68

Books from Ireland.

Nov.

had been personally engaged in the late re- pragmatical dogmatist, which most certainly bellion. Emmet's outbreak in 1803 helped he was not. He discusses, without bringing to confirm this view. Lord Cloncurry says much that is new to the argument, what he that "the elements of strife were threefold. calls the three great Irish questions of the 19th The spirit of the unnatural quarrel was com- century, the Catholic question, the Church pounded of the hatred of race, the hatred of question, and the education question. George religious opinion, and the hatred of a pro- the Fourth used to wish the Catholics perty dispute." Every one of these causes" damned or emancipated"-they are emanof hatred has now happily passed, or is pass-cipated, which is a comfort, if it were only ing away from the Ireland of our times. to escape Lord Cloncurry's discussion. How What is called the hatred of race has abso- the agitation for Emancipation passed into lutely nothing to rest on, so intermingled that for repeal of the Union, is traced to an through the whole country is the blood of offence given to O'Connell by incidents conboth islands. Religion will, we trust, soon nected with the Relief Bill, and one or two teach a lesson of peace instead of inflaming law appointments which dissatisfied him. discord. Such disputes as arise from consi- This is, we think, too narrow a view of the derations of property must of themselves subject, and a strange one for Lord Clondie away whenever society is advanced curry to have taken, considering his own enough for the perfect administration of the anxiety for this same impossible repeal. It is law, if property is to be acquired or possess an easier explanation of the facts of the case to ed-we will not say enjoyed with a feeling of believe O'Connell perfectly in earnest, and entirely satisfied that the interests of his country security by any one. During Lord Cloncurry's stay on the Con- might be better attended to in a domestic tinent, his house was broken into by a local Parliament than they could ever be in Lonmagistrate, on some pretence connected with don. We do not think that man is always Emmet's insurrection, and valuable papers governed by the most ungenerous and selfish and some curious old armour carried off. motive that can be assigned for his conduct. The party who took these things intended to O'Connell remembered Dublin before the He remembered-in everything break open his cellars, but were not permit Union. ted by the officer who accompanied them. how changed! We cannot but believe that On his return to Ireland, he wished to take he throughout regarded emancipation as but out a commission of the peace. This was a means to a great end; and unwise as was refused by Lord Redesdale; but soon after, the agitation in which the last eighteen years on the coming in of "All the Talents," he of his life was passed, we believe that through became a magistrate-in which capacity he these years he was still pursuing the same appears to have been a useful country gentle- phantom hope which had animated him man. He was the first to suggest to justices through his whole life. We are ourselves of the peace the propriety of sitting together perfectly satisfied both that emancipation in public court, and of not deciding cases, as was necessary for the peace of society, had been the custom, in their own houses. and that the repeal, which he demanded, of His friends used playfully to call him Chief- the Union with Great Britain would be inju Justice of Celbridge, a village where for rious to the empire; but it seems to us imsome five-and-thirty years he administered possible that O'Connell,-were emancipation rural justice and equity unbought, "indiffer- the sole subject of his thought, and did he ently," as the Church of England liturgy ex- not contemplate a restoration of the Irish presses it. The appointment of stipendiary Parliament, should have so seriously enmagistrates he thinks unwise in policy, and dangered the success of the first measure, we agree with him. The duty of the magis- and so frequently delayed it, as we think he trate properly belongs to the country gentle- did, by his strange interruptions of every ef man. If paid magistrates are sent to assist, fort made by its English advocates. The reit will in practice be found that everything storation of the Irish Parliament was his obwill be soon transferred to them;-no doubt ject first and last, and his mind was, we a more convenient course to the central think, too elastic to have continued long anpower, with whom it involves the necessity noyed by the class of accidents to which of perpetual communication, but in every respect less beneficial to society.

Lord Cloncurry refers his latter agitation.

