond is victimised by the dastardly fraud of the Purple Jar, and Harry gets no breakfast until he has made his bed, although the fact that his sole ablutions consist in washing his hands is in no way imputed to him as sin. But this, also, is of the period).

Miss Maria Edgeworth to Mrs. Bushe.

“Edgeworth’s Town
“July 12. 1827.

“How can I venture to send such an insignificant little child’s book to Mrs. Bushe?—Because I know she loves me and will think the smallest offering from me a mark of kindness—of confidence in her indulgence and partiality.

“My sister Harriet has given me great pleasure by writing me word how kindly you speak of me, dear Mrs. Bushe, and as I know your sincerity, to speak and to think kindly with you are one and the same. Believe me I have the honour to be like you in this. In every thing that has affected you since we parted (that has come to my knowledge) I have keenly sympathised—Oh that we could meet again. I am sure our minds would open and join immediately. After all there is no greater mistake in life than counting happiness by pounds shillings and pence—You and I have never done this I believe—We ought to meet again. Cannot you contrive it?

“I am glad at least that my sister Harriet has the pleasure which I have not. Your penetration will soon discover all my father’s heart and all his talents in her. Remember me most respectfully and most affectionately to the Chief Justice and believe me

“Most truly your
“Affectionate friend
“Maria Edgeworth.

“Harriet did not know this little vol was published or that I intended publishing it when you spoke to her.

“I had amused myself with the assistance of a confederate sister at home in getting them printed without her knowing it for the Wise pleasure of surprising her as she had always said I could not print anything without her knowledge—These little wee wee plays were written ages ago in my age of happiness for birthday diversions and Harriet added the cross Prissy 16 years ago!”

Miss Maria Edgeworth to Mrs. Bushe
Kilmurrey, Thomastown, Co. Kilkenny.

“Edgeworth’s Town
“June 18th 1815.

“My very dear Mrs. Bushe,

“This letter is dictated by my father as you might guess by the bold appellation with which I have begun. He projects a migration southward this ensuing month—towards Cork where Mrs. Edgeworth’s brother is fatly and fitly provided for in the Church. In his route my father glances sideways to the real pleasure of having an opportunity of seeing you free from all the shackles of high station and high fashion, in the retirement which your wise husband prefers to both. Tell us when he will be at home and when at home whether it will be convenient (we are vain to think it would be agreeable you perceive) to receive us for a day and a night. There will be three of us, papa, mama and self. Though we were Foxites we cannot sleep ‘three in a bed.’ As the circuit will probably engage the Sol. gen[4] for some time to come our prospect looks to the period when he may return.

“So far from my father—now of him. This day he is much better and we are all in high spirits. And he will not let me add one word more.

“Dear Mrs. Bushe,
“Affectionately yours
“Maria Edgeworth.”

“From Miss Maria Edgeworth
to Mrs. Bushe, Kilmurrey, Thomastown,
Co. Kilkenny

“Edgeworth’s Town
Augt. 26th 1832.

My dear Mrs. Bushe

“Did you ever form any idea of the extent of my assurance—

“If you did I have a notion I shall now exceed whatever might have been your estimate.

“I am about to ask you—to ask you, plunging without preface or apology—to go to work for me, and to give me, only because I have the assurance to ask for it, what every body would wish to have from you and nobody who had any pretence to modesty (out of your own family and privileged circle of dears) would venture to think of asking for.

“A bag if you please of your own braidwork my dear Mrs. Bushe—Louisa Beaufort who has just come to visit us tells me that your braid work is so beautiful that I do covet this souvenir from you. The least Forget me not—or Heartsease will fulfil all my wishes—if indeed you are so very kind as to listen to me. I have your Madonna over the chimney piece in our library and often do I look at her with affection and gratitude. I wish dear Mrs. Bushe we could ever meet again, but this world goes so badly that I fear our throats will be cut by order of O’Connell & Co very soon, or we shall be beggars walking the world, and walking the world different ways. It is good to laugh as long as we can, however and whenever we can—between crying times—of which there are so many too many now a days.

