"Here is my pond," said he, " in the crammer," which he gathered from the ground: then fumbling over the leaves, he at length unfolded the precious deposit. O'Reilly saw the bond, seized it, looked at the sum, paid it into the attorney's hands, tore the seal from the bond; then, without looking at old Jones, whom he dared not trust himself to speak to, he clapped his hat upon his head, and rushed out of the room. Arrived at the King's Bench prison, he hurried to the apartment where Edwards was confined.—The bolts flew back: for even the turnkeys seemed to catch our hero's enthusiasm. 66 Edwards, my dear boy! how do you do?-Here's a bond debt, justly due to you for my education-O, never mind asking any unnecessary questions; only just make haste out of this undeserved abode-Our old rascal is paid off-Owen ap Jones, you know-Well, how the man stares! Why now will you have the assurance to pretend to forget who I am? and must I spake," continued he, assuming the tone of his childhood-" and must I spake to you again in my old Irish brogue, before you will ricollict your own little Dominick ?" When his friend Edwards was out of prison, and when our hero had leisure to look into business, he returned to the attorney, to see that Mr. Owen ap Jones had been legally satisfied. "Sir," said the attorney, "I have paid the plaintiff in this suit; and he is satisfied: but I must say," added he with a contemptuous smile," that you Irish gentlemen are rather in too great a hurry in doing business: business, sir, is a thing that must be done slowly, to be done well." "I am ready now to do business as slowly as you please; but when my friend was in prison, I thought the quicker I did his business the better.-Now tell me what mistake I have made, and I will rectify it instantly." "Instantly!-'Tis well, sir, with your promptitude, that you have to deal with what prejudice thinks uncommon-an honest attorney. -Here are some bank notes of yours, sir, amounting to a good round sum-You made a little blunder in this business you left me the penalty, instead of the principal, of the bond-just twice as much as you should have done." "Just twice as much as was in the bond, but not twice as much as I should have done, nor half as much as I should have done, in my opinion," said O'Reilly; "but whatever I did, was with my eyes open: I was persuaded you were an honest man; in which you see I was not mistaken; and as a man of business, I knew you would pay Jones only his due. The remainder of the money I meant, and mean, should lie in your hands for my friend Edwards's use. I feared he would not have taken it from my hands: I therefore left it in yours. To have taken my friend out of prison merely to let him go back again to day, for want of money, to keep himself clear with the world, would have been a blunder indeed, but not an Irish blunder: our Irish blunders are never blunders of the heart." CHAPTER V. THE BLISS OF IGNORANCE. No well-informed Englishman would laugh at the blunders of such a character as little Dominick; but there are people who justify the assertion, that laughter always arises from a sense of real or imaginary superiority. Now if it be true, that laughter has its source in vanity, as the most ignorant are generally the most vain, they must enjoy this pleasure in its highest perfection. Unconscious of their own deficiencies, and consequently fearless of becoming in their turn the objects of ridicule, they enjoy in full security the delight of humbling their superiors. How much are they to be admired for the courage with which they apply on all occasions, their test of truth! Wise men may be struck with admiration, respect, doubt or humility; but the ignorant, happily unconscious that they know nothing, can be checked in their merriment by no consideration, human or divine.-Theirs is the sly sneer, the dry joke, and the horse laugh: theirs the comprehensive range of ridicule, which takes every creature in, of every kind. No fastidious delicacy spoils their sports of fancy; though ten times told, the tale to them never can be tedious though dull as the fat weed that grows on Lethe's bank,' the jest for them has all the poignancy of satire: on the very offals, the garbage of wit, they can feed and batten. For them the jokes of Joe Miller have that infinite variety, which custom cannot stale. Happy they who can find in every jester the wit of Sterne or Swift; who else can wade. through hundreds of thickly printed pages to obtain for their reward, such witticisms as the following* ? * The eldest partner in the firm of this book actually read the whole of Old Joe Miller, containing all the good things in above fifty jest books, published from 1558 to 1801 to obtain a competent knowledge of the treasures of English wit; he never felt so much tired even with Coke upon Littleton. "Two Irishmen having travelled on foot from Chester to Barnet, were confoundedly tired and fatigued by their journey; and the more so when they were told, that they had still about ten miles to go- By my shoul and St. Patrick,' cries one of them, it is but five miles a piece.' Here, notwithstanding the promise of a jest held forth by the words,- By my shoul and St. Patrick,' we are ultimately cheated of our hopes. To the ignorant, indeed, the word of promise is kept to the mind as well as to the ear; but others perceive, that instead of a bull, they have only a piece of sentimental arithmetic, founded upon the elegant theorem, that friendship doubles all our pleasures, and divides all our pains. We must not, from false delicacy to our countrymen, here omit a piece of advice to English retailers or inventors of Irish blunders. Let them beware of such prefatory exclamations as-"By my shoul and St. Patrick! By Jasus! Arrah Honey! My dear Joy! &c." because all such phrases, beside being absolutely out of date and fashion in Ireland, raise too high an expectation in the minds of a British audience, operating as much to the disadvantage of the story-teller as the dangerous exordium of "I'll tell you an excellent story;" an exordium ever to be avoided by all prudent wits. Another caution should be given to well meaning ignorance. Never produce that as an Irish bull, for which any person of common literature can immediately supply a precedent from our best authors. Never be at the