The Church question is with Lord Cloncurry a question of the payment of the Roman Catholic priests. His plan is

"To separate all Churches alike from the State, to remove the bishops from the House of Lords, where no one imagines they can perform any use

ful or respectable function; to capitalize the cashire-graduated at the University of Church property, and apply it to purposes of edu- Dublin in 1811-was called to the Irish bar cation and charity; and so let all parties start in 1814-entered Parliament in 1830 as fair upon their respective missions."

member for Melbourne Port, a borough of This arrangement has the advantage of sim- Lord Anglesey's-sat in 1831 for the county plicity of such simplicity as to have little of Lowth; and, in 1832, for the county of chance of pleasing any one. Think of a Tipperary. He found the expenses of conwell-endowed Church resigning lands and tinuing member for a county, where there livings, and stripping herself in order to win was almost the certainty of a contest at the race, of which this old coxcomb would every election, too great, and, in 1841, dedictate the conditions! The education ques-clined being re-elected for it. He then betion is discussed with pretty much the same came member for the borough of Dungarpractical good sense; and Lord Cloncurry's van. In 1850 he was appointed Minister at disputes with the Kildare Place Society, the Court of Tuscany, and in May 1851 he which appear to have continued for many died.

naturally and conveniently divide themselves into three periods. The first period includes the twenty years which passed previous to his graduating in college and being thrown upon the world for support; the second division brings us to the time when he entered Parliament; and the third ends with his death.

years, are illustrated by stories of a priest The sixty years of Sheil's pilgrimage who, though it was his habit to burn such Bibles as were distributed in his parish, claimed in letters to the Education Society the merit of having the Scriptures read in his parish schools. The man was a liar, and seemed to have been mad, or worse; but the case does not differ in principle from one which Lord Cloncurry mentions without disapprobation-priests having the Scrip- It is, we believe, Johnson's observation, tures read in their schools, but taking care that most men are occupied during all the that the scholars should be absent at the rest of their lives in teaching what they time of reading, with the object of risking have learned before twenty. This suggests neither the loss of the children's souls nor a word in illustration of Irish education in of the schoolmaster's salary, the latter of the time of Sheil's boyhood. His father which this disobedience of an imperative was a wealthy merchant, a Roman Cathorule would endanger. The stories, if true, lic,-had lived long in Spain, made money are worthy the telling, but not for the pur- there, returned to Ireland, bought land and pose which Lord Cloncurry has in telling built a house on the banks of the Suri, about them. It is probable that these contests three miles from Waterford. Spenser will end in the State declining to assist other than secular education.

It is impossible to think otherwise than kindly of this weak, kind-hearted, and wellmeaning man. He appears to have had considerable influence in the Courts of Lord Anglesey and Lord Wellesley; and it seems not unlikely that his representations led to the change of opinion in Lord Anglesey, which facilitated the passing of Catholic emancipation.

speaks with delight of the scenery amid which it was Sheil's good fortune to spend his early youth. Sheil himself, in a passage of great beauty, recalls the imagery that floated before his eye in childhood, and which, it would appear, at all times haunted his imagination :

the bells in the city, the smoke of which was "How often have I stood upon its banks when turned into a cloud of gold by the Claude Lorraine sunset, told the death of the departing day! How often have I fixed my gaze upon the glittering expanse of the full and overflowing water crowded with ships, whose white sails were filled with just wind enough to carry them on to the sea, by the slowness of their equable and majestic at its leisure their tall and stately beauty, and to movement, giving leave to the eye to contemplate watch them in their progress amidst the calm through which they made their gentle and forbearing way."

We have dwelt at such length on the period in Irish history which Lord Cloncurry's work suggests, that we have left ourselves little space for the other books on our list. The Life of Sheil is one of considerable interest, and it curiously happens that, as in the case of Lord Cloncurry, we have his own account of himself and his fortunes in some papers of his sketches, legal and political, and an illustrative comment by a writer of considerable power and experience, Mr. Tor"I never felt and appreciated its beauty so well rens M'Cullagh, whose "Memoir of Richard as when the consciousness that I was leaving it Sheil" is a book of great interest. Of inci- not to return for years to it again, endeared to me dent there is but little in Sheil's life. He the romantic place in which my infancy was the spot of my birth, and set off the beauty of was born in 1791-was educated at the passed, and in which I once hoped (I have since Jesuit establishment of Stoneyhurst in Lan-abandoned the expectation) that my old age D-6

VOL. XXIV.

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should decline. It is not in the midst of its at the school. Among others, on one occawoods that I shall fall into the sere and yellow sion came Monsieur, destined in after days leaf." to be King of France.