“I hear sad tidings of my much loved, more loved even than admired, friend Sir Walter Scott. His body lives and is likely to live some time—his mind oh such a mind! is gone forever. His temper too which was most charming and most amiable is changed by disease. Mrs. Lockhart that daughter who so admires him is more to be pitied than words can express. His mind was a little revived by the first return to Abbotsford—but sunk again—Of all afflictions surely this is the worst that friends can have to endure—death a comparative blessing.

“I find the love of garden grow upon me as I grow older more and more. Shrubs and flowers and such small gay things, that bloom and please and fade and wither and are gone and we care not for them, are refreshing interests, in life, and if we cannot say never fading pleasures, we may say unreproved pleasures and never grieving losses.

“I remember your history of the bed of tulips or anemones which the Chief Justice fancied he should fancy and which you reared for him and he walked over without knowing.

“Does your taste for flowers continue. We have some fine carnations—if you could fancy them. Some way or other they should get to you. If not by a flying carpet by as good a mode of conveyance or better—the frank of Sir W. Gapes or Right Hon. C. G. S. Stanley.

“To either of which direct for me anything of whatever size or weight (barring the size of the house or so) and it will be conveyed to me swift and sure as if the African Magician himself carried the same.

“I more much more wish to hear from you my dear Mrs. Bushe, and to know from your own self how you are going on than to have all the braided bags however pretty that could be given to me. That is the truth of the matter. So pray write to me and tell me all that concerns you—for

“I am very sincerely and affectionately
“Your little old friend
“Maria Edgeworth.

“Will you present my affectionate respects to the Chief Justice. I wish his country were more worthy of him—or rather I wish his country were allowed to be and to show itself more worthy of such a Chief Justice and such a private character as his.

“I am convinced that if the Scotch maxim of Let well alone were pursued in Ireland we should do well enough. But to the rage of obtaining popularity in a single individual must the peace of a country be sacrificed.[5]

“What can the heart of such a man be made of? And however great his talents how infinitely little and nauseously mean must his Mind be!

“He is too clever and clear sighted not to know too well what he is about and what his own motions are. It is my belief however that he could not now be quiet if he would he has such a Mob-omania upon him.

“We are quiet enough here—as yet.”

“The Lord Chief Justice of Ireland
“17 Upper Mount Street, Dublin.

From Miss Maria Edgeworth.

A proverb goes—(I love it well)
Of “Give an inch and take an ell”
’Tis lady’s law—and, to be brief
Now must be mine, my dear Lord Chief

“The case is this—

“May I beg your Lordship not to shake your head irrevocably before you have heard me out—

“Suppose.... I only modestly say suppose ... which leaves the matter just as it was, in case your Lordship is determined to oppose—SUPPOSE now, in short, you could contrive to come down to us a day—a day or TWO—(pray dont start off!) or if you could possibly bear 3—days before the assizes? You could get—say here—without hurry to dinner at 7—or—name your hour—and you should have coffee comfortably without being obliged to enter an appearance in the drawing room, and should retire to rest at whatever hour you like—and I do humbly concieve that your bed and all concerns, might be as comfortably arranged here as at Mullingar Hotel—(though I wd not disparage sd Hotel)—But double bedded or single room and room for friend and servant adjoining—and a whole apartment with backstairs of its own shut out from the rest of the house is at your Lordship’s disposal—And as to invalid habits unless you have the habit of walking in your sleep all over the house I don’t see how they could incommode or be incommoded.

“If you mean that you like to lie in bed in the morning late— Lie as late as ever you please.

“No questions asked. No breakfast waiting for you below, or thought of your appearance till you please to shine upon us. Breakfast waiting your bell’s touch, in your bed, or out of it at any hour you please—And no worry of Company at dinner (unless you bespeak the world and his wife—But if you did we should not know where to find them for you).

