in which he undertook to show that his appreciation of the beauties of our immortal bard surpassed that of any of our own critics, living or dead, and that his acquaintance with the niceties of the English language was superior to that of the natives. Lover's best recitation was his celebrated poor vegetable woman from Ormond Market going along the quay with a female companion, to whom she tells the story of her domestic grievances, interrupting it every moment with the cry of "New Potatoes" most ludicrously. This clever sketch of Irish character had been published in his first volume, with an illustration from his own pencil, and his very clever manner of reciting it was the means of more than doubling the sale of the book.

most amusing of Irishmen turned up, the present Chief Justice Whiteside, then at the Bar, observed that there was not a man in the upper ranks of Dublin life for twenty years before who had any pretensions to wit, humour, professional or artistic talent, who had not been a guest at Brophy's hospitable table. Whenever the Marquis of Ang-" New Potatoes," a dialogue between a lesey, who was a martyr to tie doloreux, was more than ordinarily afflicted, he sent for Pat, who, attending very little to the immediate seat of the malady, addressed himself to the noble patient's imagination. After treating him to a merry quart d'heure with Zosimus, or some other eminent Dublin character, the King of the Carmen, or the Queen of the Pill Lane poissardes, he left his Excellency as free from pain and as ready for dinner as he ever was in the course of his life. Pat's attitude or look, like Lis- It was amongst such pleasant scenes and ton's or Buckstone's, was enough, without companions that Lover's comic genius was a word from him, to throw a Quaker into nurtured and developed. He studied the convulsions. character, conversation, manner of thinkButler's "Paganini" was a wonderful touring, and habits of his humble countrymen de force; for although it exhibited vis comica most industriously, until, excepting Carleof a high order as a conception, yet from the ton, no man living knew them more intiway he scraped and stamped and rolled his mately. head and eyes, and worked his body and arms, it was physical force with a vengeance! Without any more preparation than stepping into a corner of the room for a moment, buttoning his coat up to his chin, and smoothing down those dark elf locks of his over his face, he jumped into position upon a chair or table, and you had the weird Italian before you in all his glory. Then he used to give us the Gondolier of Venice," or the Witches under the Walnut Tree," whichever we chose to call for, on the one string. The performer's voice, coming through a pin-hole formed by the tips of his lips, imitated most faithfully the tones of the devil's cremona, by which name the magic instrument went, whilst his arms and fingers aided to heighten the illusion most vigorously. Indeed they seemed really dealing with a material instead of a shadowy fiddle and bow, even to the featherbowing and pitzzicato tricks for which Paganini was so famous.

Jones was a most versatile genius of this school. Song speech, lecture, or recitation was all the same to him. His chef d'œuvre was, however, the famous Irish soldier's song of "Love, farewell!" rendered additionally famous by its appearance in one of the Irish Whiskey Drinker's papers, with additional verses and a Latin metrical translation in "Bentley's Miscellany," about twenty years ago. His next best performance was a Frenchman's lecture (in broken English, of course) on our own Shakespeare,

This is not, perhaps, the place to dwell seriously, or at any great length, upon a passage of Lover's life and career, for which, whilst one portion, and that the vast majority, of his countrymen would glorify his departed spirit, the very small minority would send it in a very different direction. I only venture to mention it in a few words, as it proves, at all events, the extraordinary talents he possessed as a caricaturist, and suggests the probability of his being now remembered as a humourist of a different and a higher stamp, the legitimate satirist of folly, hypocrisy, and wrong in our public places and institutions, had he arrived in London a few years later, or that Punch" had started a few years earlier.

The battle of English church rates, now happily, after so many years of bitter contest about to be made a drawn one with the consent of all parties in and out of Parliament, was not half so old or bitter as the battle of the Irish tithes. This long and bitter battle, although not thoroughly and satisfactorily decided as yet, was more than half won about thirty years ago, when Lord Stanley (the present Lord Derby), then Whig secretary for Ireland, carried his measure through both Houses of Parliament, which converted the tithe system, so obnoxious for ages to the Roman Catholics and Dissenters of Ireland, into a rent-charge upon the land; and the sanguinary scenes which had been constantly enacted at the collection of this portion of the law churches'

dues at the point of the bayonet, were for | berus (proh nefas!) took down and bagged ever put an end to, although they are not even as yet forgotten.