At eleven years of age he was separated from his happy home. The Abbé de Grimeau, whom the French Revolution had driven from his country, and who found occupation and support as a teacher of French in the neighbourhood of Waterford, took advantage of the Peace of Amiens to return to his native Languedoc. To him was intrusted the commission of leaving young Sheil at Kensington House, where the pères de la foi had established a school.

After the Abbé had shewn the boy the tower and the lions, he proceeded to leave him at school.

"Accordingly we set off for Kensington House, which is situated exactly opposite the avenue leading to the palace, and has the beautiful garden attached to it in front. A large iron gate, wrought into rusty flowers and other fantastic forms, showed that the Jesuit school had once been the residence of some person of distinction; and I afterwards understood that a mistress, of Charles the Second lived on the spot which was now converted into one of the sanctuaries of Ignatus. It was a large old-fashioned house, with many remains of decayed splendour. In a beautiful walk of trees which ran down from the rear of the

"Hélas! mon enfant! he would say, as some orphan was brought up to him, and then lean down to caress the child of a friend who had perished on the scaffolds of the Revolution."

In 1804, Sheil left Kensington for Stoneyhurst. While at Kensington hearing nothing but French spoken, he had forgotten his English.

"His first appearance," says a schoolfellow, “I recollect well. It was strikingly grotesque. His face was pale and meagre his limbs lank, his hair starting upwards from his head like a brush -a sort of muscular action pervading his whole frame-his dress foreign-his talk broken English

and his voice a squeak. Add to this a pair of singularly brilliant eyes, and you have before you the boy Sheil."

Sheil's own account of Kensington and Stoneyhurst should be read-nothing can be more picturesquely brought out than the characters of his several teachers. The tone of political feeling was wholly different at Stoneyhurst from that which prevailed in the French establishment. Cheers were building through the playground, I saw several given for the victory at Trafalgar, and the French boys playing at swing-swang, and, the joy of the schoolboys knew no bounds when moment I entered, my ears were filled with the it was announced that several holidays shrill vociferations of some hundreds of little emi- would be given in honour of the event. grants who were engaged in their various amuse- He passed from Stoneyhurst to Dublin Uniments, and babbled, screamed, laughed, and shout-versity. ed in all the velocity of their rapid and joyous language. I did not hear a word of English, and at once perceived that I was as much among Frenchmen as if I had been suddenly transferred to a Parisian college."

The head of the establishment was styled Monsieur le Prince de Broglie, son of the celebrated Marshal Broglie. "Monsieur le Prince, though neither more nor less than a pedagogue by profession, (for he had engaged in this employment to gain his bread), had the manner and attitudes of the Court, and, by his demeanour, put me," says Sheil, "in mind of the old régime." Some of the children at the school were the sons of persons of rank who had perished in the Revolution. Sheil describes one as

While Sheil was in Dublin University, it often occurred that men of talent disre

garded the regular college studies, and occupied themselves in a debating school called the Historical Society. To many men the institution was found singularly useful. Habits of study were sometimes formed by the necessity of preparation for its debates; and many men acquired, if not any very valuable skill in oratory, at least the power of fluent and voluble speech. Sheil spoke there occasionally, but did not attract much attention. Mr. M'Cullagh very reasonably ascribes his failure here to the felt unreality of all such topics of debate as-consistently with academic discipline - could be dis cussed in such a society. Whether Brutus was justifiable in killing Cæsar, was not "A Frenchman to his heart's-core; and wher-likely to have any very serious interest for ever the country which was wet with his father's a boy of burning blood, who, each week, blood had added a new conquest to her posses- was a listener to O'Connell's harangues, sions, or put Austria or Prussia to flight, his pale cheek used to flush into a hectic of exultation;

and he would break into joyfulness at the achieve ments by which France was exalted, and the pride and power of England was brought down."