“We have only our own every-day family party and should only wish and hope to add to it, to meet you, a sister, who in happy days knew and admired you, even from her childhood (Mrs. Butler née Harriet Edgeworth) and her husband, whom you knew in happy days too, at the late Bishop of Meath’s. Thank you my dear Lord for promising to look for the Bishop’s verses.

Now pray let me thank you in my heart for your answer to this letter.

“Mrs Bushe if she likes me as well as I most humbly believe she does, will put in a good word for us—and her good words can never be said in vain—and must be followed by good deeds.

“I am my dear Lord
with more respect than appears here
And all the sincerely affectionate
regard that has been felt for you (we need not say how many years)—

“Your—to be obliged—humble servant
“Maria Edgeworth

“Edgeworth Town
“Feb. 1st 1837”

CHAPTER IV
OLD FORGOTTEN THINGS

Chief Justice Bushe died in 1843, and Maria Edgeworth in 1849, but Mrs. Bushe lived on till 1857, a delight and an inspiration to her children and grandchildren. To her, even more than to the Chief, may be ascribed the inevitable, almost invariable turn for the Arts, in some form, frequently in all forms, that distinguishes their descendants, and to her also is attributed a quality in story-telling known as “Crampton dash,” which may be explained as an intensifying process, analogous to the swell in an organ.

But few of their grandchildren, that potent and far-reaching first cousinhood of seventy, now remain. Bushes, Plunkets, Coghills, Foxes, Franks, Harrises, they were a notable company, and I imagine that in the middle and later years of the last century they made a clan of no small power and influence. “Dublin is my washpot, over Merrion Square will I cast out my shoe,” they might have said, possibly did say, in their arrogant youth, when “The Family,” good-looking, amusing, and strenuous, “took the flure” in the Dublin society of the ’fifties. From among them came no luminary in Art, specially outstanding, yet there was scarcely one of them without some touch of that spark which is lit by a coal taken from the altar, and is, for want of a better term, called originality; and although the reputations of neither Shakespeare nor Michael Angelo were threatened, they could have provided a club dedicated to “Les Quatz’ Arts” with a very useful selection of members.

(Yet the mention of Shakespeare, and the wish to be sincere, force me to recall a tale of two of these first cousins of Martin’s mother and mine, the one an artist of delightful achievement, the other, amongst her many gifts, an astronomer and writer. The latter reproached the former for her neglect of Shakespeare, and announced her intention of reading aloud to her one of his plays. The artist replied with a high and characteristic tranquillity, “Shakespeare was a coarse man, my dear, but you may read him to me if you like. I can go into a reverie.”)

It is not out of place to mention here that the first writing in which Martin and I collaborated was a solemnly preposterous work, a dictionary of the words and phrases peculiar to our family, past and present, with derivations and definitions—the definitions being our opportunity. It might possibly—in fact I think some selections would—entertain the public, but I can confidently say it will never be offered to it; Bowdler himself would quail at the difficulties it would present.

* * * * *

Martin has, in her memoir of her brother Robert, given a sketch of life at Ross as it was in the old days, in its patriarchal simplicity, its pastoral abundance, its limitless hospitality, its feudal relations with the peasants. Its simplicity was, I imagine, of a more primitive type than can be claimed for any conditions that I can personally remember in my own country. The time of which she has written was already passing when she arrived on the scene, and she had to rely mainly on the records of her elders. The general atmosphere there and in my country was much the same, but a certain degree of sophistication may have set in a little earlier here, and when I say “here,” I speak of that fair and far-away district, the Barony of West Carbery, County Cork, the ultimate corner of the ultimate speck of Europe—Ireland. You will not find West Carbery’s name in the atlas, but Cape Clear will not be denied, and there is nothing of West Carbery west of Cape Clear, unless one counts its many sons and daughters who have gone even farther west, to the Land of the Setting Sun.

The Ireland that Martin and I knew when we were children is fast leaving us; every day some landmark is wiped out; I will try, as she has done, to recapture some of the flying memories.

To begin with

Castle Townshend.