"Oh for a forty parson power, to chaunt Thy praise, hypocrisy !"

the episcopal game! Since Hogarth sketched Churchill as a bear in canonicals, with a pot of porter in one hand and a clay pipe in the other, there never was such audacious caricaturing of the Lord's anointed. I forgot how many editions of the "Horn-book were published, but the first went up to several thousands, at five shillings a copy. Lover's secret was confided to a few who kept it well for him, otherwise his business as a miniature painter, which he followed exclusively at the time, would have been seriously injured. In after years, as he mixed in the bustle and crowds of London life, this early political escapade of his was seldom spoken of, if not altogether forgotten.

what more liberally. Mr. Disraeli's literary instincts, as well as his educating power over the wildest of his followers, would have prevented such a Boeotian outrage as that.

Such was the epigraph from Byron, which appeared in the year 1831 on the title-page of The Irish Horn-book," the letterpress of which, in prose and verse, was contributed to and edited by a Wesleyan miller and farmer from the Queen's County, named Tom Browne, whose nom de plume was Jonathan Buckthorn, and who went also by the name of the Irish Cobbett, aided by a few young barristers, commencing literateurs, and I might add junior members of Parliament, and other young men who filled a brilliant career in after life. Some of these Mr. Disraeli was called to account, most were subjected to the pains, and penalties ungenerously and most unwisely, by a of the crown prosecutors of the day, who, political opponent for having put some the more they persecuted the popular cham- poor and penniless old Orange poetaster pions, the more martyrs they found ready of the North on the Pension List. I do not to fill the gaps made by the imprisonment think that any gentleman, on the Conservaof the willing victims, until at last the fool-tive side of either House of Parliament, ish and unnatural persecution had to be would have had the bad taste and judgment given up, and Lord Stanley's Act, abolish- to find fault with Lover's political patrons ing the Irish tithe system, did away with for providing for his declining years somethe sentimental part of the chief grievances of the Irish millions, leaving the material portion of it to be settled by time; and as we all know, it is shortly to be settled. The Irish Roman Catholic and dissenting generation of thirty years ago cried out and fought against paying tithes directly to the ministers of a Church from whom they derived no spiritual advantage; the sons of that generation object to pay the same impost indirectly to their landlords in the shape of an increase to the rent (this is the way the cards have been shuffled), which increase the landlords hand over to the Church, whose ministers are thus indemnified. This most extraordinary book, which had a greater circulation than any work that was published in Ireland before or after it, and which created a greater sensation in that country than was experienced since the days of Swift, was illustrated with copperplate etchings of the finest and most exquisitely humourous character, by Samuel ventured upon than that which appears in Lover. Various were the contributors to the biographical notice of Lover's name in the literature of the volume, Tom Browne the "Men of Our Time," to the effect that being the chief; but Lover did the pictorial the success which attended his Irish Enterportion of it - alone he did it! What tainments was only second to that achieved feasts-Balshazzar feasts of the loaves and by Albert Smith's Ascent of Mont Blanc, fishes! What fishing in the Sea of Seas! which realised the enormous sum, for such What steeple-chases for the Mitre Cup! an undertaking, of thirty thousand pounds. What Satanic Shooting Excursions (the I doubt if Lover realised as many pence in metrical portions modelled on Porson's and the affair I speak of. I remember Albert Coleridge's Devil's Walk), in which the telling me one night at supper about that Great Enemy of mankind, with his dog Cer-time, that he had just been to the Soho, where

It may not be inappropriate at this moment, whilst speaking of the Irish tithe war of 1831, to state that by-and-by, when the great event comes off, and religious equality becomes a great fact in the sister country, every one of the veterans alive who fleshed their boyish weapons in the war against religious ascendancy in 1831, may be glad and proud at length to tell the tale; and they will be pointed out as the pioneers of the mighty change which has been brought about by its own bitterest enemies as much as by its natural and consistent friends. And the mighty change will be followed by still mightier changes after it. Thus it will shortly, very shortly, be; and the whirligigs of time will bring about their revenges.