Men with other feelings would often visit

which scattered live fire-brands through the land. Sheil's was an eminently practical mind,-from early manhood never misled by any phantom hopes or idle sounds. Of O'Connell's myriad followers it is probable that few knew what they were demanding

when they called for Emancipation. "It at first favourably impress his questioning audiwas"-to use the language of the son and tory. What he said, moreover, though conciliabiographer of Grattan on another occasion tory in its tenor, but uttered with a spasmodic ab-it was a toast, a sentiment, not an ob- ruptness and vehemence, calculated rather to provoke a laugh than to take admiration by surprise. ject." Some indefinite feeling of their being As he proceeded, however, his earnestness began placed in a position of social inferiority, was to win its way, and some, more impressible than the stimulating motive, and a generous and those around them, gave him an encouraging just motive it was. With Sheil it no doubt cheer. The effect of this was to render his manexisted in as full strength as with others; ner more collected, and his articulation more but he appears, unlike others, to have clear." rendered distinct to his mind the precise advantages to be gained by men circum- He spoke at two large meetings in the stanced as he was. It opened to him the same year. At one of those Mr. Maurice doors of the Commons House of Parliament; Fitzgerald was present, and praised the it gave him the prospects of the highest honors speech. Some newspaper report brought of the bar and the bench. That the civil distinc- one of those speeches to the knowledge of tions which impeded him in obtaining these Alexander Knox, who sought his acquaintobjects of ambition should be, as soon as ance.

possible, removed, and by any instru- We pass to the period to which the second mentality, was his first thought. During stage of Sheil's life belongs. He himself is Sheil's time in College, what was sometimes now a student of law at the Temple, in Loncalled the Catholic Board-sometimes the don, but still moving between it and Dublin. Catholic Committee held permanent sittings His father's prosperity is at an end. He is in Dublin. The meetings were of doubtful bankrupt, and Sheil must now depend on legality on pretence of preparing petitions himself alone for support. He is still a to the Legislature, they discussed, often not member of the Catholic Board in Dublinwithout ability-always in a vexatious and appears at its meetings frequently, and occaunbusiness-like temper-every topic of po- sionally attends the larger gatherings which litical interest; called aggregate meetings it convokes. Securities, suggested originally of newspaper editors, civil bill attorneys, by the Roman Catholics themselves, and asand all who live by the accidents of the sented to by Mr. Grattan, were in Dublin hour. Every noisy idler was summoned, indignantly repudiated, and the measure of and was sure to attend; prudent men, too, Emancipation, to all appearance, indefinitely in lines of business dependent on public postponed. In December of that year, Mr. support, found it necessary to subscribe largely; barristers, who had nothing else to give, gave their time; some made speeches; some reported speeches which they did not make. Brewers-Whitbreads in their own - went themselves; others, more modest, sent their clerks, till the phrase "patriot to a brewery" become the designation of a very respectable class of commercial clerks. The meetings, in spite of much folly, and in defiance of much ridicule, were influential. On one occasion, Sheil, who had often gone as a listener,-perhaps as a member, startled the assembly by demanding to address the chair. The subject of that day's discussion was connected with sending a deputation to London to attend during the session of Parliament, in the capacity of national representatives, to confer with members of both Houses of Parliament fa vourable to Emancipation, and to instruct them on details. Mr. M'Cullagh's description of the scene is very striking ::

conceit

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“A young man, carelessly dressed, and whose appearance was unknown to most of those present, asked for a hearing. The tone of his voice, and something wild and unsettled in his look, did not

Sheil, at the Catholic Board, made a speech, which Mr. M'Cullagh has preserved, in every respect admirable. It was conciliatory. Had the sentiments which it expressed been those of the Roman Catholics generally, Emancipation could not have been delayed, for they removed all pretences against it on which its enemies relied. They did not prevail. Mr. O'Connell's views triumphed.

Sheil was asked, soon after being called to the Bar, to prepare a petition for the Catholics of Ireland. The petition was not adopted, but we are led to transcribe a sentence from it, owing to our having seen in one of the pamphlets of the day a statement, that the petition was in truth the work of Alexander Knox, and because the sentence we quote is much more like the turn of thinking of this very clever and very fanciful theorist than like Sheil's. Knox was in truth the first founder of the visionary school of Churchmen who have been called after the name of Pusey. The petition makes the statement, that "the constitutionally favoured form of government is not Protestantism, as opposed to the Roman Catholic Religion, but the Episcopal Church of England, as contradistinguished to every other

religious description." This surely will be tion is not on the side of ascribing to any felt by every one who knows Knox and Sheil men unusual excellence; but the Protestant to belong most probably to the former. As divines are very devils. His mind was aba fact, the proposition has not a shadow of evidence to support it.

solutely poisoned by the exclusion of the Catholics from equal civil rights with the rest of the community. To remove evils of this kind, and give fair play to such minds as Sheil's, is not the least, perhaps is the greatest, benefit of the repeal of the old penal laws.