pains, for instance, of telling, from Joe Miller, a good story of an Irish sailor who travelled with captain Cook round the world, and afterwards swore to his companions, that it was as flat as a table. This anecdote, however excellent, immediately finds a parallel in Pope: "Mad Mathesis alone was unconfin'd, Too mad for mere material chains to bind ; Pope was led into the blunder of representing mad Mathesis running round the circle and finding it square, by a confused notion, that mathematicians had considered the circle as composed of straight lines. His mathematical friends could have told him, that though it was talked of as a polygon, it was not supposed to be a square; but polygon would not have rhymed. to stare; and poets, when they launch into the ocean of words, must have an eye to the helm; at all events a poet, who is not supposed to be a student of the exact sciences, may be forgiven for a mathematical blunder. This affair of squaring the circle seems to be peculiarly liable to error; for even an accurate mathematician cannot speak of it without committing something very like a bull. 7 Dr. Hutton, in his treatise on mensuration, p. 119, says, "As the famous quadrature of the late Mr. John Machin, professor of astronomy in Gresham College, is extremely expeditious and but little known, I shall take this opportunity of explaining it." It is to be presumed, that the doctor here uses the word famous in that acceptation, in which it is daily and hourly employed, by our Bond-street loungers, by city apprentices, and men of the ton-"That was a famous good joke,"--" He is a famous whip."-" We had a famous hop, &c." Now it cannot be supposed, that any of these things are in themselves entitled to fame; but they may, indeed, by the courtesy of England, be at once famous, and but little known. It is unnecessary to enter into the defence either of Dr. Hutton or of Pope, for they were not born in Ireland, therefore they cannot make bulls; and assuredly their mistakes will not, in the opinion of any person of common sense or candour, derogate from their reputation. "Never strike till you are sure to wound," is a maxim well known to the polite* and politic part of the world. "Never laugh when the laugh can be turned against you," should be the maxim of those, who find their chief pleasure in making others ridiculous. This principle, if applied to our subject, would lead, however, to a very extensive and troublesome system of mutual forbearance; troublesome in proportion to the good or ill humour of the parties concerned, extensive in proportion to their knowledge and acquirements. A man of cultivated parts will foresee the possibility of the retort courteous, where an ignorant man will enjoy the fearless bliss of ignorance. For example, an illiterate person may enjoy a hearty laugh at the common story of an old Irish beggar-man, who, pretending to be dumb, was thrown off his guard by the question, "How many years have you been dumb?" and answered, "Five years last St. John's Eve, please your hon our. But our triumph over the Irishman abates, when we recollect in the History of England, and in Shakspeare, the case of Saunder Simcox, who pretended to be miraculously and instantaneously cured of blindness at St. Alban's shrine. Since we have bestowed so much criticism on the blunder of a beggar-man, a word or two must be permitted on the blunder of a thief. It is natural for ignorant people to laugh at the Hibernian, who said, that he had stolen a pound of chocolate to make tea of. But philosophers are disposed to abstain from the laugh of superiority, when they recollect, that the Irishman could probably make as good tea from Lord Chesterfield, * chocolate, as the chemist could make butter, sugar, and cream, from antimony, sulphur, and tartar. The absurdities in the ancient chemical nomenclature could not be surpassed by any in the Hibernian catalogue. If the reader should think this a rash and unwarrantable assertion, we refer him to an essay, in which the flagrant abuses of speech in the old language of chemistry are admirably exposed and ridiculed.-Could an Irishman confer a more appropriate appellation upon a white powder, than that of beautiful black? It is really provoking to perceive, that as our knowledge of science or literature extends, we are in more danger of finding, in our own and foreign languages, parallels and precedents for Irish blunders; so that a very well informed man can scarcely with any grace or conscience smile, where a booby squire might enjoy a long and loud horse laugh of contempt. What crowds were collected to see the Irish bottle conjurort get in a quart bottle; but Dr. Desaguliers had prepared the English to think such a condensation of animal particles not impossible. He says, Vol. I, p. 5, of his Lectures on Natural Philosophy, "that the nature of things should last, and their natural course continue the same; all the changes made in bodies must arise only from the various separations, new conjunctions, and motions, of these original particles. These must be imagined of an unconceivable smallness, but by the union of them there are made bigger lumps," &c. Indeed things are now come to such a lamentable pass, that without either literary or scientific acquirements, merc local knowledge, such as can be obtained from a finger-post, may sometimes prevent us from the full enjoyment of the Boeotian absurdity of our neighbours. What can, at first view, appear a grosser blunder, than that of the Irishman, who begged a friend to look over his library, to find for him the history of the world before the creation? Yet this anachronism of ideas is not unparalleled; it is matched, though on a more contracted scale, by an inscription on a British finger-post "Had you seen these roads before they were made, There is, however, a rabbi, mentioned by Bayle, who far exeeeds both the Irishman and the finger-post. He asserts, that Providence questioned Adam, concerning the creation, * Essay on Chemical Nomenclature, by S. Dickson, M. D; in which are comprised observations on the same subject, by R. Kirwan, President R. I. A. -Vide pages 21, 22, 23, &c. This conjuror, whose name was Broadstreet, was a native of the county of Longford, in Ireland: he by this hit pocketed 2001., and proved himself to be more knave than fool. |