A more ridiculous assertion was never

he witnessed the most comic exhibition he ever was present at in his life; namely, a confidential little duet between Sam Lover and the pianoforte, in which the very small audience present took a painful interest, and could not for the life of them see any joke in it whatever.

Had Lover never written anything more than his first sketches of Irish character, his dozen or score of first-rate Irish songs, and his successful Irish drama, which last mentioned Power's illustration of the principal character was enough to immortalise; had he stuck to his palette and easel even in the inferior rank of art as a portraitpainter, or had he been fortunate enough to obtain a snug berth in one of the public offices, like Crofton Croker, another popular illustrator of Irish peasant life, and successful editor of Irish song literature, and been satisfied, like him, to rest under the shade of his early laurels, his rank as a literary man would have been higher than that which he occupies.

66

him good produce goodness; for if the child feels that there is some one incessantly occupied with his happiness and goodness, he will come to be incessantly occupied with himself. Something, Mr. Taylor contends, must be left in a spirit of faith and hope to nature and God's Providence. "Parents are to be the instruments, but they are not to be all in all." The conscience of a child, he warns them, may easily be worn out, both by too much pressure, and by over-stimulation. And he refers to a child he had known to have a conscience of such extraordinary and premature sensibility, that at seven years of age she would be made ill by remorse for a small fault. She was brought up, he says, by persons of excellent understanding, with infinite care and affection, and yet, by the time she was twenty years of age, she had next to no conscience and a hard heart. A person who had some experience of precocious consciences once observed to me, in respect to those children who are said to be too good and too clever to live, that it was very desirable they should not."* Wise is the mother, exclaims a refined critic of Wordsworth's poetry, who knows how to aid, without superseding natural influences and instinctive tendencies to let the child grow at its natural pace-not to raise it much wiser, he reflects, would the manhood upon stilts, or straighten it in stays. How of many of us be if our childhood had been to bend to the whims, systems, or caprices more joyous and less trammelled, less made of the elderly pedants about us! "We of course know that children are not diminutive angels, and need both instruction and correction; but we believe every sensible mother in the three kingdoms will go with us in an avowal of a decided preference for troublesome, ill-behaved children over the good little boys and girls who know the elements of all the ologies, and can define afores, and decline eating their dinners till many of the isms, who never dirty their pin

DREADFUL is the picture, Mr. de Quincey has forcibly declared, which in books we sometimes find of children discussing the doctrines of Christianity, and even teaching their seniors the boundaries and distinctions between doctrine and doctrine. He confesses that often it had struck him with amazement that the two things which God made most beautiful among his works, viz., infancy and pure religion, should, by the folly of man (in yoking them together on erroneous principles), neutralize each other's beauty, or even form a combination positively hateful. "The religion becomes nonsense, and the child becomes a hypocrite. The religion is transfigured into cant, and the innocent child into a dissem-grace has been said." Mr. Thackeray bling liar."

Not that the writer just now quoted, nor any other of thought and feeling, would be insensible to the charm of such a picture as that, for instance, of Richard Hooker in early childhood, for which we have Izaak Walton to thank. But people of an observant and thoughtful turn will, for the most part, acquiesce in Mr. Henry Taylor's view, that, as continual attention to making a child happy will not produce happiness, neither will continual attention to making Suspiria de Profundis,' Part I.

pictured one of his dislikes in little Cecilia
fervent precocity; declared that she would
Lovel, who repeated Watts's Hymns with
fantine sermons to her brother and maid
marry none but a clergyman; preached in-
"and sometimes wea-
ried me, if the truth must be told, by the
about worldliness;
intense self-respect with which she regarded
her own virtues."‡

It has been said that if anybody can get a pretty little girl to die prattling to her

*Notes from Life,' pp. 124. et seq.
† Essays by George Brimley.'
Lovel the Widower,' ch. iii.

and deaths they record, that they expressed becomes one of the leaders or admirers of themselves very nicely about Jesus. Now the tribe of popular preachers." a boy who expressed himself very nicely about Jesus would be the admiration of many mammas, while the toes of a public schoolman would tingle to kick him." And yet, this writer allows that, if the two were to argue the point, the lady might have the best of it; for she would urge that it was everything to get her boy to think rightly about religious subjects, and to be interested in them, and to have courage to speak boldly of them; and supposing he were sent to a place where he learnt cricket rather better than he could learn it at home, but where he left off religious feelings and religious language, the question occurs, Would the gain equal the loss?