Castle Townshend is a small village in the south-west of the County of Cork, unique in many ways among Irish villages, incomparable in the beauty of its surroundings, remarkable in its high level of civilisation, and in the number of its “quality houses.” “High ginthry does be jumpin’ mad for rooms in this village,” was how the matter was defined by a skilled authority, while another, equally versed in social matters, listened coldly to commendation of a rival village, and remarked, “It’s a nice place enough, but the ginthry is very light in it. It’s very light with them there entirely.”

I hasten to add that this criticism did not refer to the morals of the gentry, merely to their scarcity—as one says “a light crop.”

Castlehaven Harbour, to whose steep shores it adheres, defiant of the law of gravity, by whose rules it should long since have slipped into the sea, has its place in history. The Spanish Armada touched en passant (touched rather hard in some places), one of Queen Elizabeth’s admirals, Admiral Leveson, touched too, fairly hard, and left cannon-ball bruises on the walls of Castlehaven Castle. The next distinguished visitors were a force of Cromwell’s troopers. Brian’s Fort, built by Brian Townshend, the son of one of Cromwell’s officers, still stands firm, and Swift’s tower, near it, is distinguished as the place where “the gloomy Dean; (of autre fois) wrote a Latin poem, called “Carberiae Rupes.” A translation of this compliment to the Rocks of Carbery was printed one hundred and seventy years ago in Smith’s “History of the Co. Cork.” It was much admired by the historian. A quotation from it may be found in “A Record of Holiday,” in one of our books, “Some Irish Yesterdays,” but candour compels me to admit that four of its lines, descriptive of the coast of Carbery—

“Oft too, with hideous yawn, the cavern wide
Presents an orifice on either side;
A dismal orifice, from sea to sea
Extended, pervious to the god of day.”

—might be taken as equally descriptive of its readers.

The Titanic passed within a few miles of Castlehaven on her first and last voyage; I saw her racing to the West, into the glow of a fierce winter sunset. It was from Castle Townshend that the first warnings of the sharks that were waiting for the Lusitania were sent; and into Castlehaven Harbour came, by many succeeding tides, victims of that tragedy. Let it be remembered to the honour of the fishermen who harvested those sheaves of German reaping, that the money and the jewels, which most of the drowned

CASTLEHAVEN HARBOUR.

V. F. M.

CARBERIAE RUPES.

E. B. C.

people had brought with them, were left with them, untouched.

It must have been eighty or ninety years ago that the first member of “The Chief’s” family reached Castlehaven. This was his second son, the Rev. Charles Bushe, who was, as Miss Edgeworth says of her stepmamma’s brother, “fatly and fitly provided for” with the living of Castlehaven. Somervilles and Townshends had been living and intermarrying in Castlehaven Parish, with none to molest their ancient solitary reign, since Brian Townshend built himself the fort from which he could look forth upon one of the loveliest harbours in Ireland, and the Reverend Thomas Somerville, the first of his family to settle in Munster, took to himself (by purchase from the representatives of the Earl of Castlehaven) the old O’Driscoll Castle, and lies buried beside it, in St. Barrahane’s churchyard, under a slab that proclaims him to have been “A Worthy Magistrate, and a Safe and Affable Companion.” The two clans enjoyed in those days, I imagine, a splendid isolation, akin to that of the Samurai in Old Japan, and the Rev. Charles Bushe, an apostle of an alien cultivation, probably realised the feelings of Will Adams when he was cast ashore at Osaka, may, indeed, have felt his position to be as precarious as that of the first missionary at the Court of the King of the Cannibal Islands.