But Sheil was not alone an active member of those political meetings at this time, but a successful writer for the stage. Before being called to the Bar he completed the play of Adelaide, the fable of which is founded on the distresses of the French who fled from In 1825 the measure of emancipation passthe storms of the Revolution, and embodies ed the House of Commons by a majority much of what he had witnessed at Kensing-of 268 to 241, but was lost in the Lords. ton school. What leads a young poet to In presenting a petition against it, the Duke write it would be in vain to inquire: what of York had some short time before stated that leads him to select a particular form of com- the construction he put upon the coronation position is a question of easier solution. oath rendered it impossible that the relief Shiel wanted money for all his purposes, for sought for by the Catholics could at any he could not live without it. It was given time be granted; and he ended by saying, not reluctantly or churlishly by his relations, that in whatever situation of life he might but to any one except his father Sheil had be placed, he would adhere to the principles no wish to be indebted, and his father could he then expressed, "so help me God." The not now supply him. A large sum was re- excitement in Ireland on the loss of the meaquired for his call to the Bar, and a success- sure was unbounded, and Sheil, who had ful drama would give him the best chance of gradually, but slowly and resistingly, been getting it. Miss O'Neil was in the heighth whirled into O'Connell's agitation, now beof her Dublin popularity. She had not yet came if possible more violent than O'Conappeared on the English stake. She acted nell. The Catholic Association had at this the principal character, and the success of time a power greater than any similar body his play was at once decided. Shiel soon ever possessed over the Roman Catholics of after married. His wife had no fortune, but Ireland. They collected large sums of mowas connected with the Irish Master of the ney,-the aggregate of subscriptions, each Rolls, through whose interest the young bar- small in amount; but no one gave a shilling rister formed some expectation of profes- who did not feel himself by the expenditure sional advantages. These expectations were enlisted for good and evil in the cause. disappointed. There was little doubt that was like parting the drop of blood by which with anything of diligent attendance at the his victim was pledged to the service of the four courts Sheil would have succeeded at demon, and the demon to his, in the old rothe Bar; but the theatrical passion was mances. Contemporaneously with the prostrong, and he preferred the brilliant and posed Relief bill, a measure had been introtemporary triumphs of the stage. He wrote duced, breaking up the Catholic Association, some half-dozen dramas with various success, and the frenzy of the Irish mind was ingot a good deal of money from the theatres, and sold the copyright to the booksellers. Mr. M'Cullagh quotes some pleasing passages from them, but for dead plays there is no second life. During this period were also written his "Sketches Legal and Political," -as contributions of his to the New Monthly Magazine, when under Campbell's management, have been called in Mr. Savage's late reprint of them. These are, we think, far superior in every way to the dramas, and are papers, many of them, of very great interest. They have the fault and the merit of being party sketches of Irish politics by a very violent partisan. They are more hundred arms together." In one of his amusing, and not quite so true, as a novel, speeches about this time, speaking of the for novels affect probability; and Sheil in higher classes of the gentry, who had till of his sketches exaggerates everything, till it late discouraged the violence of plebeian agino longer resembles real life. His Catholic tators, he burst into splendid declamation. bishops are not actual saints; the exaggera-"The fire," said he in words not unlike the

It

creased by what seemed a departure from the understood arrangement, for the bill getting rid of the Association became law. In the debates of Parliament, it was denied that the Catholics were six millions. "Let us," said Sheil, "through our parish priests, have a census of the Irish population-distinguishing the religion of each person in the island." Meetings of the Association were prohibited-Sheil bade all Ireland rise. "Let there be," said he, "meetings of all the Catholics in every parish of Ireland on the same day. Hitherto the giant has raised but a single limb-Briareus should lift his