To which question the writer knows of but one answer - the answer of experience. Practically, it is found that boys brought up to use religious language very generally turn out badly; that the sons of clergymen are, as a rule, the most troublesome, wrongheaded, and unprincipled boys at school; and that boys educated at home escape few temptations in the long run, and, even if they are well conducted, are mostly nerveless, priggish, bigoted creatures. Experience teaches men this, and the public schoolman builds on a rock of experience from which nothing can shake him.*

The author of "John Halifax," without wishing to blame a very well-meaning class of educators, considers it may fairly be questioned how far it is wholesome to paint children going about converting their fathers and mothers, and "youthful saints of three and a half prating confidently about things which, we are told, the angels desire to look into,' yet cannot, or dare not. We honestly confess that we should very much prefer Jack the Giant-Killer.'"+Precocious children, observes a masterly essayist on social subjects, now and then talk of themselves, especially if forced and excited by a certain sort of religious teaching. "Then they can be heard to enlarge with a horrible glibness on their feelings, their convictions of sin, their schemes for setting the world to rights;" but this is mostly, the essayist ‡ thinks, a sign of an overtasked brain, accompanied sometimes by an exceptional, grotesque form of naughtiness, and sure to pass off as the health improves and the cleverness vanishes

The little hero of Freytag's Sollen und Haben is introduced in earliest childhood as so rarely naughty, that many of the ladies of Ostrau, who were disposed to take a gloomy view of life, doubted whether such a child could live; which fear was, however, Another essayist on the same theme, after at last dispelled by Anthony one day giving deploring the preposterous precociousness a sound thrashing to the son of the Landof young England's curled and crinolined darlings, and the exceeding rarity of a little girl who is meek and ignorant and full of fun, and the encouragement modern parents give their small people to discuss their family affairs and the affairs of all their neighbours, pronounces the secular to be eclipsed, after all, by the religious children; there being hundreds of unfortunates under twelve in England who are equal to writing tracts real live published tracts- with pink covers, all out of their own memory of other tracts, and who have had startling experiences and consolations, and can critcise sermons, and even detect heresy. "A philosopher may endure one of the misses in crinoline, and even attain an intimacy which will warrant him in proposing that she shall some day put on an old cotton frock, and have a good feast of bread and jam with him. But the religious child is utterly irreclaimable, and must be suffered to grow up in its lost state until it sinks into the abyss, and

"But the lady, not having the experience, cannot be argued into reasoning from it; and it must be owned that, if it were not known that public schools did good, many theoretical reasons might be found to show they would do harm.”—' Saturday Review,' xvi, 326.

rath; a misdeed that " removed his prospect
of heaven to a conveinent distance." § Be
it as it may with mature ladies, girls we are
assured by Mr. Archibald Boyd, detest
well-behaved boys. The young gentlemen
who never tear their clothes, or wet their
stockings, or break windows, or are too late
for meals, may be the delight of adoring mam-
mas, he says, but are held in supreme con-
tempt by the little damsels of their own age,
who lavish their affections upon ragged ur-
chins who are ever risking their necks after
birds' nests, or breaking into orchards, or
getting black eyes and vari-coloured noses
from the fists of their fellows. It has
been made a special merit of the late Will-
iam Collins, that in painting children he por-
trayed no infant cherubs, "fitted with
speckless frocks," and "leering ravishingly
at the spectator, under a sky wreathed in-
conceivably with clouds of red curtain, and
before a background spotted profusely with
Elysian flowers." ¶ &c. &c. ; but that under

Essay on Modern Children.'
The Age of Gold.'
'On Talking of Self.'
'Debit and Credit,' ch. i.
The Cardinal,' ch. xxxi.

¶ Life of W. Collins, R.A., i. 234.