My great-uncle Charles was for forty years the Rector of Castlehaven Parish, and the result of his ministry that most directly affects me was the marriage of my father, Colonel Thomas Henry Somerville, of Drishane, to the Rev. Charles’s niece, Adelaide Coghill. (That she was also his step-sister-in-law is a fact too bewildering to anyone save a professional genealogist for me to dwell on it here. I will merely say that my mother’s father was Admiral Sir Josiah Coghill, and her mother was Anna Maria Bushe, daughter of the Chief Justice.)[6]

There is a picture extant, the work of that artist to whom I have already referred, in which is depicted the supposed indignation of the Aboriginal Red men, i.e., my grandfather Somerville and his household, at the apostasy of my father, a Prince of the (Red) Blood Royal, in departing from the family habit of marrying a Townshend, and in allying himself with a Paleface. In that picture the Red men and women are armed with clubs, the Palefaces with croquet mallets. It was with these that they entered in and possessed the land. My grandmother (née Townshend, of Castle Townshend), a small and eminently dignified lady, one of my great-aunts, and other female relatives, are profanely represented, capering with fury, clad in brief garments of rabbit skin. The Paleface females surge in vast crinolines; the young Red man is encircled by them, as was the swineherd in Andersen’s fairy tale, by the Court ladies. My grandfather swings a tomahawk, and is faced by my uncle, Sir Joscelyn Coghill, leader of the second wave of invasion, with a photographic camera (the first ever seen in West Carbery) and a tripod.

* * * * *

I think I must diverge somewhat farther from my main thesis in order to talk a little about the Ancient Order of Hibernians (if I may borrow the appellation) who were thus dispossessed. For, as is the way all the world over, the missionaries ate up the cannibals, and the Red men have left only their names and an unworthy granddaughter to commemorate their customs.

Few South Pacific Islands are now as isolated as was, in those days,—I speak of ninety or one hundred years ago—Castle Townshend. The roads were little better than bridle-paths; they straggled and struggled, as far as was possible, along the crests of the hills, and this was as a protection to the traveller, who could less easily be ambushed and waylaid by members of the large assortment of secret societies, Whiteboys, Ribbonmen, Molly Maguires, Outlaws in variety, whose spare moments between rebellions were lightened by highway robbery. I have heard that my great-grandmother’s “coach” was the only wheeled vehicle that came into Castle Townshend. My great-grandfather used to ride to Cork, fifty-two miles, and the tradition is that he had a fabulous black mare, named Bess, who trotted the journey in three hours (which I take leave to doubt). All the heavy traffic came and went by sea. The pews of the church came from Cork by ship. They have passed now, but I can remember them, and I should have thought that their large simplicity would not have been beyond the scope of the local carpenter. There was a triple erection for the pulpit; the clerk sat in the basement, the service was read au premier, and to the top story my great-uncle Charles was wont to mount, in a black gown and “bands,” and thence deliver classic discourses, worthy, as I have heard, of the son of “silver-tongued Bushe,” but memorable to me (at the age of, say, six) for the conviction, imparted by them anew each Sunday, that they were samples of eternity, and would never end. My eldest brother, who shared the large square pew with our grandfather and me, was much sustained by a feud with a coastguard child, with whom he competed in the emulous construction of grimaces, mainly based, like the sermons, on an excessive length of tongue, but I had no such solace. Feuds are, undoubtedly, a great solace to ennui, and in the elder times of a hundred years or so ago they seem to have been the mainstay of society in West Cork. Splendid feuds, thoroughly made, solid, and without a crack into which any importunate dove could insert so much as an olive-leaf.

Ireland was, in those days, a forcing bed for individuality. Men and women, of the upper classes, were what is usually described as “a law unto themselves,” which is another way of saying that they broke those of all other authorities. That the larger landowners were, as a class, honourable, reasonably fair-minded, and generous, as is not, on the whole, disputed, is a credit to their native kindliness and good breeding. They had neither public opinion nor legal restraint to interfere with them. Each estate was a kingdom, and, in the impossibility of locomotion, each neighbouring potentate acquired a relative importance quite out of proportion to his merits, for to love your neighbour—or, at all events, to marry her—was almost inevitable when matches were a matter of mileage, and marriages might be said to have been made by the map. Enormous families were the rule in all classes, such being reputed to be the will of God, and the olive branches about the paternal table often became of so dense a growth as to exclude from it all other fruits of the earth, save, possibly, the potato.